Sex on Earth as It Is in Heaven

A Christian Eschatology of Desire

Patricia Beattie Jung

• Publisher: SUNY Press
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781438463827, 9781438463810
• eBook ISBN: 9781438463834
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Theology

This work is part of a growing chorus of theological voices raised in support of erotic desire. Although most theologians have concluded that there will be no experience of sexual desire and delight in the world to come, Patricia Beattie Jung critically examines the historical traditions and biblical rationales for this teaching. She defends an alternative claim that there will be a healed and glorified experience of sex in heaven based on a compelling account of the Christian hope for bodily resurrection. The first half of the work focuses on Christian foundations for the notion of sex in heaven, while the second goes on to discuss some of the implications of those convictions for sex on earth. Jung concludes with discussions of how best to nurture sexual delight on earth and how and why internet pornography fails in that regard.

PART 1

Sex in Heaven

CHAPTER 1

General Resurrection of the Body

Our question about whether people might enjoy sex in heaven—that is, enjoy some sanctified experience of sexual desire and delight—presumes that risen life will be in a significant (though of course transformed) sense embodied. It presumes belief in what is technically known as the general resurrection of the body. To state the obvious, if you do not believe in bodily resurrection, then this query about sex in heaven makes no sense. Furthermore, if your resurrection hope is eviscerated—so “spiritualized,” as to be unrecognizable as hope in the bodily resurrection of the whole self—then the answer to the question of whether there might be sex in heaven would be “obviously not!”

To dive deeper into this conversation, I begin with a delineation of the notion of the general resurrection of the body and also briefly examine contemporary Christian views of death and the hereafter. In the second half of this chapter, I trace the roots of such dualistic ideas back to Christianity’s ambivalence about human embodiment. I argue that hope in the resurrection of the body is a faithful response to the truly ambiguous nature of our experience of embodiment. I detail the considerable theological support that such resurrection hope enjoys and close the chapter with a brief word about the weak spots in speculations that deny sex in heaven.

THE NATURE OF BODILY RESURRECTION

Beliefs about bodily resurrection have been and are conceptualized in many and various ways. Nevertheless, there is a broad consensus among those that affirm the notion of bodily resurrection that it must express both continuity and discontinuity with embodiment as we know it here and now. Some accounts of bodily resurrection are distorted because they overemphasize the likelihood of discontinuity with life on earth as we know it. In such a framework new life cannot embody a gracious process of sanctification. From such a viewpoint, creation is annihilated. Other accounts of bodily resurrection are distorted because they stress too much of a continuity between this world and the next. At best, resurrection is merely a restoration of creation or a recapitulation of paradise, as the original blessing is imagined to have been. At worst, it is merely imagined to be the resuscitation of life as we know it. Neither of these perspectives adequately expresses Christian claims about glorification, if you believe in the resurrection of the body.

Like the body of the Risen Christ, the transfigured body must be recognizable in some sense as a personal, healed body. And yet, again like Christ’s, this glorified body must be enhanced beyond recognition, even beyond our imagination! Such glorification differs dramatically from resuscitation. Though miraculously brought back to this life, Jesus’s friend, Lazarus, was not resurrected to new life in this transfigured sense (John 11:1–43). Lazarus, like others who were resuscitated, would eventually die (again). Like the rest of the faithful departed, he too awaits the resurrection of the dead.

To believe in the general resurrection of the body is to believe that the embodied, historical identity of a faithful person is not destroyed by death. In some meaningful sense, recognizable individuals will be raised up and transformed into newly sanctified psychosomatic wholes. Why believe this? Why believe in the resurrection of the body? This will be discussed in even greater detail in chapters 2 and 3, but here let me sketch some of the important theological and anthropological foundations for such a conviction.

Resurrection of the body makes sense once the body is recognized as central to who we are. People are embodied; we do not merely have or possess bodies. It is important to recognize that human beings are constituted by their bodies. Our embodiment differentiates and distinguishes us as individually unique, while it simultaneously unites us together in the human family and with the rest of creation. For these reasons, a truly personal notion of salvation must include the redemption and sanctification of our bodies in all their particularity. Because it is integral to personhood, the body must be integral to resurrection.

Additionally, it is embodiment—along with all the desires and feelings that spring from it—that makes possible all our social interactions, including our friendships and loves, only some of which are sexual. For this reason, though deeply personal, it follows that risen sanctified embodied persons will not have private, isolated experiences of God. Our corporeality connects us to the rest of creation. Hence, it follows that we enjoy the Presence of God in the company of all the angels and saints, indeed in the midst of all that is. Risen life is communal cosmic life.

For many Christians hope in the resurrection of the dead is joined with hope for the resurrection of the body, since we do not merely have bodies but rather are embodied people. If we are raised up, then we are raised as psychosomatic wholes. And because we are embodied, we are not only socially bound up with and raised in community with other people on earth, but we are so tied to all other creatures, to the earth, indeed to the cosmos in its entirety. As the Bible testifies, all that is—even the trees—will clap their hands in glory!

CONTEMPORARY CHRISTIAN VIEWS OF DEATH AND THE HEREAFTER

The vision of the general resurrection previously sketched indicates some of what it means to believe in the resurrection of the body and the life of the world to come. Even among those who hold this to be true, there has never been unanimity about precisely how and/or when the faithful departed will experience this bodily resurrection. Today there are three primary conceptions of death and afterlife prevalent among Christians. Some believe people “sleep” between death and the Second Coming of Christ. Others believe that the souls of the dearly departed exist in an “intermediate state” between death and the fullness of risen life. Still others believe that at the very moment of death the faithful are brought—as if into another dimension—into the new creation. Let us consider each of these imaginative accounts of the hereafter in turn.

Peaceful Slumber in the Dust until Christ Comes Again

Some early Christians presumed that there would be only a brief interim between their individual deaths and the general resurrection that would accompany the Second Coming of Christ to earth. A number of scholars believe this was probably the shape resurrection hope took among the earliest Christians.1 Because persons were understood to be psychosomatic wholes, what happened to the body was presumed to happen to the soul. So when the person died, both the body and soul died. The person disintegrated. When the faithful spoke of their beloved departed as simply “sleeping” or “resting” in the dust, this was just a polite, euphemistic way of saying that the person in his or her entirety had died. The dead simply “rest” in the dirt until the end of time, when with the return of Christ, the general resurrection will take place.

Even though they believed the Parousia to be imminent, we know from biblical testimony their faith wavered and doubts arose about the resurrection of the body. Consider the Christian community at Thessaloniki. Paul felt it necessary to encourage them not to grieve for their dearly departed, at least not like their neighbors who had no hope: “Brothers and sisters, we do not want you to be uninformed about those who sleep in death, so that you do not grieve like the rest of humankind, who have no hope” (1 Thessalonians 4:13). Paul assures them that at the time of the Second Coming of Christ, “God will bring with Jesus those who have fallen asleep in him” (1 Thessalonians 4:14b) and the faithful on earth will be swept up to meet them all. Like most among the first few generations of Christians, they expected the return of Christ—and with His return their own bodily resurrection into a world fully transformed into the Reign of God—to be imminent. Even so, Paul recognized that Christians must encourage one another in resurrection hope.

Contemporary Ash Wednesday liturgies still remind Christians: “Remember thou art dust and to dust thou shalt return.” And many today have experiences that resonate with the notion that the departed simply await bodily resurrection in the grave as Christ Himself did. Some who hold this view take solace in the fact that the dead await their awakening at the End Time to the glories of risen life peacefully unaware, even of their own death. Others find this to be a vision—however hopeful in the long run—that offers little immediate solace to those who mourn the bodily corruption of their loved ones.

Soul Abides in an Intermediate State

During the course of Christian history, considerable eschatological speculation turned on the question of whether something else—other than returning to dust while awaiting the Second Coming—might happen between the moment of death and the End Time at which the Reign of God would be fully realized. As the decades turned into centuries, the early hope for the imminent return of the Risen Christ began to wane. At first only the Christian hope for the imminent establishment of God’s Reign on earth faded. Eventually, however, especially as views of the nature of the person changed, some began to see the body and soul as divided by death.2 Under Hellenistic influences, many came to believe that a person’s soul could “live on” after the body died. The notion that there could be such a division between body and spirit and the idea that the soul is immortal in this sense are Greek, not Jewish, in origin. Though the soul came to be viewed as immortal by some, the Christian hope in resurrection of the body remained important because the body remained an essential component of the person. In her remarkable study of The Resurrection of the Body in Western Christianity, 200–1336, Caroline Walker Bynum concludes that the idea of bodily continuity after death showed remarkable persistence through the late Middle Ages.3

Eventually, the hope for the coming Reign of God became too distant to be of much comfort. As the centuries passed, for some Christians the hope for this new creation was forsaken altogether. Their hope shifted largely toward the vision of a purely spiritual home, where the souls of the faithful departed were thought at last to rest in peace eternally.

Not all Christians followed this path. Many rejected this trajectory away from hope in a general bodily resurrection of the body and a new creation. Because of a tendency of some versions of this perspective to supplant hope in a new heaven and new earth, accounts of this intermediate state are still contested. Why? As Wright so aptly puts the matter, salvation is not just about the future but concerns the present. It is about “what God does through as well as in and for us.”4 It is the “this world” focus of our future hope that enables us to be hopeful here and now. If risen life does not incorporate our bodies, does not include the transformation of all that is into a new heaven and new earth, then as St. Paul declared long ago ultimately our labor—what happens here and now on earth—doesn’t really matter much.

The idea that following death the soul could await with God the general resurrection of the body and final judgment associated with the Second Coming of Christ does not necessarily undercut the notion that ultimately a new heaven and new earth will be established. Much depends on how the idea that there is such an intermediate state is interpreted. Additionally, though some reject as unbiblical this notion of an interim or preliminary stage to resurrected life, others contend this idea has considerable biblical warrant.5 For example, the evangelist Luke depicts the Crucified Jesus as promising the so-called Good Thief, “Amen, I say to you, today you will be with me in Paradise” (Luke 23:43). Not surprisingly, this passage is frequently cited as evidence in debates among Christians about the existence of human souls in a heavenly realm prior to the general resurrection. When coupled with the body/soul dualism that characterized some Greek philosophies, this viewpoint became popular among many Christians and acquired considerable weight in the tradition.6

Many Christians have lives of faith colored by a lively sense of the presence here and now not only of the Risen Christ but also of the Communion of Saints with whom as “through a glass darkly” they already pray and worship.7 For these believers (myself included) the promise of the resurrection of the body and the promise of our transfiguration in a new heaven and a new earth is not only that for which one personally hopes. It is a sense of communion of whose proleptic reality one may catch a glimpse through the grace of God.

Resurrection at the Moment of Death

More recently a third idea about death and the afterlife has emerged among some Christians. Many Protestants and Catholics alike have come to link resurrection of the body with the moment of individual death itself.8 In this view, death functions as a kind of passage into another dimension, into a radically transfigured, fully New Heaven and Earth. Clearly this conception of the Christian hope in resurrection aims to solve the problem of the utter coldness of the grave in which the faithful departed “rests.” But many object to this way of thinking. Opponents echo criticisms first raised by the deutero-Pauline author of Second Timothy: “Avoid profane, idle talk, for such people will become more and more godless, and their teaching will spread like gangrene. Among them are Hymenaeus and Philetus, who have deviated from the truth by saying that (the) resurrection has already taken place and are upsetting the faith of some” (2 Timothy 2:16–18). They argue that this notion threatens to eviscerate the concept of bodily resurrection.

Consider the reaction of then Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger—who later became Pope Benedict XVI—to this notion of resurrection. He argued that to suggest that “resurrection” happens immediately at the moment of our personal death actually “undermines the resurrection, because a resurrection which concerns neither matter nor the concrete historical world is no resurrection at all.”9 This idea does not cohere with several other important theological considerations as well. For example, it conflicts with the contemporary understandings of the person operative at the Second Vatican Council: “The human person, though made of body and soul, is a unity.”10 Likewise, it is unc...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Thinking Eschatologically about Sexuality
• Part 1 Sex in Heaven
• Part 2 Sex on Earth
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Back Cover