Chapter 6: The Spousal Body
Kleinig’s main premise in this chapter is developed from Pope John Paul II’s work “that the bodies of all men and women are essentially spousal. They were not just designed for sexual intercourse and human reproduction but also, and even more basically, for bodily self-giving love, whether it be in singleness or marriage. [Thus, this chapter is for singles as well as married couples.] And more than that! Since both men and women were made in God’s image, they were made for a spousal union of self-giving love with Christ as their common bridegroom. So God created and redeemed and sanctified their bodies to share in his love bodily and give of themselves bodily to him and others, partially now and completely in eternity. And all this is theirs only in Christ and as a gift from him” (pp. 182-183).
In Ephesians 5:22-33, Paul gives his command on how husband and wife are to love one another and then ends with saying that marriage discloses the mystery of Christ’s relation to His church, which can be described in two parts. First, “The primary mystery is the union of the incarnate Christ as the head with the church as his body and all those who belong to the church as his members. The church does not and cannot exist apart from him, just as the human body and its members cannot exist apart from the head” (p. 185). Compare this to Paul’s discourse on the church as the Body of Christ in 1 Corinthians 12:12-31.
Just as the husband is the head of his wife not in a domineering and demanding way but in service to her, so Christ serves His Bride the church “by serving her and giving himself to her.” And just as the wife in turn gives herself happily to her husband in subordination to him, so the church “is happy to be subordinate to [Christ] as her head in a divinely instituted order in which she depends on him, trusts in him, and receives everything from him, whether it be his demonstrative love, spiritual nourishment, or affectionate attention” (p. 185). Christian marriage is to mirror the love of Christ for His church. As a mystery, marriage discloses how Jesus loves His church—ultimately through self-sacrificial love—but also remains partially hidden because we don’t yet fully experience this “nuptial” love between Christ and His church until He comes again.
And second, “The secondary visible manifestation of the mystery comes from the one-flesh union of Christ with the church. It is the mystery of Christian marriage in which husband and wife are both one flesh with each other and one flesh with Christ” (p. 185). In Christian marriage, two people become one flesh, and they are at the same time one flesh with Christ as members of His church. This is a mystery. Kleinig delineates this mystery expertly in this chapter, which I won’t be spending much time on in this review.
Yet I was pleased to find that Kleinig spends a good deal of time on the vocation of singleness. We have the habit of honouring marriage so much that we unintentionally end up degrading singleness as something unfulfilling and incomplete. As a result, many singles feel as if they’re failures because they have trouble finding a spouse. But singleness is just as much a holy vocation as marriage is. In fact, “Jesus himself never married. Neither did the great prophet Jeremiah (16:2), nor the great apostle Paul (1 Cor 7:6-8)” (p. 187). So, singles are in good company.
Many Christians act as if it’s unnatural and uncommon to be single, but this isn’t true at all. As Kleinig notes, “All married people were single before they were married, and half of them will once again be single after the death of their spouse” (p. 187). Even the first human being, Adam, was single before God made him his wife.
It’s not just fellow Christians, of course, that belittle singleness. Even worse, our culture belittles singles who choose to be chaste, or as we usually put it, practice abstinence before marriage. Single Christians who are chaste are viewed as strange and inferior. Conversely, Christianity teaches that:
We do not become real women or real men through sexual maturity, sexual intercourse, or parenthood. Our manhood or womanhood is given to us genetically at conception. Our masculinity or femininity does not come from our engagement in sexual intercourse. That may, in fact, damage it. It belongs to us even if we are sexually inexperienced and sexually inactive. It is our birthright as human beings. At most, sexual activity confirms our sexuality. It does not at all establish it.
p. 188
Contrary to popular belief, singles do have something to add to the world. Whomever they interact with, singles “mirror something of Christ to the people who surround them. They are meant to embody and model true friendship and self-giving love that transcends erotic attraction and interaction” (p. 188). But as our culture sees it, because their minds are so hyper-sexualised, they believe that opposite sexes and even same sexes cannot remain true friends without some erotic tension between the two.
Take Frodo and Sam from The Lord of the Rings, for example. I wrote about this in a separate article here. People of our hyper-sexualised culture essentially argue that Frodo and Sam are secretly gay rather than simply being two straight men who are close friends. Until Sam got married at the end of the book, Frodo and Sam were two single men who dearly loved each other and even gave what we might call “a holy kiss” (Romans 16:16; 1 Corinthians 16:20; 2 Corinthians 13:12). Because our culture is hyper-sexual, a kiss can only be fumed with sexual desire. It cannot be “platonic,” for lack of a better term. It’d be no different than saying I’m filled with sexual desire when I kiss my dear mother on the forehead. Such debased minds will ruin anything good and pure.
Moving on, Kleinig describes three kinds of the single life, using the word “eunuch.” While we normally think of eunuchs merely as people who’ve been castrated, in Matthew 19:10-12 Jesus “transforms the term ‘eunuch,’ which was commonly used as a contemptuous description for single people, by adopting it as a badge of honor for single people” (p. 189).
The first kind is what we might call eunuch by biology, which are “men and women who [are] unequipped or ill-equipped for sexual intercourse. This could be for lack of sexual organs, the possession of both kinds of sexual organs, or the total absence of sexual desire… Jesus accepts them and affirms their worth” (pp. 189-190).
The second kind we can call eunuch by force. This is the usual way we think of eunuchs, people who’ve been “sexually disabled in some way, whether it be by castration or some other kind of genital mutilation, ill health, or the experience of incapacitating sexual abuse” (p. 190). Therefore, eunuchs by force would include transgenders who undergo gender “reassignment” surgery, whom the current culture forces to undergo genital mutilation because their delusions are apparently “natural.”
Lastly, the third kind we can call eunuch by choice, or what we normally think of as celibacy. People choose this life “for the sake of God’s kingdom. They have freely and willingly chosen a single state of life as part of their calling to serve God. That kind of celibacy is a special spiritual gift, a gift of grace that is given only to some men and women. It cannot be required of anybody or imposed on anyone; it is given to them by God and received by them in faithful obedience to their calling” (p. 190). Furthermore, there is a threefold purpose to celibacy:
First, it frees single people to serve the Lord more simply, directly, and wholeheartedly than married people, whose loyalty is necessarily divided between pleasing their spouse and pleasing their Lord… Secondly, it acknowledges that the chief allegiance of all Christians is to their Lord, who has reclaimed them totally for himself to live and work with him. It is, lastly, a reminder that marriage, even at its best, is a provisional reality limited to this age… It reminds us of the ties of eternal, fraternal friendship and love in the church as his body.
p. 191
Moving back to marriage somewhat, just as divorce separates what God has joined together, which God strictly forbids (and which Kleinig talks about at length), so fornication and same-sex intercourse conversely joins together what God forbids. Strictly speaking, “Fornication is sexual intercourse with a person outside marriage.” Broadly speaking, “It is a term for all kinds of sexual intercourse apart from marriage. It also refers to the pornographic imagination that feeds on it and is fed by it” (p. 199).
Kleinig goes into some depth about God’s prohibition of fornication in these ways, but it should suffice to say that “fornication wrongly unites what God has rightly separated. It unites the body that belongs to Christ with the body of a woman who is not married to him. It makes Christ a party to that act of pollution and desecration” (p. 202), and thus dishonours Christ and profanes His body to whom we are bodily united (1 Corinthians 6:15). Moreover, same-sex intercourse is equally as sinful and damnable as fornication if left unrepented.
Simply put, “Like fornication, sexual intercourse with a person of the same sex unites what God has separated.” And same-sex marriage “is a fake marriage that borrows the trappings of a real marriage to justify its existence. Since God has not instituted it [from the order of creation], the church cannot bless and sanctify it as if it were a true marriage” (p. 202).
From this, Kleinig makes a noteworthy observation that classifying people “as either homosexual or heterosexual… is, in fact, a misleading way of thinking” (p. 203). Such classifications has two major problems. “First, in this approach, people derive their personal identity from their sexual orientation and its expression, rather than from their humanity as men and women. So, these adjectives are now used to describe who I am rather than what I do” (p. 203). In other words, sexual orientation today has become the mode of one’s identity rather than a human being created in God’s image and, even more for the Christian, someone who is a baptised child of God and therefore remade in God’s perfect image.
At best, these two terms “describe how we think and feel, how we act, and why we act as we do. At worst, they are false categories that do not correspond with the complex realities of male and female sexuality, let alone with God’s purpose for us as sexual agents” (p. 204).
The second problem with seeking one’s identity in one’s sexual orientation is that it becomes the way I govern and order my life rather than that being God’s Word. As Kleinig says:
…the identification of myself as either heterosexual or homosexual largely absolves me of responsibility before God for my sexual behavior. Thus, if I am a homosexual person, then it is right for me to act in a way that is consistent with my sexual identity… Conversely, it would be wrong for me not to do so. I have a right to do so. After all, that is how God made me. If I am a normal, heterosexual person, then it is right for me to act according to my sexual nature by engaging in fornication, accessing pornography, having anal intercourse with my spouse, committing adultery, and divorcing my spouse if he or she does not satisfy me sexually. What’s more, as a Christian who accepts the teaching of the church, I can self-righteously regard myself as morally superior to all so-called homosexuals by virtue of my heterosexuality. Thus, the careless use of these terms only adds to our moral confusion and spiritual disorder.
pp. 204-205
Kleinig’s solution is twofold. First, we should think of ourselves as males and females made in God’s created order of our sexual agencies—that males are made for females and vice versa. And his second solution is of paramount importance—that we look at both homosexual and heterosexual orientations through a Law-Gospel lens. “Like God,” says Kleinig, “we should regard all sexual offenders as sinners; they are all men and women made in his image, corrupted by sin, judged by God for what they have done, and in need of his merciful pardon” (p. 206). Or as he says a little earlier:
Most of all, even though we must reject all same-sex intercourse as sinful in God’s sight, just as we reject all other sexual sins, we should not condemn people for their supposed homosexual identity, let alone their sexual orientation or their physical attraction to people of the same sex. That would only drive them to despair at their seemingly hopeless condition, or to reject God’s word. Rather, our focus should be on the salvation of their souls by repentance for their sexual sins and the cleansing of their conscience through the blood of Jesus.
p. 204
Kleinig hashes out this Law-Gospel lens for several pages, which is very much worth reading on your own. The most important thing to glean from this chapter is that both homosexual and heterosexual sinners gain their identity from Christ in Baptism as pure, holy children of God called out of the darkness of their former sins and into His marvellous light (1 Peter 2:9). This Law-Gospel lens is also how we live by example rather than by argument. For more on properly distinguishing between Law and Gospel, I recommend C.F.W. Walther’s Law & Gospel.
With this Gospel conclusion to the end of the chapter, it prepares the reader for the final chapter.
The Lutheran Column 