Some Biblical Reasons to Think Sex was not Original to / Ideal in Creation

This post goes along with Omnisubjective Sexuality and will make more sense if you read that one.

--

Do we have any Biblical reason to think that the sex act might not have been part of God's original design? (These are some quick thoughts. As usual, the real answer to a question like this is to read the whole Bible with these questions in mind, and as usual, I like that thought. I am not planning to make sexuality a foregrounded theme in my Bible commentary, but I expect to maybe capture more of the Biblical picture about sexuality there, than I do here.)

The Genesis accounts of creation and Fall (ch. 1 - 3) are a natural place to look. Adam and Eve aren't mentioned as having had sex until after leaving the garden of Eden (ch. 4). No proof that they didn't in the garden, but nothing that overturns the hypothesis that they didn't.

It does seem like God always intended women to bear children. But maybe no sex act would have been required for it. Maybe that sounds like a raw deal hedonically but apparently originally God didn't want childbirth to hurt as badly. (A poll: "Women: would you prefer A) childbirth that doesn't hurt very much but nobody has sex or B) the way things are now?". Or ask men if they would give up sex so that women had only mild pain in childbirth.) Maybe initiating the process of bringing new life has to be addictive and intensely pleasurable if childbirth hurts really badly (and if life becomes so bad that sometimes you'd rather not do all the work of populating the earth).

Some more verses that easily come to mind are the ones where Jesus is talking to the Sadducees about marriage in the Resurrection. Matthew 22:

23 On that day Sadducees (those who say that there is no resurrection) came to him. They asked him, 24 saying, "Teacher, Moses said, 'If a man dies, having no children, his brother shall marry his wife and raise up offspring for his brother.' 25 Now there were with us seven brothers. The first married and died, and having no offspring left his wife to his brother. 26 In the same way, the second also, and the third, to the seventh. 27 After them all, the woman died. 28 In the resurrection therefore, whose wife will she be of the seven? For they all had her."

29 But Jesus answered them, "You are mistaken, not knowing the Scriptures, nor the power of God. 30 For in the resurrection they neither marry nor are given in marriage, but are like God's angels in heaven. 31 But concerning the resurrection of the dead, haven't you read that which was spoken to you by God, saying, 32 'I am the God of Abraham, and the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob?' God is not the God of the dead, but of the living."

A careful (or adversarial) Bible student would try to figure out exactly what Jesus means by "not knowing the Scriptures" and "the power of God". My guess is that he could be saying "look in Isaiah and other passages in the Scriptures that talk about the Resurrection" and "of course God could raise people from the dead, and also, of course he could figure out a way to make the Mosaic Law work with his overall plan of salvation". This seems like kind of an obvious and basic way to read this, but I can imagine someone finding some kind of other way to read the passage, based on other intepretations of "not knowing the Scriptures" and "the power of God".

(I think some Christians think of the Resurrection as being the same as heaven, but the New Wine/MSLN understanding is that it is the same as the Millennium.)

Jesus' solution to the problem of multiple marriages in the Resurrection is to say that in the Resurrection, people don't marry, nor are given in marriage, because they are like the angels. There is more to investigate here: any clues from the Old Testament? Or from Second Temple Judaism? But, absent a rigorous search, just looking at this passage, it looks like there is something about angels that makes them different from humans. Humans will be changed into a different form that works differently from what we we are now. Perhaps we will have bodies of a new kind, unlike those we have on earth. It seems likely that angels have different bodies than humans. So, those bodies may not be capable of marriage.

Is marriage a bodily thing? (Or a lustful thing?) To the extent that it is not, isn't it, at it's most intense, a warm and familial friendship? (Or a particularly true one?) Do we think of such relations as "sexual"? The Biblical understanding seems to to have been that marriage is an automatic consequence of having sex, or even that having sex is the physical act which begins a marriage ("the two become one flesh"). So that serial casual sex is a string of jarringly brief marriages, accompanied by adultery and/or divorce. Does it seem like that to us? Not to many of us, but maybe that's how it feels to God. But then, it would be strange to think of marriage as only being the union of flesh.

So maybe there are two kinds of marriage: the exclusive, fleshly marriage which it may seem from the Bible is shared between (in the phrase used as a slogan or resoundingly, in politics) "one man and one woman", and the not-necessarily-exclusive, spiritual marriage which is indistinguishable from a warm, familial, true friendship? Perhaps given the limitations of time on earth, many of us could only have a maximally warm, familial, and true friendship with one person, but in the Resurrection, or in heaven, there might be time to develop multiple such friendships to their full, if that is impossible on earth. And also there may only be a few people with whom one can completely scale (and thus escape) the hierarchy of betrayal, (something which the non-fleshly aspect of marriage seems to aspire to, which overlaps a lot with having a maximally warm, familial, and true friendship) due to some people being compatible with you on more levels than others. But in the Resurrection, or in heaven, there may be more time to find the ones that exist.

(I seem to remember that in the Resurrection (in the Old Testament), there is reference to children being born. So I suppose, in keeping with the above, that women could bear children in the Resurrection without having had sex. (Or men could as well?) Does this mean that angels can have children, or do have children? What would angelic/Resurrection childbirth look like? Some interesting thoughts.)