Can sex be a source for theological reflection? Not the phenomenon of “sexuality,” understood in its broadest sense, but actual sexual experience?
The Wesleyan Quadrilateral is a methodology that recognizes four sources for theological reflection: scripture, tradition, reason, and experience. Pastoral theological reflection treats lived human experience as the key source. Any authentic examination of human experience cannot exclude sexual experience. Nor does our subjectivity, our capacity for religious experience, cease when we take our clothes off.
Sex doesn’t easily lend itself to discursive analysis. “There is something about sexual passion that language cannot comprehend or represent and at best there is no reason to try…,” writes Sara Maitland. Any understanding of sex starts with having sex. And sex itself is a form of knowing. (The Hebrew understanding of the term is quite illuminating.) A female Unitarian Universalist seminarian — who brags, “I love God and I love fucking” — engages in casual sex as a way to widen her perspective: “God is important to me and I believe that if I wish to know God, I need to really know myself and know other people in a variety of contexts…. Each partner is a new perspective, a new approach to connection….” Encountering another person sexually allows access to a dimension of personally that’s undisclosed in a non-sexual context. Embodiment also means that we encounter in the flesh the creative force she calls God. Even casual sex, suggests Rowan Williams, provides access to “the body’s grace.” This grace extends beyond the boundaries of heterosexual monogamy, according to some theologians. Promiscuity provides an opportunity to extend and enjoy, in Nancy Wilson’s words, “bodily hospitality.” Some queer theologians in particular have identified sex as an inherently religious experience which illuminates the mystery of God. Patrick Cheng describes the trinity as an orgy. Agape can be understood through eros. Sex, “the smell of our bodies when making love, our fluids and excretions, the hardening of muscles and the erectness of nipples,” in Marcella Althaus-Reed’s words, is a privileged mode of experience.
“Integration of sexuality and spirituality may call for some experimentation,” Daniel Helminiak says, “and along the way one may make some mistakes.” Has my personal sexual experimentation given me insight I would not have attained otherwise? Through the sweat and the groans and the guilt, has my erotic education been, in Tillich’s words, a “way of opening up new human possibilities?” It’s intriguing to consider that my theological formation includes the bedroom as well as the classroom.
“Theology is just like sex, the art of penetrating the mystery.”
Leon Bertoletti
Lutheran Guilt 