Revelation

Still thinking about the recent Pew survey about the growing acceptance of casual sex among Christians….

This verse from Romans, which I’ve quoted before, sums up my struggle:

I see in my members another law at war with the law of my mind (7:23).

As a believer and minister of the gospel, I am bound by divine revelation, the record of which is disclosed in the Bible. As a young believer, I became firmly convinced that if I were to live my life in accordance with the gospel, I was to abstain from sexual activity until marriage. Religion, in general, discourages unbridled sexuality, and conservative Christianity does so with particular vehemence. Yet I continued to battle these impulses that tempted me to violate my pledge. Living up to the stringent biblical doctrine of my understanding proved to be unattainable. To even look at a woman with lust in my heart was a sin. A bikini-clad girl was enough to stoke arousal and the subsequent guilt that came with it. The harder I fought against lust, the more intense the impulses became and the more frequently I succumbed to them. I sinned in secret, because it violated my religion, and I kept sinning because I couldn’t stop. The “law of my mind” which dictated sexual purity was assailed by those instincts that dwell “in my members.”

A psychologist poses this stark question: “What if revelation and common sense (or biology) diverge?” What if the law in my members contradicts the law of my mind? To put it another way, through my sexual explorations, I’ve encountered a revelation in the flesh.

Despite the heavy guilt I incurred, I excused my initial forays with escorts as youthful experimentation. By the time I was visiting Leigh regularly after college, sexual curiosity had turned into compulsion. Experimentation now yielded to indulgence. It was humbling to observe my capacity for self-discipline diminish every time Leigh let down her brown hair and removed her lacy lingerie. At the time, I was working for a prominent parachurch ministry dedicated to promoting “family values.” Contrary to my principles, I was proving incapable of restraining my sexual impulses. In my quest for purity, I had tried to admonish myself: “Resist the devil, and he will flee from you” (James 4:7). Then I discovered what Hamlet meant:

The Devil hath power
T’assume a pleasing shape.

That pleasing shape had soft, creamy skin. Full breasts. A seemingly voracious sexual appetite. My flesh instinctively responded to her open thighs. “Great sex is apocalyptic,” Norman Mailer wrote. “Apocalypse” (ancient Greek: ἀποκάλυψις) literally means “unveiling.” As my body rocked against Leigh’s, I started to receive the slow but certain revelation that I was incapable of chastity. During an earlier encounter with an escort, she teasingly predicted that my inexperience would soon yield to promiscuity: “Soon you’ll be having sex like a rabbit!” She was prophetic. The law of my members continually impressed itself on me, and I assiduously sought to obey this law. I couldn’t be sated. The more I fucked, the more I needed to fuck. My emerging satyriasis nevertheless uneasily coexisted with my religious commitments. I couldn’t forsake my theological studies or my work in ministry. Nor, despite my rationalizations and theological explorations, could I shake my earlier traditional sexual ethic. I sinned in sex and was convicted by my sin. Each time I penetrated the Deaconess, I experienced a sense of desecration. The law of my mind could not be erased.

Anyway, back to that survey. Perhaps a growing number of self-described Christians have also experienced that law in their members which can’t be reconciled with inherited interpretations of scripture.