originally posted at http://www.regenerator.com/8.2/letter_schuchardt.html; cache retrieved from archive.org
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The cover image of the most recent re:generation is remarkable in its richness. The apple, often taken as the symbol of sexual knowledge and fallenness, contains the seed of regeneration in the form of the human child. In a culture which constantly divorces sex from fertility, this beautiful fetal image gently acknowledges that we separate these two to our own detriment, that grace is born of community, and that this community has a real, physical, and sexual element. It is a spectacular image.
However, it has been a long time since re:generation offered the power of the printed word to a more spectacularly bad good idea than the one Daniel Harrell offers in "There's No Such Thing as Premarital Sex." Mr. Harrell is clearly writing from the commendable desire to untangle the (t)horny thicket left in the garden by the growing disconnection of sex and marriage, but the solution he offers—that we can affirm sex that happens before marriage as good, even between those who have no intention of marrying as long as we encourage them toward marriage—does much more to harm our already confused and wounded sense of who we are as sexual creatures than it does to heal it. His ideas are not just provocative; they are dangerous.
The whole article hinges on the claim that there is something strange about the idea that a "magical transformation takes place" at the altar to render sex suddenly virtuous. Mr. Harrell writes about this strangeness with a certain smugness, as though observing this quaint relic of the evangelical past from a very great distance. God made sex good, Mr. Harrell says, so it doesn't need to be "made good again" by the application of a spoken vow. But aren't we surrounded by things, made good by God, that can be easily contorted into combustible, dangerous things when touched by those who have left Eden behind? Food is good, and nourishing, but gluttony is bad for both body and soul. Nakedness is lovely or perverse depending on the context. The sex-is-fire metaphor may be hackneyed, but that does not make it false. There is a strange economy in the world outside the garden: the best and most beautiful things carry within them the possibility of the most profound evil.
So while there is actually nothing strange about the idea that a "magical," ontological moment occurs during the marrying of a man and woman that renders everything different afterwards, not just sex, there is something downright bizarre about doing battle with two thousand years of church history armed only with a dubious interpretation of an obscure passage in Exodus. Because really, this is what Mr. Harrell is doing. He's taking the very real historical fact that the community of faith, from the earliest Jewish theocracy to the modern church, has always marked the passing into marriage with the establishment of covenants for the protection of those involved, and brushing it aside with the fact that he cannot find the specific idea of the "spoken vow" in Scripture.
The seriousness of the covenant, and the protection it conferred, began much earlier in biblical societies than it does in the typical evangelical church today. Mary and Joseph were '"pledged" to be married, and even that premarriage betrothal would have required a divorce to dissolve it. It is fallacious to say that if our particular way of marrying in the modern church—speaking vows before an altar while clad in a white gown—can't be found in the ancient writings of the church, therefore marriage ceremonies, and the pledges they imply, did not occur. To cite the Exodus reference requiring a man to make right his seduction of a virgin (which, incidentally, falls in a long list of ways to make retribution when bad things happen) as evidence that the act of sex, rather than a process of marriage and consummation, made the two people married, makes about as much sense as arguing that a law requiring a thief to pay for the pie he has already consumed really means that the pie was rightfully and beautifully his the moment the first bite crossed his lips. It is a clear case of the exception that proves the rule. The dowry was supposed to be paid, and the woman accepted as a wife, through a real covenant before the sex happened. That's why it is called seduction.
Marriage is a covenant. Sex alone is not. The reason the universal church has always hedged virtuous sex with the covenant of marriage is for our own protection. And those who have always felt the benefits of the two-step dance of covenant and consummation are those who are most vulnerable: women and children. At the end of the day, Mr. Harrell's sexual ethics will simply add another layer to the heaviness women sense intuitively in their own sexuality as bearers of life, because it will affirm as good the kind of sex which potentially leads to children born without the protection covenant brings. The community of faith described in Scripture has always known what Mr. Harrell has apparently forgotten. We are deeply fickle creatures. Many, many are the couples who have intended to marry and didn't, and many are the wounded people who were persuaded by promises of marriage to participate in an act symbolizing a reality that had not yet come to pass and never did. Premarital sex really does singe us, and the scars left by the sex that made it almost all the way to the altar are often the most difficult with which to deal.
This kind of writing, rather than transforming both community and culture with the gospel, actually ends up enculturating the gospel, shrinking it to fit the categories that seem good to our generation. After all, it is not the conservative, evangelical church that invented the idea that premarital sex was sinful--the New Testament speaks clearly of adultery and fornication as two distinct sexual sins (see Matthew 15:19), both condemnable.
Come on Mr. Harrell! You are messing with the fundamental metaphors of the faith here: the church is the bride of Christ. It is marriage, not sex, which creates the kind of oneness Christ looks for as the ultimate picture of his relationship with his church. Erasing these boundaries doesn't open the mystery of grace to us, it simply removes the need for it.
Rachel Schuchardt
Jersey City, New Jersey