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I do appreciate this "different take" on sex in heaven. I have always thought that we oversimplify Jesus remarks on no marriage or giving of marriage. In context he was addressing a hypothetical question about a woman who had multiple husbands that died before she did. I agree that we will have even deeper relationships with our spouse(s) in the kingdom of heaven than we have in this world. However, I think you seem to almost present heaven as one giant orgy? I know that is not your real purpose, but it could be read that way, and I think that is missing the mark, figuratively and literally. I think the idea is that we will be the bride of Christ. Yes we will have unimaginable intimacy with God and each other, but it cannot be reduced to even remotely like the romantic act of sexual intercourse, as beautiful and good as that is in the bond of mortal marriage. Will there be procreation in heaven or in our redeemed state? That is I think an interesting question that is hard to answer with scripture. I like what C.S. Lewis said on the topic:

"The letter and spirit of scripture, and of all Christianity, forbid us to suppose that life in the New Creation will be a sexual life; and this reduces our imagination to the withering alternatives either of bodies which are hardly recognizable as human bodies at all or else of a perpetual fast. As regards to the fast, I think our present outlook might be like that of a small boy who, on being told that the sexual act was the highest bodily pleasure, should immediately ask whether you ate chocolates at the same time. On receiving the answer ‘No,’ he might regard [the] absence of chocolates as the chief characteristic of sexuality. In vain would you tell him that the reason why lovers in their raptures don’t bother about chocolates is that they have something better to think of. The boy knows chocolate: he does not know the positive thing that excludes it. We are in the same position. We know the sexual life; we do not know, except in glimpses, the other thing which, in Heaven, will leave no room for it.”

Duncan Cary Palmer 1y ago

Thanks for your very thoughtful interaction.🙏🏻😁

Though I appreciate Lewis's brilliance and writings generally, I think he is wrong on this point. "The very letter and spirit of scripture" uniformly celebrate sexuality in its proper context, and that context is bounded by the constraints of the present age. In the Hebrew cultural thinking of the authors of Scripture--including the founders of Christianity--the absence of marital relations in any possible future life would have been unthinkable.

Could my presentation here be misconstrued as some sort of perpetual orgy? Certainly--likely by those with a high time preference--but you are correct about that not at all being my intent. While Lewis's analogy is one of the best attempts ever at defending what has become the "traditional" view, I think it, too, is subject to the same criticism Jesus leveled at the Sadducees.

The core of the "traditional" view is based on the passage repeatedly cited by nostr:npub1x0r5gflnk2mn6h3c70nvnywpy2j46gzqwg6k7uw6fxswyz0md9qqnhshtn , which appears in all three synoptic gospels. We need to recognize what Jesus was berating the Sadducees for in that encounter; they had elevated their own anti-human, Gnostic-like, anti-resurrection tradition above what scripture *actually says* on the topic.

“Is this not the reason you are mistaken, that you do not understand the Scriptures nor the power of God?" - Mark 12:24

The Sadducees imposed their own legalist, materialist framework on their reading of Scripture. They viewed Torah as eternally binding, rather than as a contingency plan tailored and adapted to a temporal, fallen world.

The whole of Scripture is always greater than the mere sum of its parts, and every detail matters. And while I don't deny that there may be pleasures in the Glory that transcend those sexual, and as much as I enjoy the physical intimacy of marriage, I also still enjoy chocolate.😃

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Discussion

unknown 1y ago

Yeah....Christianity is really being destroyed by the world because nobody reads the bible and puts God in their own image

Marakesh 𓅦 1y ago

I appreciate your original thinking, nostr:npub1cxp3l03x20mkzezzr4takm8w8zuva7xwvacmcewp97z58hjt8xls3mexlq, and I once also came up with this interpretation and shared it with another young Christian who seemed to agree, but I have since come to see it differently.

In context, the Saduccees had asked Jesus about whose wife this woman who had been married to seven different brothers would be in the resurrection:

> In the resurrection, then, whose wife will she be of the seven? For they all had married her.” Jesus answered them, “You are mistaken, because you don’t know the Scriptures or the power of God. For in the resurrection they neither marry nor are given in marriage but are like angels in heaven.

Matthew 22:28–30 (CSB)

Under your view, I would think Jesus would have said that all of the brothers would be married to her (assuming they all make it to the new world), am I right? Instead, Jesus' answer seems to imply that she wouldn't be married to any of the brothers because there won't be any marriage (perhaps other than that of Christ and His Bride, the Church). And if there is no marriage between the children of the resurrection, I can't imagine there would be fornication or adultery among them either!

Saying that the children of the resurrection will be like the angels of God is interesting and mysterious. I remember in the movie Dogma an angel there was portrayed as having no genitalia. I would think we humans would retain our sex and presumably our organs thereto, but I also note that the Bible always appears to portray angels as looking exclusively like men (and they also don't have wings or look like fat little babies). And they are called the "Sons of God". If there are no female angels there is probably no means or need for angels to reproduce. And they certainly wouldn't be engaged in a big homosexual orgy in heaven!

Anyway, just adding my thoughts to the discussion.

> However, as it is written:

“No eye has seen,

no ear has heard,

no mind has conceived

what God has prepared for those who love Him”

1 Corinthians 2:9 (NIV)