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christian counseling today
VOL. 22 NO. 1
“‘For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united
to his wife, and the two will become one flesh.’ This is a profound
mystery—but I am talking about Christ and the church.”
Ephesians 5:31-32
SEX AS ICON
OR IDOL?
How a Biblical Theology of the Body
Saves Us from the Idolatry of Porn
F
rom Genesis to Revelation, the union of man and woman serves as the main icon of
divine love. As Bible scholar, Dennis Kinlaw, put it, “If history began with a wedding
in Eden and closes with one in the New Jerusalem, the biblical story runs from
wedding to wedding, from temporal symbol to eternal reality.”
God wants to marry us. And He wanted this eternal “marital plan” to be so plain
that He stamped an image of it right in our bodies by making us male and female and calling
the two to become “one flesh.” This means our bodies are not only
bio
logical, they are also
theo
logical. They reveal the logic of God and tell His story… and
this
is why the enemy of our
souls is hellbent on profaning our bodies.
Icons are “windows to heaven,” as they say in the Christian east. Sex-as-icon opens that
window, leading us into the “great mystery” of Christ’s eternal union with the Church. Sex-as-
idol closes that window, exchanging, “… the glory of the immortal God for images of mortal
man…” (Romans 1:23).
Welcome to our pornographic world. However, let us be clear: the solution to all this
sexual idolatry is not the
rejection
of the body, but the
redemption
of the body (see Romans
8:23)—the “untwisting” of what sin has twisted so that we can recover the true splendor of
the body’s iconography. And this is precisely what the late Pope John Paul II offered—not just
to Catholics, but to
all
Christians—in an extensive Bible study called, “The Theology of the
Body” (TOB).
CHR I STOPHER WEST