In Unprotected Texts: The Bible’s Surprising Contradictions About Sex and Desire, Boston University Professor of Religion Jennifer Wright Knust seeks to demonstrate that the Bible is far less clear about sexual ethics than most religious conservatives claim. This effort only partially succeeds.
Knust adeptly dismantles the proof-text approach to using the Bible to construct sexual ethics. Some readers who have never studied the Bible carefully might be surprised by some of her observations. People who know the Hebrew Bible only through Veggie Tales, for example, might be shocked to learn that the Patriarchs, sexually speaking, often were not very nice men; or that the Levitical and Deuteronomic law codes were soft on divorce, unfair, by modern standards, to women, and tolerated concubinage; or that the later Israelites mixed worship of God with worship of the more licentious Canaanite gods. Similarly, people who are unfamiliar with the details of the Jesus’ teachings on marriage and the family might be confused by Jesus’ statement that his followers must “hate” their parents (Luke 14:26) or his apparent teaching the there will be no marriage in heaven (Matt. 22:30). And St. Paul’s ambivalence — perhaps even squeamishness — about sex and marriage in 1 Corinthians 7 is notoriously confusing, particularly for anyone trying to construct a “Biblical perspective on marriage.”
Knust highlights these and other oddities and conundrums in the Bible’s various narratives, laws and exhortations concerning marriage and sex. This provides a useful and readable catalog, if one that very often that is transparently selling very modern, feminist readings of the text. At times this modern-critical-feminist lens simply distorts good scholarship, as with Knust’s unequivocal conclusion that the “love” shared between David and Jonathan was homoerotic.
None of these things are surprising, however, for anyone who has actually made some effort to study the Bible. Knust writes as though she is revealing unmentionable secrets and breaking some sort of code of silence, but that simply is not so. For example, I remember delighting to learn, as a teenager, that our Sunday School chorus “His Banner Over Me is Love” employed a metaphor from Song of Solomon that was unequivocally and graphically sexual (“he invites me to his banqueting table….”) (see Song of Solomon 2, which also includes a rich variety of other sexual images — “his fruit is sweet to my taste” (v. 3), “his left arm is under my head, and his right arm embraces me” (v. 4), “do not arouse or awaken love until it so desires” (v. 7), and “he browses among the lilies” (v. 16)).
More importantly, Knust fails to set her observations into the broader context of the narrative of redemption and the life and practice of the Church. Her hermeneutic seems to be merely deconstructive within the presuppositions of strong feminism. She never sets the various Biblical texts within the framework of the life of God’s people through history, except perhaps to suggest that Israel and the Church have gotten sexual ethics completely wrong.
Even this failure can provide a useful lesson, because it is precisely the same failure that renders proof-texting meaningless. Knust is correct to point out that the Bible cannot be used as a blunt weapon in today’s culture wars — at least without the context of a robust ecclesiology. It is also helpful to examine whether the Church has truly been faithful in its appropriation of the Biblical texts for the construction of ethics. Often it has not.
But with all their failures and inconsistencies, both Israel and the Church bear witness to very long and rich traditions of privileging the full expression of human sexuality within the context of covenantal marriage between a man and a woman. These traditions are rooted deeply in the Biblical narrative as well as in the Bible’s specific laws, commands and warnings regarding sex. If we cannot merely offer simplistic, legalistic answers to the questions asked about sexuality, gender, and equality in our historical and social context, nor can we merely and equally legalistically wipe away the heart of our community’s tradition based only on the not-very-new observation that the Bible is often culturally messy. If anything, in our times, we need a renewed turn back towards the Church as the family in which unmarried and married people practice a joyful purity that bears witness to the goodness of who we are as created beings, male and female, in the image and likeness of the Triune God.