Will we be male and female in the new creation?
In recent debates about the meaning of marriage, one area of speculation has been whether our differentiated sex identity as male and female (this is biological sex identity, not 'gender' as it is often called, which is almost social constructions of masculine and feminine identity) will persist into the new creation. Two people in particular have raised this issue. Robert Vocal, inCovenant and Calling, questions the logic of sex activity difference at the centre bespeak of his statement:
Sexual differentiation is therefore justified inside marriage, but it is only justified considering marriage in creation is oriented to procreation. There are no other grounds can provide the theological weight needed to require that marriage be sexually differentiated. All the same, this also implies that if procreation is no longer eschatologically necessary, And then there are no grounds for requiring all committed relationships to be heterosexual (p 48).
I don't concur with his dismissal of 'other grounds', but the point he is making here is that, if procreation is not needed in the new creation, neither will sexual activity difference, and if sex deviation is not a characteristic of the new creation, then to the extent to which we alive out that new creation in the here and now (2 Cor 5.17) so we should be less concerned most it, and indeed tin can dispense with it every bit a characteristic of covenant sexual relationships akin to marriage.
A slightly different perspective comes from Mike Higton (also of Durham) in his essay inThinking Once again About Spousal relationship. Afterwards reviewing two contempo C of Due east reflections on marriage, he comments:
The aspects of this theology that I am most readily able to assert are its insistences that to live well involves Responding attentively to our bodiliness, And that we are not actual in the abstract but always as particular sexed bodies. We receive that particularity, that differentiation, as a souvenir from God. (p 20)
But he goes on to heavily qualify this. The terms he uses are concerned with redemption, just this must (at least implicitly) include the fall, since without the fall there is no need for redemption.
We are non but called…to live in attentive response to our bodiliness, but to live in attentive response to our bodiliness in the light of God's beloved for the globe in Jesus Christ. Christian ethics, then, is non just conformity to creation just about creaturely participation in redemption.
I find it interesting that this is precisely the context for Paul's currently well-nigh contentious comments on same-sex activity sexuality, in Romans 1 and 1 Cor 6.9—the fallenness of humanity and its need for redemption, and the participation in the kingdom of God now as an anticipation of the eschaton—though Higton's direction of movement appears to exist different from Saint Paul's.
How might we engage with this question? The cardinal text that is consistently turned to is the debate between Jesus and the Sadducees about the possibility of bodily resurrection in Mark 12.25 = Matt 22.xxx = Luke twenty.36 which includes the cardinal phrase 'they volition be like the angels [in sky]'. The issue is: what does Jesus hateful past this phrase? In that location are 5 things at pale here in relation to mail service-mortem existence:
- Will nosotros have bodies rather than living a disembodied, 'spiritual' existence?
- If we do, will those bodies have continuity with our present bodies in existence sexual practice differentiated?
- If they are, will bodily sexual expression exist part of mail service-mortem life?
- If it is, volition that pb to procreation in any form?
- As a event, volition the institution of marriage persist into the new creation?
To see some of the possible answers to this, information technology is worth reading an respond very different from Jesus, from the Jewishmidrashim (which probably originate from a similar flow):
All the orifices [of the body] will spew out milk and honey, likewise as an aromatic scent, like the odour of Lebanese republic, as it is said: "Milk and honey are under your natural language, and the olfactory property of your robes is like the odour of Lebanese republic" (Song of Songs 4.11). And "similar seed" which will never end [to flow from the bodies of the righteous] in the world to come, every bit it is said: "He provides every bit much for His loved ones while they slumber" (Ps. 127.2), and friends are none other than women, as it is said: "Why should my dearest be in my firm?" (Jer. 11.xv). Each righteous person will depict near his wife in the world to come and they volition not conceive and they will not give nativity and they will not die, every bit information technology is said: "they shall non toil for no purpose" (Is. 65.23)…. and they will come to the globe to come with their wives and children. (Midrash Blastoff-Betot, Batei Midrashot, 2, ed. S. A. Wertheimer (Jerusalem: Mosad ha-Rav, 1980), 458)
This is the kind of 'mundane' vision of life in the new cosmos which Jesus is rejecting. Ben Witherington, in his commentary on Marker, believes that whilst Jesus is rejecting 3 and 4 in our list, he is not rejecting v, in that existing marriages will persist, but new marriages will not take identify. The trouble with this view is that it is precisely existing marriages (between the woman and her seven brothers) almost which the Sadducees are questioning Jesus! And his response is articulate: these volition not persist.
Then what is Jesus saying about sex identity, if anything? First, it is worth noting that angels in the Bible appear to be consistently male (rather than sexless) and in Genesis six this is particularly clear. Secondly, and possibly surprisingly, this exact question was a major bespeak of debate in the early church Fathers—and their respond is unambiguous. Drawing on this text in particular, and more widely on the fact of Jesus' and Paul'south singleness, they come across virginity as an anticipation of the resurrection life. Cyprian of Carthage comments:
What we shall be, already you lot accept begun to be. The celebrity of the resurrection you already take in this world; you laissez passer through the globe without the pollution of the world; while you remain chaste and virgins, you are equal to the angels of God.
But what is really fascinating in the patristic writings is the way that they ofttimes move from the question of resurrection life and virginal existence (encouraged not least by Rev xiv.4) to the question of the actual organs, including sexual organs. They announced to confront a very similar kind of reductum ad absurdum argument to the one that the Sadducees nowadays to Jesus: if we are to be raised bodily, and if we are going to do without sex in the resurrection, what is the signal in having sexed, differentiated, sexual organs? The answers given are unambiguous. Both Pseudo Justin and Tertullian argue that, if having sexual organs does not unavoidably lead to sexual intercourse in this earth, it will certainly not do and then in the earth to come. Jerome also argues that the resurrected ones will non stop to exist human and the difference of sex volition likewise remain.
If the woman shall not rise once more as a woman nor the man as a man, there will be no resurrection of the trunk for the body is made up of sex and members.
In other words, in our listing of five issues, they run across items 1 and ii firmly fixed together; the idea of the loss of sex divergence, evidence in the bodily organs, is one minor footstep from a rejection of actual resurrection. But in that location is a line drawn between these two and the terminal iii (sexual relations, procreation and marriage) which likewise belong together.
There is a fascinating parallel here with contemporary debates most inability, and whether disabilities which are seen to shape self-understanding and identity volition persist into the resurrection. This is especially of import for those who wish to resist a 'medical' agreement of disability, which will and so exist 'healed' in the resurrection. Nancy Eiesland, in The Disabled God, comments:
The resurrected Jesus Christ in presenting impaired hands and anxiety and side to exist touched by frightened friends alters the taboo of physical avoidance of disability and calls for followers to recognize their connexion and equality at the signal of Christ'southward physical impairment.
But if Jesus takes his actual wounds into the resurrection life, so by the same logic he surely takes his actual organs (both sexual and digestive) into this life. Luke 24 tells us that he ate fish, and John 21 that he cooked some for others; Augustine's symbolic reading of these texts need non detract from their more obvious significance that resurrection is indeed bodily. Frances Young, in God's Presence, makes a like argument in relation to her disabled son Arthur:
Arthur's express experience, express above all in ability to process the world external to himself, is a crucial chemical element in who he is, in his existent personhood. An ultimate destiny in which he was suddenly 'perfected' (whatever that might mean) is inconceivable—for he would no longer be Arthur but some other person. His express embodied self is what exists, and what will be must be in continuity with that. There will also be discontinuities—the promise of resurrection is the transcendence of our mortal 'flesh and blood' state. And so there's promise for transformation of this life'south limitations and vulnerabilities, of someone like Arthur receiving greater gifts while truly remaining himself.
What can we conclude from all this? In the biblical accounts, sex activity differentiation is non imagined to be absent in the resurrection, and indeed its absence would be unimaginable and implausible if the resurrection life is indeed bodily—every bit it is vigorously claimed to be in all NT texts that explore the question. To be human and bodily ways to be male person or female, both in this historic period and in the age to come.
But we also demand to note that, in the age to come, sex activity differentiation is seen in the NT to take lost its primary significance, because of loss of interest in procreation, and therefore the loss of interest in both sexual intercourse and matrimony. This is why Paul sees the Spirit at work in the whole of the early Christian communities, regardless of sex identity.
It is therefore not possible to dispense with sex deviation in marriage without actually dispensing with marriage itself. The two are inextricably linked.
A terminal annotation of caution on all this is offered by C South Lewis, inOn Miracles:
I remember our nowadays outlook might be like that of a small male child who, on being told that the sexual act was the highest actual pleasure should immediately ask whether y'all ate chocolates at the aforementioned time. On receiving the reply 'No', he might regard absence of chocolates as the main characteristic of sexuality. In vain would yous tell him that the reason why lovers in their carnal raptures don't carp about chocolates is that they take something better to think of. The boy knows chocolate: he does not know the positive affair 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 Sky, will exit no room for it.
(This is a summary of a longer paper I gave this week at the Tyndale Fellowship Conference entitled 'Are we sexed in heaven?' I hope it will be published later this year. The pictures are from the frescoes of Luca Signorelli in Orvieto, Umbria, Italy.)
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