Cindy K

Charis,

I guess I am disturbed by what I see as a pessimism in your comments. Personally, I believe that, based upon that which Cheryl has described well, though we are not explicitly told all the fine details (to the same degree of assurance that “God created”), to say that Adam and Eve were not together as man and wife in the Garden (something weird that I think might come out of the Kabbalah or the Gnostic gospels or some weird mystical writings) is to say that sex and unity of husband and wife came to us as a result of the fall. Some groups interpret this through a belief in a pervasive innocence, but this is not what I believe. That whole “Sex is Evil” is more Greek and Roman Catholic, actually.

I’m also disturbed by what I would describe as a “disease model” that you seem to read through. Sex as a disease, childbirth as a state of disease… And from the very beginning — from the two most healthy and perfectly healthy people that ever existed. Some of the comments here about Testosterone offered by others are all disease model approaches and perspectives. That really just disturbs me a great deal to read through a disease model anyway. I do not view childbirth as a disease state, nor do I view sex that way.

My first sexual experience was one of violation and was sick, but I never tagged sex as sick in my head. My marriage was holy before God, and I don’t read any of my marital relationship through my experience of being violated. The whole “nice perk” about “chocolate to a child” seems like another example of something of a disease model rather than that of wholeness. That doesn’t mean that Adam and Eve walked around obsessed with sex which is another disease model.

And that’s something that I fear so much about these gender teachings. They make anything gender oriented either evil or a sacrament. They are neither. Sex was likely something Adam and Eve did, right along with everything else they did, in balance. It was neither more nor less than God designed it to be, yet still a very powerful and wonderful way of unity between man and wife that changes over time and over the course of a relationship — and theirs was apparently all honeymoon. God said that His creation was good and He blessed it as such.

With sin came the consequences: painful childbirth, but still not a disease but a promise of hope and blessing.