What are we supposed to do with this approach, especially in the context of our sexually liberated culture? Do we reject it out of hand as being hopelessly out of date? Do we accept it completely and repress those powerful urges that rise up inside us? Is there a middle ground somewhere?

We start by looking for the reasons behind Deuteronomy’s attitude. Since Deuteronomy is a book of law, it helps us to look for the legal definitions underlying its view of sexuality and marriage. Genesis 2:24 is the foundational text for the biblical view of sexuality:

• “From which thing, a man will leave his father and mother and cling to his wife, and they will be two in one flesh.”

Sexuality is not an end in itself. Instead, it is the consummating act of the most basic community human beings can know: that of husband and wife. In the Genesis text, Adam and Eve find a solution to their prior problem of profound loneliness, in each other. The act of becoming “two in one flesh” is what makes marriage a marriage, according to scripture. However crude it sounds, the premise that “penetration equals marriage” is crucial to understanding the biblical teaching.

Why would the Bible teach such a thing? It’s instructive to list some possible reasons:

• In the context of Genesis, one reason is God’s concern that Adam and Eve find satisfaction and completion in each other. The two become something together neither could have been separately. This union is crowned by the sacrament of sexual intercourse.
• The Bible is concerned for the well-being of children. As hard experience teaches each generation, children flourish best under the care of mutually-committed, loving parents. This is not to say that children only flourish well under such circumstances, only that in general it works that way.
• The best way of safeguarding both the intimate communion at the heart of the most important human relationship, and the well-being of that relationship’s offspring, is by limiting the sacrament of sexual intercourse to those who are entitled to partake of it.

At least two of these three concerns are still as valid and vital today as they were in Genesis. As families go, so goes society. The well-being of children is still a paramount concern for any human community. The remaining question would be whether taking a sacramental approach to sexual intercourse is the best way to protect families and children.

Moving from the more intimate, familial setting of Genesis to the communal setting of Deuteronomy, other factors enter into consideration.

• There are public health concerns related to multiple sexual partners.
• Israel had experienced Canaanite ritual prostitution, which wedded the ultimate act of sexual intimacy to the worship of Canaan’s fertility gods.
• In practice, unrestricted sexuality tended to degrade the status of women.
• Children born outside the sanction of marriage tended to fare worse as well.

The Bible is not anti-sex, by any means. Any collection that includes The Song of Solomon obviously has a positive view of human love. In fact, it is possible the Bible has a higher view of sexuality than our supposedly liberated, contemporary one. The Bible sees sex in sacramental terms. A sacrament is “an outward and physical act, signifying an inward and spiritual reality.” The outward and physical act, intercourse, signifies the inward and spiritual reality, human marriage.

It is true that sex is “easier” now than in biblical times. The invention of the pill decouples, if you will, sexual intercourse and procreation. But does the fact that we can have multiple partners, without risking unwanted children, mean that we ought to? Is it good for us, or for those who are (or who we wish were) our partners? Hasn’t the sex act becomes an end in itself? Speaking as a product of late-20th Century American culture, I can say it certainly was for me, for long stretches of my life.

We find ourselves manipulated by sexual images to buy products. The sexual images we see distort both our expectations and our self-image. The mystery of sexual intimacy is often debased into pornography. We are desensitized to the act’s wonder, coming to see as commonplace that which God intended as one of the peak experiences of human life. And, despite contraception, the problem of children born outside a stable parental union remains as pressing as ever.

God’s revulsion against idolatry enters in as well. God calls Israel to be intimate only with Himself. He is, as scripture often repeats, the husband of Virgin Israel. There is only room for One husband in Israel’s moments of ecstatic union with its Lord. The human sacrament is intended to mirror this relationship, with its ecstatic heart reserved for two persons in an exclusive relationship with each other While it is true that Israel’s law acknowledged the practice of polygamy, polygamy is never the ideal. Over time, that particular practice fell from favor and was replaced by the exclusive model embodied in the beginning, with Adam and Eve.

At this point, changing our society’s practice of sexuality seems far-fetched. Instead, people of faith need to ask themselves a question: does our cultural way of being sexual do a better job of safeguarding those things biblical law considered foundational than the biblical model itself? Do we really “do sex” better, now that we’ve abandoned the biblical model?

Yet embracing the biblical model has its challenges as well. Would embracing it mean re- criminalizing sexual behavior? Should sex outside marriage be a capital crime, for instance? Obviously, the answer to that is no. Yet the point of the biblical statutes is not merely to punish sexual offenders. It is to remind us how important the act of sexual intercourse is, both in the Bible and in human life as a whole. After all, the law addresses only the most important elements in our interactions with each other by capital sanctions.

We could begin our quest for a more thorough biblical sexuality by re-embracing the importance of the act itself, as the Bible does. Once we understood that, we could more thoroughly cherish something so vital to human well-being. We could insulate ourselves from forces which trivialize it, or which make it an end in itself. We could preserve the mystery, rather than continually unmasking it.

Would it hurt us if sexual intimacy were once again seen sacramentally? Would it harm us if our first and only partner were “every woman in the world” to us, or “every man?” If our imagination’s free play began with our partners in intimate communion, instead of beginning with every other image we’ve seen in the world around us, would that take away from the wonder of the act itself?

These are not values people of faith can or should impose on others in pluralistic cultures. That isn’t to say they aren’t values we shouldn’t embrace ourselves. And, in embracing them, we need to provide our children the safe environment and encouragement they need to make something more of sex than we have done ourselves.