BDSM vs. The Temple of the Holy Spirit
A friend was recently challenged by someone about whether their kinky lifestyle could possibly mesh with their Christian faith. The challenger relied on the passage from I Corinthians 6 that says “don’t you know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit? … so honor God with your body.” The challenge was, “isn’t flogging, beating, wearing leather and rubber gear abusing God’s Holy Temple?”
Oy, Paul…
So I don’t know if this post is going to matter to hardly any readers of this blog, and I don’t know whether anyone reading this has any experience in the evangelical/fundamentalist Christian faith. So if you don’t care, feel free to click through to the porn. But for those who might be interested and need a refresher, the passage above was from letter that we think Paul – an early leader of the Christian church – writing to the church in Corinth. Corinth was a burgeoning metropolis of the region, with a temple to Aphrodite (goddess of love) on the hilltop and to the god of seafarers at the coast. From what we understand it was a rather freewheeling town especially sexually, and the Christians of the town were permissive of apparently grossly indecent acts, whatever they were, something that Paul says not even the pagans would do.
The thing to know about Paul’s writings is that they are heavily dependent on context. They were specific instructions to specific people at a specific time for specific reasons. The nascent church was ever on the cusp of collapse and like any other new organization or structure, a stricter set of rules was necessary to keep things from falling apart. Moreover, Paul and the church needed, more than ever in an age of plurality and many gods, to be set apart. Set apart from the Jews who saw them as rebels or cultists, and from the greater society that more or less didn’t care. Rules were more necessary to set the church apart as something different, to garner the attention of the greater society, and hopefully point those interested toward what truly made this faith different from others: the teachings of Jesus and the radically simple Love People philosophy.
While Paul’s letters had their place, I believe they also ran counter to the core philosophy Jesus espoused; Jesus boiled the Law of the Jewish people down to simple loving tenets. Paul, a lawyer and Jewish religious scholar, essentially reintroduced rules and law to a faith that shouldn’t have needed them. He had his reasons, and they may have been valid, but the real crime has been modern Christians who turn to Paul without understanding the context. They take those letters, which I doubt Paul ever expected to last more than a few years and certainly not to be canonized, at face value. When most Christians quote scripture, they either quote something they made up (like “cleanliness is next to godliness” or “love the sinner hate the sin”), or they quote Paul. Because Paul is easily digestible spiritual-sounding nuggets for the stupid masses. It’s easier to memorize pat answers from the epistles (letters) than it is to really attempt to apply the more esoteric teachings of Jesus. Paul’s letters have their place, but only if the reader is willing to understand what he was trying to say then, and how it could possibly apply to our modern context now.
I could go on for ages about Paul, and admittedly I have much more to study as well. Even a lifetime in church and four years of theology classes isn’t enough to make me feel like I get him. But moving on to the issues at hand….
