The Churchian model of marriage is seriously flawed. Too often is chastity put up on a pedestal in place of God Himself. In other words, the Churchian model of chastity is nothing more that idolatry brought on by pride. If you need an example, read this article.
I won’t quote it here, because there is too much to read and I don’t feel like quoting an entire article here. The bottom line is that this young woman took a pledge to maintain her virginity until marriage. Such pledges are very common in the Churchian world. It is wrong to do so, not but not for reasons that most people think. More on that in a minute.
The young woman then got married and lost her virginity, as many women are supposed to do on their wedding night. Now in the wake of it, she feels violated, like she has lost something. She feels dirty and unworthy of God’s love because she had sex.
This is a damaging and sick view of her sexuality. Suddenly, she feels bad because she’s no longer popular or special (in her own eyes). This is the same problem I have with many homosexuals, in that they put their entire identity as a person into their sexuality.
Now she’s not religious anymore. In other words, she was sold a lie, that her virginity made her pure, and when she lost it, in the correct way, she is no longer pure.
This is the definition of pride. Worst still, it shows how the modern Church has failed to properly address sex and sexuality within our own culture. We don’t have a marriage culture, we have a dating culture.
Can you imagine if the men and women of 200 years ago came to our modern culture and found out that engagements last for months after a year or two of dating? Then when we do get married, we are supposed to go on regular dates, as some kind of constant courtship fantasy to “fulfill” women when it really doesn’t.
The problem with the modern Church is that it places too much emphasis on pre-martial sex and husbands loving their wives, the latter of which involves proving yourself worthy of your wife, even though she is Biblically required to respect her husband regardless of what he does.
Right now, the church encourages teenagers to remain virgins. This is not a bad thing really. Telling teenagers to have sex with everyone they date is also wrong. However, the Church also encourages teenagers to date with no intentions of marrying.
This is the equivalent of putting a mug a beer before an alcoholic and waving your finger in his face telling him that he can’t drink that. We should not invite them into temptation in that way.
The truth is, Biblical marriage occurs once a man’s penis penetrates a woman’s vagina. In other words, true marriage is the act of sex. This is made very clear in the Old Testament and in the New Testament as well. The religious ceremony is nothing more than a public acknowledge that this couple has decided to bang each other until one dies.
With that definition in mind, then it becomes clear that there is no such thing as “pre-marital” sex. There is only fornication, which is the act of having sex with no intention of remaining with your partner or not remaining faithful to your partner afterwards. The modern definition of fornication is skewed. An engaged couple is perfectly fine to have sex before the wedding ceremony because they intend to stay together.
Marriage is the outlet for our burning passions. For the Christian, it is the outlet to express romantic love. Dating is a modern concept which I hope will be gotten rid of in time. Before the modern world, parents would often chose a wife for their son or a husband for their daughter once they were at an age where they could handle it. And guess what? Those marriages worked out.
Maybe letting immature people pick who they are going to spend the rest of their lives with isn’t exactly a good plan overall for society. Perhaps we need to go back to a model that may seem archaic but also was entirely stable. Unfortunately, that won’t happen as modern man and woman seem content to either fornicate until they get it right or contain themselves they burn out.
Either way is not a Biblical model. It needs to be properly addressed in the modern Church.