On Sanctification

Love, marriage, and sex.

Readership: All
Theme: Problems with The Red Pill / Misunderstood Models
Length: 1,750 words
Reading Time: 9 minutes

Love, Marriage, Sex, and Sanctification

Outside of marriage, sex and romantic love inevitably lead to heartache, bitterness, and ultimately perdition. Marriage provides the context in which sex is confined to its many purposes and is thus honorable, and love can be preserved. Therefore, we say that marriage sanctifies the individuals sharing love and participating in sex.

But today, the world believes that romantic love provides the context in which sex is most consuming, ingratiating, and satisfying, and marriage is worthwhile. Therefore, it is assumed that romantic love is what sanctifies marriage and sex. Extramarital sex is acceptable if one is “in love” with one’s paramour. Nuptial vows have been reduced to nothing more than a declaration of love for one another. When love evaporates, then it is logical to break up or divorce so that one is free to fall in love again. That is why vows are carelessly discarded on the basis of what people FEEL about the relationship.

St. Dalrock was perhaps the first to bring to our attention / awareness that this modern worship of aphrodite* is not only preeminent in Western culture but also in the converged church. In his post, Does romantic love sanctify married sex? (2018/11/20), Dalrock reveals that Pastor Tim Bayly’s stance aligns with the cultural / worldly belief that romantic love is what sanctifies marriage and sex, while the Bible tells us it is marriage that sanctifies love and sex.

* Aphrodite (see image at right) is an ancient Greek goddess associated with love, lust, sex, beauty, pleasure, desire, fertility, passion, procreation, prosperity, and victory. She was also the patron goddess of pr0st!tutes. Her syncretized Roman goddess counterpart is Venus.

Here, Dalrock writes,

“This isn’t to say that romantic love in marriage is bad.  To the contrary, it is truly wonderful!  But it isn’t sanctifying.  It is marriage that sanctifies romantic love and sex, but in our modern rebellion we have twisted this around and assert that romantic love sanctifies marriage and sex.

Pastor Bayly has much company in his assertion that romantic love sanctifies sex.  This is the overwhelming consensus in the secular world, and is the moral basis for both g@y marriage and no fault divorce.  Moreover, this perversion is the overwhelming consensus in the complementarian Christian world as well, even as they deny the logical conclusions of the perversion.”

I am usually in full agreement with most all of Dalrock’s main arguments, but I disagree with a couple parts of this essay.

Can G@y Marriage be Sanctified?

My first disagreement is merely a quibble or perhaps just a more precise explanation.

Dalrock said the idea that romantic love sanctifies sex is the moral basis for g@y marriage, but the mental gymnastics required to arrive at such a conclusion are more complex than this. It is true that g@ys think romantic love sanctifies sex, but this is not their moral basis for g@y marriage. Instead, they have used this idea to identify with the wider culture’s idolatrous emphasis on ‘love’ and thereby gain popular acceptance and recognition of g@y marriage.

The reason they want marriage is to gain a sense of dignity and pseudo-morality, to use this legal status as an acceptable cover for their abominable activities, and to obtain the attached legal rights and social recognition.

G@y marriage is not a Christian relationship / Covenant marriage, and is therefore a misnomer that contains a moral contradiction. But if we allow for this redefinition of ‘marriage’ for the sake of discussion, then it is more (but not explicitly) accurate to say that g@y marriage is what sanctifies the g@y individuals sharing love and participating in sex, which is the correct line of reasoning concerning marriage in general. Interestingly, this is closer to the Biblical ideal than that of our rebellious culture’s, so the g@y community is countercultural in this regard. It is amazing to think that g@ys are more Biblical about the purpose of marriage than the converged church (e.g. Bayly, et al.).

But when g@ys want to divorce, they’ll revert to the cultural ‘love’ programming to explain their motivations and to justify it.

What is “Good Sex”?

My second disagreement is more significant.

Dalrock’s post cited Pastor Tim Bayly’s post on Warhorn media, Authority and submission: muscles needing exercise (2018/11/17).  In this essay, Dalrock compared Bayly’s approach to Milton’s, and shows that they both agree that romantic love sanctifies sex.  Dalrock compares this view to St. Augustine’s and St. Jerome’s shared agreement that passionate sex in marriage was disgraceful.

Dalrock wrote,

“Both sets of teachings are wrong, and you won’t find them in the Bible:

1. That sex with passion in marriage is a sin. (Jerome and Augustine)
2. That sex without romantic passion in marriage is a sin. (Milton and Bayly)

I objected to this post because Dalrock used the words, (1) “with passion”, (2) “without… passion”, and (3) “in marriage”, to make it appear as though these two views (1) are the diametric opposite, and (2) both pertain to marriage.  But in fact, they are not and do not, respectively. They are both very objective discussions of what makes sex “good” under two different contexts.

The first issue of confusion revolves around the context of “good sex” and what this entails. I dissected this question before in The Mosh Pit of Sex Analysists (2019/3/24).  Some relevant exerpts have been updated here in blue text.

I was not alone in this objection. David Gudeman at Brain Legions criticized Dalrock’s arguments in his post, Sex and the Straw Man — an Exercise in Logic (2019/2/10). Gudeman also identified Dalrock’s error in reference to Bayly’s nebulous concept of “good sex”, but then he got sidetracked in the analysis.

We can only assume that “good” means deeply gratifying, and not the other meaning of moral good. This would agree with Dalrock’s running point that brutish passion makes sex good.  See Dalrock: Like a rutting buck (2016/12/21).

For example, some men might say spinning plates with BPDs is “good sex”, while others would say marital bliss is “good sex”. (We could add other perverse forms of “good sex” to the list, again depending on the context and one’s spiritual constitution. PS: Thedeti has added 3 more female views of “good sex” in the comments below.)

To spell this out in scientific detail…

1. PUA Spinning Plates = “good sex” = brutish passion absent of love (c.f. Jerome and Augustine)
2. Marital Bliss = “good sex” = Romantic Love (Milton and Bayly)

To edit Dalrock’s points for the sake of accuracy, these two views could be better represented as follows.

1. That extramarital sex with brutish passion is absent of love. (c.f. Jerome and Augustine)
2. That sex without romantic love in marriage is emotionally unfulfilling. (Milton and Bayly)

Moving on, the second area of confusion is whether both arguments truthfully pertain to marriage.

Both Jerome and Augustine drew these conclusions after their conversion and in the context of marriage (which Dalrock accurately conveys). However, both men’s marriages followed years of sexual promiscuity. Although this is speculation, I tend to believe their sexual sins before conversion had corrupted their appreciation of all sexual relations, such that they (1) had grown accustomed to associating brutish sexual passion with a lack of love for women (including their wives), and (2) attached the resultant guilt to the act of sex, even within the context of their marriages (or perhaps any context as suggested in their writings).

Defilement = Sanctification?

Many pastors and authors have committed a significant malfeasance surrounding their conceptualization of sanctification, in that they did not recognize all the following truths about sanctification.

1. Sanctification (and/or defilement) is determined by the context within which sex, marriage, etc. occurs.
2. Many things contribute towards sanctification, including commitment, marriage, self-sacrificial love, romantic love, passionate sex, having children, and perhaps others.
3. The things that contribute towards one’s sanctification within marriage are also the same things that can contribute to one’s defilement outside of marriage. For example, sex sanctifies a wife to her husband, but if she were to have sex with another man, then this act of sex would make her defiled.  A woman bearing a child would sanctify her in the context of her marriage to the father of the child and only in this context; whereas having a child out of wedlock renders her defiled in the eyes of other men seeking marriage.
4. Combining points (2) and (3), however “good sex” might be defined by each individual with respect to context, the shared denominator is that the qualities that make sex “good” are the same qualities that characterize / reinforce either perdition (postulate 1 in the previous section) or sanctification (postulate 2).
5. Moreover, sanctification (or perdition) is a state that is dependent on the context. But Dalrock, Bayly, et al. have described sanctification as a quality, instead of a state.
6. It is PEOPLE (souls) who are in a sanctified or defiled state; NOT romantic love, sex, contractual marriage, g@y marriage, etc. as these pastors and authors have assumed.

Case Study — Love with No Make-Up Sex

I found an old comment from Derek L. Ramsey that got hung up in the moderation folder.  It’s unfortunate that it was excluded from the discussion because he makes a couple noteworthy points of discernment on the place and importance of make-up sex.

Derek denied ever having make-up sex with his wife. He wrote,

“Sex doesn’t sanctify the relationship. As Dalrock said in his post, Does romantic love sanctify married sex? (2018/11/20).”

“Make-up sex is a fundamentally defective strategy. It puts the cart before the horse. The notion that sex can repair something that is broken in the relationship is backwards. It is a trendy psychological concept, sure, but it isn’t Christian.

“If we had sex to cover over disagreements, it would encourage a false sense of serenity. That’s not ideal. If all we needed was to have sex to behave properly to each other or to forgive each other, that’s not ideal either, nor is it biblical.”

Amazingly, Derek has recognized that the brutish passion that is characteristic of make up sex is absent of romantic love after a conflict (c.f. Jerome and Augustine), and that passionate sex without this romantic love is emotionally unfulfilling, nor does it fulfill the purpose of marriage, and thus, it is dishonorable and unbiblical (c.f. Milton and Bayly). He has miraculously juxtaposed and condensed Jerome, Augustine, Milton, and Bayly, and has proven Dalrock wrong IRL!

Another explanation is that Derek and his wife are both over the age of 70, have been married for over 50 years, and haven’t had sex in 10.

Related

• Eternity Matters: Churchgoers Who Support “Same-Sex Marriage” are Indistinguishable from the World (2024/4/12)