The Complete Rob Bell: His Seven Bestselling Books, All in One Place. Rob Bell

“stomach for food” perspective continues to be a dominant worldview, even to this day. The problem with it is that it’s rooted in a low view of human nature. The assumption behind it is that people are going to have sex because they can’t help themselves. This perspective is presented as freedom and honesty and just being who you are and doing what comes naturally, but it’s built on the belief that certain things are inevitable. What it really teaches is that people cannot transcend the physical dimensions of their existence. It views people much like animals.

      And so many live with a low-grade sense of despair, thinking that they’re helpless, that this is

      simply

      how it is.

      Nowhere is this chronic despair more visible than in a lot of sex-education curriculums, many of which are based on the premise that “kids are going to do it.” If you deconstruct that, what do you get?

      A loss of hope.

      Who decided that kids—or anybody else for that matter—are unable to abstain?

      In a lot of settings, abstinence programs are laughed at. So are those campaigns in which students commit themselves not to have sex until they’re married. Have you ever heard a news piece on the television or read a magazine article about one of them that didn’t at least subtly mock the idea of “keeping yourself pure for marriage”? People who organize and promote these kinds of campaigns are often viewed as hopelessly naive messengers from a far-off land that simply doesn’t exist anymore. The criticism of the “sex is for marriage” view is usually presented as the voice of realism. Are people actually capable of restraint?

      But it’s not realism. It’s the voice of despair. It’s the voice that asks, “Aren’t we all really just animals?”

      And Now for Angels

      In the same way that we can veer toward the animal impulse, we can veer toward the angel impulse. And the one is just as destructive as the other. If the animal impulse is to give in and let our cravings rule us, the angel impulse is the opposite. It’s the denial of the physical and the failure to acknowledge that our sexuality is central to what makes us human.

      I recently had a conversation with a woman whose daughter has been dating a guy for several years. My friend was telling me that her daughter mentioned recently that she and her boyfriend had never kissed. Which I guess isn’t that big of a deal. . . But then my friend went on to say that her daughter is a little disturbed because her boyfriend isn’t physical with her at all. Nothing. Ever. Holding hands, you know, the basics—nada. Cold fish. And they’re several years into the relationship.

      My friend’s daughter is starting to wonder if everything is all right with him. Which of course is leading her to a far more troubling question: Is everything all right with her?

      Which got me thinking about a conversation I had recently with a group of friends. Somehow we got on the subject of how we were first told about sex. One friend heard about it from his dad, who used ticket stubs to show how . . . well, actually, he doesn’t remember how the ticket stubs fit into his dad’s explanation. He was so traumatized by the subject that he stopped listening partway through. Other than his experience, which made us laugh, and a few others, it was striking how many in the group did not hear about sex from their parents. In fact, as the conversation continued, it turned out that a good number of the group were raised in homes where sex was not talked about at all.

      How can a parent ignore something this big?

      A man I’ve known for years was recently telling me about some of his challenges running a youth camp over the past year. The biggest one involved a fifteen-year-old girl. It had recently come out that she had been having sex with a man in the area. Which, among other things, got the man in trouble with the law. But when my friend and the girl’s dad got involved, it turned out that she’d been having sex with, well, lots of men in the area. My friend said that as the truth began to come out, her dad was shocked. He had no idea that she was this involved with anybody, let alone with this many men.

      How can a father be that clueless?

      But as many of us read that last sentence, we were thinking, Lots of parents are that clueless.

      Parents who don’t talk with their kids about sex, ever?

      College students who have been dating for years who simply have no physical attraction for each other?

      Think about the woman who has just gotten married and she’s trying to figure out what it means to be true to her new husband and yet she doesn’t want to have sex with him. She’s got a million confusing messages about sexuality and obligation and love and him and her and it, and so instead of talking about it and getting it out into the open and dealing with it and learning and being open and honest she

      just

      stuffs it.

      And he’s got images and pictures and fragments of stories floating around in his head about what a woman is supposed to be and do for him, and this woman he’s just married who’s supposed to do that and be that and perform a certain way simply isn’t delivering. His temptation is to deal with his frustration through all sorts of other channels that will only drive the two of them farther apart.

      Denying and stuffing and repressing never work because it’s a failure to acknowledge what is central to being a human being.

      They can pretend they’re angels, but they’re not. They have to talk about what they’re experiencing and how they’re feeling and what it’s doing to them or they will begin the long slow drift apart.

      Or the person who was badly burned in an unhealthy sexual relationship and became cold and withdrawn from anybody of the opposite sex. And he’s been this way for years. He doesn’t let himself feel. And he has essentially turned his sexuality off. You can’t pretend you’re an angel.

      Angels and animals.

      There are these two extremes, denying our sexuality or being driven by it, and then there’s the vast space in between.4

      More

      In the creation poem of Genesis 1, God creates animals before humans. And something significant happens in the creation of people that doesn’t happen in the creation of animals: people are created in God’s image. We have a spiritual dimension to us that animals don’t have. Some call this consciousness, others an awareness of “more,” others call it transcendence. However it’s described, the writer of Genesis wants us to see the distinction between what it means to be human and what it means to be an animal.

      Have you ever seen a dog concerned that its life just isn’t going anywhere?

      A cat reflecting? A horse not feeling centered? Animals have a physical body but no spirit.5

      In the book of Job, it’s written that when God created the world, “all the angels shouted for joy.”6 And in the book of Psalms, it’s written that God made humans “a little lower than the heavenly beings,” which is a reference to angels.7 The book of Hebrews says that an angel is a spirit.8 A spirit is a being with no body, no physical essence. Marriage and sex and procreation simply aren’t parts of their existence.

      An angel is a being with a spirit but without a body.

      When we deny the spiritual dimension to our existence, we end up living like animals. And when we deny the physical, sexual dimension to our existence, we end up living like angels.

      And both ways are destructive, because God made us human.9

      The tension here cannot be resolved easily, if ever. In the first century in the Asia Minor city of Ephesus, there was a religious group that was aware of the powerful sexual forces that we carry within us.