The essence of being a Christian is to hurt like Hell: even Jesus wept. As Christians, we long for God like an absent lover, who visited us once—long enough for us to know each other in the flesh—and then has left us with a promise to return to us sometime in the future. We are to be in solidarity with the oppressed and the poor—do you think that is all roses and cherries? Being a Christian, we reject the validity of self-satisfaction under a legalistic checklist; we also refuse the life of whim and detachment. We live in an unresolvable tension between the “already” and the “not yet” of God’s salvation. In short, being a Christian is a rough road, and a lot of things hurt like Hell.

The Christian question is—is it worth it? You are binding yourself to this person in some sense: at the profane level, this person will now become a part of your personal history and thereby be a part of what defines you; at the sacred level, the two of you will have shared a kind of proto-communion. Is the expression of God’s goodness through sex worth that kind of commitment? Is having sex with this person an act you can take before God in the eschaton with integrity and without shame?

In this whole conversation, it is also important to also remember that we should not be stumbling blocks for our brothers and sisters—even if we understand sex to be a reflection of God’s goodness, if someone else thinks it to be a sin, we need to be respectful of that (c.f. 1Corinthians 8; Song of Songs 2:7). This is not to say that we necessarily need to just pander and validate it in some kind of relativistic move, but we need to be sure we aren’t destroying others through our actions.

Hope that helps.

The idea that our soul is connected to our body is quintessential to the reasoning for God saying to wait until it’s final. Because the physical act of sex is the uniting and tying of our souls and it will (obviously) hurt like hell if we later rip those souls apart by the physical seperation of our bodies.

So what do I do with that in this time in this country? Hm, Robert? What?

Origen was the earliest one (that I know of, anyway) to really push the spirit-in-a-human-suit idea — but he also had the idea of reincarnation and angels getting bored of Heaven, so he’s an interesting one on a lot of counts. He ended up being declared a heretic about a hundred years after Augustine’s death.