Augustine famously prayed, “Our hearts our restless until they rest in You.” True indeed. Being creatures, we inherently sense our ontological poverty—our innate condition of dependence—and are compelled to find a sense of security. And it is also true—as Augustine’s own narrative painfully illustrates—that one of the things we most naturally gravitate toward as a substitute for God is a sexual relationship. The tendency to make an idol of sex isn’t simply a feature of a decadent American culture, or even of the West more broadly. An idolatrous fixation on sexual union has been a staple in human depravity for as far back as our collective memory will take us. In this brief post I offer a few preliminary thoughts on why sexual sin is so often the sin of choice, and why sexual sin is uniquely destructive to our humanity.

In Romans 1:19-32, Paul offers us a plain statement that God has made himself known through creation. “For his invisible attributes, namely, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made.” A gander at the grandeur of the mountains should cause the average mind to marvel at the grandeur of the God who made them. Gazing into the expanse of space should cause us to consider the vast unsearchableness of God. Indeed, the brute fact of creation informs us that a God of unspeakable power exists, and that we owe him our gratitude and allegiance. But alas, humanity has willfully rejected this knowledge; one can’t be his own god when the Real One is lurking inconveniently about. So we wrote him out of creation’s narrative. Rather than viewing creation as something that points beyond itself to a higher reality, we lost sight of creation’s inherently iconic nature and treated it as an end in itself. We exchanged the glory of the Creator for the lesser glory of the created thing, and began to worship the icon rather than that to which the icon pointed.

And the worship of creation hits closer to home that we often realize. Paul reminds us in vs. 23 that “mortal man” is an aspect of creation that humans frequently idolatrize. We too are part of God’s creation, also possessing an iconic ontology. Indeed, we alone within creation possess the imago Dei in the fullest sense. Irenaeus’ high anthropology is consistent with Paul’s thought when he writes, “…Man is the receptacle of all God’s wisdom and power. Just as the physician is proved by his patients, so is God also revealed through men” (Adv. Haer. 3.20.2). Man is made for God, and finds his life in God; and in turn God is uniquely glorified and revealed through man. And it is man’s iconic nature that leads to the self-worship of sexual idolatry.

In the ancient cosmology, the pagan gods were very frequently associated with material aspects of creation (rivers, sun, stars, planets). Pagan worship, for all its problems, was at least the worship of something other. It was a form of worship that required mortal man to reckon with his own humility (and often humiliation) before another who was greater than himself. But when we worship at the altar of sexual union we turn our worship inward toward humanity. We worship that part of creation which is ourselves. As such, humanity becomes uniquely incurvatus in se, turned in on itself. No longer do we look outside of ourselves for deliverance; we, as a race, look to ourselves to supply our own deliverance.[1] In this way sexual idolatry is a uniquely Pelagian form idolatry. It is humanity’s rejection of the need for outside grace, and a misplaced confidence in our own sufficiency.

This self-referential aspect of sexual idolatry helps us make sense of Paul’s somewhat opaque statement in 1 Corinthians 6:18 that, “Every other sin a person commits is outside the body, but the sexually immoral person sins against (eis) his own body,” (ESV). Here the Apostle clearly isolates sexual sin as unique among other sins. Most English versions translate the εἰς as “against.” But the natural meaning of eis in the New Testament conveys movement toward something, and is customarily translated as into, toward (this is especially true in Paul). Note that in this passage eis (into) is set in opposition to ektos (outside). Per the apostle’s logic then, other sins are directed away from oneself; but sexual sin is directed into oneself.

It is one thing to replace God with Baal or Zeus, or even the sun. But it is the height of idolatry to replace God with ourselves. That thing, which more so than any other thing was meant to point to God, has turned in upon itself and is now worshiping itself. Sexual idolatry is not unique because it is full of the body (as though anything associated with body were evil), but because it is full of the self.

All idolatry is, in the end, ruinous for humanity. No created thing is capable of sustaining the weight of human worship, and inevitably becomes a “broken reed that pierces the hand of the one who leans upon it.” But sexual idolatry is particularly ruinous, since it causes us to look inward toward our own, rather than outward toward the other.

This, of course, is not to suggest that sexual sin is the only kind of sin that matters. As Tertullian once remarked, “even chastity can lead to perdition.” Nor is it to suggest that sexual sin cannot be covered by God’s grace. “Such were some of you” Paul reminds the Corinthians, who were so no longer. The great hope of humanity—to hope to which sex points—is that through our union with Christ in his death and resurrection we can be freed from the destructive power of every kind of sin. But, as is the case with any great thing, its perversion leads to greater consequences.

Gerald Hiestand is Executive Director of the Society for the Advancement of Ecclesial Theology.