Touched by a Vampire (6 page)

Christians have much more powerful reasons than being old-fashioned for insisting that sex belongs within marriage. Christians’ belief that sex belongs within marriage is not because we are old-fashioned. We believe sex belongs within marriage because God wants good things for us. Sexuality is part of the compelling story of God’s faithfulness to us, His people. God is faithful to Israel. Christ is faithful to the church.

Bella gets much closer to the point when she thinks about sex after her marriage: “How did people do this—swallow all their fears and trust someone else so implicitly with every imperfection and fear they had—with less than the absolute commitment that Edward had given me?”
⁶
In Bella’s thinking, knowledge, trust, and commitment make sex possible. She acknowledges the intense vulnerability that is part of sexuality
and realizes that her marriage to Edward, their “absolute commitment” to each other, provides a safe, trustworthy context for that kind of vulnerability. Bella implies that sex could not have been good outside of marriage, hinting at the ways sexual purity is a gift.

Christians also believe that sex belongs within marriage because marriages ought to be a beautiful reflection of God’s love for us and faithfulness to us. In several places in Scripture, sexual faithfulness in marriage is used as an image for the way God loves us. Hosea’s story teaches us about God’s faithfulness by showing an example of unfaithfulness. God tells the prophet Hosea to marry a woman who is a prostitute. Hosea takes “an adulterous wife and children of unfaithfulness, because the land is guilty of the vilest adultery in departing from the
LORD”
(Hosea 1:2). Hosea marries Gomer, and his faithful love for her, even in the face of her unfaithfulness, is a living picture of God’s redeeming love. Hosea loves his unfaithful wife the way God loves us even though we chase after all kinds of things that are not God. Even though we are unfaithful, God promises steadfast love and mercy.

Human beings are the unfaithful ones in this story, but God is steadfast and true. God doesn’t expect us to remain unfaithful though. God’s transforming power allows us to lead a different kind of life, and faithful Christian marriage is one image of that kind of life. If we look at the picture of God’s love that we see in the story of Hosea and Gomer, we see that
waiting for sex until marriage is not just some arbitrary rule. Instead, it’s a beautiful image of the faithfulness God shows to us and the way God can turn us into people who reflect His own faithful way of loving.

In a world full of unfaithfulness, faithfulness is an amazing witness to who God is and what God can do. We live in a world full of constant choices. Do I want the navy shoes or the gray ones? The pepperoni pizza or the veggie special? Will I take the elective in advanced chemistry, or should I have fun in an art class? We make endless choices, and we encourage even little children to express their personal preferences about all kinds of things. They can choose the french fries or the fruit, for instance, to go with their fast-food kids’ meal. We can constantly update our “favorites” on our Facebook profile page or rearrange what we want to watch next on our Netflix queue.

Though it’s difficult for people who’ve always had so many choices to imagine, not every society has so much pressure to choose. When I was living in Kenya, I remember the confused look on a friend’s face when I asked her what her favorite food was. In a village where nearly everyone ate maize and beans 99 percent of the time, my question didn’t make any sense. Food, for my friend, was not about preference. She wanted to know not about my
favorite
food, but about what the
staple
food was where I came from. For her, food was about survival, not choice. Her world didn’t include the daily pressure to pick
favorites, and she certainly wouldn’t have defined herself by her favorite food or band or brand of jeans.

All the choices we have in our culture aren’t necessarily a bad thing—they can be a lot of fun. But living in a world of endless choice does create a certain mind-set in us. We think that we are what we choose, and we’re constantly on the lookout for a different choice, a better choice. We’re free to be fickle, to want the newest update. We’re perfectly willing to choose a new favorite food if something tastier than yesterday’s favorite comes along.

This means we live in a condition where being faithful isn’t something we’re particularly used to. We’re used to moving on to whatever is newer and better, not staying put and loving what was old and good. We’re used to consumer choices, and it isn’t too much of a stretch to go from choosing a favorite food or a favorite movie to choosing a new favorite person to love.

And people do choose new favorites. Faithfulness to one’s love is a rare thing in our world. So many marriages end in divorce. Many people move through a series of loves as they go through life.

In such a world, faithfulness is a dramatic witness to the beautiful love of God. And not having sex if you are not married is a dramatic kind of faithfulness. In practicing sexual purity outside of marriage, Christians are making a gigantic statement about what faithfulness looks like inside of marriage.

In Ephesians 5, Paul talks about the “mystery” in which the union between a husband and wife is an image of the union between Christ and the church. Earlier in that same chapter, Paul asks his readers to “Be imitators of God…and live a life of love, just as Christ loved us and gave himself up for us as a fragrant offering and sacrifice to God” (verses 1–2). Part of living that life of God involves the reminder that, among God’s people, “there must not be even a hint of sexual immorality, or of any kind of impurity, or of greed, because these are improper for God’s holy people” (verse 3). Sexual purity and faithfulness are God’s good gifts to us, and they are powerful ways we can imitate God’s love in this world.

In
Breaking Dawn
, the tensions of the saga are finally resolved. Bella and Edward are married at his family home. It’s a fairy tale wedding, and Bella even wears an old-fashioned wedding dress to match Edward’s old-fashioned tastes. We know the marriage means that Edward will finally transform her from human to vampire. She’ll become like him.

First, though, she wants to consummate their marriage while she is yet human. Though she has longed through the whole story to leave her human life behind, Bella doesn’t want to give up sex as a human experience. She marries Edward while still human and is determined to have her wedding night as a
human bride. Since Meyer’s vampires are insanely strong, this is an incredibly dangerous plan.

The account of their wedding night is a memorable one. Meyer avoids physical details, but that doesn’t mean the telling won’t draw the reader in. The wedding night is painted with both deep intimacy and fierce intensity. Both bride and groom are nervous, and we’re reminded of Bella’s fragility and humanity when she needs some time to clean up after the long journey to the honeymoon paradise. Edward gives her this time with the teasing words, “Don’t take too long, Mrs. Cullen.”
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Instead of giving the details of what happens next, Meyer lets readers know that Bella felt like her skin was in flames and that Edward, in an effort to control the intensity of the moment, bit a pillow and destroyed the headboard. When they wake in the morning, the room is full of feathers from the pillow he destroyed.

Edward is horrified to discover that his bride has been injured. She downplays the bruises that cover her body, but Edward is incredibly angry with himself for having agreed to the plan. “Did you expect this, Bella?” he yells at her. “Were you anticipating that I would hurt you? Were you thinking it would be worse? Do you consider the experiment a success because you can walk away from it? No broken bones—that equals a victory?”
⁸

Bella’s new husband refuses to share her bed and injure her further. Again, we find Bella begging for more. She keeps at it, and he eventually surrenders. Sex is something so powerful that they both ignore the danger. Sex is portrayed as intimate, intense, and dangerous. Edward is right to be horrified that Bella has been injured. God intends sex to be loving and mutual, never a violent experience.

If you, like many readers, find these scenes exciting, it may be because it’s part of a powerful cultural tradition in which sex is seen as dangerous, especially for women, and the excitement and intensity of sex is heightened by that sense of danger. We have to reject these lies. Sex is exciting—not because of danger, but because it’s a gift from God.

In a marriage in which both husband and wife are committed to Jesus’s command to love your neighbor as yourself, sex is not a threat to the wife. It’s a terrible shame if this wedding night story serves to glorify violent sex or to suggest that sex should involve danger if it is to be intense and exciting. This dishonors a gift that God intends for good, turning it into something hurtful.

Later in
Breaking Dawn
, Edward and Bella’s sexual relationship continues to show the reader the intensity and excitement between them. After Bella becomes a vampire, her physical relationship with Edward no longer poses a danger. Human sex, it seems, is nothing compared to vampire sex. Bella muses that “it didn’t feel like I was ever going to find a point where I would
think,
Now I’ve had enough for one day
. I was always going to want more.”
⁹
Because they don’t have to sleep, vampires have a lot of free time. The other couples in the Cullen family spend their nights having sex. His lack of a partner before Bella explains why Edward had so much time to study and practice the piano. Edward’s brother Emmett teases Bella and Edward for failing to get wild enough to reduce their house to dust. Married vampire sex is about never-ending pleasure.

Sex is a good gift from God. In the Old Testament, the book Song of Songs uses erotic language to talk about the love between God and God’s people and about human love. In Song of Songs, sexual love is portrayed as both beautiful and happy. Bible scholar Ellen Davis points out that the book shows human sexual love “in full mutuality and equality of status.”
¹⁰
Sex is not portrayed as something dangerous. It is not a matter of one person having power over another. Instead, it is about a self-giving that goes both ways.

In recent years, churches have made great efforts to remind people that sex is not a bad thing. In a sinful world, sex is often associated with problems: people have sex with people they
shouldn’t, at times that they shouldn’t, in ways that don’t reflect mutual love and self-giving. But the fact that in a sinful world sex sometimes comes with problems does
not
mean sex is bad. Sex is a gift from God created by God for God’s good purposes. It is a witness to God’s love and faithfulness in the world. It unites couples, bringing closeness, intimacy, and fun along with it. It is the way God has given us to bring children into the world. Churches have tried to recover the truth that sex is a good gift from God in order to free people from thinking that this gift is somehow shameful. Married people have been encouraged to enjoy the fullness of this gift.

Sex is a very good gift, but sex is not, as for Bella and Edward, merely about endless pleasure. Edward and Bella defer that pleasure, to be sure, but at the end of the day, their sexuality is only about one another. I see this often in Christians who are determined to wait until they marry to enjoy the goods of sexuality but who then picture sexuality as being ultimately about personal pleasure.

I am glad that Christians are now being told that sex is a gift from God, but I fear for people who picture marriage as an endless pleasure party. Sex in the Twilight Saga fits together perfectly with the fantasy that marriage is about limitless indulgence. But if we buy into this fantasy, if we believe married sex should look like it does for the vampires in the Twilight Saga, we will be stung and stunned when we experience the realities of daily life and commitment. Sex in marriage is about
the inevitable give-and-take of two sinful people trying to love and be faithful to each other through all kinds of difficulties. I fear for young Christian parents, trained to look forward to a marriage of unadulterated sensuality, when toddlers wake them up at night, leaving them tired and cranky. I fear for young couples who have to deal with sexual brokenness or the trauma of past abuse that can make it very difficult to enjoy the goods of married sexuality. Married sex is a good gift indeed, but it is not the whole of married life.

Even in marriage, sex can all too easily become selfish. Yet God designed sex to work against our tendency to selfishness. At its best, God’s good gift of sexuality takes a person and pulls him or her out of selfishness. Sex is not supposed to be a me-first indulgence. It ought to help a married couple pay attention to each other instead of living in self-absorption. For a couple who hope for their marriage to be centered on Jesus Christ, sexuality ought to turn them away from caring about only themselves and their own family and turn them instead toward loving and serving God. Sexuality is God’s good gift, but it is not finally about self-satisfaction. Sexuality is for the glory of God.

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