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Last updated on: May 19, 2006 at 12:49 pm by Cathleen Falsani

2006-05-19T12:49:00-07:00 Cathleen Falsani

LOGO Patheos Explore the world's faith through different perspectives on religion and spirituality! Patheos has the views of the prevalent religions and spiritualities of the world.

GODSTUFF:

‘DA VINCI CODE’ FLAP ABOUT SEX AND GOD—BUT MOSTLY SEX

It would not be an overstatement to say that in the last three months I’ve received hundreds of faxes and e-mails pitching one “expert” after another’s commentary on “The Da Vinci Code.”

Roman Catholic priests, Opus Dei members, presidents of seminaries, presidents of publishing companies, columnists, authors, former nuns, former priests, activists, pastors, producers, directors, pagans, Jews, Protestants, Muslims, theologians, historians, psychologists, archeologists and at least one psychic.

By far the most unusual, however, and the only one I had occasion to call upon for comment (simply because of her iconoclasm) is the Rev. Debra Haffner, a Connecticut Unitarian-Universalist minister who also happens to be a “sexologist.”

Before you start wiggling your eyebrows — nudge nudge, wink wink, know-what-I-mean? — a sexologist, Haffner explained to me the other day, is someone who studies sex professionally, such as sex education instructors, sex researchers, counselors and therapists.

Haffner, who looks a lot more like Martha Stewart than Carrie Bradshaw, has been a sexologist for about 30 years and an ordained minister since 2003. She earned her divinity degree from Union Theological Seminary in New York, and is believed to be the first sexologist ever to become a minister. (There are a few ministers who have become sexologists after entering the ministry, she said.)

As you might imagine, Haffner, who also is the founder of the Religious Institute on Sexual Morality, Justice and Healing — a group described as “a multi-faith organization of almost 2,500 religious leaders from more than 40 religious traditions who share her dedication to creating a ‘sexually healthy faith community'” — has a unique take on why Dan Brown’s far-fetched story continues to rankle so many people of faith.

It’s all about the sex.

And God.

But mostly, it’s the sex.

“A central theme of the book is a question about whether Jesus was indeed sexual and whether there was indeed the possibility that Jesus had a relationship with Mary Magdalene and fathered a child,” Haffner said.

“Certainly in Jesus’ humanity we can expect that Jesus was a sexual person,” because all humans are sexual beings, she said. “That doesn’t mean that we necessarily express our sexuality with different people.”

The idea of Jesus being sexual — having sexual thoughts, feelings, urges, or (God forbid!) actually having sex with his wife — really freaks a lot of people out.

Why?

If we are to believe, as most Christians do, that Jesus was both fully divine and fully human, then by definition it means that Jesus also was fully sexual.

So why the collective flip out?

“In the Christian tradition, we have a religion that’s based on a virgin birth that has followed an immaculate conception with a celibate hero God,” Haffner said.

Well, there’s that.

“There is built into the story an erotophobic emphasis. But that came later,” she said. “For example, the immaculate conception idea is [from the] third century. It’s not in the original story and it’s not scriptural. … We only tell part of the story. What’s happened is that because of people’s own fears of talking about sexuality, that erotophobia gets carried forward.”

If Jesus could feel all that humans do — joy, love, sorrow, anger, fear, pain — why would he not also feel sexual? That isn’t sinful.

It’s just human.

And it doesn’t mean that he had to have sex to be sexual.

But what if Jesus did?

How, exactly, would that threaten the very foundations of the Christian faith? A faith that is, if I’m not mistaken, based on the fact that Jesus came to Earth and sacrificed his sinless human life on the cross to redeem the rest of humanity, so that by faith, through grace, we all could be saved.

A faith that is not, unless I’m overlooking something, based on the idea that Jesus was a celibate man who neither married nor fathered children.

That said, nowhere in the New Testament accounts of Jesus’ life does it say he had a wife or children. But there’s a significant chunk of Jesus’ life that Scripture leaves undocumented.

“There are those who have done research who suggest, for example, that during the period of time [in Jesus’ life that is absent from Scripture] — we meet him at the age of 12 and we don’t meet him again until he’s 29 or 30 years old,” is precisely when he would have married and fathered children, Haffner said.

“At the time … most Jewish men were married off at the age of 14 in arranged marriages. Women died, on average, at the age of 25 — usually in childbirth. People have raised the question: surely as a good Jewish man, Jesus would have been married? Maybe the reason [the gospel writers] didn’t know about a wife and a child is because they didn’t survive.

“People have hypothesized that it would have been so unusual for Jesus not to have [married] that the Scripture would have commented on his always being single, which it does not,” said Haffner, author of a number of books, including From Diapers to Dating: A Parent’s Guide to Raising Sexually Healthy Children, from Infancy to Adolescence.

Of course, the absence of evidence doesn’t prove the existence of anything.

Still, Jesus as father, husband or even widower is an intriguing idea, the kind of idea lots of people — people who had never opened a Bible, looked at church history, or given a second thought to theology before they read The Da Vinci Code — now are talking about all across the country.

A couple of weeks ago, I moderated a panel at the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books, where three scholar/authors discussed such esoteric topics as Gnostic texts (including the so-called “Gospel of Judas”), how the canon of Scripture was assembled, and what influence the Greek writer Homer might have had on New Testament authors.

The place was packed. A line of people a half-block long waited outside throughout the session to see if they could snatch a seat. And this was in the middle of a Saturday afternoon in LOS ANGELES! You know, the place where they keep all the godless heathens and anti-religionists?

I couldn’t have imagined such a phenomenon a few years ago.

“My experience in my work and in my ministry is that people are hungry for a different understanding,” she said.

Enter Dan Brown.

Haffner is quick to remind me (and my readers) that Brown’s novel is just that: A NOVEL. A work of fiction, not a theological representation of what the Bible actually says.

That said, Haffner, like many clergypersons — including a surprisingly healthy number of evangelical Protestant ministers and Catholic priests — welcomes the theological, historical and moral questions the book (and surely the film) raise for so many folks.

“I happen to be one of those people who believes any time we can break the silence, it’s a good thing,” Haffner said of the hubbub around the release of “The Da Vinci Code” movie today. “What I talk about in my books for parents . . . is that it’s always important to capitalize on the teachable moments about sexuality.

“And this will become, culturally, a teachable moment,” she said, “and allow us to raise real questions.”

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