A Response to Charles Toy's "Premarital Sex: Is it a Sin or Not?

By way of a friend of friend’s facebook post, I discovered “The Christian Left” and Charles Toy’s article arguing that Christians have wrongly maligned pre-marital sex. To summarize a lengthy blogpost, Toy argues, based on the translatation of pornea and multiple Jewish scholars, that the Bible does not condemn pre-marital sex. To read his article, click here. His article provides a tempting analysis authorizing sin, and merits a response.

Toy ignores Jesus’ interpretation of sexuality. He provides several examples of polygamy, bigamy, and immorality from the Old Testament (none of which is normative) and summarizes the New Testament, saying

Christ’s teachings at the Sermon on the Mount were that the only law is the law of love. He showed this by reversing four of the Old Testament laws which conflicted with loving people. Therefore, anything that was unkind, not by mutual consent, etc. would be immoral for a Christian, but obviously it would not be immoral to love sexuality before marriage or because of different but natural sexual orientation.

The New Testament says nothing about premarital sex. Some versions though do mistranslate the Greek word pornei, which means sexual immorality, into the English word fornication, which means sexual intercourse with someone who one is not married to.

He has nothing say about Christ’s statement in the Sermon on the Mount. ““You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall not commit adultery.’ ²⁸ But I say to you that everyone who looks at a woman with lustful intent has already committed adultery with her in his heart.” In these two verses, Jesus raised the bar. The moral demands of God go beyond the literal act of sexual intercourse into the desires of the heart. Premarital sexual activity is forbidden by Christ on the grounds of it flowing from wrong desires within the heart.

Secondly, this blog claims to be a Christian website. In their purpose statement, the authors portray themselves as believers in Social Justice, speaking for the downtrodden left out of conservative Christian discourse. For a Christian analysis, however, this article has nothing to say from the perspective of Christian theology. Toy moves on from his two paragraph mention of New Testament teaching and explains why modern Judaism now permits pre-marital sex. The core of his argument rests in the assertion that premarital sexual is now normal among 90% of 22 year olds, and therefore Jewish ethics should change to fit the praxis of contemporary adults.

His analysis, then, falls short on two fronts. Toy fails to adequately address the statements on Jesus reinterpreting the Mosaic law code (which admittedly uses the marriage-connected phrase “adultery”), and he applies his argument using Jewish teaching. He does not interact with St. Paul’s understanding of marriage in Ephesians 5, or with the prohibition of Christians engaging in sexual intercourse with a prostitute because of the nature of the body of Christ. Paul contends that since the body of Christ is one, when Christians commit sexual sin, they unite Christ with a whore. Theologically, the Bible presents a clear case from Christians abstaining from sexual activity outside of marriage. The Christian Left fails to provide an adequate analysis or challenge to the traditional Christian position on pre-marital sexual activity.