Victoria’s Secret has run an ad campaign asking the question, “What is sexy?”
How would one answer that question from a biblical-theological perspective? Can it be asked? Should it be answered?
On March 21, 2012, Dr. Mark Liederbach—associate professor of Christian Ethics at Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary and senior fellow at the Bush Center for Faith & Culture—gave a faculty lecture at SEBTS trying to address just such a question.
Professor Liederbach seeks to avoid an overly physicalist analysis on the one hand and a functional Gnosticism on the other. One of his arguments is that “while many of us have an over-spiritual syrupy Christianized Gnosticism definition on the lips we live and function with the overly physicalistic answer offered by Victoria’s Secret in our hearts and minds.”
The paper has three goals or movements:
First, it will lay out the rudimentary elements of a biblical and theological ethic of worship from which to engage the question of sexiness.
Next it will identify nine biblical and theological principles that ought to shape our view of sexiness in light of an ethic of worship.
Finally, it will give particular attention and application to answering the question “what is sexy?” in light of the conclusions reached in the preceding sections. And in this way I hope to provide a foundation for redeeming sex and sexuality.
You can read the entire paper here, or watch it below:
Here is the conclusion to his provocative and insightful work:
So at the end of the day how ought we Christians answer the question of “what is sexy?” and what are we to do with the claims of Victoria Secret.
In regard to the latter question, the problem is not that we like to see human bodies or that we have particular tastes, but that we take them out of proper contexts, we make them primary in our understanding, and most tragically, we do not evaluate them in light of the overall and dominating purposes for which we and our sex and sexuality were created.
Victoria’s Secret is not wrong in claiming that the human body is attractive and sexy. In fact, in many ways they are exactly right. God did make humans physical and sexual. Further, as Scripture indicates, in the right contexts and from the experience and pleasures of sex and sexuality are meant not only to bring us great joy, but are also seen as very good by God himself. In fact, one could say that when we rightly pursue and express our sexuality it not only brings us great pleasure and joy, it makes the Father joyful as well.
But where the perspective of Victoria’s Secret is woefully inadequate and tragically deceptive is in the utter shallowness of their depiction of what “sexy” is. Divorced from the fuller biblical context of understanding and the great task we are created for, separating out the physical dimension from a richer and more holistic biblical understanding of embodied selves, and rooting the physical enticement in selfish forms of lustful want strips sexiness of its essentials and prostitutes a cheap and anemic imitation for self-oriented lusters to ever consume and never find satisfaction.
The great tragedy is not that it celebrates the human body, but that it does so by taking that which is most subjective and most temporal from the larger, grander picture of sexiness and parades it about as if it were the final goal and highest expression. Thus it is not the body form that is evil, but the context and exploitive nature of its uncovering as well as the disoriented expression of its use that is the counterfeiting thief. In truth, the secret Victoria is not telling us is that she is taking a good and beautiful element out of the beauty of its context twisting it to head in a selfish direction and undermining the higher and more satisfying pleasure.
But God offers something of far exceeding excellence for us to discover to our great and lasting joy. For it is God, the one who created sex, sexuality and sexual expression, it is God who invented pleasure, it is God who gave this great gift to the human race, and it is God who also provides contexts, purposes, and guidelines to enable its fullest expression and meaning. God understands “sexy” better than anyone and it brings Him great joy when we trade in our petty and anemic views of “sexiness” for a much more enticing one.
Thus, if there is a higher and better definition of sexy than the one paraded around in our culture, then even if it is at first hard for us to see or accept, we must trust the Maker of all good things, and seek to alter our perspective in light of His. After all He is the One who declares in Psalm 16:11 that in His presence there is fullness of joy and in His right hand there are pleasures forever. If this verse is true than it must be God’s definition of “what is sexy” that is actually the most tantalizing. And what God finds sexy, we ought also to find sexy.
