Your Body is Not a River
Further Meditations on the Seventh Commandment
To be a body in the world is to be connected, for better or worse
The Body as a Tree By a River
In the previous installment, we explored how the body inherits both good and ill, that the body of Israel was the site of two competing collective stories: infidelity to God and being made in God’s image. All of this prepares us to be able to say more about adultery as not just a private offense, but a public offense: the effects of infidelity always play out beyond the bounds of the two people involved.
For in adultery, we are already in community territory: there are already two families in play, two collective histories, two family trees and neither will avoid being damaged. If the body exists as an inheritance of two different stories, so it exists not as a walled off kind of thing, but as part of a larger network, open and porous to the world. Our bodies, biologically, are just these kinds of open and networked things, open to the elements, to nutrition, to damage, and to the bodies of others. Without this precarity and openness, we cease to be sustained as humans.
To be opened to the world, to be sustained by that beyond ourselves is both the possibility of being God’s living creature. The image of Psalm 1 is apt here, describing the wise in this way:
That person is like a tree planted by streams of water,
which yields its fruit in season
and whose leaf does not wither—
whatever they do prospers.
The wise, the Psalmist writes, are set apart from the mocker—which would defend itself against the wisdom of others—or like the scoffer—which would defend itself against the words or efforts of others. They are porous, but with the defined limits that hold together bodily integrity. There is a boundary that is meant to be stretched with a living organism, but one which cannot sever connection to the outside without being destroyed.
All of this invites reflection on connection, on how a body is shaped and sustained, and what the limits to the roots of a tree reaching out are. For the same openness that sustains us can compel us to be endlessly open, to the point of being unrooted.
When The Tree Becomes the River
There is a point in love where, having lived with another for so long, lives becomes inseparable. There is no sentimentalism in saying this so much as acknowledging that if you give decades to one person, you will be shaped by them, and shaped into them.
The tree of the Psalm, over time, becomes inseparable from the river.
It is here that, I think, the possibility of adultery appears: the very dynamic which opens us up also becomes an invitation be endlessly open; that which invites us to give ourselves to love can become that which endlessly invites, to endlessly partner, to move beyond specificity to boundless plurality. For if this intertwining can happen with one person, why not another? Why not a multitude? Why not abandon the definition of this root, this shore, for the endless river itself?
To be transformed by the river—to be opened up and transfigured by love—is one thing. But to dissolve into it is another. The river which sustains becomes the river that drowns. In one way, this is the constant temptation of the Garden: to leave being a human in its specificity and to embrace divine knowledge in its infinitude, not knowing that the finitude of human life is just how we enjoy the infinitude of God.
The Normie Concerns of How Bodies Are Shaped
If adultery has to do, then, with both valuing the way in which our particular bodies are part of a larger whole and valuing the limits of particular relationships, how do we negotiate this.
I call upon, of all people, John Calvin for assistance here.
Once again, I’m teaching an undergraduate course on Christian ethics, which moves in a traditional three-part structure: methods, history, and topics. We’re firmly in the second part of the sequence, introducing them to the various postures that Christians have taken historically on how this whole thing works, and came yesterday to Reformed ethics. To do this, I have them read a section from John Calvin’s Christian Institutes, on the limits of natural law and the vision of Scripture.
John Calvin, in his Christian Institutes, is not the monster that his stereotype would have you think. This is the part where I cheer on Marilynne Robinson from afar, not only because of her descriptions of Gilead, but because I think she’s right in her wanting to rehabilitate a John Calvin who is more normie in his concerns than we might suspect. This particular section, from Book II.6-7, builds out two particular concerns: that the Law is given to lead us to faith, and that we are not inclined to adhere to the Law. This builds on his earlier argument that while we have a knowledge of the natural law, sin obscures its knowledge in us, our desire for it, and our wisdom to apply it.
For Calvin, the obscurity of the natural law isn’t reason to jettison Scripture in public life, but to treat its wisdom as the baseline for our governance: the Law, if it is meant to be a tutor toward Christ, can also tutor publics toward their true end, which is God.
This is Calvin’s “third use of the law”: that the law not only restrains us from bad things, but can be used to encourage us positively toward good things, namely, God. Even if Calvin believes that only God can change the heart, building out a society with nudges and incentives isn’t a bad idea.
I can hear the objections brewing: don’t blame Calvin for the dumb arguments being used for the Ten Commandments in public life. The arguments of “this is just Western culture” or “this is basic human morality” aren’t the ones he makes. For Calvin, the Decalogue depends on the natural law, but implementing the Decalogue is not as wooden as requiring students to confess Christianity. Two things can be true: only God can change the heart, and the Decalogue reflects God’s intent for all human life, regardless of confession.
As an exercise in thinking about how the Law both restrains us from bad things and can possibly be used to propel us toward good things, I have them do an exercise: groups get distinct commandments from the Decalogue, along with a few passages in the Old Testament which amplify it, and they have to think about what this commandment might look like in public life. Some are pretty easy, like not bearing false witness: we can easily think of how to restrain falsehoods and encourage truth telling.
But some, like adultery, are much harder. I could feel the group who drew that shrinking into their seats, and more particularly, shrinking into thinking about adultery only in terms of private piety. They struggled with the first concern of Calvin (that the Law restrains), as well as the second (the Law can encourage us toward good things). The habits of thinking about our bodies as self-contained run deep, and so their answers for how to build out the adultery commandment mostly consisted of virtues: treat your spouse well, love your neighbor, be faithful.
But this falls short of both the Old and New Testament treatments of what is at stake here. Even if one wants to retreat from the admonition to stone to death adulterers—viewing adultery as corrosive to the covenantal people—we can’t get around the New Testament’s vision of adultery as corrosive to the body of Christ or to the life of the mind. In both ways—the life of the church and the life of the mind, we find the New Testament reiterating how our lives, and even the way thoughts issue forth into reasons, are intimately tied in with other people. To engage in adultery of the mind affects the way I think, interact with others, write; to engage in adultery as a member of the church (while having devastating effects socially) is to, in a very profound way, speak of a different Gospel: it is through the body that we know God, and God is undivided in attention, affection, and personhood1.
But this is where Calvin’s concern for public life dovetails with the Psalms: our bodies, and the lives that we live from them, are closer to ecosystems than objects, more akin to rivers than ponds. To remain faithful to my wife has effects in bounding me off from other women—and in doing so, affects them. And the deeper logic of adultery which Jesus names—the life of the mind—pushes deeper into how our minds structure the world we live in: the possibilities of my relationships are not open ended, but singular2.
To both value the river, but not fall into it, requires more than simply my good will or intention. It takes a community: to be good, to be restrained, to be drawn into a good vision, to be the shape of what God has given your one life to be, to be faithful to the spouse who journeys with you in it.
Churches near and dear to my heart have, in recent days, been profoundly harmed by the social effects of adultery.
There is a line of argument used sometimes here regarding polyamory, the Old Testament, and what trajectory there is toward monogamy through the New Testament. Perhaps this will suffice for a larger exposition: the Old Testament takes a dim view of the practicality of multiple partners, much less the theological implications of divided affections. For all we say about love being an overflowing aptitude, that love is not diminished for loving more people, sex is—both anthropologically and theologically—an excluding and restricting act: this body, and not another.