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In the Bible, the value of a person's life is not measured by the use of
natural functions like sex because the value of personal life comes from
bearing God's image (Gn 1: 27; 9:6; Ro 8:29; 2 Co 3:18). This is evident in
the way God treats us as persons from conception (Ps 139:13-6; Jer 1:5), and
is why harming a person in the womb is as bad as harming a mature adult (Ex
21: 22-5). By measuring personhood according to sexual activity, therapeutic
morality not only devalues human life but also ends in awful blasphemy. If one
must have sex to be fully human, then Jesus was never completely incarnate,
and the spotless Lamb of God is jeered for sacrificing a life that was not
worth as much as those he came to save.
3. It is completely self-centered
A third reason to reject therapeutic morality is because it is totally
self-centered. Therapeutic morality is all about self-actualization, self-
fulfillment and self-esteem. Sex is treated as an investment in self with no
reason to satisfy anyone else unless as a strategy for getting something in
return. Therapeutic sexual morality makes self an idol, and leaves individuals
no sense of moral direction other than following themselves only because they
refuse to acknowledge anything greater than themselves. Morally speaking, the
result is much like a dog chasing its tail or an idiot babbling to himself in
a language no one understands. By turning inward, the self loses reference to
anything higher than itself and ceases to improve. And the more intently the
self focuses on itself, the more it also risks collapsing in upon itself.
The Bible explains that fulfillment in life centers on Christ, not self,
and personal development comes from serving objectives set by God (Php 3:12-
4), not from self-centered sex. All we do in the body--including sex--must be
for Christ, not self (Ga 2:20). Jesus rebuked Pharisees for being full of
"self-indulgence" (Mt 23:25). And Paul explains that our natural self-centered
way of thinking has to be "transformed by the renewing of your mind," so that
psychology in all areas (including sex) is true and pure only if we learn to
pursue God's "good, pleasing and perfect will" over self-centered passions and
wants (Ro 12:2).
So, while therapeutic sexual morality expects the self to satisfy
itself, through itself, by focusing only upon itself, the Bible orders that we
"put off your old self" in order "to be made new in the attitude of your
minds" and to instead "put on the new self, created to be like God in true
righteousness and holiness" (Eph 4:22-24). Therapeutic morality assumes the