Sexuality In Heaven

When Jesus comments on the subject of marriage in heaven in Matthew 22:23-33, he directly says that heaven will not involve formal marriages as life on earth does.  In his words, people will "neither marry nor be given in marriage," but will be like angels.  This may initially seem to some readers as if the Christian conception of heaven is an asexual paradise without romance or sexuality.  However, such an idea stems from the mistaken assumption that all sexual expression permitted by the Bible is in the context of marriage and potentially from a background assumption that angels have no sexual nature.  Regarding the latter, there is no logical contradiction in an angelic being having its own sexuality, and the Bible does not clarify this one way or another, likely because it is hardly relevant to practically everything in human life.

The first assumption, though, is most certainly relevant to how people live, and one can disprove it (not that assumptions that cannot be disproven are valid, of course).  Marriage and sexuality are not synonymous.  All humans, asexuals included, are sexual beings whether or not they have a romantic partner, much less whether or not they have become legally married to a partner.  Even asexuals only lack certain sexual feelings or attractions, as they still have genitalia and the capacity to experience physical pleasure from masturbation or sexual activities with someone else.  Sexuality of some sort is an inescapable part of every individual human's life.  This is explicitly intentional on God's part!  Reading the Bible rationalistically, without relying on tradition or theological assumptions, brings readers to controversial Biblical doctrines indeed.

The lack of Biblical condemnation of basic sexual expression in itself (for singles and couples), the demand to not condemn what God has not (Deuteronomy 4:2), and God's own creation of human sexuality all prove that sexuality is objectively nonsinful on the Christian worldview.  At most, only the ways in which people express their sexualities or the motivations and attitudes behind permissible sexual behaviors can be sinful.  Everything from regular masturbation (including masturbation to sensual or even sexual images of the opposite gender) to sexual fantasies about random members of the opposite gender to the use of erotic media depicting Biblically valid sexual acts is objectively nonsinful on Biblical grounds.

If sexuality is not sinful and sexual expression is not immoral by default, then the possibility or even likelihood of having and acting upon sexual feelings in heaven should not be wholly surprising, at least to people who have freed themselves from the legalistic prudery of the church at large.  Furthermore, if the lack of sin in the Edenic state did not exclude sexuality--and this is the very context in which Genesis 1:30 says Yahweh instructed humans to reproduce--then a heaven filled with morally purified individuals does not exclude open sexual acts other than the ones prohibited by God in Mosaic Law.  Heaven may not have marriage in the legal sense, but this would not necessarily mean that human sexuality vanishes from the minds and bodies of the saved.

Sensual pleasure is not antithetical to Christian theology.  Consistently, thoroughly seeking out sensual pleasure, of which sexual pleasure is a subset, is therefore not something that represents a departure from God's wishes for human life.  God's presence and approval was never in a zero-sum game with human sexuality itself, and heaven changes nothing about this truth.  The exact manner in which people may choose to enjoy and explore their sexualities amidst eternal life might be unknowable, but the logical compatibility of sexual expression (even apart from a marital context) and the Christian afterlife is very much provable.  No Christian needs to lament some inescapable death of human sexuality in heaven.