Journal: Eikon
Volume: EIKON 03:1 (Spring 2021)
Article: Instruments Of Unrighteousness: How Pornography Offends Male Embodiment
Author: Joe Rigney

Eikon 3.1 (Spring 2021) p. 122

Instruments Of Unrighteousness: How Pornography Offends Male Embodiment

Joe Rigney

Joe Rigney is the president of Bethlehem College & Seminary in Minneapolis, MN. He is the author of five books, including More Than a Battle: How to Experience Victory, Freedom, and Healing from Lust (B&H, 2021).

Eikon 3.1 (Spring 2021) p. 123

When confronting an evil, a faithful Christian line of inquiry frequently involves examining the good that lies beneath the evil. Absolute evil is a nullity, a nothingness. Everything created by God is good, and therefore, evil is always a corruption, a perversion of some divinely designed good. This is true even of pleasures. As C. S. Lewis reminds us, God is a hedonist who has filled the world with pleasures. Sinful pleasures are simply those that we pursue at times, or in ways, or in degrees that God has forbidden: “It is the stealing of the apple that is bad, not the sweetness.”1

The evil I wish to confront in this essay is the evil of pornography, specifically the way in which pornography distorts and corrupts male embodiment. To that end, we must first ask what the male body is for, situating it within God’s larger purposes for humanity and the world. Having done that, we can then explore the ways pornography corrupts and distorts this divine design.

Eikon 3.1 (Spring 2021) p. 124

Divine Design

We begin with a brief overview of God’s purposes for humanity as set forth in Genesis 1–3.2 God created man in his own image, after his likeness, dividing man into two complementary sexes — male and female. Our sexual differences serve God’s larger purposes for humanity, expressed in the original blessing and commission given to Adam and Eve: “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it, and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth” (Gen. 1:28). Such fruitfulness and multiplication includes the multiplication of families and households, as a man leaves his father and mother in order to cleave to his wife.

Within these larger purposes, we observe different descriptions of the creation and purpose of man and woman. Adam is taken from the dust of the ground and commanded to work the ground and guard the garden. Eve is taken from Adam and is designed to be Adam’s helper. These relations are both complementary and asymmetrical. As Paul says, “Man was not made from woman, but woman from man. Neither was man created fo...