Boundaries

I considered titling this post "Setting Boundaries on a Boundless God", but I decided that could be misinterpreted too easily. My purpose in this post is to explain my (recently revisited) views on boundaries in Christian relationships, particularly those between people of the opposite sex. My goal is to walk through the existence, cause, and purpose of boundaries in light of eternity; in other words, I will attempt to look at earthly relationships while "setting my mind on things above".

First of all, I want to emphasize that this blog consists entirely of my understanding and opinions. I do my very best to make sure that what I write is in line with what we read in the Bible and what God has revealed to us, but I reserve the right to change my stance on most things, and I strongly encourage others to comment below or talk to me if they disagree or are confused about something. On that note, I would also like to add that my views on boundaries and relationships recently changed, and the realization and lesson that brought about that change is the main focus of this post.

Secondly, I want to define what I mean by "boundaries". For the entirety of this entry, unless I state otherwise, "boundaries" refer to rules or guidelines in relationships that are set in various areas in order to govern relationships and make them holy and pleasing to God. The main boundaries that I am aware of are summed up in the TEST acronym: time, emotional, spiritual, and touch. As a simple example, we often set "touch" boundaries pretty clearly (e.g. don't have sex with someone to whom you are not married). The other three can be more confusing. How much time is too much time to spend with a "friend" of the opposite sex? What can you tell them about your walk with God, and what should you hold back?

Having said that, I think that boundaries are grossly misunderstood throughout society today, even in the church and Christian groups. The main question that boundaries are meant to address is, what are relationships between Christians supposed to look like? Whenever we ask questions like this -- questions that deal with how something is supposed to be -- it is imperative that we do not like at how things are in the world today. As a Christian, I firmly believe that we live in a broken, fallen world, so the way things are is by no means a good indication of the way things are meant to be. In order to look at the way things are meant to be, I believe there are two places we can look: Heaven, where all will be made new and everything will be restored to the glory for which it was created; and the Garden of Eden in Genesis 1 and 2, before the fall, when God created everything, saw it was good, and sin had not yet entered the world. I firmly believe that both of these are the best examples we have of how all things were originally created to be, and how, in the realm of the Divine where all things are made new, all things always have been and always will be.

So what do relationships look like in these places? It is my contention that boundaries, as we currently define and understand them, do no exist in either of these places. In case that didn't sound controversial enough, according to the assertion in the previous paragraph, this means that, even in earthly relationships, boundaries are not meant to exist. 

Let me unpack this a little bit, starting with the Garden of Eden. Let's go through the TEST acronym.

--TIME: Adam and Eve were the only ones there, and, as near as we can tell, they were always together. Nowhere in scripture do we see them separate until after the fall. Adam didn't have to go to work; the garden gave them food. Eve didn't have to deal with painful childbirth; that came later.

--EMOTIONAL: Eve was created from Adam's side, to walk with him and be his helper in everything (I'm not making a statement about gender roles here, so please don't read too much into that sentence). The very fact that she was made from a rib, which is perfectly even with the middle of the body and so close to the heart, seems to me to imply that Adam and Eve were to walk through life together, side by side, sharing everything with each other.

--SPIRITUAL: this one seems the clearest to me. Adam and Eve walked together, and together they walked with God in the closest relationship with God any human has heretofore experienced. In God's presence, there can be no boundaries in your spiritual life. In fact, I would conclude that their spiritual lives were indistinguishable from each other, and were, in fact, one and the same, as they both walked together with the same God.

--TOUCH: God made it pretty clear that their job was to "be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth." Not only this, but the Bible made it abundantly clear that, before the fall, Adam and Eve didn't even need to wear clothes. I'm not going to bother expounding on that more.

From my point of view, God did not set any boundaries in the relationship between Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. While he did set clear boundaries in regards to what they could eat and what they couldn't, these rules applied to both of them together, not one or the other. In other words, for all intents and purposes, Adam and Eve were treated as one entity, with no separation, distinction, or division between them. Indeed, why else would the Bible make a reference to marriage in the second chapter by saying "the two shall become one flesh", except to emphasize that, in the perfect state of creation, man and woman are not separate, but united?

So if this is what everything is supposed to look like, what happened? Why aren't we all walking around naked and sharing every intimate detail of our lives with everyone we meet? The answer, of course, is sin happened. In choosing to disobey God, mankind broke the intimate relationship we had with Him. As a result, we broke our perfect relationships with each other. Notice that, immediately after sinning, Adam and Eve first hid from God, then made clothes to hide from each other. Thus, sin doesn't just separate us from God, but also us from each other. 

Is this not what we see when we look around today? All around, I see people suffering from the pains of loneliness, longing for the care and affection of a friend, needing support and guidance in their search for truth, and desperate for the embrace of a true lover. In one sense, boundaries aren't something we put in place, but something that were created as a consequence of sin. To avoid confusion, though, I will call these separations due to sin "walls", and reserve "boundaries" for the guidelines we set for ourselves. Sin deprives us of the intimacy and unity for which we were created, both with God and with our fellow humans. The image I have heard used is the two beams of the cross. The first pillar, the one that holds up the other, is the vertical beam, signifying our relationship with God. Without this beam and this relationship, nothing can stand. The second beam is the horizontal beam, which signifies our relationship with our fellow humans. Both of these are pivotal relationships in the life of a Christian, as demonstrated by the two greatest commandments "Love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength" and "love your neighbor as yourself".

Having started in paradise and worked through the fall, we now turn to God's plan for the redemption of the world. In its simplest sense, this plan is simply bringing the world, mankind, and all of our relationships back to the state for which they were created--namely, the world without walls, without separation, and without sin. If this is our goal, why do we create more boundaries for ourselves in our relationships with others? The answer is, once again, because of sin. Our broken relationships leave us desperately starving for the satisfactions we were created to have. Yet, because of our sinful nature, we are not only unable to return to the holy, perfect state from which we fell, but we naturally will not seek out God and this holiness. The Bible makes it abundantly clear that, although we all have needs that can only be truly satisfied by God, no man, woman, or child naturally seeks God of their own volition, for it is completely contrary to the nature of sin that is ours from birth. Rather, God seeks us out and pursues us, drawing us closer to himself by an act of divine grace. Nevertheless, we, in our brokenness, look for other ways to satisfy our desires, with one of the primary ways being through relationships with other people. Now, I want to be very careful, because, as I have already asserted, we are meant to be in close, intimate relationships with other people. However, to return to the imagery of the two pillars of the cross, these relationships can only stand in holiness when we are first firmly grounded in a relationship with God. In the absence of this first relationship, all others are taken captive by sin and brokenness. As C.S. Lewis writes in The Four Loves,

We may love another person too much in proportion to our love for God. But it is the smallness of our love for God, not the greatness of our love for the man, that constitutes the inordinacy.

Finally, then, we arrive at boundaries as we have previously defined them. Boundaries are (somewhat) clear rules and guidelines that we put in place in order to prevent us from seeking from our fellow humans what can only be rightfully given by God. Love, for example, in all its forms, must come first and foremost from God, who is the definition and source of perfect love, and flow from Him to us and then to other people. Intimacy, both physical and emotional, is a means of satisfying our deep desires to be loved and not left alone, to be a part of something or someone else. This desire exists because we were made to exist in perfect fellowship and unity with the three-personal God in the realm of the Divine. Yet we are so easily deceived into thinking that it can, and should, be satisfied in a deeply emotionally or physically intimate relationship with another human being. Thus, we put in place boundaries to prevent such idols and false gods from taking hold of our lives. In a very real sense, then, boundaries are not meant to work contrary to our deep desires as it so often seems, but to refine them, to turn them towards the Thing for which they were originally meant, and, in doing so, ultimately satisfy them. As C.S. Lewis writes in The Weight of Glory:

It would seem that Our Lord finds our desires not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased.

We have now established why boundaries exist, and why they are good. They are ultimately tools to be used in our sanctification. At this point, we have arrived where many Christians find themselves, with boundaries viewed as a good thing meant to keep us from sin and make us holy. However, the purpose of this post was not to justify boundaries as they are currently viewed. Nearly the opposite. The goal was to review, in light of eternity and God's story, why boundaries exist and where they come from. It is imperative that we do not forget where these boundaries come from and why they exist. If we do, we come dangerously close to the legalism of the Pharisees, who knew the letter of the law by heart yet still managed to miss the entire point.

Having reached this point, I do not want to stop here. Knowing where boundaries comes from gives us a unique insight into how we should live out boundaries in everyday life. First of all, it is absolutely necessary to remember that boundaries exist because of sin. In a world with no sin, there is no need for boundaries. This is what we saw in the Garden of Eden, and I am convinced this is what we shall see in heaven. If you do not agree, I challenge you to think: what boundaries does God place on his love for us? My answer would be none at all. So when we, at last, with unveiled faces, reflect to each other the boundless--and boundary-less--love of God, and are entirely caught up in His presence, having put to death any semblance of our individuality apart from God, why should we then still have boundaries with each other? I will freely admit, it can be difficult to grasp and accept. For example, will clothes be necessary in heaven? (For now, let us look past the fact that, in heaven, we shall not have bodies in the same way we have them on earth, but shall take on new, heavenly forms the likes of which we cannot conceive.) By this line of thinking, the answer should be no, they will not be necessary. For what necessary function could clothes offer in a realm where there is no lust, no self-glorification, no ugliness or malice or self-deprecation, no shame, and no sin? Perhaps I would do best to quote C.S. Lewis once again, this time from his image of heaven given in The Great Divorce:

Some were naked, some robed. But the naked ones did not seem less adorned, and the robes did not disguise in those who wore them the massive grandeur of muscle and the radiant smoothness of flesh.

The reason I bring this up is that so often I think we view boundaries not as consequences of sin and a means to our sanctification, but the opposite of sin and the goal of our sanctification. We view breaking these boundaries as inherently sinful, and keeping them inherently righteous. But understanding where they came from, these distinctions are meaningless! For as God sanctifies us and makes us more pure, more holy, and transforms us into the image of his son, we are freed from the bonds of sin and are no longer bound by them. And since our boundaries exist because of sin, once we are freed of that sin, these boundaries are no longer necessary. In a sense, the more "righteous" ones are the ones who are more free to "break" what we would consider standard boundaries. They are no longer bound by boundaries, because they are no longer bound by sin. As an example, a teenage girl should feel no qualms about discussing her latest breakup with the pastor at her church, while a similar conversation with a guy her age might be cause for caution. Sanctification breaks down both walls and boundaries as it frees us from sin. In the church, therefore, where it is presumably the goal of each person to continue to be sanctified and changed, we should see closer relationships between people, even people of the opposite gender. Because as well as pursue God and are brought into his presence, we are necessarily all brought closer together until at last, one day, we are all unified completely in God.

I may have said some pretty controversial things in this post. My main goal is to inspire thought and reasoning. Our ultimate source of truth is the Bible, and any rules and assumptions made about the Christian life must ultimately be grounded in Scripture. I recognize that I have not directly quoted any scripture, so my ideas are subjective at best, and I reserve the right to change them in the future. However, I did try my best to appeal to the general story of the Bible, rather than simply reasoning grounded in earthly observations. In my experience, many articles on boundaries between men and women in the church rarely quote scripture, and instead appeal to vague notions of purity and sin. My goal was to provide a counter to this by working through relationships from the beginning and arriving at the result, rather than starting with the assumption that boundaries are necessary and showing how they work and what can go wrong if they are crossed.

I want to end with a final warning. If you take what I have said in this post as license to be as emotionally open and intimate with other people as you please, or to constantly flirt with members of the opposite sex, or to be more physical in a relationship with a significant other, you have missed the point entirely. The point is not that we no longer need to establish any sort of rules or guidelines for earthly relationships and are therefore free to act as we please. To do so is akin to reading the Bible and ignoring any part about God or Jesus. Such an attitude neglects to plant in place the first pillar of the cross and instead reaches straight for the second. The point of this post was to say that, first and foremost, we are all meant to be united with God, through Christ, with the Holy Spirit living inside of us. As we continue to seek him and as He pursues us, draws us closer to Him, and sanctifies us into the holy, perfect image of his Son Jesus Christ, we will find that any earthly relationship we had to let die in the process will be rekindled in a glory we cannot imagine. As we are caught up in the Person and Persons of God, we will inevitably reach perfect unity and intimacy with our fellow humans as well.