Earthly desires don’t make way into heaven; that’s good
Question: As an evangelical Protestant Christian who is disabled, I want to know if there is sex in heaven. I am prepared to believe that there is no sex in hell, but since there is no disease or suffering in Heaven I want to know if perhaps in Heaven disabled people like myself will be able to have the physical intimacy and love that they could not enjoy in their earthly lives. This letter is not a joke. It is a real question and a real agony for me and many others who have been forced by disability to live limited lives here on earth. Is heaven a place of physical freedom for me? —JinNYC
Answer: The religious teachings about heaven and hell are based upon the beliefs that we are made up of material bodies and immaterial souls. This means that when we die only our bodies die and return to the earth. Our souls are released from their bodily home and return to God to continue their spiritual journey through rebirth (Hinduism) or through an eternity in heaven or hell. Whatever life after death looks like, what we do believe is that death is not the end of us. What awaits us beyond death obviously cannot be fully known and people who speak about the nature of heaven and hell with a certainty that we ought to reserve for speaking about Cleveland are foolishly pretending to know what they cannot possess.
Though we cannot know with precision what heaven and hell are really like, we can infer some things about them. The first is that they are immaterial. They are places for our souls, not places for our bodies that we leave in the grave when we die. So it is reasonable to believe that physical pleasures like eating or sex have no place in heaven or hell. That is why there is no sex in heaven. The needs of the body have been left behind.
However, sexual intimacy is a part of love and love is not a mere physical emotion. Love does exist in heaven — not sex, but love. The problem with physical intimacy in our culture now is that we have separated sex and love, and this makes sex merely physical and makes love merely emotional, which is false to both sex and love.
The New Testament seems to support this spiritual inference that our emotions live on but not our need for bodily pleasures. In Luke 20:34-36 Jesus explains precisely this point about heaven.
“And Jesus answering said unto them, ‘The children of this world marry, and are given in marriage: But they which shall be accounted worthy to obtain that world, and the resurrection from the dead, neither marry, nor are given in marriage: Neither can they die any more: for they are equal unto the angels; and are the children of God, being the children of the resurrection.’”