Further to my post on naturism – I asked a question to the Marshill Team (MarsHill church Seattle) and Matt Linden of the Theological team has been very kind in sending back a response. So below you can read Matt’s response.  

I have done some research on a couple of different Christian “Naturist” websites (one is figleafforum.com, another would be naturist-christians.org).  Since the idea of Christian nudism is something I had never heard of until now, I wanted to get an idea of just what that was all about.  I see several issues with the theological and moral arguments made in favor of so-called “redeemed” Christian nudism.

 On the FigLeaf Forum, I stumbled into the first issue of their web magazine (http://www.figleafforum.com/articles_issue01.html) which lays out their basic premise.  You can also find a list of their arguments for the case of nudism and Scriptural references picked to support that argument here: http://www.figleafforum.com/articles_bible_nakedness.html

Proponents of the idea of Christian nudism reach back to Genesis 1-3 to find most of their support of their arguments.  They correctly identify the principles set out in Genesis regarding God’s original design of humanity, but they incorrectly apply the conclusions drawn from those principles.  As is always the case with false doctrine and false teaching, the problems of a doctrine are not usually in what is said, but rather in what is NOT said – or in what is twisted.  As they say, the devil is in the details, and this topic is no exception.

Nudists draw two primary – and very sweeping – conclusions about nakedness in Scripture:

 1. Nudity is not in and of itself shameful because Adam and Eve knew no shame in their nakedness before the fall into sin.

2. Christ redeems us from our sin fully, and nudity should therefore be practiced publicly, not just privately, as an expression of worship.

To clarify the issues with what is said there, we have to hold these claims up to the light of Scripture to see clearly what’s going on.

Start with Nudist Claim #1.  Is nudity shameful?  To find out, we have to go back to the beginning and look at God’s original intent – as well as the role our sin has played since creation.

In the opening chapters of Genesis, we see God create the world, as well as the first two humans, Adam and Eve.  But humanity is different from all of the rest of God’s creation because, as Genesis 1:26-27 affirm, man and woman were created in the very image of God, after His likeness.  God affirms this special nature: although everything God created was called “good”, he pronounced the creation of the man and woman as VERY good.  This applies, of course, not just to our spiritual being but also to our physical being, and that includes our naked bodies.  We are “fearfully and wonderfully made” (Psalm 139:14).

So there you have Adam and Eve, who are described as being “naked and … not ashamed” (Genesis 2:25).  The Christian nudist stops there and says, “See?  ‘Naked and unashamed.’  Nudity is godly!”

A Christian nudist claims that because nudity is the original design of humanity (God certainly didn’t create Levis at the same time He created Adam), we should claim the redeeming power of Jesus over our physical bodies as well as our souls – and for a Christian nudist, that translates into a return to the “natural” state of nudity as was originally designed.  This is what Christian nudists even call “natural” worship or “worshiping in the natural state.”

It’s true that nakedness was our original state – but the qualifier here is that the original state of the world as a whole was a world without sin.  Our original state was nakedness because there was no sin – there was no separation from God, nothing separating us from him as well as from each other.  Adam and Eve knew each other and God fully, totally, and intimately. 

When sin entered the world through Adam & Eve’s rebellion against God, everything changed – that relationship was severed, and that has consequences all the way down to the state of our nakedness.  Adam and Eve were suddenly ashamed of their nakedness not because of their nakedness in and of itself but because of the rift that sin caused.  Nakedness is a powerful thing because of what it represents: total, complete knowing of a person.  Throughout the Bible, nakedness is used not just to describe a physical state but our state before God – he knows us completely, including all our sin.  Additionally, any description of nakedness as “shameful” in Scripture is almost always accompanied by an explicit explanation of the sin present in the context.

 We even have this idea of complete, intimate knowing of a person through nudity embedded in some of our linguistic expressions today – for example, when we’ve seen someone naked and slept with them, we say that have had “carnal knowledge” of that person.

But there’s not just a sin qualifier here to the idea of nudity – there was a relational importance and aspect to it as well.  We have to look at the relationship was that intended through nudity.  Read Genesis 2:24-25.  God has just created Eve and brought her to Adam:

 “Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and they shall become one flesh.  And the man and his wife were both naked and were not ashamed.”

 Look at a few of the key words in those verses (all caps here): “A man shall … hold fast to his WIFE and they shall become ONE flesh.  And the man and his WIFE were naked and were not ashamed.”  In other words, this is redeemed, godly, good nudity in a very specific context: the context of marriage.

We see this idea of nudity as a marital blessing to be enjoyed bared out even down to the details of how men and women are designed at the core.

Every man knows that men are incredibly visual creatures.  There is a reason so many men struggle with addiction to pornography, and there is a reason that the porn industry in the United States receives more dollars every year than are spent on foreign aid.  Men are aroused visually in a powerful way, and that is a deliberate (and in itself very good) part of God’s design of the man. 

When God brought Eve to Adam and presented her to him, she was naked and so was he – and Adam was so delighted at the very sight of her (emphasis on “sight”) that he sang her a love song, calling her “bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh”; and it is absolutely no coincidence that God took this opportunity not only to join the two in marriage to each other, but to command them to “be fruitful and multiply” (Gen 1:28).

Let’s not kid ourselves about the obvious here.  It’s not like God designed men (including Adam) to love the sight of a woman, designed women (including Eve) to love being romanced and wooed by a man, put them in front of each other strip stark naked, and then stepped back and was somehow surprised by what transpired, saying to Himself, “Wow – I didn’t think they’d figure THAT out!”  Rather, He designed our bodies, and our nakedness in particular, for a specific purpose: intimacy and relationship.

That incredibly deep physical intimacy between a husband and a wife is sacred because marriage is an expression of Christ’s relationship toward us (Ephesians 5).  This deep marital intimacy is held up as sacrosanct in both Old and New Testaments – 1 Corinthians 7:3-5 even states that a wife has exclusive rights to the body (in a sexual sense) of her husband and he to hers.

The Old Testament bares this out most clearly in Leviticus 18, where God commands the Israelites to respect the sexual boundaries (including nudity) of marriage in their relationships with one another: “You shall not uncover the nakedness of your father’s wife; it is your father’s nakedness” (Lev 18:8).

So, yes, nudity was our original design and it is not in and of itself shameful – but that original design was also intended for marital intimacy and has furthermore been corrupted by sin.

But now we’re still left with this idea that the redemptive power of Jesus should cover our physical nakedness as well as our spiritual nakedness –  Nudist Claim #2.  If Jesus wipes away our sin and restores us to right relationship with God and each other, why should we cover our naked bodies anymore?  This idea makes sense theologically at first glance, but also needs to have a closer look.

Even though it is true that we are restored into right relationship with God through the intercession of Jesus on our behalf, we still live in a fallen, sinful world with all its limitations and shortcomings.  We all still carry the sinful nature that we inherited from Adam and Eve even as we are being transformed by relationship with Jesus.  We still have a propensity to pursue our own sinful desires, and that includes sexual desires that are outside of God’s original design.  We are not perfect yet, and this isn’t heaven yet. 

That means that even as we enjoy redemption and sanctification through Jesus, we need to be wise and careful in how we apply this freedom.  Just because we’re free doesn’t always mean we should exercise that freedom.  As Paul puts it in 1 Corinthians 6:12, “All things are lawful for me, but not all things are helpful.”

What am I talking about?  Well, in considering the idea of public & social nudity, the most obvious question that comes up is whether it contains an inherent risk to cause others to stumble into lust or other sexual sin.  If it does, it is not permissible per Romans 14.

The message forums on the nudist websites I checked out – I can’t believe I just typed that – are filled with questions about this; curiously, these questions seem to almost invariably come from men wondering if their public erections at nudist resorts are a sin.

The response you almost invariably find from a nudist is that individuals (in this case, almost always men) need to be “reconditioned” to disassociate nudity with sexual arousal or pleasure.  Personally, I am not at all convinced that this is a Biblical or even a beneficial idea for several reasons, chief among them being the fact that nudity is meant to be enjoyable for a husband and wife and that men are visual for a reason.  Secondly, I would call into question the mental health of any man who wants to disassociate pleasure from the sight of a woman’s body.  Finally, the fact that this particular question appears so often on nudist message boards seems to illustrate that nudist efforts to “rewire” men’s thinking aren’t going so well, and that means we have a lust and a sexual sin issue, which means that according to Romans 14, public nudity is not permissible.

Moreover, if returning to a state of public nudity was an appropriate response to the justification and redemption of Jesus, it begs the question of why Jesus himself did not feel this was worth modeling by example, why he never mentioned it as a good idea in any of his teachings, and why this behavior is not seen in the early church after His crucifixion and resurrection.  If public nudity really is such a powerful expression of our redemption through Jesus and a proper expression of worship to God here on earth, don’t you think Jesus would have wanted us to know that and would have instructed us to give it a try?  I found no nudist answer to this question anywhere I looked.

I’ve focused pretty heavily on public nudity issues because I don’t see private nudity – individually or as a married couple (not around kids!) – as an issue anywhere in Scripture and would again leave that question to Romans 14.  If someone gets kicks and giggles from worshiping or praying privately in the nude, I’d say more power to them – although since God already sees us as naked, I don’t think it makes much difference (Hebrews 4:13).

Well Phil, I know that was a novel but I hope that it has been helpful for you.  Please feel free to email me at this address if you have any additional questions about what I have written.

In Christ,

Matt

Once again thanks to Matt for his thoughts on the matter.