Abstract: Topics of sex and nudity have often been treated as taboo subjects within the church. The very idea of nakedness is often inextricably linked in peoples’ minds with sex and pornography. However, in this paper, I will first make a case that God sees the naked human body as a very good thing as a result of us being made in his image. And while naturism (a philosophical form of nudism) was never practiced in scripture as it is in the modern day (except at the beginning), what The Bible teaches (and does not teach) renders a nudist lifestyle a freedom-in-Christ issue for the Christian. There are also brief instances of social nudity, even co-ed nudity, that lay the conceptual foundation for the moral permissibility of nudism. Moreover, biblical texts used to support the idea of modesty such as 1 Timothy 2:9, or texts seeming to depict being naked around others as inherently sinful, such as the entirety of Leviticus 18 or Genesis 9:21-25 have been badly misinterpreted. Finally, I will make the case that being a naturist is actually the key to defeating pornography once and for all. What naturism does is disentangle nudity from sexuality and psychologically reconditions the brain not to respond sexually to the mere sight of a human being, no matter how attractive they may be. This alone should be a reason for Christians to give naturism at least a shot, as porn addiction statistics among American Evangelicals are not going down, and I believe that this is because conventional Christian wisdom is misguided and grounded in pharisaical sin management; focusing on regulating behavior, but not dealing with the evil in the heart resulting in men not truly being free, even if they manage to stay away from porn for a significant amount of time.
The Human Body Is The Image Of God
In Genesis 1, we read the account of God creating everything in 6 days. On the 7th day, He rested. In my article “Genesis 1: Functional Creation, Temple Inauguration, and Anti-Pagan Polemics”, I make the case that Genesis 1 is not a scientific account of material origins, but it is a theological account describing God assigning functions to everything within those 6 days. This is the ceremonial event of God making the universe His Cosmic temple. On the 7th day, God comes into the cosmic temple to “rest”. One of the very last things God does is create images of Himself. In Genesis 1:26-27, we read “Then God said, ‘Let us make mankind in our image, in our likeness, so that they may rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky, over the livestock and all the wild animals, and over all the creatures that move along the ground.’ So God created mankind in his own image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them.” (NIV)
It was a well-known fact in the ancient world that after you materially manufactured the temple of your god and then did the inauguration ceremony that you would end the inauguration by placing a carved image of the deity in the temple to represent it. The way idolatry in the ancient world works is widely misunderstood by many Christians today. Contrary to popular lay belief, the ancients weren’t so dumb as to think the image they carved was a deity itself. Rather, the carved image was a vessel to house the spirit of the deity.
As Old Testament scholar John Walton explains in his book “Ancient Near Eastern Thought And The Old Testament”;
“The deity’s presence was marked by the image of the deity. ….The existence of an idol needed to be approved by the god whose image was being made, so the gods were responsible for initiating the manufacturing process At the end of the process, rituals were performed to transfer the deity from the spiritual world to the physical world, a process that one may refer to as ‘actualizing the presence of the god in the temple.’ Consequently, the production of the image was not viewed in human terms, but as a miraculous process through which the deity worked, ….The most significant ritual was the mouth-washing ritual. This procedure was carried out to enable the image to eat bread, drink water, and smell incense, that is, to receive worship on behalf of the deity. It purified the image from the human contamination involved in the manufacturing process and thereby enabled the statue to function as deity. At the end of the mouth-washing ceremony, as the deity entered the inner sanctum, an incantation was pronounced indicating that hereafter the god would remain in his house, where he would receive his food day by day. In this way the image mediated the worship from the people to the deity. …. From the above, we can conclude that the material image was animated by the divine essence. Therefore it did not simply represent the deity, but it manifested its presence.” [1]John H. Walton, Ancient Near Eastern Thought and The Old Testament, first edition, page 118, Baker Academic, 2006
Given the close connection between “images” that represented the deity in the temple, and given that at the end of Genesis 1, we have God creating images of Himself, and given that we already have several good reasons to believe Genesis 1 is portraying the creation of the universe as Yahweh’s temple, [2]see my article “Genesis 1 – Functional Creation, Temple Inaguration, and Anti-Pagan Polemics” for the full exegetical defense of this. See also John Walton’s book “The Lost World Of Genesis … Continue reading an inference can justifiably be made that what it means for humans to be made “in the image of God” is to represent God. We are the images set up at the end of the inauguration of God’s cosmic temple. We are God’s statues, so to speak.
The late Old Testament scholar Michael Heiser agrees. In his book The Unseen Realm, he writes “Humankind was created as God’s image. If we think of imaging as a verb or function, that translation makes sense. We are created to image God, to be his imagers. It is what we are by definition. The image is not an ability we have, but a status. We are God’s representatives on earth. To be human is to image God. This is why Genesis 1: 26– 27 is followed by what theologians call the ‘dominion mandate’ in verse 28. The verse informs us that God intends us to be him on this planet. We are to create more imagers (‘ be fruitful and multiply … fill’) in order to oversee the earth by stewarding its resources and harnessing them for the benefit of all human imagers (‘subdue … rule over’).” [3]Heiser, Michael S.. The Unseen Realm: Recovering the Supernatural Worldview of the Bible (pp. 42-43). Lexham Press. Kindle Edition.
In her wonderful book, “Being God’s Image: Why Creation Still Matters”, biblical scholar Carmen Joy Imes writes “We’ve already considered the possibility that Genesis 1 is a temple creation text. Could it be that the Israelite temple lacks a Yahweh idol because God has already placed an image in his cosmic temple? Just as a statue of a god is intended to represent that god’s claim to a particular area, so humans are the physical representation of the Creator God on earth. And just as an idol is meant to deflect praise to the actual deity, so humans are to deflect praise to Yahweh.” [4]Carmen Joy Imes, Being God’s Image: Why Creation Still Matters (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic: An Imprint of InterVarsity Press, 2023), 31.
Theologian Marc Cortez calls this “representational presence”: [5]Marc Cortez, ReSourcing Theological Anthropology: A Constructive Account of Humanity in the Light of Christ (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2017), 110–11. “We need to view the imago Dei as a declaration that God intended to create human persons to be the physical means through which he would manifest his own divine presence in the world.” [6]Cortez, ReSourcing Theological Anthropology, 109.
In light of the biblical text interpreted in its Ancient Near Eastern context, I am convinced that the image of God is a physical thing. It is not, as is often suggested, a list of mental attributes (like rationality and free will). Granted, we need these attributes to represent God well, but they are not the image in themselves. To be an image (tslem in Hebrew) is to be a visual representation of something. In light of this, why would God be ashamed of His image? Why would God want to throw tarps over his glorious images? Just imagine a pagan walking into an Ancient Near Eastern temple and being so repulsed by the statue of his deity, that he threw cloth over it, crying out “Lewd! Obscene!” Would that not be considered blasphemous?
At this point, you might object that God did just this with the animal skins in Genesis 3:21. This is a fair objection, but I don’t think it works. I will return to this later in this article.
Adam and Eve – History’s First Nudists
In Genesis 2:25 we read “Adam and his wife were both naked, and they felt no shame.” (NIV) Adam and Eve walked about the garden of Eden completely naked! The Hebrew word translated as “naked” here is Arom. This is important, as there are actually different Hebrew words to describe nakedness depending on the context. Arom is an innocent kind of nakedness. It is “mere nudity”. It is the nakedness you would witness in a toddler running around in his backyard. It is the state of nakedness you are in when you take a shower. It is the state of nakedness I am in as I type these words. Burton Scott Easton tells of the other words for naked in The International Standard Bible Encyclopedia. He writes “nā´ked-nes: “Naked” in the OT represents various derivatives of עוּר, ‛ūr, and, עָרָה, ‛ārāh, chiefly עָרוֹם, ‛ārōm (adj.) and עֶרְוָה, ‛erwāh (noun);” [7]Burton Scott Easton, “Naked, Nakedness,” ed. James Orr et al., The International Standard Bible Encyclopaedia (Chicago: The Howard-Severance Company, 1915), 2111–2112. Erwah is often nudity in a either sexually immoral context or in a context where someone was forcefully stripped. Leviticus 18 and Noah’s nakedness in Genesis 9 are a few examples of these, but Bible Hub provides many others. [8]Strong’s Hebrew: 6172. עֶרְוָה (ervah) — nakedness (biblehub.com)
It is interesting to note that these two naked humans came about after God declared everything “very good” (Genesis 1:31). [9]I take Genesis 2 to be a sequel to Genesis 1 as biblical scholar John Walton does in “The Lost World Of Adam and Eve: “Genesis 2-3 and The Human Origins Debate”. He talks about this … Continue reading There is only one thing in Genesis 2 that God says is NOT good, and it’s not that Adam is running around with his penis showing. It’s that Adam is alone. In Genesis 2:18-22, we read “The LORD God said, ‘It is not good for the man to be alone. I will make a helper suitable for him.’ Now the LORD God had formed out of the ground all the wild animals and all the birds in the sky. He brought them to the man to see what he would name them; and whatever the man called each living creature, that was its name. So the man gave names to all the livestock, the birds in the sky and all the wild animals. But for Adam no suitable helper was found. So the LORD God caused the man to fall into a deep sleep; and while he was sleeping, he took one of the man’s ribs and then closed up the place with flesh. Then the LORD God made a woman from the rib he had taken out of the man, and he brought her to the man.” (NIV) [10]There is debate over whether Adam and Eve were the only humans on the entire planet at this time or whether there were humans outside the garden. I tend to favor the latter option as a Theistic … Continue reading If God had the same view of nudity as Christians do today, surely he would have not only said “It is not good for the man to be alone. I will make for him a helper.”, but also “It is not good for the man to run around naked. I will fashion pants for him so he can stop flashing my divine council.” And yet, God says nothing negative about Adam’s naked state. Indeed, the narrator seems to speak of Adam and Eve’s nakedness in a positive tone in Genesis 2:25. They were naked, but they had no shame.
When you read Genesis 2 and 3, you come away with the impression that had it not been for the fall, God would have never covered up humanity’s bodies. You get the impression that “naked and unashamed” was God’s “Edenic ideal”. This is important, because Jesus Christ and the apostles often went back to Eden to figure out what God’s creation ideal was. For example, In Matthew 19:3-9, we read “Some Pharisees came to him to test him [Jesus]. They asked, ‘Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife for any and every reason?’ ‘Haven’t you read,’ he replied, ‘that at the beginning the Creator ‘made them male and female,’ and said, ‘For this reason, a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh’? So they are no longer two, but one flesh. Therefore what God has joined together, let no one separate.’ ‘Why then,” they asked, ‘did Moses command that a man give his wife a certificate of divorce and send her away?’ Jesus replied, ‘Moses permitted you to divorce your wives because your hearts were hard. But it was not this way from the beginning. I tell you that anyone who divorces his wife, except for sexual immorality, and marries another woman commits adultery.'” (NIV) Regarding divorce, we first have Pharisees asking if Jesus sides with Rabbi Shammai or Rabbi Hillel on Deuteronomy 21:1-4 [11]See Episode 139 of The Cerebral Faith Podcast, “Episode 139: Exegeting The Sermon On The Mount (Part 6) – Divorce” for a more thorough exposition on Jesus’ view of divorce. … Continue reading. Jesus makes his stance that he sides with Shammai that Deuteronomy 21 is not saying you can divorce your wife for “any cause”. But he goes further and says that God doesn’t even like divorce but accommodates it when giving the law due to the hardness of Israel’s hearts. He then goes back to the Garden of Eden to tell the religious leaders what God’s ideal really is. “Moses permitted you to divorce your wives because your hearts were hard. But it was not this way from the beginning.” He quotes Genesis 1:27 and Genesis 2:24 to make his point that God’s ideal for marriage is one man and one woman for life. It isn’t hard for me to imagine Jesus responding to modesty culture using similar language. “You wear clothes because you think it protects you from lust, but it was not this way in the beginning. Haven’t you read ‘The man and his wife were both naked and they felt no shame’.”
Eden is where we see God’s creation ideal for humanity. In Eden, humans were “naked and unashamed” (Genesis 2:25), had a relationship with God unencumbered by sin, free of pain, and in a beautiful marriage relationship with each other. The apostle John sees the new heavens and the new Earth God will create after Jesus’ second coming as a return to Eden. In Revelation 2:7, Jesus says “Whoever has ears, let them hear what the Spirit says to the churches. To the one who is victorious, I will give the right to eat from the tree of life, which is in the paradise of God.“ (NIV, emphasis mine in bold). A “Tree Of Life” which is “in the paradise of God”. The Apostle John is trying to telegraph to the reader that the new heavens and the new earth near the end of his apocalyptic book is a return to Eden. This is why I have coined the name New Eden which I used in my article “A Treatise On The Christian’s Eternal Home”. This tree only appears in one other place in scripture, and that’s in Genesis 2:8-9 and Genesis 3:22-23. Of course, it is true that “a” tree of life gets referenced in places like Proverbs 15:4, but THE Tree of Life, specifically one in a paradise run by God, only shows up in the Adam and Eve narrative. In Revelation 22:1-2, we read “Then the angel showed me the river of the water of life, as clear as crystal, flowing from the throne of God and of the Lamb down the middle of the great street of the city. On each side of the river stood the tree of life, bearing twelve crops of fruit, yielding its fruit every month. And the leaves of the tree are for the healing of the nations.” (NIV, emphasis mine in bold) Again, John wants his readers to think of the Eden account here. There’s a Tree of Life, there are rivers, there are fruit-bearing trees. The author is undoubtedly painting an Edenic picture.) In my article “A Treatise On The Christian’s Eternal Home”, I concluded that on the basis that humanity was naked and unashamed in the first Eden, resurrected Christians will likely be the same in New Eden. After all, clothing was a result of body shame which was a result of Adam and Eve’s disobedience to God in Genesis 3. Are we to say that all of the results of the fall will be undone by the work of Christ EXCEPT for body shame? Is Jesus unable to return us to Eden? May such a statement never be on the lips of a Christ follower!
God Thinks The Concept Of Nudity Is Stupid
So, Adam and Eve were told they could eat from any tree in Eden except for one, The Tree Of The Knowledge Of Good and Evil. Yet, Adam and Eve listened to the serpent and ate of it anyway. [12]Michael Jones of Inspiring Philosophy has a great video on this as part of his own Primeval History series. Check out “Genesis 3b: The Fall”. He makes the case that this tree was never … Continue reading This is in Genesis 3:1-6. In Genesis 3:7, they realized they messed up, and somehow got the idea that they were naked. When they heard God walking in the cool of the day, they hid themselves from them and covered themselves with fig leaves. (Genesis 3:7-8). [13]I take this to be a literal description of The Second Power In Heaven walking in a humanoid form. I take this to be the first appearance of “The Angel Of The Lord”. For more info on an Old … Continue reading God asked Adam where he was (Genesis 3:9). Adam’s response was “I heard you in the garden, and I was afraid because I was naked; so I hid.” (Genesis 3:10, NIV) What is God’s response? “Thank Me you finally learned the truth! I was tired of you lewdly parading your genitals around my sacred space. St. Michael wanted to say something, but we both felt kind of awkward bringing it up. I’m so glad you found out on your own. And Eve’s breasts were being a major stumbling block for the divine council. If I didn’t have foreknowledge, I’d be afraid that whole Nephilim thing would happen a bit early. They were so hot and bothered!” Nope. That’s not what God says. God says “Who told you that you were naked? Have you eaten from the tree that I commanded you not to eat from?” (Genesis 3:11, NIV, emphasis mine in bold). Pastor David Hatton comments on this verse saying “Finding Adam afraid of his nudity, God asked, ‘Who told you that you were naked?’ This second of three rhetorical questions was as instructional as the others. Did God ask it to expose a wicked fear-monger’s scheme? Was He highlighting the novelty of a human aversion to nudity? Or, was our Creator warning Adam (and us) not to accept definitions of His reality from fallen angels? Maybe all of these were His goals. But this middle, perhaps central, question pinpointed a culprit behind this new, foreign viewpoint. God’s query might be meaningfully interpreted, ‘Did that liar distort the attitude I gave you about the goodness of your bare skin?'” [14]Hatton, David L.. “Who Said You Were Naked?”: Reflections on Body Acceptance (p. 17). David L. Hatton. Kindle Edition. Aaron Frost writes “At this point, God challenges Adam and Eve with a second question that is very telling, ‘Who told you that you were exposed?’ This question contains the key that unlocks the mystery! God does not ask, ‘why’ or ‘what happened.’ Instead, He asks, ‘Who told you..?’ God knew that the couple did not arrive at this fear on their own; the fig leaves were not an original idea; someone had prompted them to do this. This ‘who’ question from the Father is there to make an important point. Who could have told Adam and Eve that they were naked and caused them to cover themselves except the serpent? The serpent was still in the garden filling Adam and Eve’s heads with lies after they ate the fruit. The heavenly Father’s question reveals that Adam and Eve were told of their exposure and made to believe that they should cover themselves. There was no reasonable basis for body shame in the garden context. Adam and Eve were responding in embarrassment of their bodies, but in fear from something Satan told them! Could the same thing possibly happen today? Does the same Satan still tell us that we are naked?” [15]Frost, Aaron. Christian Body: Modesty and the Bible (pp. 33-34). UNKNOWN. Kindle Edition. Now, both Pastor Hatton and Mr. Frost believe that Satan was the “Who” in the “Who told you that you were naked” question. However, Naturist Christian YouTuber Chris took issue with this. He noted that God’s question was asking who the identity of a literal personal being was which told Adam he was naked, But rather, that this was a rhetorical question basically saying “Where’d you get this stupid idea”. Chris said “‘Who told you that’ in Hebrew as much as in English is a way of asking where you got a given piece of information. It’s not necessarily an explicit reference to a personal being. Yahweh is asking Adam where he got that information. Adam says ‘I hid because I was afraid. I was afraid because I was naked.’ and God says ‘Well, where did you get that idea? I didn’t tell you that.’ And so, that’s essentially what Yahweh is getting at. Less than referencing a real person. Now, maybe Yahweh is referring to the serpent. The text does not say that, so personally I find it more plausible that he’s using the Hebrew here to just ask how and where Adam came upon that idea, because it didn’t come from Yahweh.” [16]Mudwalkers, “Christian Body Book Review: Part 2”, May 25th 2024 — https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q7lCucNG6o8&t=21s Chris MudWalker goes on to say that it is grammatically possible that Yahweh was hinting at the serpent being the one who told them, but that writers Aaron Frost should be more careful in their writings and put forth the serpent being the “who” as their inference rather than what the text is definitely saying.
But whether you agree with Pastor Hatton’s or Mr. Frost that it was Satan who told Adam and Eve they were naked, or you agree with Chris MudWalker that God was merely saying “Where’d you get that stupid idea?” in a rhetorical manner, either way, God is repudiating the idea that Adam and Eve’s nakedness is something to be covered. This would be like if a man had a son who said “My dad is going to get me a Ferarri for my 16th birthday” and the dad responds “Who told you that?” God seems to be rightly offended. “Who told you that you were naked? Where did you get the idea that you had to cover the beautiful body I gave you? You are made in my image! Do you think the image of Me is something to be ashamed of? Do you think I made you deficient in not giving you built-in pants? Did you think I forgot? Where did you get such an asinine idea, Adam?”
From the biblical data we have surveyed, it seems that God loves human nakedness. We are visual representations of Him, and when humanity got the idea that we ought to cover ourselves, God essentially called it a stupid idea. Whether Adam and Eve had the idea (as Genesis 3:7 seems to imply) or whether Satan told them, God thinks it’s stupid that his beautiful images are too lewd and obscene and must be covered the vast majority of the time. God’s view of nudity is a positive one. And evidently, social nudity is ok with Him because it appears to have been His idea from the very beginning.
Objection: But God Clothed Adam and Eve!
In Genesis 3:21, we read that God made clothes for Adam and Eve out of animal garments. The textile Christian loves to use this verse to argue that clothing is mandatory ever since the fall. Yes, God was ok with it before the fall, but we’re on the other side of Eden. Things are different now. Now being naked is a sin. Yes, God did clothe Adam and Eve in animal skins, but I highly doubt this was done out of a Victorian sense of modesty. For one thing, God basically rebuked Adam for saying he was naked in Genesis 3:11. Did God change his mind in a matter of minutes? Secondly, in Genesis 3, in God’s pronouncement of the curses, God spent a good deal of time talking about how hostile the environment outside of Eden would be. There would be “thorns and thistles” among other things. anyone who has seen an episode of “Naked and Afraid” knows that not every environment is friendly to a naked body. God’s act of clothing should be understood as like a gentle father telling his daughter “Put a coat on. It’s cold outside.” then with a prudish one saying “Put some clothes on, you hoe!” Thirdly, there is no prescriptive law here. We have descriptions of what happened in the narrative. But there is no rule saying that all people at all times in all places must wear clothes forevermore.
But Adam and Eve Were Married!
One may object that the social nudity in Eden was permissible because Adam and Eve were married. Chris who runs the MudWalkers YouTube channel has an entire video on this and I recommend you check it out when you have the time. Let me just mention a couple of the problems with this objection that Chris brought up. First is that this objection assumes that Adam and Eve were automatically married as soon as both of them came into being. Chris makes a good point in saying that when God introduced this naked woman (Eve) to this naked man (Adam), they were unmarried and had to GET married. It is unlikely that God just pushed Eve onto Adam and said “Adam, this is your wife. I probably should have let you in on this that I was going to give you a wife, but y’all are married. Here you go.” [17]MudWalkers, “But Adam and Eve Were Married”, June 8th 2024, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qYJ4f2laA8s&t=1s Even arranged marriages in the Ancient Near East required some sort of ceremony to inaugurate the union. Men didn’t just wake up one morning and randomly find themselves with a spouse! So even if you said “Adam had to marry Eve. It’s not like he had a choice, or even a lot of women to pick from anyway.” Still, it’s unlikely that the marriage would have been in effect from the very first moment that Eve drew breath. Now, maybe one could object “Well, it’s ok because they were ABOUT to be married. Maybe they weren’t married automatically upon Eve’s first drawing of breath, but they were still going to be married, Yahweh foreknew this, and so he was fine with it.” If that’s the route you want to take, that takes us into some interesting practical situations under conventional modesty standards. In the previously cited video, Chris MudWalker invites us into a thought experiment. Let’s imagine that you have a young man and woman who have never had sex before with each other or anyone else, and they have never seen each other naked. But on the day of the wedding, you walk into the church to find both of them naked in the sanctuary. They’re not touching each other or anything, they’re just standing a few feet away from each other chit chatting. You go up to them and say “What are you doing!? Why are you naked!?” And one of them responds “Chill out. It’s ok. We’re about to married in like, half an hour.” I highly doubt any believer in traditional Christian modesty would think that that is a valid response. [18]Ibid. And yet, if you think there is something sinful about that, then you have to admit that God arranged for Adam and Eve to be sinful just by meeting each other. This would impugn God’s goodness and make him the author of sin. Since God is perfectly good (Deuteronomy 32:4, Psalm 18:30) then it follows logically that it is not sinful for an unmarried naked man and an unmarried naked woman to merely be in each other’s presence. And if this is the case, then the lifestyle known as nudism is morally permissible and is a viable option for the Christian.
Naked Prophets! Saul and Isaiah Preach God’s Word In The Buff!
1 Samuel 19:23-24 says “So Saul went to Naioth at Ramah. But the Spirit of God came even on him, and he walked along prophesying until he came to Naioth. He stripped off his garments, and he too prophesied in Samuel’s presence. He lay naked all that day and all that night. This is why people say, ‘Is Saul also among the prophets?'” (NIV)
In this account, King Saul strips off his clothes and prophesies all day and all night. Evidently nude prophesying was common as this very act prompts the people witnessing the event to ask “Is Saul also among the prophets?” Some commentators, undoubtedly biased by their clothing compulsive culture, have tried to paint this event as Saul only being half naked, perhaps just bare chested or something. For example, The Commentary Critical and Explanatory Of The Whole Bible says “lay down naked—that is, divested of his armor and outer robes—in a state of trance. Thus God, in making the wrath of man to praise Him, preserved the lives of all the prophets, frustrated all the purposes of Saul, and preserved the life of His servant.” [19]Robert Jamieson, A. R. Fausset, and David Brown, Commentary Critical and Explanatory on the Whole Bible, vol. 1 (Oak Harbor, WA: Logos Research Systems, Inc., 1997), 188. Ellicott’s Commentary for English readers says “And lay down naked.—Not necessarily without any clothes, for under the tunic there was worn by men of the upper ranks certainly a fine-woven shirt of linen or cotton. Lyranus explains the words ‘stripped off his clothes’ as simply denoting that he threw off his upper garment, ‘his royal robe.'” [20]As quoted on BibleHub.com
The problem though is that the word translated “Naked” in our English Bibles is “Arom”. [21]BibleHub itself confirms this. –> https://biblehub.com/1_samuel/19-24.htm Remember, this is the word describing Adam and Eve’s nakedness in Genesis 2:25. No one thinks Adam and Eve were running around in their underwear. Moreover, Arom is also the word used to describe Job’s nakedness as a newborn baby in Job 1:21. In Job 1:21, we read “And he said, ‘Naked [Arom] I came from my mother’s womb, and naked shall I return. The LORD gave, and the LORD has taken away; blessed be the name of the LORD.'” (ESV) No one thinks Job came out of his mother’s womb only mostly naked. Both commentaries cited here don’t really give a reason why they think Saul was only partially naked, but I suspect it’s the same reason why I recoiled when I used to hear that “Jesus was crucified naked!” I would go “No! No! No! He probably at least had a loin cloth on like all the paintings depict!” In other words, it’s driven by gymnophobia. Speaking of Jesus, we’ll get to him later on in this article assuming you haven’t torn your robes and accused me of heresy yet.
Aaron Frost writes “If Saul had simply removed an external layer but remained covered the Bible could have said so, but the plain wording here is definitely “naked” (עָרֹ֔ם), and it is a common Hebrew word that never describes a partially clothed person even though commentators and teachers often fabricate assumptions that go against the consistent use of the unambiguous Hebrew word.” [22]Frost, Aaron. Christian Body: Modesty and the Bible (p. 94). UNKNOWN. Kindle Edition.
Saul isn’t the only naked prophet explicitly mentioned in scripture though. In Isaiah 20:1-4, we read “In the year that the commander in chief, who was sent by Sargon the king of Assyria, came to Ashdod and fought against it and captured it— at that time the Lord spoke by Isaiah the son of Amoz, saying, ‘Go, and loose the sackcloth from your waist and take off your sandals from your feet,’ and he did so, walking naked and barefoot. Then the Lord said, ‘As my servant Isaiah has walked naked and barefoot for three years as a sign and a portent against Egypt and Cush, so shall the king of Assyria lead away the Egyptian captives and the Cushite exiles, both the young and the old, naked and barefoot, with buttocks uncovered, the nakedness of Egypt.” (ESV, emphasis mine in bold)
Proponents of Modesty Culture insist that co-ed nudity is sinful, yet if this were so, then one has to say that The Holy Spirit empowered (or more like compelled) Saul to engage in lewd conduct and commanded Isaiah to commit 3 years of sexual sin! I’m sorry, but I am not willing to say The Holy Spirit made Saul do something sinful. I’m not sure what Blasphemy Against The Holy Spirit is (Matthew 12:22-45), but I’d rather not come anywhere close to it. And moreover, James 1:13 says “Let no one say when he is tempted, “I am being tempted by God,” for God cannot be tempted with evil, and he himself tempts no one.” (ESV) Now, granted, James says God doesn’t tempt anyone to sin, not that He won’t command anyone to do evil. However, I am making an argument from the lesser to the greater here. If God won’t even tempt someone to do evil, then it seems reasonable to argue that he wouldn’t command you to do evil either. And given that God explicitly commanded Isaiah to go clothes-free for three whole years, it follows logically that social nudity isn’t sinful. Let’s put my reasoning in the form of a syllogism.
1: God will never command someone to sin (James 1:13)
2: God commands Isaiah to walk around Israel naked for 3 years (Isaiah 20:1-4).
3: Therefore, walking around naked in front of others isn’t a sin.
So, my textile Christian friends, which premise will you reject and why? Which scriptures will you nullify for the sake of your tradition? Now, perhaps the modesty culture proponent will take a stab at premise 1. Again, how do we know Isaiah was “naked naked”? Maybe he was just in a loin cloth or bare-chested. This seems to be a trend among interpreters of body-friendly Bible texts, but we must admit it’s a possibility and dig below the surface. After all, I’d be dishonest if I didn’t say that this wasn’t my immediate response to a Christian nudist site who cited this text. The Hebrew word for “naked” here is Arom. The same Hebrew word used for Adam and Eve’s nakedness is Genesis 2:25. It is also the same word that Job uses to describe his nakedness as a newborn baby (Job 1:21). So lest we think Isaiah is just walking around in his slivers, the Hebrew language rules that out. Adam and Eve weren’t wearing underwear in Genesis 2:25. No one has ever thought that. And Job didn’t come out of his mother’s womb merely lacking a shirt. Moreover, as was typical of the prophets, their strange behavior often served as object lessons of what God was going to do in history. In this case, it showed that God was going to take everything Egypt and Cush had away from them (for nudity was associated with abject poverty in the ancient world, not with sex and pornography as it does in ours). If Isaiah had his Fruit Of The Lomb briefs on, then his buttox would be covered. Yet the end of the prophecy says “so shall the king of Assyria lead away the Egyptian captives and the Cushite exiles, both the young and the old, naked and barefoot, with buttocks uncovered, the nakedness of Egypt.’” (ESV, emphasis mine in bold)
So the best explanation is that for three years, Isaiah walked around, preaching completely naked. He undoubtedly would’ve been seen by both genders, from people of multiple age groups. On the assumption that this is sinful, then you have to conclude that God commanded Isaiah to do something inherently sinful. So premise 1 still stands. Guess modesty culture proponents will have to deny premise 2 and disagree with that part of God’s word instead. But for me, “All Scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness,” (2 Timothy 3:16, ESV). That means all of it, from Genesis to Revelation. It’s all inspired, it’s all authoritative, and it’s inerrant in what it intends to teach. That’s my view of The Bible. If the cost of adhering to the idea that simple non-sexual social nudity is evil causes you to reject the inerrancy of scripture, that should cause you to rethink the doctrine of modesty. But I can’t make you do that. As Dr. William Lane Craig said “You can’t force someone to accept the conclusion if he’s willing to pay the price of rejecting one of the premises. But what you can do is raise the price of rejecting the conclusion by giving good evidence for the truth of the premises.” [23]Craig, William Lane. On Guard: Defending Your Faith with Reason and Precision (p. 29). David C Cook. Kindle Edition. As for me, I judged that the price of being anti-nudity (i.e denying the truth of one of God’s scriptures) was far too high. God’s word is my ultimate authority, and if it leads to a rejection of something church culture holds dear, so much for that idea. That is the true essence of Sola Scriptura.
One final objection might be that the Hebrew language was just too small, and they didn’t have words to differentiate between complete and partial nakedness. They had to use “Arom” because there was no other word available. This is just false, as Aaron Frost notes “The Hebrew language does indeed have words to describe such partial unclothing as was the case when King David danced before the Lord in nothing but a revealing linen ephod ( “גּלה” H1540 2Sam.6:20), but this is not that word. Scripture does not say that David was literally naked in this passage, as is the case in these other passages.” [24]Frost, Aaron. Christian Body: Modesty and the Bible (p. 98). UNKNOWN. Kindle Edition. Transliterated, the word is Ghl (pronounced gill-ahh). When I don’t have a stitch of fabric on me, I am Arom. When I’m in my skimpy little speedo at the pool with my textile friends, I am Ghl. In English, we simply qualify the word “Naked” with the word “Half”, but Hebrew literally had two different words to describe full nudity versus partial nudity. So, if Saul in 1 Samuel 19:24 or Isaiah in Isaiah 20:1-4 were only partially naked, why did the biblical authors use “Arom” instead of “Ghl”? Maybe because they weren’t ghl. They were completely and utterly naked.
The Naked Ruth
The book of Ruth tells the story of a Jewish woman named Naomi who loses her husband, and then all of her sons one by one. Impoverished by the lack of income brought on by all of their deaths, she and one of her daughter in laws, Ruth, move to Bethlehem where Naomi was originally from. There, Ruth got a job gleaning grain fields that belonged to Boaz. Boaz quickly developed a little crush on Ruth, so he instructed his men to leave more leftovers for Ruth. Naomi found out that Ruth was working for one of her relatives, brought up the whole “Kinsman Redeemer” thing, then after one night, she made plans for Ruth to make advances towards Boaz. (Ruth 1-3). Naomi gave her this instruction: “Wash yourself therefore, and anoint yourself and put on your best clothes, and go down to the threshing floor” (Ruth 3:3 NASB). You can see by the bold letters that “best” has been shoehorned in by the modern translators simply because our contemporary sensitivities cannot handle its absence but at that point in history, clothing would have been very expensive, and as a result for “dirty jobs” like working in fields, this activity would have been done nude.
Egyptologist David Falk said this in an interview with Cameron Bertuzzi on Capturing Christianity. In response to a question concerning the lack of evidence for a historical Exodus, Cameron asks if he would expect whether they would leave anything behind. Falk says “Like what?” And Cameron lists some items including clothes, This is a full transcription of David Fall’s response; “Cloth was valuable, especially when you didn’t have the means to make more. … when you look at the middle ages, and we see these people going around who were actually collecting rags. Why were they collecting rags? Because cloth was valuable. No, they [referring to thousands of Israelites during the Exodus] aren’t going to throw away perfectly good cloth if it can be used for absolutely anything else.” [25]Capturing Christianity, “Egyptologist Presents Very Strong Evidence For A REAL Exodus”, Cameron Bertuzzi and David Falk, April 12th, 2021, 41 minutes in — … Continue reading
David Falk is no naturist. He is a PHD Egyptologist and antiquarian scholar with no naked axe to grind. Yet even he says that, yes, clothing was expensive in the ancient world. Indeed, this is implied in John The Baptist’s sermon in the gospel of Luke. He said “Whoever has two tunics is to share with him who has none, and whoever has food is to do likewise.” (Luke 3:11, ESV) Most people only had one tunic. You were lucky if you had two. In this day and age, even lower-middle-class people like myself have whole drawers full of different pants, shirts, underwear, etc. But clothing was a commodity in the ancient world. As such, if you had to work a dirty job (be if field gleaning, fishing, or trench digging), you didn’t want to risk soiling what was perhaps your only outfit. And yeah, you could wash it, but (1) You’d be naked while you did your laundry, and (2) You wouldn’t want to wash it often as you would have to scrub it up against a river rock which would wear out the cloth more quickly.
Based on the cultural context, the most likely explanation is that Ruth was naked in the field while she worked. In front of men like Boaz no doubt! Yet, there is no indication that this was sinful or shameful. While it is implied that Boaz does develop a little crush on Ruth (he treats her more kindly than the other workers after all), he treats her with dignity and respect as a person, something voyeurs don’t do when they see a naked woman. Boaz probably didn’t have a porno-prudish view of the human body, but I’m getting ahead of myself. We will return back to the issue of the male gaze later.
Matthew Neal, who runs a blog called “The Biblical Naturist” has an entire series called “Squeamish Translating” in which he shows how texts depicting full nudity have been altered by different translations of The Bible to avoid that interpretation. I think Ruth 3:3 is one of those instances. The word “best” is added by the translators, which makes it sound like Naomi just wants Ruth to change out of her “work clothes” into something fancier. But no, she literally tells Ruth “Put on your clothes”.
The Naked Christ
Jesus was naked during several points in his life. It goes without saying that he was naked at his birth, but given the common practice of nude baptisms up until the fourth century, [26]St. Cyril of Jerusalem (4th Century) “Therefore, I shall necessarily lay before you the sequel of yesterday’s Lecture, that ye may learn of what those things, which were done by you in … Continue reading and given what we’ve already said about the commodity of clothing, Jesus was most likely nude during his baptism in Matthew 3. In fact, The Garden Of Eden church posted an ancient statue of Jesus being baptized and he was depicted nude. Click here.
Jesus was naked at his crucifixion. In John 19:23-24, we read “When the soldiers crucified Jesus, they took his clothes, dividing them into four shares, one for each of them, with the undergarment remaining. This garment was seamless, woven in one piece from top to bottom. ‘Let’s not tear it,’ they said to one another. ‘Let’s decide by lot who will get it.’ This happened that the scripture might be fulfilled that said, ‘They divided my clothes among them and cast lots for my garment. So this is what the soldiers did.” (NIV) I used to think that this verse implied that Jesus at least had some kind of cloth over his waist like the movies and paintings depict, because it says that “they took his clothes, dividing them into four shares…with the undergarment remaining.” I was like, “See the undergarment remained! They kept that on him!” However, if we read more closely, we can see that that’s not what the text is saying. What the text is saying is that the soldiers took Jesus’ outer garment, tore it into four pieces so they could each have a piece, and the undergarment remained. Remained….what….on Jesus’ body? No! The undergarment remained undivided! The soldiers had no problem figuring out what to do with the outer garment. They just divided it into four pieces. But with Jesus’ garment…you know, that last piece of clothing shielding Jesus’ genitals from the world, they did not want to divide it up that way. So, they said “Let’s decide by lot who will get it.”
And so, sadly, no, Jesus had absolutely no clothes on during his crucifixion. At least not for the latter half of it. But as I think on this pitiful scene, I am moved. The devil used a naked man who ate from a tree to doom us. God hung as a naked man ON a tree to save us. In Romans 5, Paul calls Jesus “The Second Adam”, and I think Jesus was like a mirror Adam in more ways than we realized. Jesus became a bloody, beaten, naked mess to atone for my sins and yours (Romans 5:8, 1 Corinthians 15:3, 1 Peter 3:18, 1 John 2:2). But he got up out of that tomb on the third day! Praise His holy name!
Not only does a close reading of John 19:23-24 imply Jesus’ full nudity, but the cultural context surrounding crucifixion heightens the probability as well. As New Testament scholar Robyn J. Whitaker says “Slaves, the poor, criminals and political protesters were crucified in their thousands for ‘crimes’ we might today consider minor offences. The types of cross structures might differ, but as a form of execution, crucifixion was brutal and violent, designed to publicly shame the victim by displaying him or her naked on a scaffold, thereby asserting Rome’s power over the bodies of the masses. That Jesus suffered such an undignified death was an embarrassment to some early Christians. The apostle Paul describes Jesus’ crucifixion as a ‘stumbling block’ or ‘scandal’ to other Jews. Others would imbue it with sacrificial meaning to make sense of how the one claimed as God’s Son would suffer in this way. But the shame associated with this kind of death remained.” [27]Robyn J. Whitaker, “The Crucifixion Gap: Why It Took Hundreds Of Years For Art To Depict Jesus Dying On The Cross”, April 6th 2023, — … Continue reading Anglican theologian David Tomb writes “First, all four New Testament gospels record he was stripped of his clothing at the cross. John includes the detail that Jesus was stripped not only of his outer garment but also his undergarment – his chiton, or tunic. There is no mention of a loincloth in any of these accounts. Early readers would not have needed to be told Jesus was fully naked. They would have understood what crucifixion involved.” [28]David Tombs, “Art Depicts Jesus In A Loincloth On The Cross – The Brutal Truth Is He Would Have Been Naked” — … Continue reading In support of this, early Christian writers make reference to Jesus’ nakedness. For example, Melito of Sardis, a 2nd-century bishop in what is now Turkey, writes: “The Sovereign has been made unrecognisable by his naked body, and is not even allowed a garment to keep him from view. That is why the luminaries turned away, and the day was darkened, so that he might hide the one stripped bare upon the tree.” [29]As quoted in ibid.
Jesus’ naked body was on full display for many of the men, women, and children who would have been onlookers. While this isn’t “social nudity” per se, if being seen naked by anyone but your spouse or your doctor were sinful, then it logically follows that Jesus would be sinning while paying the penalty for our sins! I’m sorry, but that’s heresy. The Bible is completely clear that Jesus was sinless. 2 Corinthians 5:21 says “For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.” (ESV) Hebrews 4:15 says “For we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but one who in every respect has been tempted as we are, yet without sin.” (ESV) Jesus never sinned in his entire life, not even at the end. In fact, in John 8:46, Jesus rhetorically asks the Pharisees “Which of you can convict me of sin?” The implied answer is no one. So, unless we want to adopt a Christological heresy, we must conclude that it is not always a sin to be naked in front of non-spouses.
Now, at this point, the textile might object, that Jesus really didn’t have a choice in his public nudity as he was being crucified by the Romans. And one isn’t culpable for that which they cannot control. “Ought implies can”. Ok, well, nevermind the fact that Jesus’ crucifixion was all a part of his divine plan (see John 10:18, Acts 2:23), Jesus wasn’t just seen naked at his crucifixion, he was naked at his resurrection as well.
In John 20:1-7, we read “Early on the first day of the week, while it was still dark, Mary Magdalene went to the tomb and saw that the stone had been removed from the entrance. So she came running to Simon Peter and the other disciple, the one Jesus loved, and said, ‘They have taken the Lord out of the tomb, and we don’t know where they have put him!’ So Peter and the other disciple started for the tomb. Both were running, but the other disciple outran Peter and reached the tomb first. He bent over and looked in at the strips of linen lying there but did not go in. Then Simon Peter came along behind him and went straight into the tomb. He saw the strips of linen lying there, as well as the cloth that had been wrapped around Jesus’ head. The cloth was still lying in its place, separate from the linen.“ (NIV, emphasis mine in bold)
Then John 20:11-16, we read “Now Mary stood outside the tomb crying. As she wept, she bent over to look into the tomb and saw two angels in white, seated where Jesus’ body had been, one at the head and the other at the foot. They asked her, ‘Woman, why are you crying?’ ‘They have taken my Lord away,’ she said, ‘and I don’t know where they have put him.’ At this, she turned around and saw Jesus standing there, but she did not realize that it was Jesus. He asked her, ‘Woman, why are you crying? Who is it you are looking for?’ Thinking he was the gardener, she said, ‘Sir, if you have carried him away, tell me where you have put him, and I will get him.’ Jesus said to her, ‘Mary.’ She turned toward him and cried out in Aramaic, ‘Rabboni!’ (which means ‘Teacher’).” (NIV, emphasis mine in bold)
Jesus appeared in front of Mary Magdalene, a woman (gasp!), naked. How do we know this? Well, first, having already established that Jesus was naked on the cross, and given that we read that He left his grave clothes behind in the tomb, what else did the risen Christ have to put on? It’s not as though they kept wardrobes inside of tombs in case someone just wanted to randomly rise from the dead and leave. It also seems a bit silly and ad hoc to imagine Jesus streaking back home flashing crowds of people until he got a change of outfit, then raced back to the tomb just in time to greet the weeping Mary. We really aren’t given the impression that Jesus had the chance to go home and change. Moreover, John says that upon seeing Jesus, she initially mistook him for the gardener. Why is this significant? Remember the thing about clothing being a commodity? Yeah, gardeners often worked in the nude in order to keep from soiling their only clothes. Mary’s assumption makes sense. First, not only did she not expect to encounter a dead man. But this man was naked, and they were in the garden. She naturally just put two and two together. Not until Jesus said her name did she realize that it was him. Now, this is an interesting aside, but why didn’t she recognize Jesus immediately? It’s possible that her vision was blurred from her tears, the fact that she might not have seen Jesus disrobed before, and the fact that she didn’t expect to see a previously dead man alive again, all contributed to the delayed recognition. We can only speculate. That said, however uncomfortable it might make us, Jesus engaged in some brief co-ed social nudity. If this were a sin, we would have expected Jesus to act bashful, telling Mary to turn around. Or perhaps Mary would have covered her eyes. Instead, the narrator (the apostle John) just tells the story matter-of-factly. This may be why we, who would find such a situation extremely awkward, just forget that he left all his linen clothes inside the tomb.
Naturist blogger Matthew Neal makes a profound observation. He writes “He left our sin there… He left the grave clothes there. Could these two declarations of what Jesus left behind in that tomb really be one and the same? Death fell upon mankind when Adam and Eve sinned. Jesus conquered death when he came out of that tomb alive. He left our sins in that tomb. Clothing came into the world as a direct result of mankind’s sin. After his death, He was wrapped in grave clothes. He left those clothes in that tomb. Jesus was naked when He came out of that grave. …The only clothes Jesus had in the tomb were the grave clothes, and God made a special point of telling us that they remained in the tomb (John 20:1-7)” [30]Matthew Neal, “Jesus Left Them In The Tomb!”, April 10th 2023 All I can say is AMEN!
But here is the point as it relates to naturism; if Jesus could have a conversation with Mary for a few minutes naked, and Jesus is still without sin, then that seems to argue for the moral permissibility of social nudity in general. What exactly is the problem with a group of men and women hanging out together on a nude beach?
Objection: 1 Timothy 2:9 Teaches That Women Should Dress Modestly!
1 Timothy 2:9 is not about skin coverage. It does not say “I also want women to dress modestly, with decency and propriety, not in bikinis, or crop tops, or mini skirts.” It says “I also want women to dress modestly, with decency and propriety, not with braided hair or gold or pearls or expensive clothes” It was about wealthy women in the church flaunting their wealth and making lower class church goers actually feel the weight of their lack of affluence. You don’t even need cultural context, or Greek, or the big brain of N.T Wright to know this. Just read the freaking words on the page in English in black and white! Timothy’s congregation didn’t have a cleavage and midriff issue. They had an issue with rich people showing off how rich they were. Ironically, being completely naked would have been the most modest thing a woman could have “worn” as nudity was typically associated with financial destitution (see Deuteronomy 28:48, Matthew 25:44, James 2:15). Although if you showed up to Timothy’s church in nothing but a smile and you did have at least one garment to put on, this would have been a false modesty. But the irony remains.
Regardless of where one falls on the modesty debate, this does not justify misusing scripture to make your points. There are proof texts people sometimes marshal in to defend views that I hold but which I will not use myself. For example, I don’t use the plural of “Let us make man in our image” (Genesis 1:26) to support the doctrine of The Trinity, because I think in the genre of Genesis (ANE creation myth), and a lack of an awareness of a Trinity by Mose’s immediate audience (although later on, we do see evidence of a “Two Powers” doctrine which is a Godhead), this is God speaking to his divine council. So when Jehovah’s Witnesses point out that Genesis 1:26 doesn’t establish The Trinity, I’m like “Yep. You’re right. That’s why I don’t use that verse.” Why can’t modesty proponents do the same with 1 Timothy 2:9?
Moreover, what does “modesty” actually mean? Does it really mean being naked or half-naked? If so, then were Adam and Eve being immodest in the garden (Genesis 2:25)? Was Isaiah being immodest during his 3 years of nude preaching (Isaiah 20:1-4)? Was Jesus being immodest on the cross and at the resurrection (John 19:23-24, John 20:1-7, 11-16)? Mark Twain is quoted as saying, “Modesty antedates clothes and will be resumed when clothes are no more. Modesty died when clothes were born. Modesty died when false modesty was born.” David L. Hatton says: “For centuries, modesty was understood in those same terms, until the Victorian era gave the word a new meaning to match its prudish view of the body. In spite of this altered definition, the older meaning was retained as late as 1828, when Webster’s Dictionary continued to define modesty with no mention of clothing’s ability to produce a modest condition in the way it hid the body: “MODESTY, n. [L. modestia.] That lowly temper which accompanies a moderate estimate of one’s own worth and importance.” [31]Hatton, Meeting at the River, 118. We still use this (correct) definition of modesty today from time to time. Suppose I actually got to meet Michael Heiser, one of my heroes, before he died. I say “You made me fall in love with biblical scholarship. I love studying my Bible 10 times more now because of your books and podcast. You’re a really smart guy, and I’d like to follow in your footsteps as an academic.” Heiser responds with his usual “I’m not really doing much. I’m just taking with scholars are talking about and making it accessible to laymen like you. There’s never really been an original thought in my head.” I wave my hand and say “You’re just being modest.” I do not mean that he has a lot of clothes on. I mean that he is denying the notoriety I am trying to give him.
On this definition, someone can be modest or immodest regardless of what they do or don’t have on. Pope John Paul II said: “There are circumstances in which nakedness is not immodest. If someone takes advantage of such an occasion to treat the person as an object of enjoyment (even if his action is purely internal) it is only he who is guilty of shamelessness, not the other…Sexual modesty cannot then in any simple way be identified with the use of clothing, nor shamelessness with the absence of clothing and total or partial nakedness…Immodesty is present only when nakedness plays a negative role with regard to the value of the person, when its aim is to arouse concupiscence, as a result of which the person is put in the position of an object for enjoyment…There are certain objective situations in which even total nudity of the body is not immodest.” [32]John Paul II, Love and Responsibility (London: HarperCollins, 1981) quoting from the section “The Metaphysics of Shame,” in order from: 190, 176, 190, 191.
Let’s do a thought experiment! What is the difference between a nudist dancing to music on the beach and a stripper dancing in a strip club. In both cases, you have a fully naked woman [33]I Googled it. There are full nude strip clubs. and they’re both dancing. However, I would not say they’re both being immodest. They’re both naked and they’re both dancing, but the nudist girl is innocently having a good time on her nakation, not caring who is or isn’t watching. The stripper is flaunting her body parts specifically to excite drooling perverts eager to put dollar bills in her butt crack. The stripper is saying “Look at my naked body! Look at it and lust!” The nudist says “I love the feeling of the sun on my bare skin! I love dancing! It’s such a nice day!” I think the pope would agree that the nudist is being modest and the stripper is being immodest, despite doing similar activities (dancing) and having the exact same state of undress. Because it is an issue of motivation. For the stripper, her nakedness “plays a negative role with regard to the value [of her] as a person.” Her nakedness has the “aim to arouse concupiscence, as a result of which the person is put in the position of an object for enjoyment.” The stripper ceases to be a person made in God’s image and is of value and becomes a sexy conglomeration of body parts. None of the attendees thinks about what could have caused this woman to go into this profession, what her dreams in life were, what her likes and dislikes are, whether she’s happy or struggling with depression. She’s just a pair of boobs and a butt to gawk at, and nothing more. This is the evil that is the objectification of women. This is the satanic profaning of God’s holy images that porn industry perpetuates. But this is not true of nudist girls generally. You can be as modest as the day you were born, and be wearing the same outfit as you did on that day too!
Objection: Leviticus 18 Clearly Says Seeing Naked People Is Wrong!
Leviticus 18 includes a long list of persons to whom we should not “uncover the nakedness of”. I won’t cite the whole thing here, but you can easily look it up in your own Bible either physical or on your app (The Bible could not be more accessible today if we tried). But the problem is that this is how it reads in the English Standard Version. The New International Version, my main translation, doesn’t translate it as “uncover the nakedness of”, but rather “Do not have sexual relations with”. You see, this wasn’t a prohibition against seeing all these different types of people without clothes on. These were prohibitions against various forms of incest. I learned that this was an idiom long before I began my study into Christian Naturism. I learned this back in 2018 or 2019 when listening to Dr. Michael Heiser’s ironically named The Naked Bible Podcast.
Dr. Michael Heiser said “If you look at the language here in Leviticus 18 where you have the phrase ‘uncovering the nakedness of’ all over the place through the chapter, if you look at the instances where the passage talks about uncovering the nakedness of one’s father or uncovering the nakedness of one’s uncle, that would mean having sex with your father’s wife or your uncle’s wife, in other words, it’s beyond voyeurism. This is the idiomatic expression of to have sexual relationships with your mom, your father’s wife or your uncle’s wife. If you take that, now think about the term uncovering the nakedness, that idiomatic expression, that verb there uncovering. if you go to Leviticus 20, here’s what you read. ‘If a man takes his sister, a daughter of his father or a daughter of his mother. and sees her nakedness, and she sees his nakedness. it is a disgrace, and they shall be cut off in the side of the children of their people. He has uncovered his sister’s nakedness, and he shall bear his iniquity.'” [34]Dr. Michael Heiser, “The Naked Bible Podcast”, Episode 79: Leviticus 17-18, — https://nakedbiblepodcast.com/podcast/naked-bible-79-leviticus-17-18/
Dr. Heiser is not a naturist and he isn’t responding to this objection to justify a nudist lifestyle. He’s just simply interpreting the text. Don’t let the name of his podcast fool you. The name “The Naked Bible Podcast” just means that he wants to read scripture and interpret it as intended, without being “clothed” in filters of tradition, modern cultural thinking, denominational statements, creedal statements, etc. Just let The Bible be naked by removing as many of our modern presuppositions as we can. Don’t read it through mental filters. The podcast is about biblical scholarship, not naturism.
But as you can see, Leviticus 18 cannot be used to condemn nudist families. Unless brother and sister getting it on Alabama style, this passage is inapplicable, and thus, totally irrelevant to this discussion.
Objection: Noah’s Nakedness In Genesis 9 Was Shameful
This is another objection I learned how to respond to long before I had any interest in becoming a naturist. From 2016-2020, I did a pretty in depth study of Genesis 1-11, what scholars call “The Primeval History”. I learned that what Ham does to Noah in Genesis 9 is not just looking at his naked body and leaving, but it’s maternal incest. In other words, Ham raped his mom! I wrote an entire article on it in 2020 titled “Genesis 9: Noah’s Nakedness, The Sin Of Ham, and The Curse Of Canaan”. To prevent this article from being lengthier than it needs to be, I will merely cite my conclusion and leave it to the reader to click the hyperlink to read my exegetical reasoning towards that conclusion.
The sin of Ham was maternal incest. Ham had sex with his mother, Noah’s wife, in order to usurp his father’s patriarchal authority. Rather than outright say that Ham violated his mother, the author of Genesis employed a biblical idiom “uncovered his father’s nakedness” which meant to have sex with his father’s wife. To uncover a man’s nakedness was to have sex with a woman that belonged to him. This explains why Noah was so enraged at Ham, and why Canaan was cursed (because he was the fruit of that illicit union). It explains the “done to him” kind of language we find in the account, which suggests Ham did more than just get a quick peek. And this interpretation is not unique to me, biblical scholar Michael Heiser defends this interpretation on The Naked Bible Podcast [35]Dr. Michael S. Heiser, The Naked Bible Podcast: “Episode 159: Noah’s Nakedness, the Sin of Ham, and the Curse of Canaan” — … Continue reading and Brian Godawa defends this interpretation in the appendix of Gilgamesh Immortal (Chronicles Of The Nephilim Book 3) on pages 333-338 of the Kindle version. You’re welcome to check out these resources as well.
Objection: Moral Intuition Tells Us That Being Naked With Others Is Wrong
During a conversation with a Christian brother on Facebook, he brought up the argument that we just all know that nakedness is inherently lewd. We just all know that it’s shameful to be naked outside of marital sexual or bathing contexts. What’s he getting at? He’s appealing to what is known as “The Moral Law”. Those who have read my content on The Moral Argument for God’s Existence on this site (or perhaps have been exposed to the argument through Dr. William Lane Craig or Dr. Frank Turek) will know that I think that if God does not exist, then objective moral values and duties do not exist (Premise 1), but given that objective moral values and duties do exist (premise 2) it follows that God exists. Like Dr. William Lane Craig, I appeal to our innate awareness that some things are right and others are wrong in support of premise 2. It’s intuitively obvious that there are “moral facts” like “torturing a little baby for fun is evil” or “Nurturing a little baby is good”. In the absence of a sound defeater, we are justified in believing objective morality is real. Romans 2:14-15 also supports the idea of moral knowledge being ingrained into us, by the way.
So, even without any scripture to support the idea that nudity is bad, the argument goes, we could still be justified in affirming it on the basis of the moral law. There are several problems with this.
First, I know of no other moral fact that we read off the moral law that doesn’t also have support from scripture. We intuitively know that it’s wrong to murder innocent people. Well, one of The Ten Commandments is “You must not murder” (Exodus 20:13). We intuitively know that it’s wrong to take something that isn’t ours. Well, again, that’s one of The Ten Commandments found in scripture (Exodus 20:15). We just somehow know that lying about other people to get them in trouble is wrong. Again, in Exodus 20:16, Yahweh says “You must not give false testimony against your neighbor.” (NIV) There are passages that forbid things we might not intuit, for example, I wouldn’t have intuited that homosexualiy was wrong were it not for passages like Romans 1:26-27, and if I’m interpreting Paul correctly, he says he wouldn’t have known coveting was wrong were it not for the written law (Romans 7:7). So, in my experience, we have moral prohibitions in scripture that we don’t innately know apart from special revelation, but I know of no case where the reverse is true.
Secondly, given the positive case presented so far, it seems like The Bible actually contradicts our moral intuition at this point. Those of us who identify as protestant and take Sola Scriptura seriously should give scripture the greater weight. I have done this with homosexuality. I personally don’t see what the big deal is, but God says in his word that He doesn’t want men to have sex with men and women to have sex with women, so I submit my fallible intuition to the authority of God’s written word, which he breathed out (2 Timothy 3:16) and put into ink through human authors (2 Peter 2:21).
Thirdly, our moral intuitions across different times and cultures vary wildly on what counts as “immodest”. You may find some of the modesty standards I’m about to present as ludicrous, but to the people in these cultures, it was “obvious”. Decades ago, Chinese women had to prevent their feet from being seen by any man except their husband, but they were totally fine being naked from the ankles up. This was the modesty standard of that time. Everything else? Perfectly fine to expose. But the feet? That’s lewd! Put some socks on, you hoe! [36]“Studies in the Psychology of Sex” vol. 1 “The Evolution of Modesty, the Phenomenon of Sexual Periodicity and Auto-erotisism.” Third Edition. F.A. Davis Company Publishers. 1921 by Havelock … Continue reading Early eastern cultures had strict rules for covering the face with masks, but also frequently were nude from the neck down. [37]IBID, p. 19 Quoting from: J.W. Helfer, Reisen in Vorderasian und Indien, vol. ii p.12 This was a modesty standard also. In these cultures where the feet or the face were strictly covered, these parts of the body were sexually objectified, just as we objectify the parts of the body that are made mandatory to cover in our own culture (in our case, it’s the boobs, butts, and the genitals). In other words, a Chinese man would be sexually aroused if he caught sight of a woman’s feet or face because it had been drilled into his mind that feet were sexual! And because of his conditioning, when he saw female feet, he had the reaction that he was taught he would have. This reaction only served to confirm what his culture told him.
Now, we think this is stupid. For us, there is nothing sexual about a woman’s feet or face. We see feet and faces all the time! It’s a common occurrence. And for these aforementioned Eastern cultures, the genitals were a common sight. As a result, they did not sexualize them nor did they have sexual responses at the mere sight of them. As Aaron Frost notes in “Christian Body”, In every culture that practices some version of purdah (by this, he means modesty) the part of the body they cover becomes dirty and sexualized. In cultures where no part of the body is necessarily covered they have no concept of pornography or sexual objectification of the body. [38]Frost, Aaron. Christian Body: Modesty and the Bible (p. 13). UNKNOWN. Kindle Edition. We think these cultures are silly for requiring that the face and feet be covered, but they’d probably think we’re lewd for letting these parts be shown and say we compulsively hide the wrong parts! What does this say about the reliability of our intuition regarding modesty? Doesn’t it seem subjective? And if it’s silly to cover feet and face, maybe it’s silly to make covering any part of the body mandatory.
If this was really important, why isn’t there a universal standard of modesty across all cultures? Why do we disagree so much on what parts of the body have to be covered? Isn’t it interesting that it’s always those parts that we feel compelled to cover that just happened to be the sexualized body parts in those cultures? Maybe there’s a reason why Iranian men get aroused at the side of women’s hair and I can see hundreds of women’s hair on the other side of a cash register in a day and my manhood continues to be soft as a wet hot dog? Could it be that modesty is a man made convention and is actually not healthy?” I submit to you that our mental compulsion to cover up is not part of the moral law, it’s cultural conditioning. How does this happen? It happens all throughout our lives. When we’re toddlers and we get scolded for running around the yard naked [39]In case, you didn’t know, little children are natural born nudists. When we see our mothers or fathers freak out if we walk in on them changing, when we learn that going naked in some places is actually a sex crime, when we see movies and cartoons and see the characters act embarrassed or bashful if someone catches them naked. It happens when our parents shield our eyes if we see some bare boobs or a butt in a movie (like that that one scene in Titanic. You know which one I’m talking about). We have it hammered into our heads over and over throughout our entire lives that we ought to be ashamed of ourselves if we’re seen without clothes on. We’re taught that the naked body is an inherently sexual thing. As a result, we have this “moral intuition” that nudity being wrong is “just obvious”. Was it obvious to Adam and Eve? No. Not until they sinned and someone or something introduced the concept to them. A concept God rhetorically repudiated in Genesis 3:11.
Now, as an aside, I want to say something about the legitimacy of using moral intuition to defend the second premise of The Moral Argument For God’s Existence. One common objection I receive is that our moral intuitions contradict each other, and therefore, moral intuition is not a reliable guide for determining if objective moral values and duties really do exist. There are two responses I usually give; one of which is that disagreements on what is right and wrong doesn’t undermine our justification for believing in right and wrong, anymore than two people disagreeing over a specific shade of blue means that color isn’t an objective part of reality. Moreover, often times our disagreement comes not in what is right or wrong, but in the specific facts pertaining to the situation. For example, Is abortion morally right or morally wrong? People disagree on this. However, the disagreement is not over whether murdering innocent people is wrong. The disagreement is over whether the fetus is a living human person or not. Pro-lifers like myself say it is. Pro-choicers say “It’s just a blob of cells.” Pro-Choicers aren’t justifying murder. They just don’t believe that abortion is taking an innocent life. We don’t disagree on morality! We disagree on biology! There are several other examples I could cite just like this.
Likewise, what is the moral fact upon which Christian Textiles and Christian Naturists agree? We both agree that people should be sexually pure. We should be chaste. We should not sexually objectify other human beings and/or lust after them (Matthew 5:28). However, the textile thinks that nudity is a breeding ground for lust whereas naturists like myself see it as the cure! My sexual ethics have not changed one tiny little bit. I believe that sex should be between a man and a woman in the confines of marriage (Song Of Solomon 8:4, Hebrews 13:4), that sex should not be between two people of the same gender (Mark 10:6-9, Romans 1:26-27, 1 Corinthians 6:9-11, 1 Timothy 1:8-11), that we should not commit adultery (Exodus 20:14), and that even to look after a woman with lust is to commit adultery in the heart (Matthew 5:28) [40]If you’d like to see my exposition on this verse, see The Cerebral Faith Podcast, “Episode 138: Exegeting The Sermon On The Mount (Part 5) – What Adultery Is and Is Not”. You … Continue reading. I detest pornography with every fiber of my being. I believe it degrades women by turning them into mere pieces of meat for horny voyeurs to drool over. Yes, I am a naturist, but I am every bit of chaste as I was when I kept my clothes on. In fact, as I’ll argue near the end, in my case, gaining the ability to actually live our all of my sexual ethics was the major selling point for naturism. I am more chaste now than ever! There is no disagreement on sexual ethics here. The disagreement is over what is conducive or counterproductive to live sexually ethical lives. The disagreement is over facts concerning human nakedness.
Why I Got Into Naturism – Shattering Indestructible Chains
I have lived in unbreakable chains since I was 13 years old. I remember my very first exposure to pornography. It was totally by accident, and it wasn’t even real women I was looking at. I was 9 years old surfing the web for Pokemon sites and I came across a website depicting some of the female characters nude and doing some very lewd things. One image was of Misty standing in front of a brick wall completely naked, and she had ridiculously huge breasts. Ash was standing to the left with his mouth agape. I had no idea this kind of content existed on the internet. I would later learn that this specific type of porn is called “hentai”. I was enthralled! I hadn’t hit puberty yet, so I wasn’t aroused per se, just fascinated. It didn’t take long before I made the inference “I wonder if there are pictures of real naked women on the internet”. A quick Google search confirmed my suspicion. Again, I was enthralled. I scrolled through all of the images. “So this is what naked women look like!” I thought to myself. I distinctly remember amusingly saying to myself “You can find just about anything on the internet, can’t you?” I spent several weeks just scrolling images of women; real and anime. Eventually, my natural curiosity was satisfied. I stopped going to the porn sites and didn’t go back for four whole years. Later, when I was 13, I remember looking at the bikini model in my 2004 Sports Illustrated calendar, she was a well-endowed blonde woman with a few cute freckles on her face. Because I objectified this divine image bearer (and because it was so long ago), I don’t remember her name, but I think she was in the July month. I remember being overwhelmed by lust and sexual arousal. I closed my door, unzipped my pants and….well, I’m sure you can guess what happened next. After the deed was done, I was overcome with immense guilt and shame that I couldn’t explain at the time.
Eventually, I learned to suppress my conscience and I convinced myself this was totally normal for a teenage boy to do. I went back to internet porn and hid it from my parents. This was the mid-2000s before everyone had a smart phone, and my parents forced my computer to be in the living room. By divine providence, my porn use was limited. If this weren’t the case, I might have become a worse coomer than I actually was. I was mostly confined to wanking to my Sports Illustrated calendar and a Playboy magazine I somehow got my hands on. I would later learn of the Coolidge effect and the horrible brain damage hardcore porn could do to your brain. Being limited to simple nudes and bikini models may have limited the damage. As I have said elsewhere, I was a nominal Christian and did not fully give my life to Christ until I was 17. By age 18, The Holy Spirit began convicting me of what I was doing. A.W Tozer once said “The Holy Spirit never enters a man and lets him live like the world. You can be sure of that.” [41]Unable to Live Like the World – AW Tozer | Deeper Christian Quotes. The conscience that I had stifled came roaring back in the form of Holy Spirit conviction. I tried to repent because I loved Jesus with all my heart. I asked him to help me break free. I had faith that He could give me the power to do it. But the urge to engage in cyber voyeurism kept coming back. I would resist with all my might, but the longer I would resist, the stronger and stronger the urge would get until I would eventually give in and masturbate. The internet has coined a term called “Post nut realization”. It’s when you do lewd and perverted things and don’t feel any shame until after you orgasm and come to your senses. This was a cycle I endured for years and years.
Michael Cusik, in his book “Surfing For God” explains exactly what I went through. He wrote “First, it begins with getting clean—genuine remorse and sincere repentance. Promising God that we won’t go there again. Then, for reasons we don’t really understand, we go there again. Eventually, when our shame overwhelms us, or perhaps we’ve been discovered, we come clean again. But this time we tell somebody and find an accountability partner. Finally, we commit to a new strategy by redoubling our efforts, trying even harder, checking in more often with our accountability partner, and maybe reading our Bibles more. It’s lather, rinse, repeat—with the emphasis on repeat. And the saddest part of this cycle is that most men see no alternative. We’re seemingly stuck with two choices: either suppress our passions or give in and indulge them. We know in our hearts that porn is not God’s best for our lives. But in the heat of the moment, it seems as if there’s nothing better than porn. We desperately need another way to live.” [42]Michael John Cusick, Surfing for God (Thomas Nelson) Kindle, 221.
For years, I begged and pleaded with God to help me get free from porn. Sometimes I would spend hours in my bedroom petitioning Him for help. Sometimes I would scream my prayers in tears. Why? I couldn’t understand it. Why wasn’t God helping me? I studied The Bible deeply searching for answers, but the scriptures seemingly gave no answers. Sometimes I would get angry with God for making me feel guilty for something He wouldn’t help me stop doing. Like Martin Luther, I loved God, and yet I hated Him. I wanted to please God, but yet I was plagued with guilt and shame and desired to do what He disapproved of. I could echo Luther’s statement “Love God? Sometimes I hate him!” I felt like a real like Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. [43]By the way, the 80s Christian Rock band Petra wrote an excellent song titled “Jekyll and Hyde” which really resonated with how I felt. Even well into my apologetics ministry (i.e Cerebral Faith), I struggled with this. I had heard preachers say that sin is never satisfied, but it will grow more and more as you feed it. When Ravi Zacharias was exposed as a molester of women, I was struck with fear. “Could I become like him one day? What if I stop being satisfied touching myself to mere images? What if I become a successful Christian intellectual who falls because of sexual sin?” Now, to this day, I have never laid a hand on a woman, but this was a fear of mine, a fear that the small fire of porn addiction could grow into a massive wildfire of sexual misconduct. I did not want to become the next Ravi Zacharias.
The math wasn’t mathing. 1 Thessalonians 4:3 says “It is God’s will that you should be sanctified: that you should avoid sexual immorality;” (NIV) and 1 John 5:14-15 says “This is the confidence we have in approaching God: that if we ask anything according to his will, he hears us. And if we know that he hears us—whatever we ask—we know that we have what we asked of him.” (NIV) If it’s God’s will for me to not be sexually immoral, and I have assurance that I will receive whatever I pray for in accordance to God’s will, then God should be doing something. I shouldn’t be in bondage to pornography, right? That would seem to follow Modus Ponens’ reasoning. I kept these scriptures close to my heart and trusted that maybe, for whatever reasons known only to Him, maybe it just wasn’t the right time. I’ll be honest, this is one of those times where I’m glad my Christian worldview was grounded in solid arguments and evidence. It would have been so easy to conclude that the reasons my prayers weren’t being answered was that there is no God to respond to those prayers. And yet, because of The Kalam Cosmological Argument, The Cosmic Fine-Tuning Argument, The Moral Argument, The Ontological Argument, and the historical evidence for the death and resurrection of Jesus, I knew God existed. God was still the best explanation for the origin and fine-tuning of the universe, and Jesus’ resurrection was still the best explanation of the minimal facts. No matter what the answer for God’s inaction was, it couldn’t be because He wasn’t there! My worldview wasn’t grounded in feelings, and, ergo, feelings couldn’t change my mind. Am I just going to become a denier of facts because God isn’t doing what I think He should be doing? That would be irrational.
Years and years passed. I prayed for God to take away my sex drive. He didn’t. There were times when I considered castrating myself as the church father Origen did [44]Origen’s Castration – EARLY CHURCH HISTORY. I didn’t, because deep down I knew that wouldn’t fix the issue. I never used filters or software like Covenant Eyes because I knew ahead of time how I could get around them. I tried to figure out ways to get around anti-porn software because I wanted to make sure that I found a fool proof plan before I confessed my shame to someone. Sadly, I knew exactly how I would circumvent these external porn management measures. I reasoned that even if all of my electronics were completely locked down, I could still get it done the old-fashioned way. There’s a meme circulating around Facebook that has vintage underwear models on it and it’s captioned “Back in my day, the ole’ Sears catalog would get the job done”. Indeed, I could just go buy physical copies Sports Illustrated and Playboy magazines from a store if I was barred access digitally. And if nothing else, there is no software one could install to keep me from fantasizing about women I fancied. For the 15 years I fought this thing, I felt like a doctor desperately trying to find a cure for his own illness, desperately hoping for that “Eureka!” moment.
This past January at the Defend apologetics conference at New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary, I heard a plenary session by Dr. Bob Stewart. His talk was “The Most Important Thing In Christian Apologetics”. Among the things he brought up was porn. He said that to be a truly effective apologist, we shouldn’t be in bondage to this sin. He said to “Find an accountability partner. Find someone you trust, someone who won’t spread it around.” I sat in my seat next to my friend Nick Peters and scoffed while having guilt and hopelessness bubble up inside me. “Yeah, right.” I internally dialogued. “Like that’ll do any good.” Did you know that you can lie to your accountability partner? Yeah, you don’t have to tell them when you fall. You can lie to them. With all respect to Dr. Stewart, this is one piece of conventional Christian wisdom regarding fighting porn that is ineffective.
One week in early April 2024, I was feeling particularly “horny”. Every day for several days straight, I masturbated 3-4 times a day! This is not usual for me. I usually would do it once every few days. During one of my sessions, I was searching for key terms to find material to fap to. I was hoping to find some hidden camera footage of nudist beaches. So I would Google “Nudists”, “Nude beaches”, “Nudists on nude beaches.”, “Naturists”, and so on. The coolidge effect was strong this day, as I couldn’t seem to find something that truly got me off. During my web searches, I “accidentally” came across a blog called Aching For Eden. The article was titled “Be Ye Transformed”, and I’ll link to it for you to read if you’d like. The article was not written by the site owner, but by a guest writer who went by “South West Will”. I read the article and I was shocked to find that this author said that naturism was something God used to transform the way he responded to the site of naked bodies. Now, I knew of Christians who were nudists/naturists. Nevertheless, I had never heard of naturism being used as a catalyst to free someone from porn.
Let me rewind a little. Before I found this website, I gave into despair. I completely gave up hope. I said something to God that went along these lines; “If You truly hate what I’m doing, then get off Your divine butt and do something. I am utterly powerless to stop myself. If You don’t do it, it won’t get done. Now, You can continue to watch me return to this abomination or you can act. The ball is in Your court. You decide what happens from here on.” I was fully prepared to be in bondage to porn until the day I died. I was fully prepared for God to do nothing. I thought that the only thing I could hope for was to continue asking for His forgiveness, to be freed from my sin’s penalty by Christ’s cross, but I had completely given up hope that I would ever be freed from its power. I had resigned myself to a life sentence in Pornshank Prison. [45]A play on Pornography and Shawshank Prison in case you didn’t know. It may have been a few days or a week, but it was very soon after I truly, 100% “let go and let God” that I found “Be Ye Transformed” on the Aching For Eden blog.
I was at the point where I was willing to try anything. Especially if I wanted to go into an academic ministry. I didn’t want to be disqualified because of sexual sin.
I began reading. First, I read Phillip Oak’s book “Surprised Into Freedom: The Effortless Obliteration Of Lust and Body Shame”. I was sold after reading that book. But as an aspiring scholar, I still wanted to do more research to make sure naturism was really compatible with my faith. So I read David Hatton’s book “Who Said You Were Naked?” And Aaron Frost’s “Christian Body”. I binged articles on The Biblical Naturist blog and I read the entirety of Fig Leaf Forum’s “Naturist Apologia” e-book. As a Christian Apologist who has made apologetics content since 2012 at Cerebral Faith, the term apologia definitely got my attention. It was a compilation of about 40 different objections to naturism from textile Christians. At the end of it, I was convinced that there was no biblical, philosophical, or scientific grounds for not being a naturist. I had every reason to become a naturist and no reason not to.
Naturism has freed me from porn. No, God has freed me from porn. But he used naturism as the means to do it. First, I learned a more proper “Theology Of The Body” from folks like Phillip Oak and David Hatton. Then I lived as though the truth were true. I have mostly been a home nudist, but I planned on reconditioning my mind to see nudity in a non-sexual way. One thing I did was I purchased several videos on Vimeo from an organization called The Naked Club. These are 30-minute to an hour-and-a-half videos of naturists just playing around and having fun. Men and women are involved, usually college-aged. The non-sexual nature of the settings was powerful. Here were these naked girls and guys just doing things you would see any textile people doing.
I’m not going to say that I didn’t get aroused when I first started watching these films. However, I did not act on it (i.e pleasure myself in response to the arousal). Instead, I gave my penis a death stare until the erection went away, and I continued to watch the nudists on screen having innocent fun. I didn’t realize it at the time, but this reconditioning strategy is what naturist blogger Jochannan called “Breaking Naked”. He talks about it in a guest post on Aching For Eden here. –> Breaking Naked (by Jochanaan) – Aching for Eden (wordpress.com)
My mind no longer associates nudity with sex. I no longer look at women as sex objects. And I am no longer enticed to lust by the mere sight of a woman. No matter what she is wearing. Or if she isn’t wearing anything at all!
It’s funny what happens when you fight a battle God’s way instead of man’s way. I hope Oak gets a big reward in Heaven for inviting me to naturism as the catalyst for my freedom. I have been four full months without pornography, and guess what? I have no filters, no Covenant Eyes, no accountability partners. I just do. not. want. it. I no more have a desire to indulge in pornography any more than I have a desire to eat a bowl of excrement. I no longer objectify women. I no longer see women as a collection of breasts and butts. I see people made in God’s image (Genesis 1:26-27) and, if they are Christians, Holy Spirit temples (1 Corinthians 6:19).
God used nudism as a means of grace to clean up my mind and I will never stop praising Him for it (Romans 12:2). After 15 years of failed prison breaks, I am FREE!
There is NO sin in your life that Christ cannot conquer! The same power that raised Christ from the dead lives in us (Romans 8:11)! As my friend Dr. Tim Stratton Of FreeThinking Ministries once said, every Christian is a walking stick of dynamite! There is no cage of the enemy that can hold us! Praise His Holy Name!
Objection: Didn’t You Just Change One Form Of Porn For Another?
I realize that for many, this may not sound like any solution at all. How can seeing naked women be the cure for lust when seeing naked women was what caused the problem? The problem is that seeing naked women wasn’t the issue at all. And had I not been blinded to the scriptures, I would have known. Actually, I must confess that I caught glimpses of the truth from time to time, such as when I reasoned that if all my magazines and electronics were taken away from me, nothing could stop me from fantasizing. You see, in Matthew 15:19-20, Jesus said “For out of the heart come evil thoughts—murder, adultery, sexual immorality, theft, false testimony, slander. These are what defile a person; but eating with unwashed hands does not defile them.” (NIV, emphasis mine in bold) The context here is eating without having ceremonially washed your hands. But the principle is applicable to this context as well. Just as eating with unwashed hands doesn’t make you sinful, so seeing a naked woman does not defile me. We could imagine Jesus saying “Evan, foolish little brother, are you so dull? Photons bounce off of a woman’s body and hit the retina, transferring information to the brain to create an image. It is not what goes into your eyes that defiles you, but what comes out of your heart. For out of the heart come evil thoughts—murder, adultery, sexual immorality, theft, false testimony, slander. These are what defile a person; but looking at unclothed people does not defile them.” Beautiful unclothed women only triggered an evil in my heart that was already there! In Matthew 5:28, Jesus says that to look at a woman with lust is to already be an adulterer at heart. And in Matthew 15:19-20, he says that evil begins in the heart and comes from there. Among the things he lists are adultery and sexual immortality. Piper Fawn and Alisa Amore didn’t do anything but draw out an evil that laid dormant in my heart. In fact, in retrospect, most of the pics I jerked off to were images of simple, non-sexual nudity. I mentioned Alisa Amore specifically because I don’t think I’ve ever seen her in anything distinctly erotic. I have memories of her simply standing naked on a beach or in a field. Fawn did some porn work, but honestly I only occasionally viewed actual pornography – i.e videos of men and women having sex, blow job videos, etc. That isn’t to say I wouldn’t watch one every now and then if simple nudes weren’t enough to give me an erection. But for the most part, I was mostly simply into nudes. But the evil in my heart was still evil. I still looked at these women as pieces of meat for my self-gratification. The photograph may have been inherently innocuous, but to my lustful perverted heart, it was porn.
I just Googled “Alisa Amore” (who also goes by Jessica Albanka) and I see some of her photos with new eyes, even some of the ones I used to pleasure myself to. Yes, she’s naked, but she really isn’t doing anything but sitting, standing, doing exercises, running on a beach, or relaxing in a bathtub. I didn’t get aroused. I didn’t lust. But I was overcome with a desire to apologize to her for abusing her images in the past, and I wanted to tell her that Jesus loves her. I wanted to tell her that her body is the image of God, and that she reflects Him back to creation just by existing. I wanted to tell her to make that body of hers a home for The Holy Spirit. But if I did, I’d just be talking to a photograph. But I want you to see just how different my responses are. The same external stimuli evoked two different kinds of responses out of me before and after my mind renewal. One was satanic, the other was godly. That’s because it wasn’t the pictures that made me sin. Sin lived in my heart the whole time. “For out of the heart come evil thoughts—murder, adultery, sexual immorality, theft, false testimony, slander. These are what defile a person;” (Matthew 15:19). Lust is no longer in my heart. So Alisa’s naked body does nothing to me. It can’t evoke lust because it cannot draw something out that isn’t inside of me anymore.
Moreover, there have been a couple of times recently in which I have accidentally discovered actual porn (lewd acts, not merely naked people). When I saw them, they aroused something alright; they aroused righteous anger. In one case, I X’d out of my browser and literally felt nauseated. I wanted to throw my phone against the wall. I saw God’s images, persons with feelings, hopes and dreams, lives, souls, being exploited for perverted onlookers.
I find pornography to be a form of blasphemy and sacrilege now. Because of my clear vision, I see all people as images of God and/or temples of The Holy Spirit. The former is true of all people, the latter is true only of Christians. For me, to jerk off to an image of a woman would be no different than if I jerked off to a painting of Jesus, who, because He IS God (John 1:1-3, 14, John 8:58, John 10:30), is visible image of the invisible God in an even more metaphysically profound sense than we are (Colossians 1:15). To treat the body of any human as an object for self-gratification is to show contempt for the God they visually represent.
The Bible says “Do not be conformed to the patterns of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind.” (Romans 12:2). My mind has been renewed and as a result, I have been transformed. I now respond to the sight of pornography the same way God does; with disgust and righteous anger. Now, I am not saying that there is anything wrong with being sexually attracted to a woman. Not at all. It is ok to think women are beautiful. That’s part of what it means to be a heterosexual man. But there is a difference between admiring a woman’s beauty and mentally reducing that woman to a sex doll. When I googled Alisa Amore just now, I still think she’s beautiful. She has a pretty face and a nice-looking body. But I am acutely aware that this is a person to be loved, not a thing to be used. It is not God’s will for us to be a-sexual. He just wants us to not be voyeurs with hearts full of lust.
All of this may sound utterly alien to you. How can a heterosexual man not be overwhelmed with lust at the sight of a beautiful naked woman? You probably believe that men are hardwired to be sexually aroused visually. I’ve heard it preached from many pulpits that this is the case, and even many non-Christians believe and propagate this, but it’s a lie. You might think that I’ve merely desensitized myself to female sexual beauty, but you’re wrong. I’ve merely undone 30 years of cultural conditioning. You see, when preachers, sex experts, therapists, your parents, and everyone around you tell you that you’re going to get off by seeing the naked body of the sex you’re attracted to, when it’s hammered into your head by how characters in movies and TV shows respond (e.g all the anime characters and their nose bleeds at the sight of boobs), you are conditioned to think that this is normal. In fact, if a man sees a naked pretty woman and he doesn’t have a sexual reaction, he’s made to believe something’s wrong with him. “Am I gay? Do I have erectile dysfunction? Am I Asexual? What’s wrong with me?” You’re expected to basically be a voyeur. There’s nothing you can do about it. It’s just the way you are. So the solution is to just cover women up as much as possible, or at least their “Sexual” parts (breasts are used in sex…..how, exactly?). If we don’t see it, we won’t be aroused. Out of sight, out of mind. Until you catch a glimpse of a woman in a crop top, or go to the beach, or decide to seek it out on the internet. This is the satanic lies preached from pulpits. The human body is a lust trap. We blame women for our lust problems. Like Adam in the garden, when God calls us to account, we are saying “The woman YOU gave me. It’s HER fault! She should have covered up more!” (Genesis 3:12). It’s God’s fault for making women too hot and it’s a woman’s fault for not wearing enough clothes. That’s why men have lust problems. LIES! LIES! LIES!
We have been conditioned by our culture to have sexual responses to the nudity or partial nudity of the gender we’re attracted to. Yes, men ARE visual. So are women by the way. The Magic Mike movie did well and it wasn’t because it had a great story, I assure you. But we were conditioned to be visual. The good thing about conditioning? It can be undone through therapy. Praise God!
Naturist Christians such as Aaron Frost, David Hatton, and Chris MudWalker frequently compare what has happened to us to Pavlov’s Dogs. Pavlov’s Dogs were conditioned to salivate at the sound of a bell, because every time the bell would ring, the dogs would get food. In his video, “Pavlov’s Dogs…and Nudism?” Chris MudWalker invites us to imagine Pavlov’s Dogs being given to homes after the experiment was over. One of these dogs meets another dog at a dog park and they have a conversation. In the middle of the conversation, Pavlov’s former dog said that he heard his master’s cell phone ring (a bell sound) and it just caused him to salivate so badly that he made a mess on the floor, and how he wishes humans would get rid of all types of bells because it’s such a stumbling block. The other dog thinks Pavlov’s dog is weird for reacting that way to the mere sound of a bell. He hears bells ring all the time and it’s no big deal. Pavlov’s Dog accuses the other dog of basically lying to him or lying to himself. ALL dogs salivate at the sound of bells. It’s just the way they are, he argues. Dogs are hardwired to salivate at the sound of bells. The other dog is still confused and wonders what must be wrong with his new friend. Because salivating at bells is not normal. This is how people were raised nudists or who grew up in “naked cultures” react to textiles who think that boobies automatically lead to erections, or for the lady readers, that a bare-chested muscular man will lead to a moist vagina. It’s not normal, it’s not innate, and we were not “born this way”. We are products of our environment. The worst thing about this is that churches everywhere teach otherwise. I think the church needs to undergo a new reformation. And just as we left indulgences and papal infallibility behind during the first reformation, we need to leave modesty culture behind in the second reformation. Interestingly, Phillip Oak made his own “95 Theses”, which can be read by clicking here.
I think it’s safe to say that I am reconditioned. And I’m not the only one. Adopting a naturist lifestyle has freed many other Christian men from these otherwise unbreakable chains. Phillip Oak, author of “Surprised Into Freedom” is one of them. Matthew Neal who writes The Biblical Naturist blog is another one. Chris who runs the MudWalkers YouTube channel is still yet another one. R.B Mears is another one. R.B Mears wrote a Christian Naturist novel called “Chain Breakers” in which a group of porn-addicted teens find freedom simply through experiencing chaste nudity with each other by skinny dipping over the summer. It started with one of the characters reading the articles from the website MyChainsAreGone.org and then passing on what he knew to his friends. Over the course of the story, it became an entire club bearing the name of the book title. It is my hope that what I have written here will inspire other Christians to shatter their own chains. What actually works to shatter the chains of pornography just isn’t being talked about in mainstream Christianity. Phllip Oak, Matthew Neal, Chris MudWalker, R.B Mears, and myself all found freedom from porn by learning (1) The truth and (2) Living as though the truth were true.
Conclusion
I have many more things to say, but you cannot bare them now. I called this article “The Case For Naturism” and I tried to be as in-depth as I could.In retrospect, perhaps this should have been a book, but in my experience, most people who read my written content read my blog posts, not my books [46]I should have made “Yahweh’s Inferno: Why Scripture’s Teaching On Hell Doesn’t Impugn The Goodness Of God” into a multi-part series. So few people have read it.. I am honestly afraid of what people will think when they hear that I’ve become a naturist. Will they think I’m some pervert? Will they falsely accuse me of being a voyeur or an exhibitionist? Is this going to kill any chance of pursuing a career in biblical scholarship? Will Powdersville First Baptist bring me in for “church discipline?” Maybe. Maybe not. But like I said, the church is in desperate need of reformation. Like Martin Luther, I struggled with years of guilt and shame, feeling God’s disapproving gaze. And as it was when Luther learned that he as saved just by his faith in Christ’s work on the cross (not by good works), so my realization that naturism, not prudery, is what has and will continue to, set me free from guilt and fear. I wholeheartedly believe that a clothing free lifestyle is God’s creation ideal. We see that from the very beginning before sin entered into the world. When you live inside of God’s will, things will go better for you.
I believe God kept me in bondage for years because if He had told me what I needed to do at 18, I would have rejected it. I would have suppressed the truth. I would have been like “No, this is too weird. Anything but that!” God in His wisdom knew I needed to reject the failure of all other methods to fight porn and face defeat after defeat after defeat before I’d be willing to listen to him. I also needed to truly surrender to Him and stop acting like I could do it on my own. And this is an experiential lesson in the problem of evil as well. God knew why He wasn’t helping me. “How you want to win this battle is not the same as how I want you to win this battle” The Holy Spirit said as I tried to force an answer out of him to teach me how to defeat the insanely powerful enemy known as porn addiction. Once I gave up, The Holy Spirit was willing to show me the way. God is wiser than we are. He has access to all the facts. We are not in the position to judge Him. The math really was matching after all. I was just missing parts of the equation. And now, God’s Will for me to be freed from sexual immorality has been realized (1 Thessalonians 4:3). I prayed according to His will, He heard me, and I got what I asked for (1 John 5:14-15). Praise be to His holy name! Sometimes what looks like a “No” is really a “Not Yet”.
The Holy Spirit did not want to zap me with an infinite amount of willpower and make me stay away from porn. No, He wanted me to learn the truth about nudity and human sexuality. He knew that this truth would transform my mind (Romans 12:2) and set me free.
“Then you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.” – John 8:32 (NIV)
“Jesus replied, ‘Very truly I tell you, everyone who sins is a slave to sin. Now a slave has no permanent place in the family, but a son belongs to it forever. So if the Son sets you free, you will be free indeed.” – John 8:34-36 (NIV)
I mentioned Martin Luther a few times. For the textile reader who may disagree with me at best and accuse me of entering a sinful lifestyle at worst, I will modify Luther’s words and make them my own;
“Unless I am convinced by Scripture and plain reason – I do not accept the concepts coming from modesty and purity culture, for they have contradicted each other on what even counts as modest and immodest – my conscience is captive to the Word of God. I cannot and I will not recant anything, for to go against conscience is neither right nor safe. God help me. Amen.”
References
| ↑1 | John H. Walton, Ancient Near Eastern Thought and The Old Testament, first edition, page 118, Baker Academic, 2006 |
|---|---|
| ↑2 | see my article “Genesis 1 – Functional Creation, Temple Inaguration, and Anti-Pagan Polemics” for the full exegetical defense of this. See also John Walton’s book “The Lost World Of Genesis One: Ancient Cosmology and The Origins Debate” published by InterVarsity Press, and Carmen Joy Imes’ “Being God’s Image: Why Creation Still Matters”, published by IVP Academic. |
| ↑3 | Heiser, Michael S.. The Unseen Realm: Recovering the Supernatural Worldview of the Bible (pp. 42-43). Lexham Press. Kindle Edition. |
| ↑4 | Carmen Joy Imes, Being God’s Image: Why Creation Still Matters (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic: An Imprint of InterVarsity Press, 2023), 31. |
| ↑5 | Marc Cortez, ReSourcing Theological Anthropology: A Constructive Account of Humanity in the Light of Christ (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2017), 110–11. |
| ↑6 | Cortez, ReSourcing Theological Anthropology, 109. |
| ↑7 | Burton Scott Easton, “Naked, Nakedness,” ed. James Orr et al., The International Standard Bible Encyclopaedia (Chicago: The Howard-Severance Company, 1915), 2111–2112. |
| ↑8 | Strong’s Hebrew: 6172. עֶרְוָה (ervah) — nakedness (biblehub.com) |
| ↑9 | I take Genesis 2 to be a sequel to Genesis 1 as biblical scholar John Walton does in “The Lost World Of Adam and Eve: “Genesis 2-3 and The Human Origins Debate”. He talks about this on pages 63-69. Intervarsity Press. |
| ↑10 | There is debate over whether Adam and Eve were the only humans on the entire planet at this time or whether there were humans outside the garden. I tend to favor the latter option as a Theistic Evolutionist, and I think there are indications in the text that there were indeed humans outside of Eden, whole apart from what population genetics says. Old Testament scholar John Walton writes “In Genesis 4, Cain has a wife (Gen 4:17). The option that he has married his sister has never been an attractive one, though many have embraced it as seemingly the only possibility. We also find that Cain fears that “whoever finds me will kill me” (Gen 4:14) when he is driven from the LORD’s presence. Who he is he afraid of? If he is driven away from the LORD’s presence, then he is also being driven away from his family. This suggests that there are people other than his family in the land. Finally, we note that Cain builds a city (Gen 4:17). The term city would not be appropriate unless it was a settlement of some size for many people. We would conclude then that the text actually implies that there are other people.” – Walton, John H.. The Lost World of Adam and Eve: Genesis 2-3 and the Human Origins Debate (The Lost World Series Book 1) (p. 64). InterVarsity Press. Kindle Edition. On this understanding, we can see Adam as more like Tarzan. Tarzan lived his whole life not coming into contact with any other humans. He was raised by gorillas and lived with them until one day a beautiful Englishwoman named Jane visited his jungle. Tarzan met her and realized that there were “strangers like me”. Adam’s meeting of Eve could be a similar type of thing. “This is a human like me!” All this proposal would need is for the rest of evolved humanity to live far away. However, the creation/evolution debate and how the Genesis account fits into all of this isn’t important for what I’m talking about here. Whether one takes a literal YEC or OEC view, or a more evolution friendly view of the Adam and Eve narrative, the point I’m making from this passage stands. |
| ↑11 | See Episode 139 of The Cerebral Faith Podcast, “Episode 139: Exegeting The Sermon On The Mount (Part 6) – Divorce” for a more thorough exposition on Jesus’ view of divorce. This is also on YouTube if you’d like to see the slides. |
| ↑12 | Michael Jones of Inspiring Philosophy has a great video on this as part of his own Primeval History series. Check out “Genesis 3b: The Fall”. He makes the case that this tree was never intended by God to be off limits indefinitely, but only until He was ready for them to eat from it themselves. Michael Jones humorously compares the idea that the tree was inherently evil, yet God still put it there and put a ban on it, to a church having a bag of cocaine at the check-in counter with a sign that says “Do not snort”. |
| ↑13 | I take this to be a literal description of The Second Power In Heaven walking in a humanoid form. I take this to be the first appearance of “The Angel Of The Lord”. For more info on an Old Testament Godhead and Jesus’ pre-incarnate humanoid appearances, check out my YouTube presentation “The Angel Of The Lord and A Two Person Godhead In The Old Testament” on the Cerebral Faith YouTube channel. |
| ↑14 | Hatton, David L.. “Who Said You Were Naked?”: Reflections on Body Acceptance (p. 17). David L. Hatton. Kindle Edition. |
| ↑15 | Frost, Aaron. Christian Body: Modesty and the Bible (pp. 33-34). UNKNOWN. Kindle Edition. |
| ↑16 | Mudwalkers, “Christian Body Book Review: Part 2”, May 25th 2024 — https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q7lCucNG6o8&t=21s |
| ↑17 | MudWalkers, “But Adam and Eve Were Married”, June 8th 2024, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qYJ4f2laA8s&t=1s |
| ↑18 | Ibid. |
| ↑19 | Robert Jamieson, A. R. Fausset, and David Brown, Commentary Critical and Explanatory on the Whole Bible, vol. 1 (Oak Harbor, WA: Logos Research Systems, Inc., 1997), 188. |
| ↑20 | As quoted on BibleHub.com |
| ↑21 | BibleHub itself confirms this. –> https://biblehub.com/1_samuel/19-24.htm |
| ↑22 | Frost, Aaron. Christian Body: Modesty and the Bible (p. 94). UNKNOWN. Kindle Edition. |
| ↑23 | Craig, William Lane. On Guard: Defending Your Faith with Reason and Precision (p. 29). David C Cook. Kindle Edition. |
| ↑24 | Frost, Aaron. Christian Body: Modesty and the Bible (p. 98). UNKNOWN. Kindle Edition. |
| ↑25 | Capturing Christianity, “Egyptologist Presents Very Strong Evidence For A REAL Exodus”, Cameron Bertuzzi and David Falk, April 12th, 2021, 41 minutes in — https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=syS-SOXJa-A&t=0s |
| ↑26 | St. Cyril of Jerusalem (4th Century) “Therefore, I shall necessarily lay before you the sequel of yesterday’s Lecture, that ye may learn of what those things, which were done by you in the inner chamber, were symbolical. As soon, then, as ye entered, ye put off your tunic; and this was an image of putting off the old man with his deeds. Having stripped yourselves, ye were naked; in this also imitating Christ, who was stripped naked on the Cross, and by His nakedness put off from Himself the principalities and powers, and openly triumphed over them on the tree. For since the adverse powers made their lair in your members, ye may no longer wear that old garment; I do not at all mean this visible one, but the old man, which waxeth corrupt in the lusts of deceit. May the soul which has once put him off, never again put him on, but say with the Spouse of Christ in the Song of Songs, I have put off my garment, how shall I put it on? O wondrous thing! ye were naked in the sight of all, and were not ashamed; for truly ye bore the likeness of the first-formed Adam, who was naked in the garden, and was not ashamed. Then, when ye were stripped, ye were anointed with exorcised oil, from the very hairs of your head to your feet, and were made partakers of the good olive-tree, Jesus Christ. For ye were cut off from the wild olive-tree, and grafted into the good one, and were made to share the fatness of the true olive-tree.”
Bishop Hippolytus of Rome: (Hippolytus. “Apostolic Traditions” of Hippolytus, 21:1-11. Translated by Edgecomb, Kevin P. Derived from Bernard Botte (La Tradition Apostolique. Sources Chretiennes, 11 bis. Paris, Editions du Cerf, 1984) and of Gregory Dix (The Treatise on the Apostolic Tradition of St. Hippolytus of Rome, Bishop and Martyr. London: Alban Press, 1992) And it makes sense given that baptism was modeled on the Jewish Mikva, which was also done nude. And also considering that clothing was a commodity, most people only had one or two garments at best and wouldn’t want to get them wet and soggy. The idea of a wardrobe full of a dozen outfits is a modern luxury. This is also why fishing (a dirty job indeed) was often done naked, as John 21:7 indicates in addition to a plethora of ancient iconography. |
| ↑27 | Robyn J. Whitaker, “The Crucifixion Gap: Why It Took Hundreds Of Years For Art To Depict Jesus Dying On The Cross”, April 6th 2023, — https://theconversation.com/the-crucifixion-gap-why-it-took-hundreds-of-years-for-art-to-depict-jesus-dying-on-the-cross-202348 |
| ↑28 | David Tombs, “Art Depicts Jesus In A Loincloth On The Cross – The Brutal Truth Is He Would Have Been Naked” — https://theconversation.com/art-depicts-jesus-in-a-loincloth-on-the-cross-the-brutal-truth-is-he-would-have-been-naked-226229 |
| ↑29 | As quoted in ibid. |
| ↑30 | Matthew Neal, “Jesus Left Them In The Tomb!”, April 10th 2023 |
| ↑31 | Hatton, Meeting at the River, 118. |
| ↑32 | John Paul II, Love and Responsibility (London: HarperCollins, 1981) quoting from the section “The Metaphysics of Shame,” in order from: 190, 176, 190, 191. |
| ↑33 | I Googled it. There are full nude strip clubs. |
| ↑34 | Dr. Michael Heiser, “The Naked Bible Podcast”, Episode 79: Leviticus 17-18, — https://nakedbiblepodcast.com/podcast/naked-bible-79-leviticus-17-18/ |
| ↑35 | Dr. Michael S. Heiser, The Naked Bible Podcast: “Episode 159: Noah’s Nakedness, the Sin of Ham, and the Curse of Canaan” — https://nakedbiblepodcast.com/podcast/naked-bible-159-noahs-nakedness-the-sin-of-ham-and-the-curse-of-canaan/ |
| ↑36 | “Studies in the Psychology of Sex” vol. 1 “The Evolution of Modesty, the Phenomenon of Sexual Periodicity and Auto-erotisism.” Third Edition. F.A. Davis Company Publishers. 1921 by Havelock Ellis. (Available through Google Books) p. 14 Quoting from: K. Klem, “Peal’s Ausflug nach Banpara, zeitschrift für Ethnologie, 1898, p. 20 Quoting from : J. Matignon, “A. propos d’un Pied de Chinoise,” Archives d’Anthropologie Criminelle, 1898, p. 445.. |
| ↑37 | IBID, p. 19 Quoting from: J.W. Helfer, Reisen in Vorderasian und Indien, vol. ii p.12 |
| ↑38 | Frost, Aaron. Christian Body: Modesty and the Bible (p. 13). UNKNOWN. Kindle Edition. |
| ↑39 | In case, you didn’t know, little children are natural born nudists. |
| ↑40 | If you’d like to see my exposition on this verse, see The Cerebral Faith Podcast, “Episode 138: Exegeting The Sermon On The Mount (Part 5) – What Adultery Is and Is Not”. You can also see the YouTube version by clicking here if you’d like to see the slides. |
| ↑41 | Unable to Live Like the World – AW Tozer | Deeper Christian Quotes |
| ↑42 | Michael John Cusick, Surfing for God (Thomas Nelson) Kindle, 221. |
| ↑43 | By the way, the 80s Christian Rock band Petra wrote an excellent song titled “Jekyll and Hyde” which really resonated with how I felt. |
| ↑44 | Origen’s Castration – EARLY CHURCH HISTORY |
| ↑45 | A play on Pornography and Shawshank Prison in case you didn’t know. |
| ↑46 | I should have made “Yahweh’s Inferno: Why Scripture’s Teaching On Hell Doesn’t Impugn The Goodness Of God” into a multi-part series. So few people have read it. |
Wow… I had no idea Christian naturists were a thing… And your arguments are interesting and dare I say, compelling. I do have a couple questions though, and I sincerely hope you can answer. And I am asking in all sincerity.
Given our highly pornified culture, what do you think Christian naturists should look like in the day to day (ideally)? Christian nudist colonies or just dressing normally but with the naturist mindset?
My pastor very recently preached something that’s been bothering me before I even read this and learned any of this existed – that the desire to bed running around naked is satanic, and he referenced the mad man of Gedara and how he was naked while possessed but put on clothes afterwards. How do you respond to that?
Are you advocating for all Christians to be naturists or to simply shuck a pornified mindset and Western cultural norms when approaching Scripture? And the reason I ask this – I’m extraordinarily comfortable with my body, I don’t keep a pornified mindset and have actively chosen to view humans as souls for a very long time. I don’t see a particular need to run around naked. (And I am not at all discounting your experience or being negative towards what tool God chose to use. I’m simply curious about what you have to say.)
Thank you in advance!
Thank you for taking the time to read my article. To the first question, I don’t think it logically follows from the man at gardara that being naked is Satanic. I mean, for one thing, that would imply Adam and Eve were under the devil’s influence before they even met him in Genesis 3! Let’s keep Genesis 2:25 in mind and God’s response to Adam in Genesis 3:11. Demons in the gospels make people do all kinds of things. In Mark 9, the father of a demon possessed boy spoke about the demon trying to thrust his son “into the fire and into the water to destroy him”. On your pastor’s reasoning, we ought to conclude that going swimming is Satanic! But that would clearly be absurd.
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I am not trying to convince everyone to become a naturist by means of this article. I do think you can hold the naturist philosophy (as you seem to) and still be a “textile”. If that’s the case, that’s all I want. If you like your clothes, you can keep your clothes. I simply defended this as a freedom in Christ issue, and I also wanted to explain the reason why I got into it. Basically explaining myself. I personally love a clothes free lifestyle and plan on vacationing at nudist resorts at some undefined time in the future. My conscience is clear. And being naked is quite a comfortable state to be in. Even if it’s just in my bedroom reading or blogging.
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I think it would be good if we could become like Jesus’ culture. What I mean is that even if we’re a generally clothed society, we’re not so funny about nudity that we’d freak out if we saw our neighbor gardening au naturale, or skinny dipping. We’d just smile and wave. So basically yes, all I’m trying to accomplish is the shucking of the pornified view of the body. Naturism can help you do that, but you don’t necessarily need to be a naturist to do that. David Hatton, for example, isn’t a naturist to my knowledge. But he shares the same theology of the body and learned how non-sexual nudity is from his time as a registered nurse. He saw naked people on a daily basis and didn’t have the kind of sexual responses the church told him he would have. This lead him to search the scriptures to see what the Bible REALLY taught about nakedness. So Hatton is evidence that you can agree with me and keep your clothes on.
Hi Evan,
Thanks for your thoughtful piece. I have also been researching the topic and have read some of the authors you mention. It seems like the bulk of the argument for Christian naturism is that it is not specifically forbidden, and there are some Biblical examples of God-sanctioned nudity. The question I wrestle with is this-is naturism holy? We are called to be holy (1 Peter 1:15-16). What do you think? Is our nakedness, either in private or with others, holy?
Given that it is the body that is the visual image of God, it shouldn’t be too hard to get at the answer? If it is our bodies (as opposed to a set of mental faculties) that is the image, and God is holy, then would it follow that human nakedness is holy? Of course, as naked state can be used for evil. The devil has hijacked the innate goodness of our bodies sans man made addatives and has made an unholy spectacle of them in the form of strip clubs and pornography. But the abuse of a good thing does not make the thing unholy. Christians began to realize this sometime in the 1970s or 80s that rock and roll was not the exclusive rights of the devil, and ended up with awesome bands like Petra, Stryper, and later on Skillet and Disciple. Just because the devil hijacks something and uses it against God doesn’t mean it’s inherently bad and that we can’t reclaim it for Christ. Pornography is bad. Objectifying people is bad. Just as lyrics that glorifies sinful lifestyles is bad. But the human body is good. And guitar solos are good.
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For me specifically, I have made the case that God has used naturism as a form of therapy to free me from pornography. In that case, it has aided me in my holiness. And I suspect it can help a lot of others too. Although I wouldn’t be so presumptuous as to say this is what every last porn addict in the country needs. The human psyche is complex and someone else’s addiction may be rooted in something entirely different from the sexualization of the body. But I am totally against external behavioral management measures like filters and accountability partners. No matter what the underlying cause is, external behavioral management isn’t going to help anyone. That is cleaning the outside of the cup and ignoring the inside. But I’m rambling now.
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To make a long answer short; Yes, human nakedness is holy because the human body is God’s image, and God is holy. And it has helped several people including myself not sexualize nudity, and thus it isn’t fetishized, and therefore, the mere sight of a woman isn’t lust inducing.
Hello Evan. This was a very well-researched post and I appreciate your scholarship on this issue. However, I think that sharing the gospel while naked seems almost sacrilegious. Would you share the gospel naked with someone like at a nudist beach where its legal to be naked?
Was Isaiah being sacrilegious? (Isaiah 20:1-4).
Georgie, in all honesty, I have found it easier and I have had greater boldness to share my faith in Christ while nude at a clothing optional location than I ever have clothed at some other social location.
I think the reason is this.
When I am in a socially nude environment, and I start to speak of my faith in Christ, it is abundantly clear that I am not just parroting the same old, same old christianese that they have heard from many many other people whom they considered to be fake.
I’m very tangibly telling them that I follow Jesus, but I don’t follow religious systems. I don’t doubt false standards of morality that do not arise from the Bible.
In general, naturists allow people to be exactly who they are. And they’d let them talk about it. So if your hair on fire for Jesus, it’s pretty easy to share your faith in a naturist environment.
Sacrilege? I have no idea what you might be thinking that would cause you to suggest such a thing.
Our clothing does not commend us to God. Of course, neither does our nudity, but the error that most Christians believe is that somehow clothing makes us more godly. That is simply not true.
Rejecting man-made rules of righteousness? That is a godly thing to do. And since the nudity taboo that the church has taught for so many years, actually is a man-made doctrine, it actually is good and godly thing to reject.
Isaiah was reduced to a state of humiliation. Ridiculous. It’s descriptive, not prescriptive dumbass. That’s like saying “I eat locusts because that’s what John the Baptist did.
God did prescribe Isaiah to preach His words to the people “Arom” for three years. If it’s sacrilegious for a Christian naturist to preach Christ crucified, logical consistency would seem to require we say that not only was Isaiah sacrilegious, but even worse, that God commanded Isaiah to commit sacrilege. And then we have a problem with James 1:13. So do you think Isaiah was being sacrilegious?
Isaiah did not preach Christ, retard.
You’re right. The death and resurrection of Jesus hadn’t occurred yet. But you’re missing my point. He still had the words of God in his mouth. He preached God’s message for 3 years. If nude preaching is inherently sacrilegious, whether you’re going down the Romans Road or saying something else divinely inspired, it would seem that Isaiah was being sacrilegious. Can you tell me how you avoid that conclusion instead of just insulting me?
Isaiah sure did preach the words of Christ! Jesus is the word of God. Isaiah preached the word of God. They are one in the same. A matter of a few thousand years does not make God’s message to us any different. We must rely on on Christ himself for salvation and goodness.
It’s a shame when people are reduced to insults instead of addressing factual valid and reasoned arguments. To me it shows that there are no valid points available. This just appears to be an example of clinging on to unsubstantiated religious beliefs. These people’s religiosity can be used to reduce those adherents to becoming the goats that are on our Lord’s left, just like what became of the Pharisees.
Overall this paper is good. Thank you for being candid with this very impactful part of your life. I have a similar story, and I loved reading yours. I found the greatest satisfaction in reading that you told God that you were done trying to solve your porn addiction yourself. You told God either He was going to have to do it, or it wasn’t going to be solved. This is about the best theology I’ve ever read. Even if the consequences to all you hold dear were going to be an utter disaster, you still choose God. That was a beautiful moment that will be remembered for all of eternity. It was like a Job moment where he said, the Lord gives and takes away, praise be to God!
When I embraced nudism I realized that I had thought God was a liar because He told me His burden is easy, and light. I couldn’t believe Jesus because my addiction to lust was a massive burden. I believed I needed to control myself. God revealed to me that my legalism was preventing Him from getting rid of my lust. Now that naked bodies aren’t sexual, I have utter freedom in Christ. It’s beautiful, and has brought me to a deeper understanding of who God is and how I must rely on Him for all things.
Reference #12 above regarding the tree of the knowledge of good and evil is problematic in a few spots. The video is very good in many aspects, but elevates wisdom, whether intentionally or not. Even wisdom from God should never be elevated. Only God Himself should be elevated. This tree should be thought of as a test for man to determine if mankind will choose a loving God that they know, or a good thing that God gives to them as He sees fit. We need to stop looking to wisdom, but instead look to God.
John 14:26 But the Helper, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, he will teach you all things and bring to your remembrance all that I have said to you.
Thanks for your appreciative comment. I can resonate with what you said about Jesus and his burden. I remember when I read that in my early 20s and just scoffing at it. I had the same experience.
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I’m glad you checked one of my references! That’s what they’re there for. Although I do have a little bit of disagreement here. I think God wants us to pursue wisdom. There’s a whole book of the Bible dedicated to that; Proverbs. And when Solomon asked God for wisdom so he could rule the people of Israel and not fumble the job, God was practically giddy at his request. A lesser king in his circumstances would’ve asked for the blood of his enemies, for wealth, but not Solomon. And God praised Solomon for it, and said that not only was he going to give him wisdom, but he was going to give him all of these other things he didn’t ask for as well. The problem comes in if we make pursuit of wisdom a higher priority than cultivating a relationship with God. But that’s the case with anything. “Anything can become an idol” as preachers often like to remind us. And God had to set me straight once when I got dangerously close to making academics an idol.
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Anyhoo, it really is amazing that I can see a naked woman now, even if she is the most gorgeous woman on Earth, and I just don’t have an inappropriate reaction. There’s no erection, there’s no lust, there’s no pornographic thoughts going through my mind of “Boy what I’d like to do with her.” It just doesn’t happen. I’ve been this way for months and I’m still amazed at it. Because I never thought it was possible. And I think a lot of my textile Christian friends don’t think it’s possible. I suspect a lot of them think that I’m lying about this! We’ve been so ingrained with the teaching that lust is just an integral part of who we are, that it must sound as absurd as claiming that I’ve trained my body to never sleep again or something like that. But I know what I’m experiencing. You and I know we’re not lying, and most importantly God knows we’re not lying. God bless you, brother. 😊
Hi Evan,
This is SouthWest Wil. I finally got around to reading this article. Very well done. I am now about 14 months into this renewing of my mind, and just like your last paragraph explains above, I am amazed that I am finally and completely free. Praise God for what he has done in my life. I will never go back to the pit of filth I was in, that was described so powerfully in My Chains Are Gone.
Keep your fire blazing strong brother. Your newfound freedom, and the zeal with which you are pursuing righteousness are a balm to my soul.