Yes. Scripture does not reserve deep human closeness for marriage. It honors marriage as the place for sexual union. It also tells stories of fierce, covenanted, non-sexual love, and it gives the single life a place of honor. David Bennett, a celibate Christian theologian who once worked as a gay activist, argues that many churches have tied all intimacy to sex and marriage. That habit leaves single people with no picture of love they can live in. The biblical text offers more than the church usually preaches.
That claim needs testing against the passages that carry the weight: David and Jonathan, Jesus’s words about friendship, the disciple Jesus loved, and Paul on singleness. It also has to answer the strongest objection, which starts in Genesis 2.
Where does the idea that intimacy means marriage come from?
Lisa Fields frames the problem from what she has told church leaders. If every illustration of intimacy is a marriage illustration, people who will never marry hear a quiet verdict about themselves. She says churches need to show that intimacy is not just sex, “but also you could have deep intimacy in friendship.” When they don’t, she warns, “then you leave them hopeless.” Her concern is pastoral, but it rests on a reading claim. The church has narrowed the meaning of love beyond what the text supports.
Bennett traces part of that narrowing to an old split in Christian thought about love. One strand set God’s self-giving love, agape, against human desire, eros, as though desire were always selfish. He points to a Lutheran theologian whose book pitted the two loves against each other, and then to Pope Benedict XVI’s encyclical Deus Caritas Est, which argued that they belong together. In the classical sense Bennett describes, eros meant a desire for union with the good. Sex was one possible expression of it, and sometimes a threat to it. Once desire itself is treated as suspect, and sex becomes its only legitimate outlet, single people lose any good way to want closeness.
He puts the consequence bluntly: “But if it is true that your erotic desires, your desire for intimacy can only ever happen in a marriage, there is no place for the celibate.”
A reader should know two things about this argument. The word eros never appears in the Greek of the Gospels and Epistles, so Bennett is reasoning from Christian theology and tradition rather than from a word study. And he knows his vocabulary sounds strange to modern ears. His example is ordinary. He describes loving his mother’s hugs and cooking: “And I just feel so drawn to be one with my mom. And it’s not sexual, but it’s erotic.” If the word is a barrier, drop it. His point survives without it: a strong desire to be near someone is not automatically a sexual desire. Whether that holds up depends on what the Bible actually shows.
What does the story of David and Jonathan actually say?
This is narrative, so the first task is to notice what the writer reports before deciding what it requires of anyone. The friendship begins right after David’s victory over Goliath: “the soul of Jonathan was knit with the soul of David, and Jonathan loved him as his own soul” (1 Samuel 18:1). Two verses later, Jonathan and David make a covenant, and the reason given is that Jonathan “loved him as his own soul” (1 Samuel 18:3). Jonathan then gives David his robe, his armor and his weapons. He is the king’s son, and he hands over the symbols of his own claim to the throne.
The story keeps going in that direction. Jonathan risks his father’s rage to protect David. The two weep when they part. When Jonathan dies in battle, David’s lament is the most intense language of love in the narrative: “I am distressed for thee, my brother Jonathan: very pleasant hast thou been unto me: thy love to me was wonderful, passing the love of women” (2 Samuel 1:26).
Lisa Fields draws attention to the contrast the text itself sets up. David’s early marriages are not told as romances. Saul offers his daughter Michal as part of a political bargain. Abigail becomes David’s wife after her foolish husband Nabal dies. Fields argues that the deepest trust, love and respect in David’s story appear in his bond with Jonathan. That reading can be pressed too far. The narrator does record that Michal loved David (1 Samuel 18:20), and silence about David’s feelings proves nothing about them. Still, the pattern is real. The relationship the writer most fully describes as soul-deep love is a friendship.
Some modern readers argue that the friendship was sexual. The text gives that reading nothing to stand on. No scene depicts a sexual relationship. The words the narrative leans on are covenant, loyalty, protection and grief. The covenant of 1 Samuel 18:3 is sealed with gifts of armor and weapons, and Jonathan later chooses David’s side against his own father’s house. The love described is bound up with sworn allegiance. Fields argues that people who sexualize the friendship prove the very problem she names. In her words, “you actually fall into the trap of making all intimacy sexual.”
She sees the same trap among some young people who describe themselves as fluid, while saying plainly that this is not true in every case. Someone who feels the kind of love David had for Jonathan, and has never been told such love can be good inside friendship, may conclude the feeling must be romantic. The story in 1 and 2 Samuel offers another category: love that is total and committed without being sexual.
What did Jesus mean by the greatest love?
The central verse comes from Jesus’s final discourse to his disciples, the night before his death: “Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends” (John 15:13). The setting matters. Jesus has just commanded the disciples to love one another as he loved them. Two verses later he says he no longer calls them servants but friends. The greatest love he names is the love he is about to show at the cross, and the word he attaches to it is friends.
Bennett paraphrases the verse this way: “the greatest love you can have is not to get married, but it’s to lay down your life for your friends.” John 15 itself does not mention marriage. The contrast is Bennett’s own application, and a fair one. When Jesus chooses a single word for the relationship that the highest love serves, he chooses friendship.
Fields widens the point to the apostolic letters. Paul does tell husbands to love their wives “even as Christ also loved the church, and gave himself for it” (Ephesians 5:25). The same self-giving pattern runs through the instructions to every believer, and Fields insists on it: “All of these one anothers are not just confined to marriage, they’re just how we should treat people in general.” Forgive one another, bear one another’s burdens, love one another: those commands assume deep bonds among people who are not married to each other.
John’s Gospel adds a further detail. It refers several times to a disciple whom Jesus loved, who at the last supper was “leaning on Jesus’ bosom” (John 13:23). The posture reflects the ancient practice of reclining at a formal meal, where a guest lying beside the host would rest close against him. The language describes where he lay at the table, and the narrative uses that nearness to mark a trusted place. Who this disciple was is debated. Church tradition identifies him as John, the son of Zebedee, and Bennett assumes that reading. Some scholars propose other candidates, since the Gospel never names him.
Bennett goes further and hears an echo between Jonathan, the friend of David, and John, the friend of the Son of David. He calls David and Jonathan’s love a foretaste of Jesus’s own ministry. That is typology, and it should be held as interpretation. The names are different names, and the identity of the beloved disciple is itself uncertain. The plainer point stands without the echo. The Gospel writer freely describes Jesus as having a beloved friend, and that friendship is presented as a mark of honor.
Was Jesus’s life incomplete because he never married?
Here Bennett’s argument has its greatest force. “Jesus was celibate. Jesus was a eunuch for the sake of the kingdom of heaven. Jesus didn’t ever marry, and he was the greatest picture of human flourishing.”
The phrase about eunuchs comes from Matthew 19:12. There Jesus, responding to his disciples’ shock at his teaching on divorce, speaks of those who give up marriage for the sake of the kingdom of heaven, and adds that whoever is able to receive this teaching should receive it. He does not require celibacy of every follower. He does present a life without marriage as a real path chosen for the kingdom.
Paul writes from inside that path. In 1 Corinthians 7 he answers questions the Corinthian church had sent him about marriage and sex, and his own preference is clear: “For I would that all men were even as I myself. But every man hath his proper gift of God, one after this manner, and another after that” (1 Corinthians 7:7). Paul calls both marriage and singleness a gift. He also tells those who cannot exercise self-control to marry, “for it is better to marry than to burn” (1 Corinthians 7:9). Some of his reasons concern “the present distress” (1 Corinthians 7:26), a hard season the church was facing, and others concern undivided devotion to the Lord. His preference cannot become a rule that singleness is better for everyone, because Paul himself refuses that move. Nor can anyone read him as saying single people are waiting for real life to begin.
Matthew 19:12 and 1 Corinthians 7 together treat singleness as a full and honored way of following Christ. If Jesus is the fullest picture of what a human life is meant to be, an unmarried life cannot be a lesser life by definition. Bennett draws the conclusion that matters most for anxious single readers: the measure of a life is likeness to Christ. “It’s whether we’re like Jesus and if we’re like him, we will experience deep intimacy.”
Bennett also insists that honoring celibacy does not demote marriage. In his view, marriage points beyond itself: “Marriage is the sign of a greater signified, the future heavenly reality.” Celibate believers live toward that reality directly; in his phrase, “celibates get to start the party now,” while married believers point to it in their marriages. So he argues that “by validating celibacy, you actually lift marriage higher into the heavenly things.” Ephesians 5 supports the basic move, since Paul presents marriage as a sign of Christ and the church. A sign is honored when the reality it points to is taken seriously.
Doesn’t Genesis 2 make marriage the answer to loneliness?
This is the strongest objection, and it deserves a direct reading. “And the LORD God said, It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him an help meet for him” (Genesis 2:18). The phrase “help meet” is archaic English for a helper suited to him, a partner who corresponds to him. The verse leads straight into the creation of the woman and the first marriage. In its context, it grounds marriage in God’s good design.
Christian readers differ on how far the verse reaches beyond that. Some read it narrowly, as the founding of marriage specifically. Others read it as grounding human relationality more broadly, so that the remedy for aloneness includes family, friendship and community. On either reading, the rest of Scripture keeps the verse from becoming a sentence against single people. Jesus was not alone. Paul was not alone. Jesus says that whoever does the will of God is his brother, sister and mother (Mark 3:35). Genesis 2 says isolation is not good. It does not say marriage is the only remedy God gives.
A second objection is practical. A single person can agree with every line of this and still go home to an empty apartment. That is fair, and no passage promises the loneliness will lift. It is also exactly Fields’s point to church leaders: the theology has to show up in practice, or it leaves people hopeless. Scripture describes covenant friendship, a beloved disciple, and a household of brothers and sisters. A church that believes those texts has to build a common life where they can exist: friendships that are expected to last, tables that are open to people who will never bring a spouse, and preaching that pictures love in more than one shape. The text has already made room for the single believer. The remaining question is whether the church will.