"Intercourse is the ultimate creaturely gesture of this sort, the movement of my body to the other that cannot be surpassed without harmful consequences. For here the one body actually engulfs the other and that body enters the first, only in this active abolition of distance to be mutually the bodies they are. Therefore if intercourse is a gesture and not a mere technique of sensation or reproduction, it can be the embodiment of an ultimate promise: the promise of myself if it kills me, of share life 'until death do us part.' . . ."We can of course stipulate together that intercourse shall be the sign of a lesser address. We can make it be the gestural embodiment of 'I am yours forever, maybe,' or 'I am yours for this pleasant weekend.' But then we have no gesture left for final commitment, and so become incapable of it. A society in which this was a widespread condition could not long cohere."
Robert W. Jenson, Systematic theology, vol. 2, The works of God (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 92.
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