Why did Paul prefer singleness for himself and others?

In his book The Divine Magician, Peter Rollins explores the human tendency to create and pursue idols. Much like Adam and Eve, all humans long for some object that lies on the other side of a veil of prohibition (like a magician’s curtain). Because this object is inaccessible to us, we invest it with a kind of religious significance, revering it as sacred. As a result, in our daily lives we operate with the assumption that if we could somehow obtain the object of our desire, it would provide us with the kind of wholeness and well-being that we seek.

But Jesus pulls the magician’s curtain back to reveal the truth: our sacred object is an illusion. And it always has been. There is nothing behind the curtain that will ever fulfill us. In fact, the “lack” that marks our lives—the “emptiness” we obsessively attempt to fill—is actually created by the very object that we seek. So even when it is obtained, our experience of the fulfillment it provides is profoundly unfulfilling. Thus for Jesus to say that marriage and sex are not part of resurrection life is not to make a once substantive reality disappear. Instead, it is to reveal to us that our sacred object never actually existed in the first place.

What I find most interesting about Rollins’s book is how often he refers to marriage and romantic relationships to make his point about the idolatry that pervades the Christian community. Indeed, as Rollins points out, the obsessive quest for marriage among single Christians and the elevation of the marriage relationship within our Christian communities seems to be one of the more fitting images for humanity’s idolatrous tendencies. Rollins explains: