In order to secure the space of agape, within which the speech of men and women with each other corresponds to their speech to and from God, eros had to be limited. His limit was marked by the veil – a visible sign, bound to a particular cultural context and questionable even there, of the invisible reality of a boundary that must be established wherever there is ekklesia, in which woman is not apart from man nor man from woman. In the Lord, the belonging-together of man and woman is not an erotic relation. ‘Man’ and ‘woman’ are present here not as potential sexual partners, to be identified as such by way of the erotically charged look that seeks out the face and body that might provide an answer to its insistent question, but as called in Christ to be together in agape.

In the union of the Christian with Christ, there is a fruit-bearing for God that supersedes the fruit-bearing for death that occurs under the law. The law's prohibition of desire is sin's opportunity to generate every kind of prohibited desire; for the divine law is the place where the possibility of human autonomy is established. Yet the possibility of an autonomous desire subject only to its own law is excluded by a death and a resurrection, through which the intent of the law – a pattern of human conduct oriented towards life rather than death – is fulfilled.