From Gerard Loughlin's Alien Sex: The Body and Desire in Cinema and Theology:
[Bess in Lars von Trier's Breaking the Waves] is possessed of a love that knows no limits, that gives itself away without thought of the cost — giving "anything to anyone," as Dodo says of Bess near the beginning of the film...
In Christian marriage, as Paul imagines it, husband and wife are completely the slaves of Christ, in body and spirit, to be trained in the practice of dispossession, which is the very price by which they have been purchased. They own one another only to the extent that they are owned by a third, whose ownership constitutes the relationship of dispossession between them. They become the slave of a slave, and must act as he does...
A similar conlcusion is reached by Adrian Thatcher, who, having noted the integration of marriage and slavery in the Pauline texts, argues that once the institution of slavery has ben repudiated, so must the theology of marriage built upon it. "It is inadmissible to appeal to biblical teaching on marriage while at the same time rejecting slavery since marriage and slavery are as indissolubly linked as a man and a woman are linked in marriage."
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