What constitutes Christian love amid the sweaty delights of sex? Organized religion always takes an interest in sex, usually so it can tidy people’s sexual lives into some easily-managed pattern. The Vatican’s traditional emphasis is that God commands humans to procreate. Good sex has the potential to produce children; bad sex is everything else. Bad sex includes heterosexual acts involving contraceptives; masturbation; gay sex acts of all sorts. The equation of sex and procreation remained convincing for centuries because contraceptive devices were expensive, unreliable and even more comic in appearance than they are now. Now, however, readily available contraception has transformed the way in which human beings use and experience sex. Sex has always been fun: contraception has shown that the fun can be detached from the possibility of having children. The Christian tradition is now faced with the reality that pleasure and procreation are two separate purposes of sexuality, and many parts of the Christian Church, especially the Vatican, are baffled and angry.
How can Christianity cope? A first step would be to recognize that its traditional views on sexual intercourse were filched from non-Christian sources. Christianity is a complex system with two main strands: Jewish and Greek. Of the two, the Greek has made the running for nearly two thousand years. Even though Jesus was a Galilean Jew and probably had little contact with Greeks, the enthusiasts who wrote up his life and discussed his ideas took Christianity far from its Jewish roots. Most of their potential audience had a Greek cultural background, and in trying to make Greeks understand the message, Christianity absorbed the culture which it was trying to capture.
I doubt if most of us would dispute that the predisposition to asceticism in sexual matters – at least in the West – often had a tendency to shortchange the companionate aspect of marriage. It’s interesting, though, that despite frequent allusion to Eucharistic iconography, MacCulloch makes no reference to the Christian conception of the union of man and woman as iconic of the union between Christ and the Church, if only to debunk it.
Of course, I find the stark contrast of judaism and hellensim which undergrids this historical narrative implausible, and I note the way in which the Jewish context is completely elided, but I am genuinely touched by the way in which Prof. MacCulloch nevertheless writes with tenderness about the faith he has rejected.
driver8,
As always, I’m glad when you chime in, and I agree that the ex-Christian prof writes with a touching degree of affection for the faith he’s abandoned. But I’d just add that he’s far from an objective critic here. He’s a self-confessed gay man.
And unfortunately, his simplistic summary of the Christian (and especially Catholic) view of sex is grossly misleading. It’s a caricature. Just compare the magnificent (and refreshingly positive) teachings of Pope John Paul II (“the Great”) on the subject.
David Handy+
One interesting aside is that way the Hellenistic move functions to bracket off Jesus from the critique. Whether that’s a tactical move or a suspended sediment of a faith once held, I don’t know.
Though I disagree with his historical narrative on this matter, I do appreciate the way that he is clear on what his sort of view implies. Namely, that the historic teaching of the church on human sexuality is deeply in error and needs abandoning. Better to have that sort of clarity, with which one can disagree, than the evasive and double speaking talk one sometimes finds from various other figures of authority.
And, of course, MaCulloch’s personal morality as a self-confessed gay man has nothing to do with his conclusions as a historian–even though his writing here reads (because of some of its strained speculations) as though he had decided to make his historical conclusions match his personal moral choices.
British scholar attempts to change catholic Christian message on marriage and sexuality by arguing self-serving misrepresentations of Church teaching as well as Western history. Annoying but historically predictable.
Evolution has made sex a pleasure precisely because. if it were not, the race would disappear. That is, the evolution of pleasure in this context is in a causal relationship with procreation. They cannot be divided – even if we ignore for the moment scriptural admonitions – for evolutionary reasons.
I should add here however, that the argument in this entry we have seen a thousand times from homosexuals. they need the argument to be affirmed for their own sense of accepting the otherwise unacceptable.
Larry
I find his logic somewhat lacking. He seems to create a false dichotomy between 1st Century Jewish understandings of sexuality and Greek. I think he was on the right track with Aristotle, but he completely ignores the Platonic notions of ideals and forms. He also does not take into account that Aristotle was not largely re-introduced into the West until Aquinas in the Middle Ages. He also seems to want to blame everything on the Greeks and Romans, as if the strict Jewish purity laws and all didn’t also play into potential misunderstandings of the gift of sexuality. He has some serious logical and historical glosses that he needs to address before I can proceed to further expound upon his argument.
One good thing about seeing this bit of McCulloch’s work—I was thinking of buying his huge opus on Christian History–now I know it would be a waste of money. Before this I knew very little about him or his works.
#9 – So does one routinely NOT read books before calling them a waste of money?
He makes a few important points: one is the aristotelean inheritance of Christianity. That’s relevant to our current debate. And it does seem that we’ve divorced pleasure and procreation: that seems to be empirically true. Young women can generally have sex without fearing pregnancy. Or death. And that’s a pretty big sea change.
I recognize that some want to hold the tradition together. But our responses better be more sophisticated than moral mandates. That is, if we expect people to listen.
Agenda? There is no agenda! DM is hardly a dispassionate or objective voice. But I am sure that he has no agenda to push because we have all been told that there is no agenda. That, of course, explains the decline of the EcUSA/TEc into a PAC with fabulous clothes and shoes, and Watertown, Connecticut, http://www.rep-am.com/articles/2010/04/25/news/local/478815.txt
and the destruction of the Anglican Communion. And I notice that the declines must be evidence of JW’s people’s listening to the agenda and rejecting it.