Nobody Believes in Historic Christian Sexual Ethics
Note: this article is about sex. It also references several generally offensive statements from historic theologians. It feels decent to warn people about things like that.
I was raised in a fairly conservative Reformed context, and opposing gay marriage was one of our central identity markers. At least in our heads, we were holding fast to "God's plan for marriage" while "the Culture" defected from it. We knew there were pro - gay Christians, but we thought this was ridiculous. If the Bible could be read like that, why hadn't the Church done so until the twentieth century? How could God's church have been so wrong for so long?
Since then, I have regrettably contracted the woke mind virus. I think that Scripture can be read in a pro - gay way, and many considerations recommend this. But I've also come to find the conservative appeal to church history deeply inconsistent. I won't deny that Christians have condemned gay relationships until recently -- that is beyond dispute. But this is situated within a broader condemnation of non - procreative sex acts, one which almost all of us now reject.
Until the twentieth century, the whole church condemned contraception and non - vaginal sex. This is why the word "sodomy" is a blanket term for anal sex, not just about sex between gay men. Thomas Aquinas decries "acts from which generation cannot follow" as "the unnatural vice," something he considers worse than rape and incest.1 Nor is this a later Medieval innovation, Clement of Alexandria disapproved of non - procreative sex acts in the second century.2 Mentioning birth control and abortion in the same breath, St. Augustine says contracepting couples are not married at all.
...lustful cruelty, or, if you please, cruel lust, resorts to such extravagant methods as to use poisonous drugs to secure barrenness...if both parties alike are so flagitious, they are not husband and wife; and if such were their character from the beginning, they have not come together by wedlock but by debauchery. But if the two are not alike in such sin, I boldly declare either that the woman is...the husband's harlot; or the man the wife's adulterer.3
But, in the twentieth century, we rejected this sexual ethic. In 1920, the Anglican Communion unilaterally condemned birth control.4 In Mere Christianity, C.S. Lewis references controversy over contraception, but he says he's not the guy to ask about it.5 Today, almost noone thinks contraception and oral sex are mortal sins. Even in the Catholic Church, which officially condemns most forms of birth control,6 those who take this teaching seriously are a small minority. As birth control got better, we reevaluated the theological and philosophical arguments against it, and we found them wanting.
This is exactly what affirming Christians are now doing with gay marriage. We have reconsidered historic Christian teaching in the same way most modern Christians have, and we have come to conclusions that are comparably revisionary.
He says this in The Instructor, Book II Chapter X. But the only translation online renders the part where he talks about sex into Latin, apparently to preserve the reader's innocence. This is very funny but also quite inconvenient.↩
Mere Christianity pg. XII. "...I have a reluctance to say much about temptations to which I myself am not exposed...[So] I have...said nothing about birth-control. I am not a woman nor even a married man, nor am I a priest. I did not think it my place to take a firm line about pains, dangers and expense from which I am protected; having no pastoral office which obliged me to do so."↩
They have a carve - out for the rhythm method, which has always seemed deeply unprincipled to me. If it's fine because it's not artificial, then coitus interruptus must also be licit. If the problem is that you're intentionally avoiding pregnancy, then you can't have the rhythm method either. I understand conservative Catholics will feel differently.↩