Sex, Marriage and Family in World Religions (22 page)

While denominations disagreed over what to count as an essential defect, they continued to endorse the ideal of Christian marriage as a serious, exclusive, and enduring commitment.

The endorsement became more emphatic when linked to the second motif of
reproduction
and the idea that sexual relations are for the sake of having and raising children. Historically this notion is more ambivalent than the first, and Christian churches have qualified it in various ways. Some theologians have held that sexual activity was not required for a marriage. Couples have been
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urged to abstain from sex in order to have a more spiritual relation. Some couples might have a marriage without ever having “consummated” it sexually—as some believed of Jesus’s parents, Mary and Joseph. Still, theologians assumed that most marriages would include sexual activity, at least in their early years, and so they counted having children as one of the goods of marriage. In consequence, they taught that attempts to interfere with conception were sinful.

Contraception, whether “natural” or artificial, was regarded as a serious breach of marriage in the great majority of churches. There could be marriages without sexual intercourse, but any intercourse had to be left open to the good of children.

The third motif,
mutual self-giving,
enters here. Christian teachers have typically held that wife and husband give themselves to each other wholly, gen-erously, as body and soul. Spouses should treat each other lovingly, of course, but that is no more than all Christians are called to do for any human being.

Married Christians further pledge their bodies to each other in something like an exchange of ownership. Spouses “owe” physical intimacy to each other, unless they should together make a religious decision to refrain. The mutual gift of bodies becomes a sign and cause of more complete union between them.

Christian writers have often praised the vowed friendship between spouses.

Indeed, they have counted it among the goods of marriage alongside having children. They have understood marital intimacy as a figure for the union between Christ and the church. Christian marriage, especially with children, is often pictured as the church in miniature.

The exchange of bodies is a splendid sign of union, but it can also be a fearful temptation. Sexual temptation calls forth the fourth theme of
self-control.

In a religion generally skittish about sexual pleasure, the lascivious possibilities of the marriage bed had to be curtailed—and they were, by a commitment to self-control or chastity in marriage. The goods of marriage could justify sex, but not of any kind in any quantity. Christian spouses were to be moderate in their sexual relations. They were not to seek them mainly for pleasure, but for other goods, like children or friendship. This was another reason for prohibiting sexual practices that appeared only to offer pleasure rather than procreation. It can further explain the absence of anything like a Christian “erotic” teaching, much less any Christian pornography. Only married believers are permitted sex, and their concern with it is precisely not to refine or manipulate pleasures. Even Christian marriage manuals describe sexual matters mainly to warn and restrict.

The only place Christian traditions have regularly offered for erotic writing is in descriptions of the soul’s relation to God. Until recently, Christians did not publish workbooks on having better sex. Christian depictions of the techniques of passionate love are written by mystics aflame with God.

For Christians marriage has been a more worldly matter, as the final theme of concern for the
social order
suggests. Most Christian writers have recognized the importance of well-regulated marriage for a stable society, just as they have 88

l u k e t i m o t h y j o h n s o n a n d m a r k d . j o r d a n condemned unbridled sex as contrary to the common good. Yet there is an old uncertainty about how much Christian marriage belongs to the churches and how much to civil authority. In western Christendom, the collapse of imperial government encouraged churches to assert more and more jurisdiction over marriage. They were to devise not only its rites, but its regulations. Once marriage was declared a sacrament, it became by definition a matter essentially subject to church teaching and church courts—in the same way that the Eucharist or baptism would be. But there was still uncertainty, because permanent, monogamous unions outside the church were also considered marriage according to the “law” of nature. Many Protestant reformers rejected the tangle of medieval marriage law and the corrupt proceedings of church courts, especially in regard to separations or dissolutions. They tried in various ways to rethink the balance of jurisdiction between church and civil government. At the same time, the Reformation gave increased importance to marriage as a Christian vocation, thus reasserting the moral or spiritual stake of the churches in good marriages. The distinction between church and civil government was also blurred as rulers or governments adopted principles of reformed Christianity. What could it mean to insist the marriage belong to the state when the state itself was intent on enforcing denominational policies?

The latter half of the twentieth century saw significant and even startling changes in the position of the churches on sex, marriage, and family. Many contemporary Christians in the developed nations, both “liberal” and “conservative,” hold views on sex or marriage that earlier churches would have instantly pronounced un-Christian. The most obvious changes concern contraception and divorce. Around 1900 the huge majority of European, Canadian, and American Christians stood with the tradition in considering contraception mostly immoral and divorce an unusual, unhappy remedy for extreme situations. By the year 2000 it is much easier—and much quicker—to enumerate Christian bodies that still do reject contraception or divorce. More diffuse changes, but in some ways more profound, have affected women’s roles in marriage and family. As women have gained their civil rights, and then more of their share as full members of Christian churches, they have been less willing to accept a view of marriage in which they are treated as perpetually incomplete or immature human beings. The claims of women to be equal members in church and, for that matter, in the writing of Christian theology have hardly been settled. Even where women have been allowed into ordained ministry or denominational leadership, the theological implications of women’s equality are only just beginning to be worked through. For the longest time Christian teaching on marriage has been written by men on behalf of women. Now women can teach in their own voices.

Most recently, Christian teachings have been challenged by blunt questions about their old denigration of sexual pleasure. A few decades ago the challenge
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was posed by “premarital” sex: Should a man and a woman who would soon be married have sex with each other before the wedding day? In retrospect that question seems charmingly naive. The fiercest fights now rage around the sexual activity of avowedly lesbian or gay Christians, some of whom want not only approval of their embodied loves but a full share in Christian marriage. The controversies have already divided some denominations in fact, and they may shortly divide them constitutionally into separate churches. This would be un-fortunate, but also misleading. Both extramarital sex and same-sex unions are proxies for a much larger controversy that will prove decisive for future Christian teaching, whether it considers itself progressive or traditionalist. It is a controversy about the fundamental logic of justifying sex through marriage. Indeed, it threatens to undo the original compact that gave marriage a place in church thinking and ritual. At the heart of this controversy is this question: can Christians approve sexual pleasure that is not subordinated to procreation or contained within the marriage of one man and one woman?

CREATION AND FALL IN THE BOOK OF GENESIS

In the first century ce Christianity emerged as a sect of Judaism and interacted with Hellenistic culture. The New Testament constantly reinterprets the scriptures shared with Judaism in light of the experience of Jesus, the crucified and resurrected Messiah. But earliest Christian attitudes toward sexuality, marriage, and family were also affected by stringent sexual teaching developed by Greco-Roman and Hellenistic Jewish moral teachers. While Jewish interpreters were drawn to legal texts, early Christian writers focused on the narrative parts of Scripture, above all the creation stories. On one side, Jesus points to the union of Adam and Eve as the ideal for marriage. On the other side, the story of the fall of humanity suggests the shattering of that ideal. Finally, Paul considers the resurrection of Jesus to be a “new creation” and Jesus to be the “last Adam,”

which creates some tension with the “first creation.” Ancient writers did not consider the two distinct creation accounts to be from two different sources (as critical scholars do), but read them continuously as a single account. Thus the ideal conception of humanity is the image of God reflected in both male and female. But in the actual flesh, woman is secondary, created to be a “fit helper”

for the man. When Adam and Eve transgressed God’s command and ate from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, they ruptured not only their relationship with God but also their relationship with each other and to the earth itself. (See Doc. 1-1 in chapter 1.)

THE GRECO-ROMAN CONTEXT

There is no evidence that the writers of the New Testament knew or made direct use of the Greco-Roman writings presented here. We include them to 90

l u k e t i m o t h y j o h n s o n a n d m a r k d . j o r d a n indicate the cultural context within which the New Testament was composed.

The popular perception of the Roman Empire is as a cauldron of sexual li-cense—and there is ample support for that portrayal in ancient historians, novelists, and satirists. But a countercurrent of strict sexual ethics was found among some philosophers, especially those of the Stoic-Cynic tradition, such as Musonius Rufus and Epictetus. Musonius (b. ca. 30 ce) is notable for the stringency of his sexual teaching. Epictetus (ca. 55–135 ce) calls for a “func-tional celibacy” for the Cynic philosopher like that advocated by Paul in 1 Cor.

7:25–35.

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m u s o n i u s r u f u s , o n s e x u a l i n d u l g e n c e Not the least significant part of the life of luxury and self-indulgence lies also in sexual excess; for example those who lead such a life crave a variety of loves not only lawful but unlawful ones as well, not women alone but also men; sometimes they pursue one love and sometimes another, and not being satisfied with those which are available, pursue those which are rare and inaccessible, and invent shameful intimacies, all of which constitute a grave indictment of manhood.

Men who are not wantons or immoral are bound to consider sexual intercourse justified only when it occurs in marriage and is indulged in for the purpose of begetting children, since that is lawful, but unjust and unlawful when it is mere pleasure-seeking, even in marriage. But of all sexual relations those involving adultery are the most unlawful, and no more tolerable are those of men with men, because it is a monstrous thing and contrary to nature. But, furthermore, leaving out of consideration adultery, all intercourse with women which is without lawful character is shameful and is practiced from lack of self-restraint.

[Musonius Rufus, “On Sexual Indulgence” (Fragment 12), in
Moral Exhortation,
A Greco-Roman Sourcebook,
ed. A. J. Malherbe, Library of Early Christianity (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1986), pp. 152–153]

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e p i c t e t u s , o n t h e c a l l i n g o f a c y n i c But, said the young man, will marriage and children be undertaken by the Cynic as a matter of prime importance?—If, replied Epictetus, you grant me a city of wise men, it might very well be that no one will lightly adopt the Cynic’s profession. For in whose interest would he take on this style of life? If, nevertheless, we assume that he does so act, there will be nothing to prevent him
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from both marrying and having children; for his wife will be another person like himself, and so will his father-in-law, and his children will be brought up in the same fashion. But in such an order of things as the present, which is like that of a battle-field, it is a question, perhaps, if the Cynic ought not to be free from distraction, wholly devoted to the service of God, free to go about among men, not tied down by the private duties of men, nor involved with relationships which he cannot violate and still maintain his role as a good and excellent man, whereas, on the other hand, if he observes them, he will destroy the messenger, the scout, the herald of the gods, that he is . . . from this point of view, we do not find that marriage, under present conditions, is a matter of prime importance for the Cynic.

[Epictetus, “On the Calling of a Cynic” (Discourse III, 22, 67–77), in
Epictetus,
the Discourses,
trans. W. A. Oldfather, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1928), vol. 2, pp. 153–155]

HELLENISTIC JEWISH MORAL INSTRUCTION

Jewish authors writing in Greek interpreted the traditions of Scripture in ways strongly influenced by Greco-Roman philosophy. Philo of Alexandria was typically strict in his condemnation of pleasure-seeking and sensuality. In the following passage an anonymous Jewish author, called Pseudo-Phocylides, writing in the first century ce, camouflages Jewish ideas within a literary form (gnomic wisdom) and style that are entirely Greek.

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p s e u d o - p h o c y l i d e s o n d o m e s t i c e t h i c s 175Do not remain unmarried, lest you die nameless. 176Give nature her due, you also, beget in your turn as you were begotten. 177Do not prostitute your wife, defiling your children. 178For the adulterous bed brings not sons in (your) like-ness. 179Do not touch your stepmother, your father’s second wife, 180but honor her as a mother, because she follows the footsteps of your mother. 181Do not have intercourse with the concubines of (your) father. 182Do not approach the bed of (your) sister, (a bed) to turn away from. 183Nor go to bed with the wives of your brothers. 184Do not let a woman destroy the unborn baby in her belly, 185nor after its birth throw it before the dogs and the vultures as a prey. 186Do not lay your hand upon your wife when she is pregnant. 187Do not cut a youth’s masculine procreative faculty. 188Do not seek sexual union with irrational animals. 189Do not outrage (your) wife by shameful ways of intercourse. 190Do not transgress with unlawful sex the limits set by nature. 191For even animals are not pleased by intercourse of male with male. 192And let women not imitate the 92