JThunder, and what do you make of Paul, then? With his “better to marry than to burn” quote? The first person in Christianity to talk on sexual morality was St. Paul. He says, “It is good for a man not to touch a woman.” (Corinthians I, 7:1)
St. Augustine in his writings proclaimed the belief that sex was inherently sinful:
(Basic Writings of St. Augustine, p. 455.) Augustine argued that the act of sexual intercourse itself was tainted with guilt because of the sin of Adam and Eve. Sexual intercourse was transformed from something innocent to something shameful by the original sin of Adam and Eve, which is passed on from generation to generation.
These tenets held sway in the Catholic church for centuries, and still do, to some extent.
And the list continues with the Manichaeians, the Shakers, and the Rappites, to name a few. All opted for celibacy, declaring sex itself to be sinful.
So yes, Christianity has taught in the past, and branches of it still do teach that sex is inherently sinful.
Personally, my moral code is not to have sex with anyone whose child I would not be willing to bear; my current commitment is to not have sex with anyone whose child I do not actively desire to bear at some point (though I’m currently doing my best to not be fertile).
I’d have a hard time morally justifying the concept of limiting sex to marriage when there are people who would like to make marriage-commitments who are not actually permitted to do so. I could – and did, as it happens – make vows that bind me in what I would consider a marriage, but it can’t be legal, and it wasn’t before some people’s preferred god, so a number of people will say it doesn’t count and call it “sin”.
I think this is pretty tiresome when I have to deal with it. I’d be pretty shocked if the other people on the board who aren’t able to marry their partners didn’t also find it wearying.
Lilairen, I’m confused. Sex with somebody who’s child you’d want to bear sounds heterosexual (since a woman can’t bear another woman’s child), but not being able to legally marry your partner legally sounds like a homosexual commitment ceremony.
Can you please clarify what you’re talking about? Thanks.
Hmmm…Lilairen, it’s probably fairly easy to misread my position, and I suspect that some have done so.
I see a committed relationship as the ideal place for sex, not a dividing line between “licit” and “illicit” sex. Two people who intend to make a life together and desire each other should be entitled to do what they want, consensually, to engage in. And it’s the commitment, not the legal, social, or ecclesiastical recognition of it, that makes that a “marital partnership.”
There are obviously people who are not in a position to form such a relationship at the moment who have sexual desires and may wish to gratify them in a consensual manner, and I’d be very loath to start classifying their behavior as “sinful.” As in the gay adoption thread and a bunch of other stuff that’s come up lately, I tend to argue for the ideal situation – but much of the world does not find the ideal situation easy, or even possible, to access. The last thing I want to do is to suggest to our teenage members that their sex drive is somehow “evil” because they’re horny and not yet ready to marry.
Encouraging patience and self-restraint is a good thing. But demanding it of another while you yourself are free to engage in what you’re demanding someone else refrain from is quite another. (As one of our members has recently discovered… ;))
Quite simply, that quote does not say that sex is wrong. It says that sex should be within the context of marriage.
You’re omitting the context of that verse. IMMEDIATELY afterwards, he says “Nevertheless, because of sexual immorality, let each man have his own wife, and let each woman have her own husband. Let the husband render to his wife the affection due her, and likewise also the wife to her husband” (I Corinthians 7:2-3). Paul did NOT condemn sex per se; if anything, he condoned it within the context of marriage!
Augustine was one person. Even if we assume this claim to be true (and in the absence of a specific quote, that has yet to be established), Augustine did not speak for the church at large, and his words do not have the authority of Scripture.
No. At best, it means that certain individuals might have taught this. (I say “might” because we haven’t produced a specific quote from Augustine yet.) This is not the same as saying that Christianity itself adhered to this belief. If it did, then why don’t you produce those volumes of writings which say “Hey, you! Stop perpetuating the human race, will ya?!!?!?”
As far as your claim that “branches of it still do teach that sex is inherently sinful,” you have yet to substantiate that. Where are these branches of which you speak, and where is your proof that they teach such. (Moreover, since you attribute this belief to certain “branches,” your claim implicitly admits that only certain Christians might hold to this belief, and that Christianity itself does not endorse it. Ergo, the claim that “Christianity” considers sex to be sinful is a gross exaggeration at best, and an outright falsehood at worst.)
Okay. Shakers demanded celibacy (one good reason why there are no more Shakers! :)) That gang of heretics from 13th Century Provence whose -ist name I can’t think of right at the moment classed members into two circles, one group that could have sex more or less ad lib., and an inner elite who were too holy for it and had to abstain. No doubt there were other groups that ascetically considered it a necessary evil.
But the sex=sin groups are at most a fringe, not any part of the mainstreams of Christian thought – which I do admit are divided on a lot of issues, but seem to have only two consistent stances on this particular one.
Catholicism and some conservative Protestant groups believe that the sole purpose of sex is procreation, and that any sex not engaged in for that purpose is sinful. Moderate and liberal Protestants and I think Orthodox (along with many individual Catholics) tend to suggest that along with the biological purpose of procreation, it also has the social purpose of building and sustaining a pair bond.
So can we dispense with the generalizations, please?
Polygamy is just as nonexistent as legal recognition of homosexual partnerships where I live. Places I’m aware of that might consider polygamy probably don’t consider polyandry.
And, to the topic of the OP, I note that Saint Augustine declares polyandry to be automatically sinful where polygyny is not. (The logic being that sex is only legit when done for procreation; a man with access to multiple women has his potential reproduction rate increased while a woman with access to multiple men does not.) I’m sure someone will want a cite for that; let me see if I can find it.
From “On Marriage and Concupiscence”. The bit I’m referencing is about two fifths of the way down, citing Book I, Chapter 10, but there’s a lot of stuff that influenced a great swath of Christian practice in there.
The Albigensians (Cathars). And, actually, some of them even starved themselves to death.
And, Ava, just as a note, the Stoics didn’t believe that life was worthless, and pleasure was wrong. They did, however, believe that passion was wrong in general…all passion.
Well the Bible itself doesn’t condem polygamy (or polyandry for that matter either) but in cases in the Old Testament where someone had more than one wife, in the end, it usually caused big problems, implying that it’s better to have just one husband and one wife, but it actually never condems the practice.