The Main Source that supports the claims in this Post is Diarmaid MacCulloch’s Little Lower Than The Angels:The History of Christianity and Sex, Chapter 2, 2024.
We are inclined to think that the attitudes that have pervaded in the Church towards sexuality come from The Bible. That God wants sex for procreation purely and solely. This was the Medieval Church’s stance, and where it comes from its not the Bible. Rather it comes from the Greco-Roman culture of Antiquity, which was forged by Philosophers like Plato and Aristotle. In the Greek Culture, Self Control was seen as Honor, to the point that sexual enjoyment in excess was considered a weakness and betrayal of your masculinity, and the blame for sexual excess was placed upon women. This concept that you must curb your pleasure, and not enjoy Sex too much arrived in the Church through Monasticism and Asceticism, how? Because the Medieval Roman Catholic Church used Plato and Aristotle as a lens for interpreting Scripture, as a result the values of anti-ecstacy, and the promotion of chastity as the greater virtue became prevalent because the Ancient Greeks valued sexual abstinence, and control over your sexual desire. This is ironic when you consider orgies and sexual deviancy was so common in THe Greco-Roman world, and that is not a shock, when you forbid pleasure that God made to be enjoyed in matrimony, the result is rebellion to the rules and customs of abstinence.
Judaism and Early Christianity had a opposite view of sexual pleasure. In the Canon of the Hebrew Bible, our Old Testament are many tales of Sexuality, you have Rehab the Harlot saved the spies and is an ancestor to Jesus, you have Hosea told by God to marry a prostitute, and you have a book full of orgasms and sexual delights between a man and woman called The Song of Songs or Song of Solomon. This was where Judean world and Greco-Roman one differed greatly. Sexual pleasure and ecstasy was not only allowed, it was encouraged in the bounds of marriage for Jews an Early Christians. Losing yourself in the passion of eros, of love was encouraged by The Song of Songs which is in our Bibles. But Greeks and Romans on contrast saw this as dishonor and a lack of self control; and perhaps envied the Jews and Early Christians. We know Early Christians felt the same about sex as Song of Songs in that The Apostle Paul says, “However, if you cannot control your desires, you should get married. It is better for you to marry than to burn [with sexual desire],” (1 Corinthians 7:9) and He even goes as far as to say, “But because of the temptation to impurity and to avoid immorality, let each [man] have his own wife and let each [woman] have her own husband. The husband should give to his wife her conjugal rights and likewise the wife to her husband. For the wife does not have [exclusive] authority and control over her own body, but the husband [has his rights]; likewise also the husband does not have [exclusive] authority and control over his body, but the wife [has her rights]. Do not refuse and deprive and defraud each other [of your due marital rights], except perhaps by mutual consent for a time, so that you may devote yourselves unhindered to prayer. But afterwards resume marital relations (sexual), lest Satan tempt you [to sin] through your lack of restraint of sexual desire.” (1 Corinthians 7: 1-5 AMP). This was radical! The Greco-Roman belief was woman had no rights over a man, but here the Apostle Paul in Antiquity is saying a man’s body belongs to his Wife! That would have infuriated Aristotle, and Plato, who though self control of passions was key, that God was passionless transcendent who had nothing to do with the flesh and carnal; while Judeo-Christianity emphasizes that God is physical, walks in Garden of Eden, appears as Man to Ezekiel, wrestles with Jacob, and became fully incarnate as Jesus Christ. We see then how radical and forward thinking, and free Judeo-Christianity was in comparison to Pagan Greco-Romans in terms of women’s rights and sexuality. People today say Judaism and Christianity is strict with sex inside marriage only, but what they fail to understand is how radical and liberal if the word can be used, progressive maybe, they were about pleasure in sex! That in marriage Jews and Christians in 300 BCE to 100 A.D. were all for you pleasuring one another as much as you wanted in marriage, but the Pagan world was against you having excessive pleasure, and demanded you live by this ‘honor’ of control over your passion for another, which would become the model for Monks and Nuns forbidding too much sexual pleasure in their volumes, even writing three strict volumes on masterbation (Source: Martin Luther, Eric Metaxas). This is because Monasticism comes from the Platoian and Aristotelian view that you must temper passions and not enjoy any pleasure excessively, it is not anything Jesus Christ our Lord taught, nor the apostles who wrote canon of the New Testament.
How damaging is it that we Protestants continue to allow a semblance of this shadow of the Greek Philosophers and their hatred of pleasure to caste over our churches. While we must agree with Scriptures that our sexuality needs to be in prism of marriage, there is no prohibition of how much pleasure we may enjoy from a spouse! What alarms me is purity culture with True Love Waits and etc, has the smell of Plato and the Greeks who want you to self control all your passion, and guess what the result is.. human nature, rebellion, and cognitive dissonance, where you say you gonna do True Love Waits, but the extreme persecution of the pleasure in your mind pushes one to Pornography, and sexually acting out. That is the nature of the beast, trying to curb sexual lust by saying sexual passion is bad only strengthens it, rather you need to explain that sexual passion, ecstasy, and pleasure is natural and desirable, but it needs to be in the confines of marriage for these chief reasons: the protect the spouses (common law marriage doesn’t not go into effect till seven years, meaning if you need to bail over abuse and etc you will not get financial rights), to protect children who will be begot by the pleasure, giving them security in a home with parents to rear them, and who will have obligations, and lastly through importantly, marriage is second phase of love called committal love in the The Love Languages by Gary Chapman, it is the mature step, because when you fully love someone, you want only them unto yourself, and they you, and marriage is the covenant that binds you two as one flesh as Jesus said.
The Sexual Revolution of the 1960’s was inevitable. It truly is a tearing down of the Greek Philosophers insane teachings on sexual pleasure being bad. We Protestants tend to stick to the Judeo-Christian model of the Bible, because we are Solae Scirptura, which keeps us away rom infection of Greek Philosophers and Monastics, but the Roman Catholic Church and Eastern Orthodoxy Churches have this pollution that to this day still elevates ascetics and abstainers, and allows only the high offices of its churches from Bishop to Patriarch and Pope to be filled by celibates.
The word we need to get out there is that Judeo-Christian beliefs in the Bible viewed Sex not in strict and repressed manner, that was Pagan Greeks and Romans who adopted their literature and cultural morality. Yes we call sex outside marriage a sin, but the Greco-Romans saw all sexual pleasure as sin, even in marriage. So who was really more repressive? The answer is the Pagans of Antiquity. Yes they had orgies and lapsed in their quest for dominion over themselves, but their culture was espousing hatred towards conjugal love and pleasure. Thank God that the Song of Songs in our Bibles, and God is clear he wants us to “be fruitful and multiply,” and makes no prohibitions of how much pleasure a husband and wife can have. Amen.
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