6 days Ago
LOWER THAN THE ANGELS: A History of Sex and Christianity . By Diarmaid MacCulloch. Viking.
688 pages. $40. In matters of faith and its practice, voices of moderation are seldom well-received, let alone heeded.
In the Western tradition, religious belief is, for most, a binary choice that dismisses all but its own perspective and the perceived basis for it, with no use for the idea of a middle ground. No one should know this better than Diarmaid MacCulloch, former Oxford professor of the history of the Church, who has for decades written insightfully about the evolution of Christianity in general and the conflicts that have shaped the Western Church in particular, especially the latter’s most ideologically fraught period, the Reformation. Yet in his most recent book “Lower than the Angels: A History of Sex and Christianity,” MacCulloch issues a call for moderation in the highly divisive debate on sex and sexuality among contemporary Christians.
He wants the opposing sides in the various expression of the conflict, driven by rapid social change over the last century, to “calm down” and embrace the complexity and, indeed, uncertainty in Christian theology, doctrine and practice relating to sex, and thereby engage in a less febrile dialogue that might have some hope of building a broader consensus. A naively hopeful desire, perhaps, but one that MacCulloch pursues effectively, casting a wide historical and ideological net and sifting its contents methodically and lucidly for his reader. As in his magisterial “Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years” (2009) and “The Reformation” (2003), MacCulloch’s analysis ranges across a broad expanse of intellectual history, from Classical Greek and Roman Civilization and pre-Christian Judaism to our own time.
It is full of disparate and often contradictory ideas relative to sex, sexuality and their primary interface with Christian practice — the institution of marriage. MacCulloch has said that “Lower than the Angels” may be called “a history of marriage,” which has become the point of fracture among Protestant denominations in the past several decades, including MacCulloch’s own Anglican Church, and the book’s clinical examination of the history of “religious marriage” is fascinating. The ancient Greeks, Romans, and Jews had little notion of marriage as something with religious significance.
It was, instead, a contract between two men (the fathers of the betrothed), and it was easily entered into and easily exited. Indeed, the most famous wedding in the Bible, that attended by Jesus at Cana in Galilee, was not a “church wedding” as we would understand it. There was no ceremony held in a Temple or a Synagogue.
It was, as MacCulloch explains, “a big post-contract party in a convenient local house, where the main concern was the quality of the wine.” Jesus’ pronouncements on marriage come in his condemnation of divorce (again, a common practice in his world) in the Synoptic Gospels. MacCulloch rightly points out that Jesus’ “no divorce” is a radical departure from the practice of his day, although he leaves us without a complete analysis of the concept of “one man” and “one woman” becoming “one flesh” that is its basis (despite some intriguing discussion of gender in Greek, Hebrew and Latin, and the translation thereof earlier in the book).
MacCulloch points out that divorce already was a departure from the “one flesh” concept laid down in Genesis, and that St. Paul very soon defied Jesus’ near categorical prohibition by telling his Corinthian correspondents that divorce is acceptable in certain situations, leading to confusion and embarrassment that is still with us among “divorced Evangelical Protestants who would otherwise be very anxious to know what Jesus would do.” MacCulloch asserts that Paul introduced sexuality into the concept of marriage with his concept of a “marriage debt,” based on reciprocal power over one spouse’s body by the other.
There is a contractual mutuality here that is a nod to the old “Law,” and Paul’s views are complicated by the fact that the early Church often promoted celibacy over sexual marriage, treating the later as a not so necessary evil to which was preferred marital celibacy. The monastic tradition that dominated Christianity for a thousand years flowed from this sentiment, and the evident lack of doctrinal clarity with regard to Christian marriage seems to have been reflected in its lack of liturgical standing in the Church. In the most fascinating strand of MacCulloch’s narrative, he describes how there was little concept of Christian marriage for the first seven centuries after Jesus.
It was only in the 7th century that the Far Eastern churches began to oversee marriage (as a way to curb Muslim polygyny), followed by the Eastern Orthodox Church in the 9th century, and the Western (Roman) Church in the 13th century. Strange that a sacrament invoked so often as foundational to the Church and Christian society has not existed for most of its history, MacCulloch observes. His broader point is that the Christian understanding of marriage, like other elements of life of the Church (such as family and to a lesser extent sexuality) has evolved, and continues to evolve, based on changes in social context.
Very little can be directly traced to authority that reasonable Christians would consider immune to the influences of history. MacCulloch does not argue for any of the sides in the current debates on these issues. Rather, his careful historical analysis speaks for itself, and what it speaks to is an unclear revelatory and traditional basis for any particular view.
To use the example of marriage, perhaps the sex or sexual orientation of the participants do not matter as much as we might think. Where MacCulloch runs thin is on questions of gender and sexual identity that underlie many of these arguments. With regard to the former, MacCulloch acknowledges that he has been outflanked by the trans movement and the issues it raises, but also points out that these issues are relatively new in Christian history and will take time, and more importantly, earnest and informed dialogue, to assess.
For the present, “Lower than the Angels” provides much needed and well-presented historical perspective for consideration of these divisive issues..
