I was reading about a taboo subject
today – sex! And particularly about the Christian understanding of
sex. You all know what it is. Sex is bad. Or at the very least the
slippery slope to sin. But have you ever wondered why we feel that
way?
After all, it seems pretty much
hardwired into us that it both feels good, and is necessary to make
more of us. But that is the problem, when it feels good we think we
are doing something wrong.
The person to blame for this is
Augustine. He was one of the original, and earliest writers about
what Christianity should look like. He was a Bishop in Africa some
300 years after Jesus. He wrote these massive books on the church, on
faith, on belief, and his writings became the norm for our thinking
about church.
But he had issues. Most of them having
to do with sex. He had a mistress. He had boyfriends. He had an
illegitimate child. He got in more trouble than all of these fallen
mega church pastor's put together. And the root of his trouble was
sex. Or at least, that is what he felt. He could not control his
temptations.
And so he developed something you have
heard of, but was never, and is not, in the Bible. Original Sin.
Yup, Augustine made that up to explain
why he could not stop having affairs. Original Sin was lust, and lust
was injected into us as unborn children because we were conceived
through, gasp, sex. This was not natural, as most biologists would
feel, but a result of the disobedience of Adam and Eve.
Therefore every single person is born
sinful – and every single person is incapable of controlling or
accepting their sinful sexual urges.
This is a brief history lesson and
ancient theological explanation but I just want you to have some
background for the idea that our Christian views on sex and sexuality
are actually crazy. They are not from the Bible, they are not from
Jesus, they are probably not even from the Holy Spirit, they are from
some guilt driven sense of remorse in one man's writing.
The absolute only thing Jesus ever says
about sex is that if you are married, you should not have sex with
someone else. That is it, the entire ethical standpoint of Jesus
Christ as to what is good and bad about sex.
The fact that we took Augustine's views
on sex and made them doctrine is the equivalent of taking Charles
Manson's views on group dynamics and making them the law in terms of
how we build churches. It is crazy.
I have felt this for a long time, but
now a woman named Debra Hirsch has written a book called Redeeming
Sex. In it she points out that all of this is based on the physical
aspects of sex and ignores the emotional and spiritual component –
it ignores how sex can be an act of love, of passion, of intimacy
which brings two people together in an extremely close and loving
way.
She argues for us to start over. For us
to realize that everything the church taught about sexuality for the
last 1500 years has been based on Augustine's guilt.
It is hard to change your belief about
something mid stream. I doubt we can really start over. But it is
certainly worth starting to admit that some of what we think is just
weird. How can sex be something so terrible if it creates such cute
babies, for example?
Even if we could just start to make the
change to thinking, sex is natural and everyone does it, that might
begin to swing the pendulum. Who knows what we could do if we stopped
fighting about this!
