Dave Tomlinson

This article was published as a chapter in Sex, a book published by The Erotic Review and edited by Stephen Bayley. The book, which contains very explicit photographs, is ‘a celebration of sensual delights in words and pictures…a voluptuous record of the lure of the body, seeking to explore every aspect of sex from auto-eroticism through fashion and fetishism to aphrodisiacs and cybersex.’

The book contained two religious perspectives on sex and sensuality: a Jewish contribution from Rabbi Schmuley Boteach, and my chapter on sex and the Church. If you track down a copy of the book, be warned – the pictures are very rude! I noticed that one used copy advertised on Amazon was described as ‘leafed through but never read’.

Religious writers have never been short of things to say about sex but not too many of them have been renowned for their humour on the subject. What a welcome surprise therefore to find C. S. Lewis subverting the Church’s usual po-faced stance, talking about erotic passion as a ‘divine joke’.

For I can hardly help regarding it as one of God’s jokes that a passion so soaring as Eros, should thus be linked in incongruous symbiosis with a bodily appetite which, like any other appetite, tactlessly reveals its connections with such mundane factors as weather, health, diet, circulation, and digestion. In Eros at times we seem to be flying; Venus gives us the sudden twitch that reminds us we are really captive balloons. It is a continual demonstration of the truth that we are composite creatures, rational animals, akin on one side to the angels, on the other to tom-cats. It is a bad thing not to be able to take a joke. Worse, not to take a divine joke; made, 1 grant you, at our expense, but also (who doubts it?) for our endless benefit.
The Four Loves (1960)

And of course it is true: there is a delightful absurdity about two bodies writhing around in sweaty fervour feeling, groping, stroking and caressing with ever-increasing urgency until finally collapsing in a gratified heap laughing or at least grinning from ear to car.

No wonder jokes about sex abound in every language and culture in the world. Some of them are funny; many of them are dull or disgusting, all of them are old. Yet as Lewis observes, they do embody an attitude to sex that ‘endangers the Christian life far less than a reverential gravity’. Sadly, the point is lost on many churchgoers who still adhere to what Lewis calls the ‘ludicrous and portentous solemnisation of sex’. If sex really is a divine joke these people definitely don’t get it and they fully intend to wipe the grin off the face of anyone who does.

The irony in the Church having so much trouble with bodies and sexuality should not be missed. After all, Christians claim to worship the Creator of bodies. More importantly, Christianity is founded on the belief that the divine became enfleshed in a human body complete with all the usual ‘bits’ and experiencing all the desires and urges felt by anyone else.

Yet, even as we move into the third millennium, the Church still can’t find the grace in carnality. Most of the sticky issues that trouble the faithful revolve around some aspect of sexuality: celibacy, contraception, divorce and remarriage, homosexuality, cohabitation. Goodness knows how many people have been alienated from Christianity by the Church’s stance on these subjects.

So where docs all this distrust of bodiliness originate? There are certainly traces of it in the Bible. The priestly law that treats menstruating women, and men with ‘a flow of semen’, as unclean (Leviticus 15) hardly enhances bodily self-esteem. Yet the Bible as a whole treats sexuality as a gift of God and an essential pan of being human. It also contains bits that, if translated into the vernacular, would turn many a face in the pews bright red. The Book of Ruth’s account of Ruth and Boaz on the threshing floor takes a bit of explaining by even the deftest Sunday school teacher. And The Song of Songs, an erotic poem that throbs between the covers of the Bible, gloriously celebrates human sexual desire and bodiliness for its own sake. God’s presence is identified in the closing section as residing in the passion of the lovers and it is by no means clear, that they are even married.

The real source of the problem lies not in the Bible but in the dualistic ideas that contaminated the Church in the early centuries. Despite its repudiation by orthodox Christianity, Gnosticism a system of belief that was prominent in the second century AD with its insistence on the inherent sinfulness of the flesh percolated into the psyche of the early Church with subtle and devastating effect. From Clement of Alexandria in the second century AD and his pupil Origen through to Augustine in the sixth century and down to our own day, the dualistic exalting of spirit at the expense of matter has characterised much, if not most, of Christianity.

The Church Fathers had all kinds of problems with sexuality. A modern-day sex therapist would probably have a field day with these guys. In the fourth century AD Saint Ambrose thought that sexuality was an ugly scar on the human condition, Saint Jerome likened the body to a darkened forest filled with the roaring of wild beasts that could only be controlled by rigid diet and strict avoidance of sexual attraction, and Origen was voluntarily castrated to demonstrate how unimportant sex was!

Throughout the early centuries of the Church, marriage was treated with great suspicion, and the superiority of virginity and celibacy over marriage was taken for granted. Augustine tolerated marriage for the purpose of procreation provided the couple did not succumb to lust – ‘You can do it but you mustn’t enjoy it!’ The essence of Adam and Eve’s fall, Augustine argued, was the loss of control over the body, especially over the phallus. To think that lust can be tamed is a delusion (he had lived with a woman for thirteen years prior to being converted). So for Augustine the sex act, which is not under the control of the rational mind and will, but seems to take place on its own, is sinful and transmits original sin to every child that is born of the flesh.

But the Church Fathers were a ’small class of literary celibates’. Just how much their teachings affected the average Christian is unclear (perhaps about as much as the Vatican’s stance on contraception affects most Catholics today). The stress on virginity, on the horrendous nature of any sexual sin and on the superiority of celibacy to marriage probably appeared almost as alien to many a Christian lay person as to their pagan neighbours. But gradually over the centuries, through the teaching of the clergy and the development of penitential discipline, this outlook came to shape the values and attitudes of the Christian Church as a whole.

In the sixteenth century, the Reformation certainly moved things on - a little! Martin Luther’s approach to marriage remained, like Augustine’s, basically pragmatic: sex is a necessary evil, a way of (men) combating fornication. But he did go a little further in that he effectively defended the ‘right’ of priests to be as lustful as the next guy, so members of the clergy were permitted to marry in order to avoid fornication. John Calvin made a bit more headway by embracing the legitimacy of pleasure. But he could not let go of the then universal belief that too much passion amounts to lust, hence sin, even in the marriage bed. So, apparently, it was still a case of not enjoying it too much.

Surprisingly, it appears that the Puritans, generally vilified for their legalism, prudery and dowdiness, actually made most progress in rejecting medieval attitudes to sex and marriage: ‘Married sex was not only legitimate in the Puritan view; it was meant to be exuberant’- as described by D. Daniel in his essay ‘The Puritans, Sex and Pleasure’ in Christian Perspectives on Sexuality and Gender (1996). Sex was good, created by God for human welfare and even pleasure. And apparently, they ‘were not squeamish about it’. Yet the Puritans remained deeply uneasy about ‘excessive’ desire, which they thought reduced people to the level of animals, and couples were expected to pray before having intercourse. Nowadays, of course, people are more inclined to beseech the Almighty in the midst of love making.

Notwithstanding the Puritan’s ‘exuberant’ sex lives, another three hundred years or so would need to pass before any real change of attitude toward sexuality would occur in the Church. But changes there have been - mostly over the last forty years or so of the twentieth century. Nowadays, none of the mainstream Churches make childbearing the primary end in marriage, the Vatican alone holds out on recognising the legitimacy of contraception, sexual pleasure is assumed to be the rightful expectation of both men and women, and homosexuals and cohabiting couples are widely accepted into communion in many churches.

But shifts of attitude in Church institutions do not tell the whole story. Throughout the centuries, a gulf has probably always existed between the pronouncements of the Church and the practices of ordinary Christians. Nowadays, that gap is wider than ever before, and factions proliferate across the Churches between those who desire increasingly progressive policies and those who think that things have gone too far already.

Two distinct paths of theology are emerging. The first, labelled ‘a theology of (or about) sexuality’, tends to argue in a one-directional way: ‘What do scripture and tradition say about sexuality and how it ought to be expressed? What docs the Church say? What does the Pope say?’ etc. But feminist theologians, gay theologians and others are developing a ’sexual theology’ that asks: ‘What does our experience as human sexual beings tell us about how we read scripture, interpret the tradition, and attempt to live out the meaning of the Christian gospel?’

The contrast between the two approaches is clear: the first revolves around given authorities like scripture, tradition and papal statements, with no real voice for present-day experience; the second actually begins with present-day experience, which then becomes the basis for a whole new discussion with scripture and Church tradition. Both seek to take the Bible and the Church seriously, but they go about it in quite different ways.

Sin still rears its ugly head in the new sexual theologies. But, it is not sex that makes a person sinful. It is the person who can make sex sinful. That is the conclusion of Father Kevin Kelly, an eminent Roman Catholic theologian whose work typifies the new approach. In his challenging book, New Directions in Sexual Ethics Kelly asserts that sex is not sinful. It is a gift of God. What is sinful is the way human persons can behave destructively towards themselves and others in the sexual field.’ What is sinful is what violates the good of the human person, ‘integrally and adequately considered’.

So what about something like casual sex? The quality of sex is intrinsically bound up with the quality of the relationship, Kelly argues. Casual sex sells us short as relational beings, capable of interpersonal love. In that sense, it is dehumanising since it is living below our human potential. ‘It also fails to do justice to us as bodily persons since it involves two persons using each other’s bodies for individual pleasure without interest in and concern for the profound body-person each of them is.’

That said, Kelly recognises the danger of the Church imposing its values on a society that does not necessarily proceed from the same moral starling point. If people are to be taken seriously as moral agents, a ‘Yes, but. .. ‘ or ‘No, but … ‘ response may be required to many specific questions about sexual behaviour, rather than a straightforward ‘Yes’ or ‘No’.

Given its seemingly endless capacity to screw up people’s lives, sexually, we should be thankful that the Church no longer calls the shots in society. Yet a reconfigured Christianity, committed to the crucial work of creating an appropriate ethic for today, has much to offer the wider community. The tragedy, as Richard Holloway, the former Bishop of Edinburgh points out, is that ‘by exaggerating the claim to divine inspiration’ the Church fails to commend some of the enduring values in the traditional Christian ethic, such as restraint. By patiently pointing to the pain and guilt created by unrestrained sexual behaviour, a strong case can be made for an ‘ethic of self control’. But this needs to commend itself to people because of the benefits it offers rather than because of an imposed religious guilt-trip, as argued by Brueggemann in The Bible and Postmodern Imagination (1993).

At its heart, Christianity is a profoundly body-affirming faith. It not only declares God to be the creator of physical bodies, it also centres on the assertion that the divine became fully embodied in the person of Jesus Christ. There are even Christian theologians who argue that sexuality can be a sacrament - a means of encountering God. Yet this appears to have had little bearing on the guilt, shame and misery the Church has inflicted on people throughout the centuries on account of sex. If~ in the twenty-first century, the Church is to offer helpful and realistic guidance to people on sex, it must climb down from the heady heights of moralism and engage in an adult conversation.