Sex & the Early Church

(essay by Sam Torode, 2005)

When most people get engaged, they start looking at rings and reception halls. I started reading books about sex. No, not those books. I mean weighty tomes on marital relations, natural law, and contraception. More than the joy of sex, I wanted to know the theology of it.

Being conservative and rational by temperament, I veered towards Catholic theology because claims the oldest pedigree and uses natural law in a logical, clear-cut moral system. My fiancée and I drank up John Paul II’s Theology of the Body and took a class in natural family planning. A year later, we spit it back out in a little book, Open Embrace: A Protestant Couple Rethinks Contraception. (We’re still rethinking, and have changed our minds somewhat in the five years since.)

Bethany didn’t care so much about tradition—at the time, natural family planning just made intuitive sense to her. But I was inspired, in large part, by wanting to follow the way of the early church.

Why care about what the early Christians thought about sex? In the Baptist church I grew up in, it was assumed that the church fathers were wrong about everything. The years between the Acts of the Apostles and the founding of Pine Crick Baptist Church didn’t command much attention. The Bible was infallible, but any theologian between Bible times and ours was highly suspect.

In college, I lost faith in the notion that the Bible alone, left up to individual interpretation, is a sufficient guide for life. More often than not, Bible reading left me confused. Instead of giving up on Christianity altogether, I turned to authors like Russell Kirk, G. K. Chesterton, and Jaroslav Pelikan, who argued for the importance of tradition. The church fathers, they told me, were just the guides I needed.

My first steps in reading the fathers opened up a whole new world. Writings such as St. Athanasius’ On the Incarnation showed that my questions and doubts weren’t anything new; and brilliant theologians like Athanasius had provided compelling answers centuries ago.

This was a couple years before I met Bethany. Later, when we wrote Open Embrace I included quotes from several church fathers against contraception. I didn’t read the actual works they came from--I just pulled the quotes from Catholic apologetics books and Web sites. At the time, I assumed that the church fathers taught the same things about sex and marriage that the Catholic Church proclaims today. When I began looking at their writings in greater depth, I was in for a surprise.

I was disappointed to discover that the church fathers wrote a great deal about monasticism but very little about marriage, which they often treated as a distant second best. Even when they defended marriage against heretics like the Manichaeans, the church fathers tended to be very uneasy about sex.

They couldn’t condemn sex altogether—there’s no getting past the fact that Jesus and Paul praised marriage as a "one flesh union," and "one flesh" sure sounds a lot like sex. But from the outside looking in, many celibate church fathers saw only two possible reasons for sex: procreation or pleasure. And, in their ascetic mindset, pleasure was a surefire shortcut to hell.

That left only one justifiable reason for sex—and even marriage as a whole. Justin Martyr (c. 100–165) put it bluntly: "We Christians marry only to produce children."

"If a man marries in order to have children," Clement of Alexandria (c. 150–215) added, "he ought not to have a sexual desire for his wife. . . . He ought to produce children by a reverent, disciplined act of will."

St. Jerome (342–420) asked, "Do you imagine that we approve of any sexual intercourse except for the procreation of children?" Then he took the procreation vs. pleasure attitude to its logical conclusion: "He who is too ardent a lover of his own wife is an adulterer."

Augustine (354–430) agreed, while leaving some wiggle room for indulgence: "It is one thing to lie together with the sole will of generating: this has no fault. It is another to seek the pleasure of flesh in lying, although within the limits of marriage, this has venial fault."

Contrary to contemporary Catholic teaching, Augustine condemned the rhythm method (and, by conjecture, Natural Family Planning): "You warn us to watch the time after the purification of the menses when a woman is likely to conceive, and at that time refrain from intercourse. From this it follows that you consider marriage is not to procreate children, but to satiate lust." I could see why I’d never come across this quote in NFP-apologetics literature.

In the sixth century, Pope Gregory the Great (c. 540–604) said that if any pleasure was mixed with intercourse, it "transgresses the law of marriage." According to Gregory, pleasure "befouls" intercourse, though, like Augustine, he concluded that this was only a minor sin within marriage. And so, a tradition was firmly established. All sex was suspect, and any non-procreative sex—during infertile times, pregnancy, and old age—was especially sinful.

The denigration of sex paralleled the elevation of virginity. Because sex was tainted (Augustine considered it the vehicle for passing on original sin), priests who already had wives were expected to remain abstinent or even permanently separate. Before long, celibacy became a requirement for the priesthood in the Western Church.

In 386, the monk Jovinian was condemned for heresy in Rome, in part for saying that "virgins, widows, and married women, who have been once passed through the layer of Christ . . . are of equal merit" and "there is one reward in the kingdom of heaven for all who have kept their baptismal vow." Jovinian was denounced as a demon by Jerome, who countered with a tract denigrating marriage to such an extent that even Augustine thought he went too far.

When I first learned all this, about a year after Open Embrace was published, I got quite depressed. So much for the "unbroken tradition" on sexuality often claimed by Catholic apologists. If this was the tradition, I didn’t want any part of it.

After deciding that many of the church fathers were wrong about sex, I wondered—is the Christian tradition hopelessly flawed? Must we sweep aside everything the early church said about sex, and (like the Baptists I grew up with) start from scratch?

Thankfully, I found that Jerome, Augustine, and company didn’t have the last word on sex in the early church. In the East, a more positive vision of sex and marriage was set forth by St. John Chrysostom (c. 347–407).

Chrysostom, archbishop of Antioch and Constantinople, was the most celebrated orator of his day, and the liturgy he wrote is still used by the Orthodox Church. He praised married love in terms that scandalized his congregation (and would make many blush even today):

First and foremost, Chrysostom says, sex is about unifying love. In another sermon, he explicitly rejects the view that the sole (or even main) reason for marriage and sex is procreation:

As Chrysostom makes clear elsewhere, "chastity" doesn’t mean sexual abstinence—it means husbands and wives cultivating a passionate love for each other. Reading Chrysostom restored some of my faith in the early church. Still, he seemed outnumbered—a lone beacon of light in a sea of negativity.

Then I wondered whether I was putting too much stock in the church fathers. After all, the mind of the early church can’t be reduced to the writings of a handful of theologians. As important as they were in defining dogma, their opinions on marriage were just that—opinions. With that in mind, I started searching for statements from church-wide councils.

When the bishops of the early church met and prayed together, I learned, they often defended marriage and sexuality in the strongest terms. The Council of Gangra (325-381) resolved, "If anyone shall condemn marriage, let him be anathema" and "If anyone of those who are living a virgin life for the Lord’s sake should treat the married arrogantly, let him be anathema." (Take that, Jerome.)

During the first ecumenical council at Nicea, a motion was raised for mandatory celibacy among the clergy. But St. Pophanatrus—himself a celibate monk—objected, saying that "marriage and married intercourse are of themselves honorable and undefiled," and his words carried the day.

The motion for celibacy at Nicea was proposed by Western bishops, and the celibate priesthood soon became a rule in the West. But in the East, the Greek council of Trullo (692) reaffirmed the earlier tradition:

The council fathers went on to say that forcing married priests to separate from their wives is an injury to marriage, which was "instituted by God and blessed by his presence." Sex within marriage, they said, is pure. It doesn’t disqualify priests from ministering the sacraments. The Council at Trullo concluded: "If anyone dares, contrary to the Apostolic Canons, to deprive any of those who are in holy orders of cohabitation and intercourse with his lawful wife, let him be deposed."

At least a major portion of the early church—not just John Chrysostom—had a fairly healthy handle on sex. My depression was lifting.

The last place I thought to look for the early church’s view of sex and marriage was perhaps the most obvious: wedding liturgies. When reading the negative things certain fathers said about sex, it’s easy to forget that the early church blessed marriage as a sacrament—and sex, becoming one flesh, is what defines marriage).

The oldest wedding liturgies (Byzantine, Egyptian, and Syrian) bless lovemaking without blush or hesitation, even calling for angels to watch over the marriage bed. There are many prayers for fruitfulness, but children are seen as a gift bestowed by God, not a justification for this messy business of marriage and sex.

Even the Western marriage liturgies (Roman Catholic and Anglican), which were developed later, never suggest that non-procreative sex is sinful. Though they include the formula that marriage was instituted "first for the procreation of children," they balance it with two further biblical reasons for marriage—companionship and chastity.

My experiences over the last five years have helped qualify my love of tradition. Tradition can be a valuable guide—when it doesn’t conflict with the obvious meaning of the Bible and the experiences of ordinary Christian couples.

Yes, individual church fathers left a lot to be desired when it comes to sex. No, the early church wasn’t perfect. But the early church as a whole—especially in the East—left us a firm foundation for a beautiful, biblical theology of sex and marriage.

When Bethany and I were married using the original Anglican prayer book service, we recited these centuries-old words: "With this ring I thee wed; with my body I thee worship." Is there any more beautiful description of sacred sex? That’s the mystery of sacramental marriage: by loving and delighting in each other, spouses worship God.