Sex, Marriage and Family in World Religions (20 page)

From the beginning Christianity has had an uneasy relationship with the human body and therefore also to sexuality, marriage, and family. This uneasiness is found in the complex and sometimes contradictory teachings of the New Testament, the collection of first-century ce compositions that Christians have always read, together with the Old Testament, as an inspired Word of God directing humans how to live. The deep ambivalence concerning sexuality finds its roots in classic Christian writings and throughout the history of Christianity.

The distinctive complexity of the New Testament can be approached by means of contrast to the other great monotheistic traditions of the West, Judaism and Islam, each based more or less directly on the Scriptures of ancient Israel.

As religious systems they are simple: God creates, reveals his will through law, and rewards or punishes human behavior. Humans, in turn, are free either to obey or disobey God’s commands. Equally simple and straightforward are these traditions’ views of sex. Both Moses and Muhammad marry, have children, live to an old age, and die naturally. Both Torah and Qur’an are unequivocally in 78

l u k e t i m o t h y j o h n s o n a n d m a r k d . j o r d a n favor of marriage, even while recognizing the reality of divorce. These traditions view family as an unambiguous blessing from God and approve of heterosexual activity within the bounds of marriage, while rejecting sex outside marriage, whether polygamous or monogamous. Sexual love can be celebrated within the sacred text, and the marriage bond between man and woman powerfully symbolizes the covenant between God and humans. Both Judaism and Islam are uncomplicatedly committed to the goodness of sex, marriage, and family.

Why did Christians, who read the same sacred texts—although in the Greek translation called the Septuagint rather than in the Hebrew—come to such complicated and confusing conclusions on the same issues? It is because they read their Scripture from within quite a different set of circumstances and religious experiences. The circumstances were those of the Greco-Roman culture of the first-century Mediterranean. The religious experiences had to do with Jesus of Nazareth.

t h e c o m p l e x w i t n e s s o f e a r l y c h r i s t i a n

The New Testament compositions were written over a roughly seventy-year period after the death of Jesus and include four narratives about Jesus (Gospels), an account of Christian beginnings (Acts of the Apostles), an apocalyptic writing (Revelation), and a collection of twenty-one letters from Paul and other early leaders. They vary in their social location, literary form, and perspective. But all of them engage already developed forms of moral teaching among Greco-Roman philosophers and Jews who also spoke and thought in Greek—and also interpreted life by means of the Septuagint.

Attitudes toward sex and marriage were considerably less relaxed in the early empire than they had been earlier. Philosophers of classical Greece had thought of sex primarily in terms of health rather than morality. But like the emperor Augustus himself—who introduced stringent laws concerning marriage and divorce—Greco-Roman moralists showed anxiety about sex, especially sexual pleasure. Cicero thought of pleasure and vice as virtually synonymous. Epictetus thought marriage and children an unacceptable distraction for the true philosopher (Doc. 2–4). Musonius Rufus allowed sexual intercourse, even within marriage, only in order to have children (Doc. 2–3). Hellenistic Jews also developed strict views of sex. Philo’s ideal contemplatives were celibates.

Whereas the Old Testament thought of virginity as a curse or punishment, Philo regarded it positively as a freedom for philosophy. Other Hellenistic Jewish writers worried about desire, especially sexual desire or lust. And Hellenistic Jews all rejected homosexuality as a distinctively Gentile vice.

The New Testament, in short, did not flow directly from the Old Testament.

Christians read their Greek version of the Bible in light of changing sexual mores in the world around them. But even more important were four factors
Christianity
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that directly affected the shaping of the New Testament’s extraordinarily complex, if not inconsistent, teaching on sex, marriage, and the family.

1. The ministry and death of Christianity’s founder. In contrast to Moses and Muhammad, Jesus died young and violently. He had neither wife nor children.

Jesus is not a model for active sexuality, marriage, or family. The short ministry preceding his death, moreover, most resembled that of a Cynic philosopher or Elijah-like prophet. He was itinerant and demanded that his disciples imitate him. In the Gospels, furthermore, Jesus’s teachings are at once nonsystematic and radical.

2. The character of the founding experience. Unlike Judaism and Islam, which formed societies based on the words and exemplary deeds of a prophet, Christianity took its origins from experiences and convictions connected to the death and resurrection of Jesus. The resurrection is the key. Jesus was not re-suscitated in order to continue his mortal life, but entered into a full share of God’s life and power. Through the Holy Spirit, furthermore, he gave other humans a share in that same life and power, a gift of “eternal life.” The resurrection as source of true life marks a real departure from the this-worldly perceptions of Torah. The New Testament interprets the blessing of Abraham, not in terms of many biological descendents and a prosperous and safe life on the land, but in terms of “the promise that is the Holy Spirit.” For early Christians, then, fullness of life is not the result of the natural processes of the body but the paradoxical expression of death and resurrection. A split between spirit and body results, but one that is different from Plato’s mind-body distinction. Christians meant that there was a gap between natural human capacity (the body) and divine gift (the Holy Spirit).

3. The intense eschatology of early Christians. In one way or another, all New Testament compositions agree with Paul that “the frame of this world is passing away” (1 Cor. 7:31 [Doc. 2–6]), whether they think of this “passing away”

in temporal terms—the world will come to an end soon—or in more existential terms as a “new creation” (2 Cor. 5:17; Gal. 6:15). For no early Christian was “this age” a sufficient measure of reality or worth. The death and resurrection of Jesus introduces a new age, which already participates in the “age to come.”

Jesus is therefore more than a new Moses, a declarer of law; he is the “final Adam,” the “new human” into whose image his followers are to be formed.

However the eschaton is understood, at the very least it means that the ordinary round of “marrying and giving in marriage” as well as of “buying and selling”

is called into question (Luke 17:26–30; 1 Cor. 7:29–31 [Doc. 2–6]).

4. Early Christianity’s lack of sociological and cultural definition. The Christian religion did not grow out of a natural kinship group or nation. Christians formed an intentional community whose boundaries required negotiation with both Judaism and Hellenism, with elements from each accepted and rejected.

Gentile idolatry was rejected as well as (explicitly) its philosophy—though much crept in—while a number of distinctive Greco-Roman moral values were 80

l u k e t i m o t h y j o h n s o n a n d m a r k d . j o r d a n embraced. Similarly, they rejected Jewish circumcision and ritual observance, while holding firmly to the covenantal ideals of Law and Prophets. While the founding experience of the new religion was distinctive, it drew eclectically if purposefully from older and more stable traditions within its environment.

Given the extraordinary character of the Christian experience and claims, the perilousness of its early years, the pluralism of the world within which it defined itself, and the haphazard production of its normative texts, it should be no surprise to find the teaching of the New Testament on family, marriage, and sexuality to be less than consistent.

f a m i l y, h o u s e h o l d , a n d e k k l e s i a

Family was of obvious importance in Israel: the children of Abraham are less a nation in the political sense than a household
(oikos),
an extended kinship system. The family was no less significant in Greco-Roman culture: the household
(oikos)
was the basic unit for mapping the social world.

The New Testament itself contains some positive appreciation of the natural family. Two of the Gospels pay positive attention to Jesus’s family of origins. In Matthew, Joseph is a heroic protector who preserves the life of the infant Messiah (Matt. 1–2). In Luke’s Gospel, Mary exemplifies those who belong to Jesus’s true family because they “hear the word of God and keep it” (Luke 1–2; 8:15).

During his ministry Jesus is shown sharing the hospitality of households and is considered by foes as overly fond of household celebrations; he is no ascetic like John the Baptist (see Luke 7:31–50). Jesus is also fond of children and makes the manner of receiving children a mark of the rule of God he proclaims (see Mark 9:14–29, 33–37, 42–48; 10:13–16, 35–45).

Households also played an important role in the early mission. The Acts of the Apostles shows the good news spreading through the conversion of entire households (Acts 10:24–48; 16:14–34). Early letters assume the household as the natural place for families as well as the meeting place for the congregations.

Leaders of households tend to become leaders of local assemblies or churches
(ekklesiai)
. Parenting skills serve to qualify for leadership in the assembly. Moral instruction for households developed in Greco-Roman philosophy is applied to Christian families, mitigating only slightly the patriarchal structures of ancient households.

But the New Testament has as much by way of direct challenge to the natural family. In the Gospels of Mark and John, Jesus is at odds with his natural family, which does not recognize him (Mark 3:20–35; 6:1–6; John 7:1–9). Jesus says he has nowhere to lay his head (Matt. 8:20; Luke 9:58) and must depend on the hospitality of others (Luke 10:38–42). He calls his disciples to a radical renun-ciation of natural family: they are to leave parents, spouses, and children in order to follow him (Luke 9:57–62; 14:25–33 [Doc. 2–5]). Jesus’s followers form
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with him a fictive kinship group, a family gathered around the prophet: those who listen to him are his mother and father, sister and brother (Luke 8:15, 19– 21; Mark 3:34).

The same challenge to family continued in early Christian communities.

The
ekklesia
gathered on the basis of faith, not natural kinship ties. Members were called out of their previous lives to participate in this more public and heterogeneous body. A distinctive feature of this movement was its use of fictive kinship language. The founder of a community was its father (1 Cor. 4:15) and members called each other “brother and sister” (1 Cor. 1:10; Rom. 16:1). Such language strengthened bonds between members and provided an alternative to the natural family. And since the ideals of the assembly were more egalitarian than patriarchal (see Gal. 3:28; Col. 3:10–11), this alternative family also became a source of stress within natural families, especially when the fictive family of the
ekklesia
held its meetings in a household run on conventional lines (see,
e.g.
1 Cor. 11:3–16; 1 Tim. 2:11–15; 6:1–2).

s e x a n d m a r r i a g e i n e s c h a t o l o g i c a l

On the positive side, Jesus appears to approve of marriages (or at least weddings!) by his miracle at a wedding (John 2:1–12). And he uses traditional biblical language for covenant when he speaks of himself as “the bridegroom” (Luke 5:34). Jesus is also far stricter concerning divorce than any Greco-Roman or Jewish teacher. In the earliest form of his statement on divorce, Jesus forbids it absolutely (Mark 10:2–12; Luke 16:18), a prohibition known, approved, and reported by Paul (Doc. 2–6). In Matthew 5:31 and 19:3–9 a partially modified form of the prohibition is attributed to Jesus: divorce is allowed only on the grounds of the partner’s sexual immorality
(porneia)
.

In the more radical form of the prohibition, Jesus calls Moses’s allowance of divorce (see Deut. 24:1–4) a concession to human hardness of heart. He bases his demand of absolute fidelity on the original state of humanity in Eden. Mark has Jesus quote the first creation account in Genesis 1:27 (Doc. 1–1 in chapter 1: God “made them male and female”) in direct connection with the second in Gen. 2:24 (Doc. 2–1: “for this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife and the two shall become one flesh,” Mark 10:6–7).

Since they are one flesh, God has joined them, and humans should not separate them (Mark 10:8–9). If either husband or wife divorce and marry again, they commit adultery (Mark 10:11–12), and if anyone marries a divorced person, he or she commits adultery (Luke 16:18).

Paul is sometimes considered an opponent of marriage, but the majority of statements in his letters support it strongly. He tells the Thessalonians to “abstain from fornication, that each one of you know how to take a wife in holiness and honor, not with lustful passion like the Gentiles who do not know God”

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l u k e t i m o t h y j o h n s o n a n d m a r k d . j o r d a n (1 Thess. 4:4–5; see also the positive statements in Heb. 13:4 and 1 Pet. 3:1–7).

Paul approves of community leaders who have been faithful to one wife (1 Tim.

3:2, 12) and widows who have been married to but one husband (1 Tim. 5:9).

Paul includes marriage with food and drink among “all the things that God has created good” and considers those who forbid marriage to be “liars whose consciences are seared” (1 Tim. 4:3). He wants younger widows to “marry, bear children, and manage their households” rather than be a burden on the community’s meager financial resources (1 Tim. 5:14). He tells his delegate Titus that older women should instruct younger women to love their husbands and children and be good managers of households (Titus 2:4).