Posted on 07/27/2010 6:07:29 PM PDT by Brian Kopp DPM
July 23, 2010
(RNS) Is contraception a sin? The very suggestion made Bryan Hodge and his classmates at Chicago’s Moody Bible Institute laugh.
As his friends scoffed and began rebutting the oddball idea, Hodge found himself on the other side, poking holes in their arguments. He finished a bachelor’s degree in biblical theology at Moody and earned a master’s degree at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School.
Now, more than a decade later, he is trying to drive a hole the size of the ark through what has become conventional wisdom among many Christians: that contraception is perfectly moral.
His book, “The Christian Case Against Contraception,” was published in November. Hodge, a former Presbyterian pastor who is now a layman in the conservative Orthodox Presbyterian Church, realizes his mission is quixotic.
In the 50 years since the birth-control pill hit the market, contraception in all its forms has become as ubiquitous as the minivan, and dramatically changed social mores as it opened the possibilities for women.
No less than other Americans, Christians were caught up in the cultural conflagration. In a nation where 77 percent of the population claims to be Christian, 98 percent of women who have ever had sexual intercourse say they’ve used at least one method of birth control.
The pill is the most preferred method, followed closely by female sterilization (usually tying off fallopian tubes).
“People are no longer ... thinking about it,” says Hodge, 36, who had to agree with a Christian publisher who rejected his book on grounds that contraception is a nonstarter, a settled issue.
“People don’t even ask if there is anything possibly morally wrong about it.”
For more than 19 centuries, every Christian church opposed contraception.
Under pressure from social reformers such as Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger, the Anglican Communion (and its U.S. branch, the Episcopal Church) became the first to allow married couples with grave reasons to use birth control.
That decision cracked a door that, four decades later, was thrown wide open with the relatively safe, effective birth-control pill, which went on the market in this country in the summer of 1960. Virtually every Protestant denomination had lifted the ban by the mid-1960s.
Even evangelicals within mainline Protestant and nondenominational churches embraced the pill as a way that married couples could enjoy their God-given sexuality without fear of untimely pregnancy.
“It was a reaction to that whole Victorian thing where sex was seen as dirty,” says Hodge, who lives in Pennsylvania.
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Official Mormon teaching through the late 1960s was against birth control. But by 1998, the church’s General Handbook of Instructions made it clear that only a couple can decide how many children to have and no one else is to judge.
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There remains one massive holdout among major Christian churches—the Roman Catholic Church, which expressed its opposition in no uncertain terms in Pope Paul VI’s 1968 encyclical, Humanae Vitae.
To separate the two functions of marital intimacy—the life-transmitting from the bonding—is to reject God’s design, Paul VI wrote.
“The fundamental nature of the marriage act, while uniting husband and wife in the closest intimacy, also renders them capable of generating new life—and this as a result of laws written into the actual nature of man and of woman,” Humanae Vitae proclaimed.
Janet Smith, a Catholic seminary professor whose writing and talks have been influential for two decades, puts it this way: “God himself is love, and it’s the very nature of love to overflow into new life. Take the baby-making power out of sex, and it doesn’t express love. All it expresses is physical attraction.”
The church’s ban on contraception stunned many, including one of the doctors who created the pill, Harvard’s John Rock, a Catholic. By and large, Catholics went with the culture rather than the church.
A 2005 Harris Poll found 90 percent of adult Catholics support contraception, just 3 percentage points lower than the general adult population.
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“The ban on contraception is completely irrelevant to Catholics,” said Jon O’Brien, president of the group Catholics for Choice. “We know the position the hierarchy has on contraception is fundamentally flawed, and that’s why it’s ignored en masse.”
The Rev. Ken Vialpando, pastor of St. Joseph Catholic Church in Ogden, Utah, places much of the blame for Catholics’ disobedience on priests who are reticent to talk about church teachings on marriage and sex, or who bought into the 1960s notion that one’s conscience was a sufficient guide.
“What if our consciences are not fully informed?” Vialpando asked. “How can we fault the people if they haven’t heard about it and recognize the purpose or meaning of marriage?”
Smith, whose recorded 1994 talk “Contraception, Why Not?” has sold more than 1 million copies, says young adult evangelicals and Catholics, including men studying for the priesthood, seem more open to the possibility that contraception is a sin.
The pendulum may yet swing, she said.
“They are going to have a huge impact,” says Smith, who holds an ethics chair at Sacred Heart Major Seminary in Detroit. “They already are.”
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The Rev. Greg Johnson of Sandy, Utah, who is on the board of the National Association of Evangelicals, says most evangelicals remain firmly in the contraceptive camp, even if some stress that it should not be used frivolously or to avoid children altogether.
A recent Gallup poll of the association, and another of its board, found 90 percent support for contraception.
Such statistics are disheartening for evangelicals such as Hodge and James Tour, a renowned chemist specializing in nanotechnology at Rice University in Houston, who believe contraception is not biblical.
Rather than heeding Christian theology to be “agents of life in the world,” Christians have largely adopted culture’s philosophic naturalism, which considers sex an itch to be scratched, Hodge said.
“They have the same view of conception that atheists have.”
Evangelicals’ dearth of understanding about sexuality and marriage explains why they have trouble arguing against gay marriage, he contends. Contracepted sex, in his view, is no different from gay sex: It’s not life-giving either way.
Tour, a Jew who converted to evangelical Christianity as a teenager, like Catholics endorses “natural family planning”—avoiding intercourse during the woman’s monthly fertile cycle—but wonders if Christians ought to forgo even that measure of family planning.
He says young lustful men who have had unfettered access to their wives actually welcome a message of self-restraint.
“The women are looking for relief. The men are looking for relief,” Tour says. “They’re like, `I want that. I want to live in peace. I want to live in fulfillment.’”
Throwing out contraception “is more trusting in God. It ultimately lets him decide what is the right number (of children),” Tour said.
“Protestants in 30 or 50 years are going to say, `My God. What were we thinking in those generations?’?”
Flawed analogies. Pregnancy is a part of the healthy, natural, and life-giving process of sexual intimacy in marriage.
Taking safety precautions, or prudence in investments is not the same thing as preventing something healthy, natural, and life-giving.
If you have a broken seat belt, or you can't see the road, or you cannot research and investment....you refrain from driving, crossing the road, or investing.
If you cannot afford kids....you refrain from getting married and having sex. End of story.
John Calvin is not God. He was a fallible human being like the rest of us. I disagree with him on this point.
Christians get to do that.
Noted. Thank you.
Ping to post 42.
It is not a “false distinction.”
Life begins at conception.
Not before.
The Onan incident clearly refers to methods that waste the seed, such as barrier methods.
It is wise and prudent to oppose abortifacient hormonal contraceptives. But its not Christian to make this false distinction and accept barrier methods.
Hormonal contraceptives are immoral because by nature they are contraceptive. They are doubly immoral because they are also abortifacient.
Your dismissal of Calvin's wisdom on this issue is part and parcel of mainstream Protestantism's falling away on moral theology. Thankfully the best and brightest in the OPC are swimming against this tide.
Noted,
I just agree that if the consistent witness of Christianity both Catholic and Protestant has been to oppose artificial birth control until the 1930 Lambeth Conference, perhaps we should take a closer look at its acceptance by so many Christians today. Do you think earlier Christians taught it was wrong simply because they were anti-woman?
I believe in Church teaching on this matter. But I don’t think the arguments put forth by the Church are exclusive to Catholic teaching on the nature of marriage.
Christian_Capitalist, maybe you could assist Dr. Eckleburg on this issue?
Go ahead and preach fanaticism. Protestants will happily accept those Roman Catholics who realize Rome is in error on so many things, barrier contraception being only one of them.
Life begins at conception.
Not before.
Most Christian ethicists I know of, both Roman Catholic and Protestant, even while condemning both, do distinguish between the prevention of pregnancy (contraception) and the destruction of it, involving homicide, by abortion, IUD's or the pill. Killing a human of course is much more grave a sin than preventing a natural blessing...even if both involve sexual reproduction.
Many Christians, especially in evangelical Protestant circles (of which I am in...) oddly enough, have trouble distinguishing greater and lesser sins however.
All sin though involves lacking faith--and ultimately avoiding the blessings that come from walking by faith.
Thank you for that Scriptural truth. I learn something splendid every day on this forum.
God does not lie.
God hates sin. Read your Bible.
" The LORD trieth the righteous: but the wicked and him that loveth violence his soul hateth." -- Psalm 11:5
But to claim there is no scriptural basis for teaching that birth control is immoral is simply beyond credulity.
Christianity has always, unanimously declared that contraception is inherently wrong, based on the Onan incident and Natural Law.
Its only within the last 80 years, but primarily since 1960, that Protestantism has reinterpreted these issues to say that contraception is morally licit.
When Christian moral theology unanimously teaches that something is inherently evil, then certain subsets of Christianity only in the last several generations claim otherwise, that is by definition proof of apostasy in moral theology, one's personal interpretation of scripture notwithstanding.
If we disagree with the entire patrimony of Christianity on this issue, we cannot possibly be correct, and we must examine ourselves to find our error.
From BIRTH CONTROL AND GENESIS 38:
We can look at Genesis 38 itself to see that the argument that Onan was killed because of his refusing to fulfill the obligation to raise up children is insufficient. This theory that God is punishing Onan merely because he failed to fulfill the Levirate rule makes God capricious. For example, in this very chapter of Genesis, not only does Judah not get punished for doing the very same thing as Onan did, (withholding his son Selah from her), but Selah himself withholds himself from her. Given that Judah himself compounds the problem by making her a harlot, Onan's specific act of destroying seed takes a larger picture. Judah had promised to give Tamar his son to her (v.11), when he was older. Judah himself is deceitful, and he himself, when caught, admits that he is a worse sinner than herself (v. 26). Shelah himself, who was now grown up, (v. 14), also was deceitful, should have taken her as her husband, and raised up children. He did not. Tamar notices this, but no deaths of either Judah or Shelah. Thus, they were all in a sense rebellious, and did not do what they should have. So, what is the difference between Judah, Onan, and Shelah? The only substantive fact is that Onan went into her lawfully as he married her (unlike Judah who went into her unlawfully), but only Onan destroyed the seed. Ultimately any attempt to exclude this as the principle grounds of Onan's death, is a pure attempt at expediency.
"Biblical schoar Manuel Miguens has pointed out that a close examination of the text shows that God condemned Onan for the specific action he performed, not for his anti-Levirate intentions. He notes that the translation 'he spilled his seed on the ground' fails to do full justice to the Hebrew expression. The Hebrew verb shichet never means to spill or waste. Rather, it means to act perversely. The text also makes it clear that his perverse action was related towards the ground, not against his brother. "His perversion or corruption consists in his action itself, not precisely in the result and goal of his act...In a strict interpretation the text says that what was evil in the sight of the Lord was what Onan actually did (asher asah); the emphasis in this sentence of verse 10 does not fall on what he intended to achieve, but on what he did. Manuel Miguens, "Biblical Thoughts on Human Sexuality," Human Sexuality in our Time, ed.(Boston: St. Paul Editions, 1979) 112-115. Martin Luther himself noted this fact, and argued from this that birth control is even worse than adultery!!!
What "contempt?"
I should have written “inherent distaste.” So much for trying to write from memory.
I am reading Father Thomas Euteneuer’s book “Demonic Abortion.’ In it he writes that the culture of death’s unholy trinity is abortion, contraception and comprehensive sex education.
Also, NFP is a form of birth control. It is used as such. Now, it doesn't kill any babies, but the mentality is often the same. Rather than being used only in dire situations, it is taught in every pre Cana class and many CCD classes. In other words, the expectation is that good Catholics will limit children using NFP (it works great the other way too).
Read your Bible.
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