I'm so happy to see someone write this!! The Catholic understanding of sex is so beautiful and has led me to a deeper level of surrender. If sex is just for pleasure, and the procreative aspect can be left out, then why aren't same-sex acts also permissible?
Same-sex acts totally ignore why God made sex; while sex is for pleasure, it's also for children. They ignore the existence of children. And they ignore, or never figured out, that sex and children can lead to unity and character and closeness.
Current Protestant here but I’m exploring Catholicism and it seems everyone I’m reading lately is Catholic. There definitely is a presupposition within evangelical spaces that men are sexual and women aren’t. There is always an assumption that men have the higher sex drive. So much “if we just coax the woman the right way she’ll put out” kind of attitude. It’s quite disgusting. And yes, there is def an assumption that you’ll use some form of birth control. We currently have 4 girls and I’m often asked if we’re done. Personally, I think it’s pretty bizarre to ask a married person why they have sex. But apparently, amongst 20 or so couples in my bible church small group all but 2 men (my husband and another man who recently had his 6th kid) have had vasectomies.
The thing I found most disturbing in my research was the implication that you need to meet all your husband's sexual needs to the point of non reciprocal sexual action on demand (the whole quote about the hand job being the most obvious example) if you want any chance of having YOUR (non sexual ) needs met. Wives are often so much more genuinely needy and vulnerable than their husbands in a marriage (the first few weeks after childbirth spring to mind) that this honestly seems just straight up exploitive.
The quote from Saint Paul is “husbands love your wives as Christ loved the Church” not “husbands, love your wives when they readily put out.” It seemed very tit for tat and transactional.
This is fascinating! I have attended evangelical churches for over a decade, though I have never read a book on evangelical sex (or Catholic sex! Or actually any sex books at all.) And I’ve only read one evangelical marriage book. It was the worst book ever- Dr Emerson Eggerichs Love and Respect. He does include a short section on sex (under men’s needs, of course) and shares an anecdote about how women naturally do not enjoy sex, but we had ought to put up with it because our husbands need it and of course it is over so quickly.
I’ve also sat through women’s ministry events during which we were counseled by the pastor’s wife that sex for men is like talking for women- they need sex, we need to gab. I feel strongly that this is baloney. I can think of lots of reasons why a woman might not enjoy sex (maybe she is one of the one in four women who has been sexually abused or assaulted in this country. Maybe she has issues that can be addressed by a competent gynecologist. Maybe her husband is just lousy in bed and they can work on that…)
Another fascinating thing is that the above was all experienced in white evangelical church. We recently started attending Black evangelical church and it is completely different regarding women and sex. There is definitely still an expectation that we are in control of our family’s size, but it’s expected that women enjoy sex. I’m really grateful for this. I did not grow up in white evangelical churches, but I can see how there is this culture of shame around sex for women.
I had no idea church was going to be so complicated when I became a Christian.
The Catholic perspective on sex is so interesting! I have literally never heard that. I do know evangelicals who have lots and lots of babies but I would say that birth control has been tacitly or explicitly encouraged the entire time I’ve been in church. I grew up in a mainline denomination and it was definitely strongly encouraged there and over 3 kid families got plenty of side eye. When I got pregnant after 11 years of unexplained infertility, my mom’s first response was to ask me what I was going to do birth control after the baby was born.
Thank you so much for sharing your experience!! This is actually super interesting.
I definitely get the impression that reading a whole bunch of books on this stuff isn't normal for most people, lol. It's actually super helpful and enlightening to hear just what a normal, lived experience is with this stuff. The differences between white and black church culture is super interesting too...I wonder how I could research that?
That Love and Respect book sounds so bad that it almost sounds like a parody. That's insane. (And un-biblical...did the guy ever read Song of Songs?!)
A wonderful weave of Catholic intimacy/sacrament. Something I noted missing (since my wife and I are well past birthing years) is the "rules" remain the same for the older married. And, who knows (Sarah and Elizabeth come to mind) what lengths God goes to for couples to remain open to miraculous conceptions.
Also, your difficult path of kindness to what you posit as Evangelical thinking is not just for Evangelicals. Many Catholics have the same understanding. Maturity in faith is a never-ending process, so behaving with sacred attention remains important even when we know these things either early or late in a marriage.
I grew up Evangelical and converted to Catholicism in my twenties (right around the time I got married, ha!) -- the biggest difference regarding sex was the "gift of self" paradigm (Catholic) vs. "reward that married people get" paradigm (Evangelical). "If you can just wait, everything is going to be fine. But if you don't wait, you'll ruin the reward. It won't be as good." That said, I do remember an Evangelical youth pastor telling us that sex was just part--and a small part at that-- of the experience of married love. I remember being baffled - "Then why do we talk about it so much?" This does align with the later understanding that I gained from some (very, very surface level) understanding of ToB, which doesn't get to things like sex (and other ways the gift is lived out) until it's well established that our bodies are gifts, given to the world.
Thank you so much for writing this -- this must have taken so much time, and it's so well done. I'm glad you did it, and I love that you ended with the fact that we have enough commonalities for conversation.
Appreciate this! While I don’t agree with every aspect of Catholic teachings on sex, I find that even as a Protestant I agree with far more of it than I do with mainline evangelical teaching expressed in the quotes you shared. It’s so much richer and more biblical. But I do know lots of everyday evangelicals who live out an understanding of sexuality closer to a Catholic (and I think more biblical) view. For better or for worse, the freedom most of our denominations ascribe to (or the silence on the matter) means that there is a wide variety in the convictions and practices of evangelicals.
I'd be curious what parts of it you don't agree with, and how you don't see them as Biblical. Evangelical Christianity is something I'm very much outside of, but I'd really like to understand. Not least of which because more and more it seems like Catholics and Evangelicals agree on what living a Christian life should look like even while our styles of worship remain really different.
To your question - The Bible isn’t clear enough about “family planning” for me to be as dogmatic about it as the Catholic Church is. I guess avoiding sex around ovulation seems just as artificial to me as using a barrier or pulling out or any other sexual act that doesn’t end with a man ejaculating in a vagina. Allowing those things + NFP or not allowing family planning at all seem to both be positions that are more coherent. I realize you guys have a whole philosophy that supports your position and I see it as compelling enough to be a really beautiful ideal, but not compelling enough to define anything outside of NFP as mortal sin or to account for all the complex situations a person or a couple might find themselves in and the different ways Scripture comes to bear on their situation.
A couple real life examples I’m specifically thinking of:
1) A woman with long, irregular cycles - often this means very few “safe” days with weeks or months of abstinence. How do we also obey 1 Corinthians 7?
2) The husband and wife are not in agreement. Perhaps one is an unbeliever, perhaps this topic just wasn’t on the radar when they got engaged, or perhaps one or both of them has just changed over the years. How does a wife submit to her husband and/or how do they both obey 1 Corinthians 7?
3) A wife has severe pain with penetrative sex. She’s dying to have a baby so only has penetrative sex during fertile times. Her heart’s in the right place but because she’s trying to address the physical and psychological aspects of her sexual pain she sometimes has sex without the pressure for it to end in penetration. Getting to the point where sex doesn’t hurt anymore will allow her life and marriage to be far more fruitful than if it hurts forever.
I guess over all I’m just a lot more concerned with a couple’s reasons for avoiding having babies than I am the details of how they avoid (although I’m totally against anything that allows fertilization but prevents implantation). You can be a strict NFP user and totally resent it and be just as selfish in your reasons for avoiding pregnancy as a couple who uses any other method of avoiding pregnancy.
I’m definitely open to learning more about the Catholic view and would very much welcome book/article/podcast recommendations on the topic (already put the ones you listed at the end on my book list).
Also, just something I wanted to clarify - while Catholics and Protestants should certainly agree on the majority of moral issues, our differences go much deeper than worship styles. I think even the way I handle the family planning question demonstrates this. Scripture is my final and ultimate authority so I will always prioritize the very clear teachings in the Bible (don’t deprive each other of sex; wives, submit to your husbands, children are a blessing, etc.) over the not as clear ones. The bigger issue though, is how we’re reconciled to God. My righteousness does nothing for my standing before him. Only Christ’s death for my sins and his righteousness covering me can make me acceptable to God. Even my faith is a gift from him. My good works and obedience should flow from love for him and a truly repentant heart, but my security as His child and my hope of Heaven has nothing to do with my obedience. He will complete what He has begun in me, He will chasten me when I sin, and He will never lose me. My hope lies entirely in the sacrifice of Christ and the grace of God and my obedience is merely a thankful and imperfect response to His overwhelming kindness in saving me.
Ok, that makes sense. I see where you're coming from.
For the situations you mentioned...all I have to say is that you're right that if Catholic understanding of sex is wrong that the limits we have are a huge burden that's unfair to place on people. If we're right though, and birth control is a moral evil rather than a moral neutral, than none of those situations justify sin (anymore than, say, euthanasia or abortion are justified by the myrad of horrible situations people try to escape by using them). In those situations, being faithful to Christ looks like picking up our cross and following Him.
So...I encourage you to check out those books I suggested and see whether or not our position is true. Sometimes living a Christian life means taking a path marked with a lot of suffering.
You seem to be under the impression that Catholics believe we earn our salvation. We don't believe that. We believe that Salvation is an unearned gift of God, same as you do. We are saved by accepting it, and faith is also a gift from God.
That isn't to say that there aren't serious differences between a Christianity that ascribes to Sola Scriptura and one that doesn't. But it seems like you don't really understand what we actually teach.
We believe the letter of James when he says that, "Faith without works is dead." We also have a different understanding of grace than you do: it doesn't "cover" us, it transforms us. We accept the unearned gift of salvation by doing our (very imperfect) best to live as Christ has commanded. He knows we can never live up to it, but as we try, He gives us the grace, the interior changes and strength, to get closer and closer to it. To get closer and closer to what He's created us to be. Like any relationship, that means saying sorry when we mess up (repenting...repeatedly) and it means showing by our actions that, yes, this person is important to me. It's like a marriage: if you're doing it right, you get closer as time goes on (even if you start out in a less than ideal place). If you neglect and abuse the other person, you get further apart.
I believe the Bible supports that interpretation. Paul talks about working out his salvation in "fear and trembling". Christ tells us if we don't take care of the poor that when we get to Heaven He'll say, "I was hungry and you gave me no food, thirsty and you gave me no drink....depart from me." Christ even gives His apostles the ability to forgive sins, "Whatever you forgive is forgiven them, whatever you retain is retained." Why would He give the Apostles that sort of authority if, "once saved, always saved"? What would be the need? And why does St. Paul say his suffering , "makes up for what is lacking in the cross of Christ"? If it's not at all something we participate in, why would his suffering matter one way or the other?
Hopefully that helps explain things. Yes, there's very big differences between us... I find that makes the similarities more striking. And gives me a lot of hope.
Totally agree that suffering for obedience is always right and worthwhile. This stuff is definitely worth wrestling with.
I’ve not read any books on Catholic theology; I only have what’s expressed in the words and actions of Catholics or former Catholics I know. I’ll have to pick their brains!
I would agree that grace transforms us, but it’s Christ’s righteousness that covers us and makes us acceptable to God. And that we will get closer and closer to Christ in our sanctification. While I don’t believe you can lose your salvation, I do think if your life isn’t showing fruit of salvation, you should certainly examine your heart to be sure you are in Christ. And that evangelical churches are full of people who aren’t truly regenerate, but are clinging to “once saved, always saved” in a way that cheapens grace and isn’t biblical and ultimately gives them a very dangerous false sense of security. I take “faith without works is dead very seriously”.
Could you share the reference for where Paul says his suffering “makes up for what is lacking in the cross of Christ"?
Thanks for your explanations and taking the time to respond!
If you ever want to hear what Catholics teach straight from them, you can always Google "Catechism of the Catholic Church" and then whatever subject you're curious about too.
Rebekah you gave a really thoughtful response, I’m sorry to be so brief. Just chiming in for a quick analogy that may or may not help shed light on the difference between NFP and a barrier method (re: your comment that avoiding sex around ovulation seems just as artificial as barrier / pulling out). I think comparing it to eating a delicious piece of chocolate cake is the best I can do that makes sense to me.
If I want to *not* add 400 extra calories to my intake today, maybe I’m trying to lose weight or something, avoiding eating a piece of chocolate cake is a totally natural thing to do. If I eat the chocolate cake but then throw it up later … or chew on it to get the delicious taste and spit it out before the consequence of having to digest it.. those are fairly unnatural ways to eat and enjoy food most would agree. You either choose to eat the cake, and you get the consequence (the calories and the lovely pleasure of the delish chocolate cake) or you choose to not eat the cake and get those consequences (sadly no cake enjoyment, but also no added calories).
But we don’t really get to have it both ways.. changing or manipulating the natural way our body works to have cake enjoyment but no calories.
I wish I had time tonight to address some other points you made - I’m sure others smarter than I can handle it!! The *very best* explanations on Catholic teaching and especially about sexuality, I have found, are by Fr. Mike Schmitz, either on his Catechism In a Year podcast or you can search the subject matter and his name in YouTube and find some great talks of his.
"It's not a serious occasion where we process into the bedroom carrying candles, chanting Latin and burning incense or anything like that (though I suppose you could if you wanted to)."
Had a good laugh here. As a Catholic with many Non-Denom friends, I've had many conversations about this topic. Usually they're slightly horrified. I love that the Church addresses every aspect, even the most intimate of our lives.
The older I get, the more I realize how "weird" being a practicing Catholic is, lol. The biggest culture shock for me has actually been realizing that there's no mandatory Church attendance on Sundays for most Evangelicals. Even the ones who go on most Sundays see it as optional.
While we're over here like, "willfully missing mass on Sunday is a mortal sin!"
There's a new-testament verse, "don't forsake your own assembling together, as is the habit of some." But that's the only verse most of us evangelicals quote about church. It's good, but not a necessity.
The French court also had public spectators at meals and during the queen's childbirth, and Marie had to appear in front of the French court naked to symbolically forsake her native Austria to marry into the French royal family.
Thanks for writing this. It is a succinct and insightful contrast/comparison.
I’m Catholic and I find I can’t read the sex part of most Protestant marriage books for the reasons you mentioned. The separation of sex and babies plus the focus on pleasure being the main point is truly so different and has big implications for differing views of marriage as a whole. My non-theological impression is that for Catholics, openness to life is a default in marriage unless there are serious reasons to avoid (licitly - and that’s difficult to keep up if your reasons aren’t so serious) vs. for Protestants (and our culture at large) the default is to use birth control unless or until you want a baby.
I think the implications also spill over into other matters. If sex really is primarily about pleasure, it’s easy to see God as unfair for giving only heterosexual people that privilege. Whereas for Catholics, chastity is necessary for every state in life. It involves sex for married couples - and sometimes periods of abstinence - as well as accepting any babies that result.
When people ask about Catholic teaching on gay marriage (or IVF or whatever adjacent issue), it feels like nothing short of the entirety of the Theology of the Body will do to explain!
Yep. Everyone has to bear the cross in their bodies and embrace that cross out of love. And that ALWAYS involves saying no to your desires at some point or another.
Now if we could just get our leadership to live that out a bit better...😬
An excellent Protestant book to investigate for a (protestant) critique of popular evangelical teachings on sex and intimacy is The Great Sex Rescue by Sheila Wray Gregoire, a Canadian author. She and her husband have also written The Good Girl's Guide To Great Sex and the Good Guy's Guide To Great Sex if you're interested in actual advice for newly married couples. She also has a blog at www.baremarriage.com which has an extensive archive of posts about evangelical marriage teachings and advice for marriage in and out of the bedroom. I highly recommend her writing and would say (as a Protestant) that pretty much everything she writes is healthy and Christ-centered from a Protestant perspective.
Thank you! I appreciate the suggestions. I've actually poked around on her blog a bit and was very relieved to find a more healthy view of sex and relationships.
Thank you so much for this article. As a Catholic trying to navigate marriage, this is very helpful.
I am curious, though, about whether mutual masturbation is really forbidden in the Catholic church. My husband and I tried to find the answer to that in the Catechism, but the Catechism does not clearly forbid it. Considering the Catholic church's focus on life creation, forbidding makes sense. But I wonder if you believe that the secondary sources are worth taking as the church's official stance.
Once again, I appreciate this article a lot. Thank you!
The official Church teaching is that every sexual act involving geneltalia has to end in a way that's open to life. If you haven't already read it, Humane Vitae (the Church's letter explaining why birth control is immoral) goes into detail on why that is. Mutual masterbation to completion (ie, male orgasm) is wrong for basically the same reasons that birth control and "pulling out" are wrong.
That said, it's acceptable to do so as foreplay, just not to completion.
I don't think "secondary sources" are worth taking as official Church stance, no. Some of them are, to be blunt, written by crazy people. I don't see Humane Vitae as a secondary source, because it's directly from the Pope acting in his official capacity.
The reason I used secondary sources in this article is because I was trying to compare/contrast popular writing (ie, not academic ) on Christian sexuality from Evangelical and Catholic popular psychologists and talking heads. Those are the books that are most accessible and that I think show the "on the ground" attitude to this stuff.
I'm protestant, but I agree with much of what you've described about the Catholic understanding of sex. On the other hand we have 8 kids, so I'm not the typical protestant. However, I think the one thing that virtually every exploration of sex ignores is how difficult and expensive it is to raise children. I suggest this, more than any other consideration, affects our attitude toward sex. Sex creates children ( at least part of the time) and that difficulty demands closeness and unity, which will lead to more sex and more children in an endless, wonderful cycle. And the end of all this might be character growth and satisfying relationships, both with God and your spouse.
The danger in commenting on Protestant views on literally anything is that there's such a wide range! Since I've written this, I've found several other Protestants who have a similar viewpoint to mine on it.
I'm Protestant overall but love the Catholic view here! All sorts of evil was facilitated with the availability of the Pill. Thanks for the reading references-- will definitely check them out.
I’m a former Progressive Protestant and Wheaton College grad (so at least a former cultural Evangelical) who has now turned Byzantine Catholic. I had been progressive because of what I perceived to be a lack of consistency in much of Evangelical (though as discussed in other comments, Evangelicalism is too broad to make a one size fits all generalization) marital theology. If sex can be divorced from its procreative aspect and there are not necessarily roles in the Church for people not called to heterosexual marriage, then what’s to stop two gay people from marrying? I also met a number of young women at Wheaton who had been raised with misogynistic forms of marital theology though I will be clear this is not representative of all Evangelicalism, nor was I ever taught any of it directly while at Wheaton, where the wife was practically denied any agency in marriage. In some cases, meeting the husband’s needs included looking a certain way, for some wives were literally exhorted to “not let themselves go,” for their husbands would not be able to help themselves and cheat if their wives got fat and lost their looks. Once again, this is not representative of all Evangelicalism. I remember one of my roommates reading a book on marriage for a class that the professor teaching the class definitely disagreed with but was still representative of a wide enough swathe of American Evangelicalism. According to the author, the wife pretty much had to do everything the husband told her and could never say “no” to intercourse. At the time, we thought it was really feminist and the one bright spot for the author to have a whole section dedicated to artificial contraception, but since listening to the Rise and Fall of Mars Hill, I’ve thought otherwise. Of course the author supported artificial contraception. If he was teaching a theology where the wife had to meet the husband’s sexual needs at any time, then artificial contraception allowed him to use his wife as an object without consequences. From a more secular perspective, the more I learn about hormonal birth control and NFP, the more misogynistic I find hormonal birth control to be. I’m fully aware it’s often prescribed to alleviate symptoms of PCOS and endometriosis etc, though it doesn’t actually treat those issues, but for its general usage, it treats female fertility like a disease. It’s essentially a medication to stop the female body from functioning healthily and doing the one thing the male body can’t do. (By this standard, vasectomies would be considered misandristic as well.)
I'm having to hold myself back from a long rant on the pill and the state of OBGYN care in the United States in general...
Yes to all of this. The more I look into it, the more I see Protestant acceptance of birth control culturally paving the way for the sexual revolution and everything else that followed from it, including the gender identity stuff we have now. And that being preceded by a surprisingly viralent rejection of celibacy (i just had a very long conversation with a guy who identifys as old school, rejects birth control Protestant who had VERY strong opinions against anyone having a celibate vocation).
1) To an extent it seems as if it compares apples and oranges. An 'evangelical' book on sex is merely a book on sex written by an evangelical. It does not necessarily represent 'evangelical' thought, let alone serious evangelical thought.
And it certainly doesn't represent official thought. Whereas Catholic writings often do reflect official teachings.
2) And it compares modern 'evangelical thought' with modern 'Catholic thought' at a time when there is little evangelical thought... ie evangelicals have, by and large, abandoned church teaching on this issue. Reading a book written before 1930 or so would reveal a rather different perspective, let alone reading John Calvin et al.
3) It would be interesting to compare both to Scripture. Would love to do a long form exchange on that!
1.) I recognize that, especially since Evangelicals have such a wide range of belief. I've met Armenian, Calvinist, and "Bible cowboy Church" evangelical Christians who all love Jesus but disagree on a lot of the specifics. The reason I went with popular writing is because I thought that was the fair way to show what a lot of them believe. The books I cited are all from large evangelical organizations or are popular in those circles. Even if they're not 'official', they're widely accepted. One was even recommended to me by a Catholic I know who's married to an Evangelical as a book she found helpful.
(And who would be considered "official"? The SBC? Calvary Chapel? That's the other thing, there's really no "official" body that covers everyone).
I don't think it's apples to oranges, because I'm looking at what both groups see as the "approved" viewpoint. The closest to that that Evangelicals have is, for better or worse, widely accepted popular books by Christian writers claiming to write from a Biblical viewpoint (unless they're very academically inclined, which, give me some book recs!!).
2.) Church as defined by whom?
It's undeniable that popular perception of sexuality by mainstream Christianity has changed dramatically since 1930. I'm not interested in how Evangelicals viewed sex 90 years ago (at least, not for the purposes of this piece). I'm interested in what Protestant Evangelicals believe now.
3.) Agreed. I'd love to read that piece. Not sure I have the chops to write it.
2) Well, it may not be interesting to you, but in the light of the issue of ‘evangelical’ vs ‘Catholic’, it is an interesting issue. I would argue that the current condition right now (at least with the Catholics that I know) is that the may go to church as Catholics, but they live as Protestants in the sexual area.
3) I was hoping for an exchange :) But I have written a post on the Biblical view of birth control, at least. I haven’t ventured quite into all of sexual behaviour, but I am fully willing to :)
1) The ‘official’ stance would need to be come church document or confession, not merely a popular book. For all I know ‘Shades of Grey’ was popular with Catholics, but neither of us would look to it for Catholic theology on sexuality.
Should we drop the numbers? I feel like they're getting a bit cumbersome, lol.
I feel like if we're going to Church documents or confessions, we're getting into the weeds and not dealing with "mainstream" Christianity as it exists anymore. As an example, a Baptist Church in my area recently had a pastor who was Armenian leave, and a pastor who was Calvinist come in. Those are two very different views on how the economy of salvation works, and yet, both are considered Baptist and capable of pastoring that given Church. Yes, Church members left that church after the change, but that gets at the heart of it-- there doesn't seem to be a central authority. The old confessions and documents are treated with respect, but not authority (and isn't that part of the point of Sola Scriptura?).
And it's also worth pointing out a lot of the early reformers hold views that most Evangelical churches don't. Even the mainstream denominations that those reformers founded. Martin Luther had a profound respect for the Virgin Mary, but I've never heard of Marian devotion being promoted by a Lutheran community.
I see your point that I'm not dealing with the actual theology. And I see your point that a lot of Catholics behave like Protestants, or pagans, in the bedroom.
But I don't see a lot of books read and recommended by devoted Catholics promoting those attitudes. I do see books read and recommended by devoted Protestant Evangelicals promoting the attitudes I've described. That's why I felt comfortable comparing them.
I seriously don't think I have the time or energy that a Scriptural comparison would take. I'm a homeschooling mother of small children who writes in her spare time. I could recommend some authors to you if you'd like to do your own research on the Catholic viewpoint of it though.
Something else worth talking about...what would be your definition of a devoted Christian? I'm wondering if maybe we're missing each other in that point.
That's a great question. I think I will leave the answer to God, however. Only He sees the heart.
As a Protestant (of the old school, not the kind you've been writing about) my question for all Christians is... what do the Scriptures say. Maybe I'll take a link to your post and deal with the issues you deal with (and some you skipped) and write a post on what the Scriptures say.
I came back to this post bc I just read This Momentary Marriage by John Piper. I highly recommend it, it’s more about the theology of marriage and less of a marriage manual, which I think you would be interested in comparing/contrasting with Catholic theology of marriage. Piper does include a chapter on sex and his teaching on this was so fascinating and so completely different than anything I’ve heard before. I would love to hear what you think about it if you get a chance to read it.
I found a copy online and I've been browsing it...chapter 9 sounds a LOT like the teaching of the Catholic Church on celibate vocations (priests, nuns, consecrated virgins, etc). To the point that it's spooky.
The chapter on sex sounded very similar to what I've heard on Theology of the Body (theological treatment of the body and human sexuality by Pope St. John Paul II). The idea that sex and sexual pleasure in marriage points us to God and to a relationship with Him...yeah. Absolutely. There's a book called Theology of the Body for Beginners by Christopher West that I'd really recommend for more in that vein.
I'm going to read it more carefully and more than just picking random chapters and give you a more in depth response (and make sure I'm actually seeing what I think I'm seeing, which may mean I need to re-read some Catholic sources too). This looks like a really fantastic resource to check out, thank you for thinking of me and sharing it.
And it's exciting to see stuff that's so similar -- truth is truth is truth, and it's so very hopeful to see an example of the same truths coming from two different directions.
Oh man... my family went to the church John Piper pastored back during my middle/high school years. ha! I have not read This Momentary Marriage in a LONG time.
Been enjoying reading the comments on this (oldish) post! Very intriguing, and I think you pretty much described the evangelical view of married sexuality very well. Which is impressive.
A few months ago, I went through the book "Praying the Scriptures for Your Marriage" and the chapter on sex was infuriating in how there was NO MENTION OF FERTILITY OR BABIES. In a chapter on praying over your sex life! Wild.
Thank you, I will definitely check out Theology of the Body. Admittedly, I have not done a lot of reading in this area, but this is an absolutely new idea for me. I love your observation that truth is truth! And I agree that it’s very exciting to see resources from our different churches that are pointing in the same direction.
I'm so happy to see someone write this!! The Catholic understanding of sex is so beautiful and has led me to a deeper level of surrender. If sex is just for pleasure, and the procreative aspect can be left out, then why aren't same-sex acts also permissible?
Exactly.
Same-sex acts totally ignore why God made sex; while sex is for pleasure, it's also for children. They ignore the existence of children. And they ignore, or never figured out, that sex and children can lead to unity and character and closeness.
Current Protestant here but I’m exploring Catholicism and it seems everyone I’m reading lately is Catholic. There definitely is a presupposition within evangelical spaces that men are sexual and women aren’t. There is always an assumption that men have the higher sex drive. So much “if we just coax the woman the right way she’ll put out” kind of attitude. It’s quite disgusting. And yes, there is def an assumption that you’ll use some form of birth control. We currently have 4 girls and I’m often asked if we’re done. Personally, I think it’s pretty bizarre to ask a married person why they have sex. But apparently, amongst 20 or so couples in my bible church small group all but 2 men (my husband and another man who recently had his 6th kid) have had vasectomies.
The thing I found most disturbing in my research was the implication that you need to meet all your husband's sexual needs to the point of non reciprocal sexual action on demand (the whole quote about the hand job being the most obvious example) if you want any chance of having YOUR (non sexual ) needs met. Wives are often so much more genuinely needy and vulnerable than their husbands in a marriage (the first few weeks after childbirth spring to mind) that this honestly seems just straight up exploitive.
The quote from Saint Paul is “husbands love your wives as Christ loved the Church” not “husbands, love your wives when they readily put out.” It seemed very tit for tat and transactional.
This is fascinating! I have attended evangelical churches for over a decade, though I have never read a book on evangelical sex (or Catholic sex! Or actually any sex books at all.) And I’ve only read one evangelical marriage book. It was the worst book ever- Dr Emerson Eggerichs Love and Respect. He does include a short section on sex (under men’s needs, of course) and shares an anecdote about how women naturally do not enjoy sex, but we had ought to put up with it because our husbands need it and of course it is over so quickly.
I’ve also sat through women’s ministry events during which we were counseled by the pastor’s wife that sex for men is like talking for women- they need sex, we need to gab. I feel strongly that this is baloney. I can think of lots of reasons why a woman might not enjoy sex (maybe she is one of the one in four women who has been sexually abused or assaulted in this country. Maybe she has issues that can be addressed by a competent gynecologist. Maybe her husband is just lousy in bed and they can work on that…)
Another fascinating thing is that the above was all experienced in white evangelical church. We recently started attending Black evangelical church and it is completely different regarding women and sex. There is definitely still an expectation that we are in control of our family’s size, but it’s expected that women enjoy sex. I’m really grateful for this. I did not grow up in white evangelical churches, but I can see how there is this culture of shame around sex for women.
I had no idea church was going to be so complicated when I became a Christian.
The Catholic perspective on sex is so interesting! I have literally never heard that. I do know evangelicals who have lots and lots of babies but I would say that birth control has been tacitly or explicitly encouraged the entire time I’ve been in church. I grew up in a mainline denomination and it was definitely strongly encouraged there and over 3 kid families got plenty of side eye. When I got pregnant after 11 years of unexplained infertility, my mom’s first response was to ask me what I was going to do birth control after the baby was born.
Thank you so much for sharing your experience!! This is actually super interesting.
I definitely get the impression that reading a whole bunch of books on this stuff isn't normal for most people, lol. It's actually super helpful and enlightening to hear just what a normal, lived experience is with this stuff. The differences between white and black church culture is super interesting too...I wonder how I could research that?
That Love and Respect book sounds so bad that it almost sounds like a parody. That's insane. (And un-biblical...did the guy ever read Song of Songs?!)
A wonderful weave of Catholic intimacy/sacrament. Something I noted missing (since my wife and I are well past birthing years) is the "rules" remain the same for the older married. And, who knows (Sarah and Elizabeth come to mind) what lengths God goes to for couples to remain open to miraculous conceptions.
Also, your difficult path of kindness to what you posit as Evangelical thinking is not just for Evangelicals. Many Catholics have the same understanding. Maturity in faith is a never-ending process, so behaving with sacred attention remains important even when we know these things either early or late in a marriage.
Thank you!
I grew up Evangelical and converted to Catholicism in my twenties (right around the time I got married, ha!) -- the biggest difference regarding sex was the "gift of self" paradigm (Catholic) vs. "reward that married people get" paradigm (Evangelical). "If you can just wait, everything is going to be fine. But if you don't wait, you'll ruin the reward. It won't be as good." That said, I do remember an Evangelical youth pastor telling us that sex was just part--and a small part at that-- of the experience of married love. I remember being baffled - "Then why do we talk about it so much?" This does align with the later understanding that I gained from some (very, very surface level) understanding of ToB, which doesn't get to things like sex (and other ways the gift is lived out) until it's well established that our bodies are gifts, given to the world.
Thank you so much for writing this -- this must have taken so much time, and it's so well done. I'm glad you did it, and I love that you ended with the fact that we have enough commonalities for conversation.
Appreciate this! While I don’t agree with every aspect of Catholic teachings on sex, I find that even as a Protestant I agree with far more of it than I do with mainline evangelical teaching expressed in the quotes you shared. It’s so much richer and more biblical. But I do know lots of everyday evangelicals who live out an understanding of sexuality closer to a Catholic (and I think more biblical) view. For better or for worse, the freedom most of our denominations ascribe to (or the silence on the matter) means that there is a wide variety in the convictions and practices of evangelicals.
I'd be curious what parts of it you don't agree with, and how you don't see them as Biblical. Evangelical Christianity is something I'm very much outside of, but I'd really like to understand. Not least of which because more and more it seems like Catholics and Evangelicals agree on what living a Christian life should look like even while our styles of worship remain really different.
To your question - The Bible isn’t clear enough about “family planning” for me to be as dogmatic about it as the Catholic Church is. I guess avoiding sex around ovulation seems just as artificial to me as using a barrier or pulling out or any other sexual act that doesn’t end with a man ejaculating in a vagina. Allowing those things + NFP or not allowing family planning at all seem to both be positions that are more coherent. I realize you guys have a whole philosophy that supports your position and I see it as compelling enough to be a really beautiful ideal, but not compelling enough to define anything outside of NFP as mortal sin or to account for all the complex situations a person or a couple might find themselves in and the different ways Scripture comes to bear on their situation.
A couple real life examples I’m specifically thinking of:
1) A woman with long, irregular cycles - often this means very few “safe” days with weeks or months of abstinence. How do we also obey 1 Corinthians 7?
2) The husband and wife are not in agreement. Perhaps one is an unbeliever, perhaps this topic just wasn’t on the radar when they got engaged, or perhaps one or both of them has just changed over the years. How does a wife submit to her husband and/or how do they both obey 1 Corinthians 7?
3) A wife has severe pain with penetrative sex. She’s dying to have a baby so only has penetrative sex during fertile times. Her heart’s in the right place but because she’s trying to address the physical and psychological aspects of her sexual pain she sometimes has sex without the pressure for it to end in penetration. Getting to the point where sex doesn’t hurt anymore will allow her life and marriage to be far more fruitful than if it hurts forever.
I guess over all I’m just a lot more concerned with a couple’s reasons for avoiding having babies than I am the details of how they avoid (although I’m totally against anything that allows fertilization but prevents implantation). You can be a strict NFP user and totally resent it and be just as selfish in your reasons for avoiding pregnancy as a couple who uses any other method of avoiding pregnancy.
I’m definitely open to learning more about the Catholic view and would very much welcome book/article/podcast recommendations on the topic (already put the ones you listed at the end on my book list).
Also, just something I wanted to clarify - while Catholics and Protestants should certainly agree on the majority of moral issues, our differences go much deeper than worship styles. I think even the way I handle the family planning question demonstrates this. Scripture is my final and ultimate authority so I will always prioritize the very clear teachings in the Bible (don’t deprive each other of sex; wives, submit to your husbands, children are a blessing, etc.) over the not as clear ones. The bigger issue though, is how we’re reconciled to God. My righteousness does nothing for my standing before him. Only Christ’s death for my sins and his righteousness covering me can make me acceptable to God. Even my faith is a gift from him. My good works and obedience should flow from love for him and a truly repentant heart, but my security as His child and my hope of Heaven has nothing to do with my obedience. He will complete what He has begun in me, He will chasten me when I sin, and He will never lose me. My hope lies entirely in the sacrifice of Christ and the grace of God and my obedience is merely a thankful and imperfect response to His overwhelming kindness in saving me.
Ok, that makes sense. I see where you're coming from.
For the situations you mentioned...all I have to say is that you're right that if Catholic understanding of sex is wrong that the limits we have are a huge burden that's unfair to place on people. If we're right though, and birth control is a moral evil rather than a moral neutral, than none of those situations justify sin (anymore than, say, euthanasia or abortion are justified by the myrad of horrible situations people try to escape by using them). In those situations, being faithful to Christ looks like picking up our cross and following Him.
So...I encourage you to check out those books I suggested and see whether or not our position is true. Sometimes living a Christian life means taking a path marked with a lot of suffering.
You seem to be under the impression that Catholics believe we earn our salvation. We don't believe that. We believe that Salvation is an unearned gift of God, same as you do. We are saved by accepting it, and faith is also a gift from God.
That isn't to say that there aren't serious differences between a Christianity that ascribes to Sola Scriptura and one that doesn't. But it seems like you don't really understand what we actually teach.
We believe the letter of James when he says that, "Faith without works is dead." We also have a different understanding of grace than you do: it doesn't "cover" us, it transforms us. We accept the unearned gift of salvation by doing our (very imperfect) best to live as Christ has commanded. He knows we can never live up to it, but as we try, He gives us the grace, the interior changes and strength, to get closer and closer to it. To get closer and closer to what He's created us to be. Like any relationship, that means saying sorry when we mess up (repenting...repeatedly) and it means showing by our actions that, yes, this person is important to me. It's like a marriage: if you're doing it right, you get closer as time goes on (even if you start out in a less than ideal place). If you neglect and abuse the other person, you get further apart.
I believe the Bible supports that interpretation. Paul talks about working out his salvation in "fear and trembling". Christ tells us if we don't take care of the poor that when we get to Heaven He'll say, "I was hungry and you gave me no food, thirsty and you gave me no drink....depart from me." Christ even gives His apostles the ability to forgive sins, "Whatever you forgive is forgiven them, whatever you retain is retained." Why would He give the Apostles that sort of authority if, "once saved, always saved"? What would be the need? And why does St. Paul say his suffering , "makes up for what is lacking in the cross of Christ"? If it's not at all something we participate in, why would his suffering matter one way or the other?
Hopefully that helps explain things. Yes, there's very big differences between us... I find that makes the similarities more striking. And gives me a lot of hope.
Totally agree that suffering for obedience is always right and worthwhile. This stuff is definitely worth wrestling with.
I’ve not read any books on Catholic theology; I only have what’s expressed in the words and actions of Catholics or former Catholics I know. I’ll have to pick their brains!
I would agree that grace transforms us, but it’s Christ’s righteousness that covers us and makes us acceptable to God. And that we will get closer and closer to Christ in our sanctification. While I don’t believe you can lose your salvation, I do think if your life isn’t showing fruit of salvation, you should certainly examine your heart to be sure you are in Christ. And that evangelical churches are full of people who aren’t truly regenerate, but are clinging to “once saved, always saved” in a way that cheapens grace and isn’t biblical and ultimately gives them a very dangerous false sense of security. I take “faith without works is dead very seriously”.
Could you share the reference for where Paul says his suffering “makes up for what is lacking in the cross of Christ"?
Thanks for your explanations and taking the time to respond!
Colossians 1:24
I was going off of memory and paraphrased a bit.
If you ever want to hear what Catholics teach straight from them, you can always Google "Catechism of the Catholic Church" and then whatever subject you're curious about too.
Rebekah you gave a really thoughtful response, I’m sorry to be so brief. Just chiming in for a quick analogy that may or may not help shed light on the difference between NFP and a barrier method (re: your comment that avoiding sex around ovulation seems just as artificial as barrier / pulling out). I think comparing it to eating a delicious piece of chocolate cake is the best I can do that makes sense to me.
If I want to *not* add 400 extra calories to my intake today, maybe I’m trying to lose weight or something, avoiding eating a piece of chocolate cake is a totally natural thing to do. If I eat the chocolate cake but then throw it up later … or chew on it to get the delicious taste and spit it out before the consequence of having to digest it.. those are fairly unnatural ways to eat and enjoy food most would agree. You either choose to eat the cake, and you get the consequence (the calories and the lovely pleasure of the delish chocolate cake) or you choose to not eat the cake and get those consequences (sadly no cake enjoyment, but also no added calories).
But we don’t really get to have it both ways.. changing or manipulating the natural way our body works to have cake enjoyment but no calories.
I wish I had time tonight to address some other points you made - I’m sure others smarter than I can handle it!! The *very best* explanations on Catholic teaching and especially about sexuality, I have found, are by Fr. Mike Schmitz, either on his Catechism In a Year podcast or you can search the subject matter and his name in YouTube and find some great talks of his.
Thanks for the resource recommendation Kristin!
"It's not a serious occasion where we process into the bedroom carrying candles, chanting Latin and burning incense or anything like that (though I suppose you could if you wanted to)."
Had a good laugh here. As a Catholic with many Non-Denom friends, I've had many conversations about this topic. Usually they're slightly horrified. I love that the Church addresses every aspect, even the most intimate of our lives.
The older I get, the more I realize how "weird" being a practicing Catholic is, lol. The biggest culture shock for me has actually been realizing that there's no mandatory Church attendance on Sundays for most Evangelicals. Even the ones who go on most Sundays see it as optional.
While we're over here like, "willfully missing mass on Sunday is a mortal sin!"
Amen. The divide in life gets more apparent by the day for me, lol. You’re not alone!! Catholic freaks for Jesus together, haha!
There's a new-testament verse, "don't forsake your own assembling together, as is the habit of some." But that's the only verse most of us evangelicals quote about church. It's good, but not a necessity.
Actually, they did this in past times. Read the description of the wedding night of Louis the Dauphin and Marie Antoinette.
The French court also had public spectators at meals and during the queen's childbirth, and Marie had to appear in front of the French court naked to symbolically forsake her native Austria to marry into the French royal family.
So...yes? But only if you happened to be royalty.
Thanks for writing this. It is a succinct and insightful contrast/comparison.
I’m Catholic and I find I can’t read the sex part of most Protestant marriage books for the reasons you mentioned. The separation of sex and babies plus the focus on pleasure being the main point is truly so different and has big implications for differing views of marriage as a whole. My non-theological impression is that for Catholics, openness to life is a default in marriage unless there are serious reasons to avoid (licitly - and that’s difficult to keep up if your reasons aren’t so serious) vs. for Protestants (and our culture at large) the default is to use birth control unless or until you want a baby.
I think the implications also spill over into other matters. If sex really is primarily about pleasure, it’s easy to see God as unfair for giving only heterosexual people that privilege. Whereas for Catholics, chastity is necessary for every state in life. It involves sex for married couples - and sometimes periods of abstinence - as well as accepting any babies that result.
When people ask about Catholic teaching on gay marriage (or IVF or whatever adjacent issue), it feels like nothing short of the entirety of the Theology of the Body will do to explain!
Yep. Everyone has to bear the cross in their bodies and embrace that cross out of love. And that ALWAYS involves saying no to your desires at some point or another.
Now if we could just get our leadership to live that out a bit better...😬
An excellent Protestant book to investigate for a (protestant) critique of popular evangelical teachings on sex and intimacy is The Great Sex Rescue by Sheila Wray Gregoire, a Canadian author. She and her husband have also written The Good Girl's Guide To Great Sex and the Good Guy's Guide To Great Sex if you're interested in actual advice for newly married couples. She also has a blog at www.baremarriage.com which has an extensive archive of posts about evangelical marriage teachings and advice for marriage in and out of the bedroom. I highly recommend her writing and would say (as a Protestant) that pretty much everything she writes is healthy and Christ-centered from a Protestant perspective.
Thank you! I appreciate the suggestions. I've actually poked around on her blog a bit and was very relieved to find a more healthy view of sex and relationships.
I echo this! Was actually scrolling through the comments to see if anyone had recommended The Great Sex Rescue. A definite MUST read!
Thank you so much for this article. As a Catholic trying to navigate marriage, this is very helpful.
I am curious, though, about whether mutual masturbation is really forbidden in the Catholic church. My husband and I tried to find the answer to that in the Catechism, but the Catechism does not clearly forbid it. Considering the Catholic church's focus on life creation, forbidding makes sense. But I wonder if you believe that the secondary sources are worth taking as the church's official stance.
Once again, I appreciate this article a lot. Thank you!
The official Church teaching is that every sexual act involving geneltalia has to end in a way that's open to life. If you haven't already read it, Humane Vitae (the Church's letter explaining why birth control is immoral) goes into detail on why that is. Mutual masterbation to completion (ie, male orgasm) is wrong for basically the same reasons that birth control and "pulling out" are wrong.
That said, it's acceptable to do so as foreplay, just not to completion.
I don't think "secondary sources" are worth taking as official Church stance, no. Some of them are, to be blunt, written by crazy people. I don't see Humane Vitae as a secondary source, because it's directly from the Pope acting in his official capacity.
The reason I used secondary sources in this article is because I was trying to compare/contrast popular writing (ie, not academic ) on Christian sexuality from Evangelical and Catholic popular psychologists and talking heads. Those are the books that are most accessible and that I think show the "on the ground" attitude to this stuff.
Hope that helps.
It helps a lot. Thank you! I haven't read the humane vitae, but now I really want to read it.
Humanae Vitae needs to be preached every week for the fifty years it wasn't.
I'm protestant, but I agree with much of what you've described about the Catholic understanding of sex. On the other hand we have 8 kids, so I'm not the typical protestant. However, I think the one thing that virtually every exploration of sex ignores is how difficult and expensive it is to raise children. I suggest this, more than any other consideration, affects our attitude toward sex. Sex creates children ( at least part of the time) and that difficulty demands closeness and unity, which will lead to more sex and more children in an endless, wonderful cycle. And the end of all this might be character growth and satisfying relationships, both with God and your spouse.
The danger in commenting on Protestant views on literally anything is that there's such a wide range! Since I've written this, I've found several other Protestants who have a similar viewpoint to mine on it.
I'm Protestant overall but love the Catholic view here! All sorts of evil was facilitated with the availability of the Pill. Thanks for the reading references-- will definitely check them out.
I’m a former Progressive Protestant and Wheaton College grad (so at least a former cultural Evangelical) who has now turned Byzantine Catholic. I had been progressive because of what I perceived to be a lack of consistency in much of Evangelical (though as discussed in other comments, Evangelicalism is too broad to make a one size fits all generalization) marital theology. If sex can be divorced from its procreative aspect and there are not necessarily roles in the Church for people not called to heterosexual marriage, then what’s to stop two gay people from marrying? I also met a number of young women at Wheaton who had been raised with misogynistic forms of marital theology though I will be clear this is not representative of all Evangelicalism, nor was I ever taught any of it directly while at Wheaton, where the wife was practically denied any agency in marriage. In some cases, meeting the husband’s needs included looking a certain way, for some wives were literally exhorted to “not let themselves go,” for their husbands would not be able to help themselves and cheat if their wives got fat and lost their looks. Once again, this is not representative of all Evangelicalism. I remember one of my roommates reading a book on marriage for a class that the professor teaching the class definitely disagreed with but was still representative of a wide enough swathe of American Evangelicalism. According to the author, the wife pretty much had to do everything the husband told her and could never say “no” to intercourse. At the time, we thought it was really feminist and the one bright spot for the author to have a whole section dedicated to artificial contraception, but since listening to the Rise and Fall of Mars Hill, I’ve thought otherwise. Of course the author supported artificial contraception. If he was teaching a theology where the wife had to meet the husband’s sexual needs at any time, then artificial contraception allowed him to use his wife as an object without consequences. From a more secular perspective, the more I learn about hormonal birth control and NFP, the more misogynistic I find hormonal birth control to be. I’m fully aware it’s often prescribed to alleviate symptoms of PCOS and endometriosis etc, though it doesn’t actually treat those issues, but for its general usage, it treats female fertility like a disease. It’s essentially a medication to stop the female body from functioning healthily and doing the one thing the male body can’t do. (By this standard, vasectomies would be considered misandristic as well.)
I'm having to hold myself back from a long rant on the pill and the state of OBGYN care in the United States in general...
Yes to all of this. The more I look into it, the more I see Protestant acceptance of birth control culturally paving the way for the sexual revolution and everything else that followed from it, including the gender identity stuff we have now. And that being preceded by a surprisingly viralent rejection of celibacy (i just had a very long conversation with a guy who identifys as old school, rejects birth control Protestant who had VERY strong opinions against anyone having a celibate vocation).
A couple of issues with this anaysis:
1) To an extent it seems as if it compares apples and oranges. An 'evangelical' book on sex is merely a book on sex written by an evangelical. It does not necessarily represent 'evangelical' thought, let alone serious evangelical thought.
And it certainly doesn't represent official thought. Whereas Catholic writings often do reflect official teachings.
2) And it compares modern 'evangelical thought' with modern 'Catholic thought' at a time when there is little evangelical thought... ie evangelicals have, by and large, abandoned church teaching on this issue. Reading a book written before 1930 or so would reveal a rather different perspective, let alone reading John Calvin et al.
3) It would be interesting to compare both to Scripture. Would love to do a long form exchange on that!
1.) I recognize that, especially since Evangelicals have such a wide range of belief. I've met Armenian, Calvinist, and "Bible cowboy Church" evangelical Christians who all love Jesus but disagree on a lot of the specifics. The reason I went with popular writing is because I thought that was the fair way to show what a lot of them believe. The books I cited are all from large evangelical organizations or are popular in those circles. Even if they're not 'official', they're widely accepted. One was even recommended to me by a Catholic I know who's married to an Evangelical as a book she found helpful.
(And who would be considered "official"? The SBC? Calvary Chapel? That's the other thing, there's really no "official" body that covers everyone).
I don't think it's apples to oranges, because I'm looking at what both groups see as the "approved" viewpoint. The closest to that that Evangelicals have is, for better or worse, widely accepted popular books by Christian writers claiming to write from a Biblical viewpoint (unless they're very academically inclined, which, give me some book recs!!).
2.) Church as defined by whom?
It's undeniable that popular perception of sexuality by mainstream Christianity has changed dramatically since 1930. I'm not interested in how Evangelicals viewed sex 90 years ago (at least, not for the purposes of this piece). I'm interested in what Protestant Evangelicals believe now.
3.) Agreed. I'd love to read that piece. Not sure I have the chops to write it.
2) Well, it may not be interesting to you, but in the light of the issue of ‘evangelical’ vs ‘Catholic’, it is an interesting issue. I would argue that the current condition right now (at least with the Catholics that I know) is that the may go to church as Catholics, but they live as Protestants in the sexual area.
3) I was hoping for an exchange :) But I have written a post on the Biblical view of birth control, at least. I haven’t ventured quite into all of sexual behaviour, but I am fully willing to :)
1) The ‘official’ stance would need to be come church document or confession, not merely a popular book. For all I know ‘Shades of Grey’ was popular with Catholics, but neither of us would look to it for Catholic theology on sexuality.
Should we drop the numbers? I feel like they're getting a bit cumbersome, lol.
I feel like if we're going to Church documents or confessions, we're getting into the weeds and not dealing with "mainstream" Christianity as it exists anymore. As an example, a Baptist Church in my area recently had a pastor who was Armenian leave, and a pastor who was Calvinist come in. Those are two very different views on how the economy of salvation works, and yet, both are considered Baptist and capable of pastoring that given Church. Yes, Church members left that church after the change, but that gets at the heart of it-- there doesn't seem to be a central authority. The old confessions and documents are treated with respect, but not authority (and isn't that part of the point of Sola Scriptura?).
And it's also worth pointing out a lot of the early reformers hold views that most Evangelical churches don't. Even the mainstream denominations that those reformers founded. Martin Luther had a profound respect for the Virgin Mary, but I've never heard of Marian devotion being promoted by a Lutheran community.
I see your point that I'm not dealing with the actual theology. And I see your point that a lot of Catholics behave like Protestants, or pagans, in the bedroom.
But I don't see a lot of books read and recommended by devoted Catholics promoting those attitudes. I do see books read and recommended by devoted Protestant Evangelicals promoting the attitudes I've described. That's why I felt comfortable comparing them.
I seriously don't think I have the time or energy that a Scriptural comparison would take. I'm a homeschooling mother of small children who writes in her spare time. I could recommend some authors to you if you'd like to do your own research on the Catholic viewpoint of it though.
Something else worth talking about...what would be your definition of a devoted Christian? I'm wondering if maybe we're missing each other in that point.
That's a great question. I think I will leave the answer to God, however. Only He sees the heart.
As a Protestant (of the old school, not the kind you've been writing about) my question for all Christians is... what do the Scriptures say. Maybe I'll take a link to your post and deal with the issues you deal with (and some you skipped) and write a post on what the Scriptures say.
I'd love to read it. Please let me know if/when you do it.
And, it's up!
https://vonwriting.substack.com/p/biblical-sex
It is due for publication on Monday.
I came back to this post bc I just read This Momentary Marriage by John Piper. I highly recommend it, it’s more about the theology of marriage and less of a marriage manual, which I think you would be interested in comparing/contrasting with Catholic theology of marriage. Piper does include a chapter on sex and his teaching on this was so fascinating and so completely different than anything I’ve heard before. I would love to hear what you think about it if you get a chance to read it.
I found a copy online and I've been browsing it...chapter 9 sounds a LOT like the teaching of the Catholic Church on celibate vocations (priests, nuns, consecrated virgins, etc). To the point that it's spooky.
The chapter on sex sounded very similar to what I've heard on Theology of the Body (theological treatment of the body and human sexuality by Pope St. John Paul II). The idea that sex and sexual pleasure in marriage points us to God and to a relationship with Him...yeah. Absolutely. There's a book called Theology of the Body for Beginners by Christopher West that I'd really recommend for more in that vein.
I'm going to read it more carefully and more than just picking random chapters and give you a more in depth response (and make sure I'm actually seeing what I think I'm seeing, which may mean I need to re-read some Catholic sources too). This looks like a really fantastic resource to check out, thank you for thinking of me and sharing it.
And it's exciting to see stuff that's so similar -- truth is truth is truth, and it's so very hopeful to see an example of the same truths coming from two different directions.
Oh man... my family went to the church John Piper pastored back during my middle/high school years. ha! I have not read This Momentary Marriage in a LONG time.
Been enjoying reading the comments on this (oldish) post! Very intriguing, and I think you pretty much described the evangelical view of married sexuality very well. Which is impressive.
A few months ago, I went through the book "Praying the Scriptures for Your Marriage" and the chapter on sex was infuriating in how there was NO MENTION OF FERTILITY OR BABIES. In a chapter on praying over your sex life! Wild.
Thank you, I will definitely check out Theology of the Body. Admittedly, I have not done a lot of reading in this area, but this is an absolutely new idea for me. I love your observation that truth is truth! And I agree that it’s very exciting to see resources from our different churches that are pointing in the same direction.
I'll have to see if I can get my hands on a copy. Thanks!