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.
(BEGIN FIRST OPTIONAL TRIM)
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.
(END FIRST OPTIONAL TRIM)
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.
(BEGIN SECOND OPTIONAL TRIM)
“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.”
(END SECOND OPTIONAL TRIM)
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?’?”
Do you deny the verse I quoted from Scripture?
I realize Roman Catholic apologists don’t like the Old Testament, but IT’S THE SAME GOD. He still hates idolatry and lies and sin.
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.
Oh, believe me, I'm only too aware of this. Its one of the reasons my wife and I are no longer associated with the NFP "industry."
When we taught NFP, I really hammered the concept that NFP is only morally licit when used for grave reasons. We even had a couple walk out on our class because of that talk.
Here's the way I explained it on an old Catholic forum:
NFP CAN BE and often IS used, and even TAUGHT, in a sinful manner. Yet it is NOT and can NEVER be inherently sinful as artificial contraception is so.
NFP itself is NOT inherently sinful, and anyone claiming otherwise is not only misrepresenting post-conciliar but also pre-conciliar Catholic moral theology.
To say that NFP is ALWAYS sinful is just as wrong as to say that NFP is NEVER sinful.
If my "INTENTION" is to bring home enough money to feed my family, that is a good thing. I may get a job, bring home my salary, and feed my children. The job is a licit way to achieve a licit thing.
On the other hand, I could rob a bank and get enough money to feed my family for a whole year. That is an illicit way of achieving a licit good thing.
The same is true for child spacing. If my children would literally starve if my wife were to get pregnant, it is morally licit to space children until I could afford to feed them.
NFP would be a morally licit way to acieve this necessity.
But artificial birth control is intrinsically evil. It can never be morally licit to have recourse to artificiaql contraception.
So to answer your question, the INTENTION in having recourse to EITHER artificial family planning OR "natural" family planning could be illicit or licit. One may be sinsul, one may not.
However, the method itself, in the case of artificial birth control, is intrinsically illicit, i.e. regardless of intent is it gravely sinful.
However, NFP itself is morally neutral. It becomes morally illicit when the intention itself is illicit.
4 main reasons for having recourse to NFP.
1--Physical/ mental health---a pregnancy could kill you or so physically impair you as to prevent your fulfillment of your duties in your state in life---NOT because of a widening wasteline or drooping skin! Or psychological health, i.e., mom would literally have a nervous breakdown if she became pregnant---not because she "just couldn't stand being home with the little kids all day without the personal fulfillment of her professional job..."
2--Financial constraints---your child will starve if you have another. Wanting a bigger house or designer SUV just does not cut it!
3--work on the mission fields by one or both spouses that would proclude having children temporarily
4--active persecution or war---i.e., you or your child likely to die by coercive abortion, in concentration camp, in acts of war, etc.
Clearly we say these reasons must be SERIOUS, not trivial. Only the couple and their confessor can truly decide what truly constitutes grave reason.
We've had couples sit through my talk on this subject and literally say, "Gee, we thought we were being good Catholics just for deciding to use NFP. Now we realize we don't even have grounds for recourse to NFP," then tell us a month or two later they're pregnant.
NFP vs Contraception
Spacing children may be a desirable goal that does not violate God's laws in certain serious situations such as those outlined above. But the means of achieving the goal differ.
One is intrinsically evil (abortion, abortifacient contraception, barrier methods, sterilization) while one is morally neutral (Natural Family Planning.
In one, an act is performed (sex) but its natural outcome is artificially foiled.
In the other, no act is performed (simple abstinence during fertile times) so there IS no act, therefore the practice is morally neutral.
It is then the intention of using NFP that constitutes its relative moral licitness or illicitness.
If NFP is used in a selfish manner, it too can be sinful.
If it is used only in grave circumstances, it is not sinful.
The difference is real.
Dieting (decreasing caloric intake, the "act" of NOT eating) is a moral and responsible means of losing weight to maintain the body's health.
Bulimia (the ACT of eating, them vomiting) is rightly called an eating DISORDER.
An ACT is performed (eating in this case) and its natural outcome (nutrition) is foiled by expelling the food from the body.
Likewise contraception is a disorder. An ACT is performed (sex) and its natural outcome (procreation) is foiled by expelling the sperm or egg or both (abortifacient contraceptives) from the body.
Contraception is to NFP what Bulimia is to dieting.
But just as dieting can be misused (anorexia) so too can NFP be misused in a sinful manner
And vast numbers of RCs don’t follow Romanist teaching on the Pill either. See it in my practice every day.
The irony here is that I, a Calvinist, won’t write a ‘scrip for them. (or to any other individual seeking OCs for that matter)
My humble opinion on birth control as the mother of 7..(how many do you have Brian?)
I believe that if God ordains a life there will be one..birth control or no birth control
I know a family where the dad had a vasectomy 10 years ago..his wife gave birth to a healthy son 5 years later.. (yes it is his..)
I heard a news story from England 30 years ago where a woman had to have a hysterectomy ..a few months later she told her doctor she felt pregnant..he laughted until he heard the heart beat ..sees the child had been conceived before the uterus was removed and the fertilized egg attached to her bowel ..it was delivered near term by c section
We all have heard about a tubal failing or a failure in the loop or the pill ...Scripture says God opens and closes the womb, we see that all through scripture ..He is the God that changes not.. .. He is sovereign in the number and the sexes of the children we will have . This is not within our control ... it is HIS territory.
So if God does not ordain a pregnancy one will not occur..If He does no human method will stop it..
So to me the question is moot ...
My God is God of life and death..
This may be steering off topic. Does the Obama Health Care assault take away your right of conscience to not write a script for the pill?
Dunno.
Haven’t got a memo one way or the other.
But that is actually being questioned in many places by laymen and pastors. As I have said before, growing up the two places where you saw families with more than two kids was the LCMS parish and the Catholic parish.
The fundamental Hypocratic principle of “do no harm” applies, I believe to natural, life-giving processes too, which especially include reproduction and childbirth. Therefore to “do no harm” to the natural, normal, healthy processes of the human body is, logically, not to prevent them....as in contraception of any kind.
Another principle, this one straight from scripture...not through general revelation (or natural law), is that the children of godly people are ALWAYS seen as a blessing, never a burden. While it is true in pre-modern cultures, as in bible times, children were the primary pension system...still it is significant that children to God’s people are never seen to be “inconvenient” or “too many.” (Children of people who are NOT godly, well, that’s a different question.)
It’s also true (and a look at family trees will confirm this) that a normal woman will usually only have 5 or 6 kids...without using birth control, not the imagined 15 or 20....which numbers are, and always have been, exceptional.
I believe the Roman Church is right on this....and other Christians have been way too glib and shallow on this point.
I can also say this...there would be no Social Security crises, nor a demand for illegal alien labor...had America had the children they denied themselves for “convenience” sake due to contraception.
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What a wise and insightful post, AnalogReigns. I highlighted some of the sections which I think are especially timely, relevant, and worthy of consideration by all readers. Well done!
We always wanted 6-8 or more, but God only gave us three. Its a mystery to us why He gives children to parents who don't want them, but not to some who dearly desire a child or more children.
That's one of the reasons we stopped teaching NFP. It was, frankly, too heavy a burden to desperately want more children, yet be teaching NFP.
Good. I do believe movements like the LCMS and OPC will redeem some of mainstream Protestantism from its moral malaise.
So if God does not ordain a pregnancy one will not occur..If He does no human method will stop it..
So to me the question is moot ... My God is God of life and death..
Amen, Mom! As near to poetry as this forum gets.
You can bet it will. It will be a crime not to write a prescription for what the state deems a valid request. These valid requests will no doubt include the "morning after" pill and the "month after" pill, which is just around the corner.
Funny we wanted 3 and God kept sending them :)
We agree to disagree.
Nice straw man. The analogy is not the type of result, but that is a controllable result. My attitude is to do your best and let God handle the rest. The end of the comment I responded to was "let God decide". This attitide is an abdication of responsibility. An attitude I firmly reject.
The funny thing is that the original poster should reject your comment starting with "If you cannot afford kids". I'm thinking that the original poster would tell you that you lack faith. If having kids is God's decision, who are you to decide for God? If He gives you kids, He'll provide a way to provide.
But God doesn't provide to those that sit on their couch and wait for Him to act. God expects us to act. God expects us to control what we're able to control and not worry about the rest because we put everything we can't control into God's hands.
Your type of answer is different that the original poster. To say to someone "refrain from getting married and having sex" is a concrete action that someone can control.
However, I can't support your attitude because it seems that it leads to the idea that someone who is sterile shouldn't get married.
We bought a twelve passenger van when the children were younger, fully expecting to need it as the years went by. Presumption on our part, I guess.
Only on my good days. 8~)
I’m going to have to disagree with you on this one, DrE. The Catholic Church was right on the money long, long ago that artificial birth control would give humans the impression that secular humans controlled the origin of life. They called it a slippery slope, and I agree. Unrestricted abortion was the next stop down that slide, and the final stop will be (is?) euthanasia.
I also think it is for this reason, this solid logic, that Dr Kopp brings this subject up. It is an obvious victory in prediction for the Catholics, and personally, I applaud them for it. I suspect he is proud of it as well, and that is why he posts about it.
Perhaps God intends you to adopt , and He already has that child ready for you :)
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