"Delightful Secrets of Sex" (Vanity)

With all the incessant media drooling over the sexual options smorgasbord, with the Gay Summer of 2003 still flickering blue on our TV screens, and with even the Girl Scouts and the YWCA endorsing “safe-sex” training for young girls, people plugged into the mass culture have heard few discordant notes about the sexual revolution—and some have heard, perhaps, only one. Namely, that “the pope” is against it. To whom is sometimes added “the Christian right.” And, especially maddening to the Socially Responsible, “the pope” is even for some reason bizarrely, unaccountably opposed to what even most churches agree is the best thing since One-A-Day vitamins: contraception.

Secular journalists seem to assume that a comprehensive critique of the agenda and the paraphernalia of the sexual revolution is an idiosyncrasy of “the pope” alone. They are unaware that such opposition is only the latest expression of the continuous Judeo-Christian concern for sexual integrity going back to the New Testament and the church fathers, going back in fact to Genesis.

Who bothers to explain, even superficially, the rationale for the (until this century) universal Christian teaching against contraception? The implication is that there are no reasons for the historic Christian position: nothing worth examining, nothing even worth refuting. The believers who do accept the traditional teaching—mostly Catholics, and a minority of them at that—accept it on “blind faith,” and that’s that.

Yet the sexual revolution—the disjointing and dismembering of human sexuality into a heap of fragments to be rearranged into any shape at will—rests upon certain underlying assumptions about the nature and ends of sexuality. It relies upon contraceptive paraphernalia as its necessary technology. I am no professional philosopher, but I can see the urgency of examining the assumptions before taking any stance at all with regard to the technique.

Sexually, we resemble baboons. This is, and to a certain extent ought to be, true. But saying it seems like a dig, a put-down.

We know that human sexuality is something like other mammalian sexuality, and at the same time something more. For us, as for apes, mating fulfills an appetitive drive and satisfies an itch. Like other primates, we reproduce sexually. Again like other primates, we use sexual gestures to express affinity or “matedness” or belonging on some level: Our mating patterns order our herd, our group, our community.

But there is still something more than affinity, progeny, and itch. The sacramental view of sexuality was never based on studies of baboon communities or squints at barnyard sex. Christians believe that, first, since we were made in the image and likeness of God, our design is both revelatory and providential. Second, the “honor of the marriage bed” is rooted in the scriptural view of the marital union as showing forth, mysteriously, the love-union of Christ and the Church.

If human sexuality had no designer, then vain is an appeal to honor the design. Furthermore, if there is a design, and the design is already perfectly reflected in our instincts, drives, and appetites, then “honoring the design” should need no special appeal at all: We should expect it to happen automatically.

When Christ, during his ministry here on earth, was asked (in Matthew 19) about the propriety of certain sexual customs, his method was to refer his questioners back to Genesis. He used the argument from design: that the Creator had made the human race male and female, that he had designed them to hold fast together, becoming one flesh. So the design of male and female is a sign of different-sex alliance and fidelity (Gen. 2:18–24) as well as God’s way of making his human creatures fruitful (Gen. 1:28). This is the way it was to be in Eden (literally, “Delight”).

The question Jesus was asked had to do with divorce. His answer made clear that in the beginning (Genesis), in the time of delight (Eden), man and woman were one: There was no divorce. He notes that divorce came in later because of people’s hardness of heart—in other words, because they sinned. But rather than accommodating that hardness of heart, he challenges his listeners with a hard saying—“Anyone who divorces his wife and marries another, is guilty of adultery”—a hard saying that paradoxically upholds once again the norm of Eden, the full-orbed sexuality of delight.

What does this discussion of divorce have to do with contraception? The underlying question in both cases is whether we are justified in breaking this full-orbed sexuality apart.May we break apart, rearrange, a man and a woman? May we break apart fruitfulness and delight? Are we free, because we are able to do so, to split sex up into its various “animal” and “angel” components: fondness here, fertility there; here the itch, there the issue; affection and desire and covenant and conception considered separately and experienced separately—rearranging the pieces to suit whatever project we have in mind?

The picture is complicated by the fact that men and women have become hardened in their responses, in their feelings, in what seems natural to them, because of sin. We’re not in the Garden anymore. Our hearts are hard. So, for instance, rape seems natural, even urgent, to some poor sinners. To others, natural is the pleasure of seduction. For some men, mating with a man seems natural. Still others seek sexual gratification with children. Or animals. Or, lower still, with plastic sex toys and video images.

And many—especially in our day—think it a problem and a vexation that natural sex should so easily produce offspring. It seems to them normal that sex should be usually—almost invariably—infertile. The fruitfulness of the sexual embrace distresses them. I could almost say it affronts them. The connection between sexual fulfillment and fertility strikes them as a defect of design.

Fruitfulness is undeniably a component of real sex. Bible and biology, Genesis and genetics, every source of knowledge, natural and supernatural, is there to tell us so. It is not a defect: It is part of the design. The question, then, is what do we do about it? Do we learn to live with our created sexual design, learn about it “on our knees” as learning something holy? Or do we reject our sexual nature as it is, and invent something else?

Contraception means the rejection of real sex: It is an insistence that we can break sexuality into pieces, select the bits we like, and put the rest in the wastebasket.

It takes patience and humility to live with a husband or wife whose sexuality is whole, entire, and unbroken. It means one’s great bodily powers and heart-energies are at the service of somebody else—at the service of another sex, and another generation—and not of oneself. This laying out of sexuality at the service of another—seeing genital activity itself not as self-fulfillment but as self-donation—is at the heart of Christian sacramental reflection.

Now consider this: If the husband or the wife says, “I love you, dearie, but you’ve got one God-given, healthy, holistic power that gives me a pain: fertility. So bag it. Fix it. Suppress it. And then I’ll sleep with you”—that is not exactly the acceptance of a whole person by a whole person. It is altering the person (suppressing natural fertility) as a condition for marital union.

Thus, contraception does not just offend the procreative power; it offends the unitive power, too. It involves a maiming of bodily wholeness—cutting sex down to size—which ultimately means cutting your spouse down to size.

Both reason and revelation tell us that a great purpose of the sexual bonding of a man and a woman—and therefore of marriage—is the begetting and raising of children. But there are some who say that if a husband and wife are, on the whole, accepting of children, there’s no reason for this “holistic acceptance” to be expressed in every act of marital union. In other words, openness to life inheres in the relationship as a whole, and not necessarily in individual sexual acts.

Just a moment now. Suddenly we have a “relationship” that is somehow independent of its “acts.” Try this statement instead, which substitutes “fidelity” for “fertility”: “Marital fidelity inheres in the relationship and not necessarily in individual sexual acts.” (Oops! That comes a little too close to what the mass culture is already beginning to say: “Flexible Fidelity: the Next Big Thing.”) Let’s try one more: “Your Savings and Loan believes that business ethics inheres in the relationship and not necessarily in individual financial transactions.” Now we’re cooking!

A relationship is not separable from its “acts.” The acts are the ingredients of the relationship. If your recipe for brownies is 99 percent wholesome except for a tablespoon from the cat’s litter box, haven’t you subtly altered the character of brownies per se?

But don’t we have a dilemma here? On the one hand, the marriage relationship is ordered to self-donation: holy oneness with one’s spouse, and the procreation and education of children. But there are occasions—particularly in times of sickness, poverty, and hardship—when the arrival of more children would seriously compromise the family’s ability to care for the children they have already been given and make oneness far more difficult, if not (apparently) impossible.

In these cases—when the mother’s health is at serious risk, or the family’s finances are close to calamitous, or the caregiving needs of the existing children are already nearly overwhelming—wouldn’t contraception actually serve the ends of marriage by making it more likely that the children already born will also be decently cared for, given the parents’ limited resources of time, energy, and money?

I am convinced that the answer is no. Even in these cases, contraception would not serve. There is something literally disordered about contraception: It entails actively rejecting and extirpating part of our created design. We are not allowed, and should not want, to bring disorder into our lives, especially our married lives.

In these cases, natural family planning (NFP) could very well be the answer to prayer. For the same reason, it should be clear why natural family planning is morally acceptable: It means knowing, respecting, and acting in harmony with our created design.

NFP involves knowing the bodily signs of fertility and infertility and then acting accordingly: choosing intercourse during fertile times if the conception of a child could be accepted, or abstaining at those times if there are grave reasons to avoid pregnancy. In both cases, the spouses are acting with, and not against, the natural powers and potentialities inscribed by divine wisdom in their own bodies.

That is why it is inaccurate to call NFP a “method of contraception.” Contraception is a key part of the larger modern project of splitting sexuality into its components and then exploiting those components separately. It calls for nothing by way of virtue. It requires only drugs, devices, or surgery. It is the ultimate technical fix.

NFP expresses a much more ancient and holistic view: that sexual powers require harmonious cooperation, patience, gentleness, self-control—in fact, all the fruits of the Holy Spirit. NFP presupposes husbands and wives who have placed their sexual lives humbly in each other’s hands; who can, by mutual consent, lovingly abstain for a little while, and lovingly come together again (1 Cor. 7:4–5); who know there is a time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing (Eccl. 3:5).

St. Paul said something about human sexual love that was never said about any animal’s sex life: that for us—for human persons and particularly for baptized persons—sexual union is a mysterium tremendum. It is the prime image of the union of Christ and the Church (Eph. 5:32). To be sure, St. Paul does not say that this imaging is a property of sexual relations considered in isolation, but of marriage as a whole. Nevertheless, we’re not talking here about the love of parent and child, of brothers and sisters, of workmates or the monastery or the parish, but precisely the union exclusively proper to married persons. The sacred sign of this is sexual intercourse.

It seems to me that the goal of Christ’s work is the creation of a new human race, one that lives the way God originally wanted the human race to live. This is a call backward to Genesis, to original design, to what one might call Alpha Humanity. But it is also a call forward to something new, to life fulfilled in Christ: Omega Humanity.

If the sexual act signifies this, if eternal salvation has a nuptial meaning (the Spirit and the Bride say, “Come”), then its structure is not to be tampered with, any more than one would tamper with the matter of the Eucharist or the name of the Trinity. This means that wholeness is not just desirable, not just an ideal, but is obligatory for purposes of signifying what God wants to signify; in other words, for sacramental reasons. This is why honest virginity and honest married love both honor the sacramentality of sex: virginity, by keeping sex wholly reserved; and marriage, by keeping sex whole whenever it is expressed.

This doesn’t mean that a baby must be desired whenever intercourse is chosen (although it is a beautiful thing for husband and wife to come together knowing that conception is possible; they are then true wonder-workers in each other’s eyes!). But it means, at least, that the natural pattern of fertility and infertility is recognized as providential. We cooperate with it. We respect it. We don’t restructure it.

Those who never really fast, never really feast. The seasons of nature alternate cold and warm, dry and wet, the hard-shelled seed buried in darkness and the spring and sap of the new green shoot. In the same way, the church calendar is spangled with its purple and rose, its white, green, and gold, keeping its octaves, counting its days, fasting without bitterness and feasting without shame.

I speak here of sexual abstinence: the virginity of the unmarried, the continence of the celibate, and the periodic abstinence of NFP couples; and also of those many occasions when husband and wife are unable to come together because of illness, weariness, or separation. These are our fasts. Yet the meaning of abstinence is never found in itself, but in rhythms larger than ourselves, larger than our whole lifetimes. The meaning of the fast is found in the Feast.

Truly, if this life were all there is, there would be no reason not to squander our sexual energy ad libitum, de-coupled as to partner, disoriented as to sex and gender, Dionysian as to its final end: Remember that in Euripides’ play The Bacchae it ends in death.

But if this life points mysteriously to a life to come, we must honor the “secret meaning” of our sexuality as a Sign of sacred fertile union. To deliberately splinter the parts of the Sign—to break away from the sacredness, to split off the fertility, or to disrupt the spouses’ one-flesh unity—would be like hacking up a painted highway marker into a heap of unrelated syllables. But to restore the Sign of whole sexual love—man and woman, lifelong and exclusive, faithful and fruitful—means to read the Sign rightly and to reach the destination to which it points: the Marriage of the Lamb, the feast that has no end.

Juli Loesch Wiley is a worshiper of one God, the wife of one husband, and the homeschooling Mater et Magistra of two fine sons in Johnson City, Tennessee. She can be reached at jlw509@earthlink.net. A version of this article appeared in Re:generation in 1995.

If you enjoyed this article, you'll find more of the same in every issue of Touchstone magazine. An introductory subscription (ten copies for one year) is only $24.95.

Zological science has always interested me (though I take sociobiology with a huge grain of salt.) I remember reading that most mammalian males can't perform a completed act of intercourse (mounting + penetration + ejaculation) in the absence of female pheromones which act as physiological triggers to the process. Do you know anything about that?

I understand pheromones to be a powerful force in attraction but don't know about their role in copulation. Unlike with the apes and other mammals, sex for the human (IMHO) is primarily enjoyed in the higher form of the mind rather than in the senses, though they do indeed have a part in focusing the mind.
It is my understanding human woman is the only female species capable of orgasm, therefore the only species truly able to experience the full range of sex...we know that she is the only female species with full breasts, hips, buttocks, etc., to attract male interest--the other mammal species look more or less the same with the exception of the male being larger.
Humans, also can enjoy the sex act through out female estrus cycles; all other animal species (with the exception of the fore mentioned bonobo) cannot.
Human females also have to bear a more extraordinary amount of pain in child birth, which the other mammals are more-or-less exempted from (the human head being larger going through the birth canal)...God indeed moves in mysterious ways, His wonders to behold!

I'm sorry I never made it back to the forum last night.

It seems we will not be able to reach agreement. While I consider myself to be a fundamentalist Christian, I am not Catholic. Also, you cannot change my mind, as our chosen method of birth control seems to have success rates ten times better than NFP.

After we had two children and 8-9 pregnancies, we both decided that a vasectomy was the answer. If God decides different, I'm sure He'll make the proper arrangements.

You are right. People who advocate no contraception display a stunning ignorance of the lives of real women and real families prior to the means to control fertility. The terrible poverty of families too large, the maternal deaths, the women with broken down bodies and no teeth, looking like old women at 30, the children lost and overlooked amid too many children with parents too tired from the struggle of it all, the widowers struggling on alone with so many children.

I have two daughters. One is tall, with large bones and wide baby-making hips, a strong girl who could probably have fifteen babies over 20 years with no trouble at all. My other daughter is slight, not very tall, with a tiny little waist and a delicate bone structure. Even with modern medicine I wouldn't expect that she could have more than three, and would probably have great difficulty carrying a pregnancy at all after age 30 or so. Put the requirement on my girls of never using contraception and one lives, one dies. It's that simple. That is not God's will.

My view is that God gives us brains and he intends for us to use them.

The use of contraception DOES, however, require higher ethical behavior from men. Since men are no longer forced by nature to become fathers, they will have to consent to do so. So, out of love for their wives (most women wanting children) and out of obedience to God, they'll have to make that choice.

People who advocate no contraception display a stunning ignorance of the lives of real women and real families prior to the means to control fertility. The terrible poverty of families too large, the maternal deaths, the women with broken down bodies and no teeth, looking like old women at 30, the children lost and overlooked amid too many children with parents too tired from the struggle of it all, the widowers struggling on alone with so many children

Thank you for explicating the contraceptive mentality so well. The gift of children, a full quiver, is considered a burden, and to be freed from them is a blessing. You could not have more clearly described this modern inversion of priorities if you had intended to.

You apparently didn't read the article. It did not make the argument that a childless marriage is sinful. It was not against family planning. Neither was it proposing a sexless marriage. Rather, it advocated a philosophy and a method of family planning which is good for love, good for marriages, and pleasing in the eyes of God.

I pray for the best for you and your family.

All we know is that God was not pleased by Onan's actions. Apparently God's will was for there to be children produced from this specific marriage and Onan didn't allow that to happen. God's will was twarted. It is not clear from this passage that God hates the spilling of one's seed in all cases at all times. The OT lists all sorts of laws and manners of behaviors but a law to not spill one's seed is not listed as far as I know. Even if it was we are not bound by the law anyway in the strict sense as the jews are. This is legalism. This puts the focus on ourselves and our own behavior rather than Christ. The law is there to expose our sin and cause us to run to Christ.

And all we know is that God was displeased when Cain killed Abel. It is not clear from that passage that God hates the spilling of innocent blood in all cases at all times.

The OT lists all sorts of laws and manners of behaviors but a law to not spill one's seed is not listed as far as I know.

The OT punishment for refusing to raise up a family for your brother is not death. So Onan's refusal to generate children for his brother's line is not what he is being punished for. It is the spilling of seed.

Even if it was we are not bound by the law anyway in the strict sense as the jews are. This is legalism. This puts the focus on ourselves and our own behavior rather than Christ. The law is there to expose our sin and cause us to run to Christ.

We should still know what sin is and attempt to avoid it. Not use the cry of "legalism" and rationalization in order to call what is sin good.

And all we know is that God was displeased when Cain killed Abel. It is not clear from that passage that God hates the spilling of innocent blood in all cases at all times.

Thou shalt not kill.

The OT punishment for refusing to raise up a family for your brother is not death. So Onan's refusal to generate children for his brother's line is not what he is being punished for. It is the spilling of seed.

All we know is he was punished for not fulfilling God's will to father children in this case. To make up a "law" around this requires interpreting this event and extending it to contraception for all people in all cases and at all times. And if you are going to be a legalist and adhere to this man-made law, you may as well ensure you follow all the other explicit laws in the OT as well.

You can play pharisee if you wish.

You can play pharisee if you wish.

And you can play "deconstruct the text away from traditional understanding in order to justify your own actions" if you wish.

Sin is sin, no matter how you try to rationalize it. Nineteen hundred years of Christians understood what Onanism was. It is only "modern" man who has the hubris to overturn tradition because he feels he knows better.

It is not legalism to call sin a sin.

All of Christendom was a united front against contraception until the 20th century. Martin Luther considered it a sin "worse than adultery or incest" (Commentary on Genesis 38:10). Calvin and Wesley, as well as Protestant theologians like Spurgeon and Pink, all condemned birth control. (In his remarkable book, The Bible and Birth Control, Charles D. Provan provides abundant quotes from them and other Evangelical greats.)

It was not until 1930 that this united front showed a small crack. The Anglican bishops at their Lambeth Conference approved a resolution allowing the use of birth control (the condom) in certain "extreme circumstances." Within 40 years almost all the liberal Protestant churches caved in.

Interestingly, even some of the so-called "conservative" Protestants approved contracepton because they said it was the only way to prevent legal abortion. Then in the 1970's, these same churches went on to approve abortion. They apparently missed the last place where they could have drawn a line, and now all they can do is slide.

It's true that no Protestant church (that I know of --- correct me please, somebody, if I'm wrong) -- held out against the zeitgeist of the sexual revolution, the linchpin of which is contraception.

Is that a sign that we should all "go with the flow" until the whole idea of good sex, natural sex --- sex as God made it -- goes down the drain?

Few realize it today, but before 1930 all Christian churches opposed contraception as an unnatural and thus impermissible interference with God’s design for human sexuality.

That changed when, at their 1930 Lambeth Conference, Anglicans began permitting the use of contraception on a limited basis; other denominations quickly absorbed the secular sexual morality that flooded into the Protestant world. Today no Protestant church maintains the historic Christian faith on this issue. Only the Catholic Church has stood firm and resisted the onslaught of secularism in sexual ethics.

Things grew so bad in the Protestant world that by the early 1970s some Evangelical leaders were advocating not only contraception, but even abortion. At that time abortion and contraception were viewed as "Catholic" issues. When abortion was legalized by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1973, these Evangelicals rethought the issue and became firmly prolife.

In recent years, as the prolife mindset has grown strong in Evangelical circles, some are even reconsidering the issue of contraception and are rejecting the contraceptive mindset.

In doing so, they are returning to the unbroken historic position of Christianity and the position of their own Protestant forebears (MARTIN LUTHER, JOHN CALVIN, JOHN WESLEY, and all the rest)who unanimously identified contraception as a morally offensive act in the eyes of God. (

Moral Absolutes Ping.

This one got lost for a couple of days (durn that comment page that only shows 20!!!) but here it is for your thoughtful consideration.

This is always a hot button issue whenever it's presented. I'm firmly on the side of life - of not preventing conception, other than if the woman will die from pregnancy. The crux is that when pregnancy is prevented by chemical or mechanical means, people have the general tendency to view each other as an object for gratification, rather than as God's child who is the potential vehicle for God's will in the form of a child. There is a growing tendency to separate the sex act from, of course, children which mean family life, and even lifelong commitment and love. Contraception enables people to easily engage in sex acts with no constraint, no rules, no love, no responsibility.

Contraception definitely feeds divorce and sex outside of marriage. Who can deny it?

Freepmail me if you want on/off this pinglist.

Note: What to speak of the fact that many contraceptives are either abortifacients or harmful to the woman (or the man, in the case of vasectomies.)

I see no evidence to suggest contraception in of itself is a sin at all. Only God knows for sure. If it is a sin He did not communicate it very effectively in the Bible. If one believes the Bible to be the inerrant word of God than the amount of time, clarity and emphasis placed on certain sins should be an indication of their relevance and importance in our lives. Pride, greed, lust, anger etc are certainly dealt with extensively and clearly.

It's kind of thud-headed to say God didn't communicate very clearly that contraception is a sin --- since every Christian church and denomination on earth thought it was as clear as daylight until 1930.

It's always useful to get outside of the 20th and 21st centuries for awhile, to observe what most Christians, at most times, and in most places, actually believed and how they interpreted His scriptures and His will.

We are such timeline provincials: never peeping outside of the fashions of our own de-Christianized, late-sensate culture.

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