Posted on 09/09/2019 10:37:16 AM PDT by CondoleezzaProtege
The effective separation of sex from procreation may be one of the most important defining marks of our age–and one of the most ominous. This awareness is spreading among American evangelicals, and it threatens to set loose a firestorm.
Most evangelical Protestants greeted the advent of modern birth control technologies with applause and relief. Lacking any substantial theology of marriage, sex, or the family, evangelicals welcomed the development of “The Pill” much as the world celebrated the discovery of penicillin — as one more milestone in the inevitable march of human progress, and the conquest of nature.
At the same time, evangelicals overcame their traditional reticence in matters of sexuality, and produced a growth industry in books, seminars, and even sermon series celebrating sexual ecstasy as one of God’s blessings to married Christians. Once reluctant to admit the very existence of sexuality, evangelicals emerged from the 1960s ready to dish out the latest sexual advice without blushing. As one of the best-selling evangelical sex manuals proclaims, marital sex is Intended for Pleasure. Many evangelicals seem to have forgotten that it was intended for something else as well. For many evangelical Christians, birth control has been an issue of concern only for Catholics. When Pope Paul VI released his famous encyclical outlawing artificial birth control, Humanae Vitae, most evangelicals responded with disregard — perhaps thankful that evangelicals had no pope who could hand down a similar edict. Evangelical couples became devoted users of birth control technologies ranging from the Pill to barrier methods and Intrauterine Devices(IUDs). That is all changing, and a new generation of evangelical couples is asking new questions.
A growing number of evangelicals are rethinking the issue of birth control-and facing the hard questions posed by reproductive technologies...First, we must start with a rejection of the contraceptive mentality...
(Excerpt) Read more at albertmohler.com ...
Blessings for your boy. He is doing amazing. Such a proud Dad, Mark.
As faithlessness, lamentably, abounds.
What is important to me, though, is some exploration, like Dr. Mohler's, of the truth of the teaching. Maybe few are capable of such investigation---- or even of such an interest.
“There fact that there are numerous predominately Catholic countries where poverty is endemic and large families predominate among the poor but exactly ZERO predominantly Protestant countries where the same conditions occur should tell you the answer to that question.”
......
Italy disproves you theory...
“The Refusal** to acknowledge the connection is a stain on the legacy of American Protestantism.”
.....
And the seeming majority of Catholics around the world that do the same??
Sure. If you want your lineage to become extinct and your country to be taken over by others who actually have children, use birth control. It’s a great idea—if you’re a misanthropist.
A misnomer. Premeditated Pogrom.
To which this can be added:
To understand the change in Protestant thought and practice, we need to understand the Protestant vision of family and fertility, particularly as expressed by Luther and Calvin, and how it has changed over the last hundred years.
Early sixteenth-century Europe was an era very different from ours. The late medieval Church claimed about one of every four adults in celibate orders, serving either as priests, nuns, or monks or in celibate military and trading groups such as the Teutonic Knights.
Over the centuries, the religious orders had, through bequests, accumulated vast landed estates and gathered in the wealth that came through this ownership of productive land. The trading orders held remarkable assets in land, goods, and gold. Many orders were nonetheless faithful to their purposes and vows and used this wealth to tend the sick, help the poor, and lift prayers to heaven.
However, in others, spiritual discipline had grown lax. Indeed, sexual scandals of a sort rocked the church of that era. I draw strictly on Catholic witnesses for this.
For example, the great Dutch theologian Desiderius Erasmus, while always loyal to Rome, complained: “Let them prate as they will of the status of monks and virgins. Those who under the pretext of celibacy live in [sexual] license might better be castrated. . . . [T]here is a horde of priests among whom chastity is rare.”
Philip of Burgundy, the Catholic bishop of Utrecht, admitted that chastity was nearly impossible among clerics and monks who were “pampered with high living and tempted by indolence.” This problem festered until the reform-minded Council of Trent convened in 1545...
For Luther, God’s words in Genesis 1:28, “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth,” were more than a blessing, even more than a command. They were, he declared in his 1521 treatise on The Estate of Marriage, “a divine ordinance which it is not our prerogative to hinder or ignore.”
Addressing the celibate Teutonic Knights, he also emphasized Genesis 2:18: “It is not good that man should be alone; I will make him a helper who shall be with him.” The “true Christian,” he declared, “must grant that this saying of God is true, and believe that God was not drunk when he spoke these words and instituted marriage.”
Except among those rare persons—“not more than one in a thousand,” Luther said at one point—who received true celibacy as a special gift from God, marriage and procreation were divinely ordained. As he wrote: “For it is not a matter of free choice or decision but a natural and necessary thing, that whatever is a man must have a woman and whatever is a woman must have a man.”
John Calvin put even greater emphasis on Genesis 1:28. He argued that these words represented the only command of God made before the Fall that was still active after God drove Adam and Eve out of Eden. This gave them a unique power and importance.
While occasionally acknowledging in unenthusiastic fashion St. Paul’s defense of the single life, the Reformers were far more comfortable with the social order described in Luther’s Exhortation to the Knights of the Teutonic Order: “We were all created to do as our parents have done, to beget and rear children. This is a duty which God has laid upon us, commanded, and implanted in us, as is proved by our bodily members, our daily emotions, and the example of all mankind.”
Marriage with the expectation of children, in this view, represented the natural, normal, and necessary form of worldly existence....
In his last years, Francis Schaeffer seemed to be moving toward the historic Christian view of contraception. Since 1980, several resolutions adopted by the Southern Baptists at their annual meeting have criticized contraception. By the close of the twentieth century, the Family Research Council featured special reports on “The Empty Promise of Contraception” and “The Bipartisan Blunder of Title X,” the latter referring to the domestic contraception program in the United States.
Conservative Calvinist publishers are producing books not only against contraception but promoting Natural Family Planning. A movement of Missouri Synod Lutherans is working to overturn their church’s current teaching and return it to Luther’s, and observers report a new interest in the traditional teaching among conservative movements in the mainline churches. - http://www.touchstonemag.com/archives/article.php?id=20-04-020-f
A lot to unpack in your comment, which is just SO off the mark, from a Christian sense anyway. It puts you right in line with the secular eugenicists who have contributed to Europe’s demographic decline, 3rd world sterilization programs, and China’s disastrous one child policy.
Europe’s Demographic Crisis: Migrants No Solution to Aging Populace and Low Birthrates
https://www.nationalreview.com/2017/07/european-demographic-crisis-migrants-no-solution-aging-populace-low-birth-rates/
Alternatives:
Banned Parenthood
Planned Barrenhood
Klanned Parenthood
The Baby-Parts Emporium
**Should Christians Use Birth Control**
Never!!!
Work with the Lord, “Go forth and multiply.”
what is the difference between “natural” family planning and birth control? Both seek to avoid pregnancy.
One incorporates abstinence and honors the natural cycles of fertility and nature, the other is bending nature to one’s whims and fancy.
birth control of any kind is not absolute. It can and does fail leaving open the possibility of life. The point being made on this thread was to not prevent pregnancy as God’s will. So again, what is the difference between “natural”’family planning and birth control. Both seek to prevent pregnancy which is what is being defined as the problem. No one apparently sees the hypocrisy
again birth control can and does fail. Both birth control and natural family planning seek to avoid pregnancy, only the method differs. What’s so hard about that?
i guess it’s like the whole divorce annulment thing. Catholics don’t see the hypocrisy in that one either.
Either seeking to avoid pregnancy is bad, in which case the method does not matter, or it is not.
I'm curious, how does Catholic-approved NFP (natural family planning) fit into that over-all standard of yours?
A couple may be abstaining from sex, particularly around fertile times of month —for very legitimate reasons. Maybe one of the partners is sick for example. The “why” behind it and the “how” matter.
It may seem subtle but there is a difference between adjusting one’s behavior around the workings of nature and around the rhythms of our bodies and fertility as designed by God.
Versus making nature bend to our desires and will for whatever reason. Forcing nature to go against itself. To revolve around OUR pleasures and behavior. Installing an artificial device or drug to block what our bodies were created to do.
Natural family planning still keeps GOD at the altar. Artificial birth control puts SELF.
And annulment is a huge thing because marriage is more than a legal contract. It is a sacramental covenant made before God. A spiritual union was formed. Hence why it’s dissolution requires more than a few signed papers and money thrown around.
Sad how de-spiritualized so much of the Western world has become. And we wonder why there is so little contrast between the lives of non-believers and those of faith.
You are correct to point out the disconnect in what is allowed and what is not. My feeling is that children are a blessing from God - HE is who opens and closes the womb (Isa. 66:9). But, He expects us to act responsibly. There are many types of birth control that cause abortion (hormones and IUD) and some that don't (barrier methods, NPF, sterilization) though as you correctly said, they all have a chance of failure. My dad had a vasectomy after fathering five children but afterward he fathered two more!
I think ALL abortifacients SHOULD be rejected because they can cause a fertilized egg to not implant to the uterine wall and be expelled - the woman has no idea when it occurs - which cheapens the value of human life and blurs the line between it and abortion.
I agree on the abortifacients although I may define them a little differently than you do. I actually was not commenting on whether birth control is right or wrong, Just pointing out the disconnect in those who think preventing pregnancy is wrong unless you use their approved method to prevent it.
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