June 28, 2004

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The Budding Young Theologian Answers the Questions You Want to Ask

Dear BYT,

Is it wrong to have sex before marriage? And what's the big deal about marriage anyway? I know I know, fornication is supposed to be forbidden, but didn't Jesus just have one commandment—love your neighbors as yourself? Wouldn't sex be part of "loving"? How come Paul came in and wrote all those letters and "defined" MORE laws? Like sex laws. What was his problem? Was the thorn in his side really a stick up his butt?

I’m inclined to go straight to the remarks re Paul and avoid the first question altogether, knowing full well that the sex-before-marriage issue has no good answer. But honestly, no, I do not think it is wrong to have sex before marriage. I once had a priest ask my girlfriend and me if we were “intimate.” When we said yes, he approved, so there is at least one good Jesuit out there who agrees with me (he also is a defender of both homosexuality and the full involvement of women in the Church, not to mention most other places where Catholicism fails to be compassionate). I do, however, think it is wrong to be irresponsible about pre-marital sex. Explaining this would take me too far afield and require personal and altogether subjective discussions about birth control (which I find basically good) and abortion (which I find a political necessity, but basically sad), which I don’t really want to go into here.

Now, the greatest-commandment (more properly, to love God and to love your neighbor as yourself) approach provides a nice way in to a more general discussion, and also will flow smoothly into Paul’s opinions about love.

Loving God and loving your neighbor, in this Christian usage, is not really about sex at all. Greek, the language of the New Testament, has a word for sexual love (eros) and another for Christian love (compassion or charity, agape). To argue that Jesus is talking about sex when he tells the apostles that agapic love is the greatest commandment is very simply wrong. Paul glosses this commandment in his love hymn of I Corinthians (familiar to most of us from Christian weddings). “Love (agape) is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. …” Really, Paul deserves his due, if only for having the insight he did about agape; he was a brilliant theologian. But then, maybe he made the mistake of trying, yes, to regulate eros, when he should have stuck to agape.

But why Paul made the rules is quite plain: he was the leader of a young, but growing community of outlaw believers whose expectations of the second coming of Jesus were, day-by-day, being disappointed. Largely, Paul was defining the early, gentile Christian communities he was involved with over against Peter’s mainly Jewish communities (Paul ended up winning). As outlaws (we all know stories about the persecution of Christians), his communities needed organization and consolidation, which ended up a great big paradox (mainly because his followers did a good deal of writing in his name, contradicting him to a point), complete with as many radically egalitarian aspects as there were traditionally hierarchical ones. No distinction between slave and free, gentile or Jew, woman or man (from Galatians, which Paul certainly wrote); except that wives were meant to be subservient to their husbands, etc. (from Ephesians, which is attributed to a follower of Paul; yet bear in mind that even in Ephesians, husbands were instructed first to love [agape] their wives). Defining laws and building (figurative) walls in the Pauline communities became a means of protection against persecution and a way to consolidate authority under one voice—Paul’s not Peter’s, and certainly not Jesus’. And laws bred more laws, etc., etc., etc. The formation of Catholic Schools in the United States was a similar (much more current) movement, a way for the Church to assert itself as a stable system of mutual support in a very antagonistic environment (Protestant America).

Paul was not as egalitarian as Jesus. And Paul’s followers were not as egalitarian as Paul. And so on down the line, over the centuries, it seems, up to our current religious environment, which can hardly be considered radically egalitarian.

But here I’ve gone far afield, just as I said I would. In short, I think sex is an expression of love, yes, but Jesus was not referring to sex when he gave the apostles the greatest commandment of agape. Paul’s penchant for rule-making was in the service of community-building. And it was Paul’s followers (including his twenty-first century followers) who did most of the damage in terms of eliminating anything really radical in Christianity. As for the thorn-in-side vs. stick-up-butt: I’m fairly convinced that conservative Christians are pretty serious in their opposition to sticking anything at all up their butts. Although, they are also the ones who want the Ten Commandments (including #6, against killing) displayed in our courthouses, yet get all giddy when Texas kills another inmate.