Christianity's Obsession with Sex, Transcript

(4) Christianity's Obsession with Sex - YouTube

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VvUC8_xlafU

Transcript:

(00:08) foreign good evening welcome to Center place and Welcome to our history Theology and philosophy lecture series I'm really excited to be able to be resuming our series I've had a long um summer of traveling which I've been kind of traveling everywhere from French Polynesia to England and Scotland and Wales and a lot of across U.

(00:41) S and Canada and that's kind of prevented me from being able to update our YouTube channel but anyway now hopefully that traveling is behind us and we'll be able to get back with our schedule as always the lecture tonight is a live interactive presentation and so landro is here acting as the producer of the lecture and he is hopefully taking down questions as you're answering asking them both on YouTube and on Facebook um and at the end of the presentation he's going to forward those to me and we'll be able to uh answer those say

(01:19) juicy topic tonight so we're talking about sex and so maybe that will encourage people to want to ask a bunch of different questions we'll see we invite you to go to centerplace.ca lectures to view our whole catalog of these lectures they haven't been adding up as much recently but we'll start adding them newly again as we go and there is a whole host of content already there you can also subscribe to our YouTube channel so that you get all of the new content that we add our lectures are always listener supported and so we encourage you to

(01:56) make a donation if you'd like to and you can do that again at centerplace.ca slash donate as I mentioned we are continuing now to restart our schedule and so next week on Tuesday October 25th at the same time Brian caruana the director of the encounter world religion Center who has been a guest lecturer many times before here at Center place he's going to return and he's going to give us an all new lecture uh entitled from Jerusalem to Rome and he's going to talk about essentially how Christianity which is essentially

(02:37) founded in Galilee and Judea in Jerusalem how the focus so quickly shifted in the first few centuries from that origin place to Rome and so that will be a very interesting lecture the week after that on November 1st Tuesday November 1st I will talk on the topic of monarchy uh in Mormonism in the in the realm of of Mormon history uh the prophet James Strang of the strangite branch of Mormonism was sort of famously crowned as a king and he ruled as essentially King on Beaver Island in Lake Michigan but when he did that

(03:22) um it was actually intending to have that be a spiritual Kingdom and in other words being King of the kingdom of God on Earth and he was actually imitating his predecessor Joseph Smith who also was declared King in his own lifetime in Nauvoo Prophet priest and King and so we're going to look at essentially how um what I'm going to call the prophetic monarchy has evolved in the different expressions of Mormonism obviously in the strangite branch there was Joseph Smith's successor James Strang but there hasn't been any subsequent prophetic

(04:00) monarchs um in Utah Brigham Young and uh his essentially oligarchy of Apostles have been in charge ever since and in Community of Christ there was a lineal succession from Joseph Smith to his son and then his grandsons and great-grandson until now the new leaders of the church the new Prophet presidents are no longer from the Smith family and so we'll look at how that has all evolved and anyway some of the interesting consequences of having you know either a constitutional or not so constitutional uh monarchy at the head

(04:38) of a religion our topic this evening uh it's a juicy one I guess Christianity's obsession with sex this is something that I think is a very very serious problem personally in Christianity that has been kind of ongoing and continues to be a problem today that I think needs to be addressed and I want to kind of look at the scope of this and sort of the origins and what maybe can be done about it so um I started out in the summer I was thinking of the the slippery slope of dancing so if you'll remember back in the 1984 uh movie Footloose the villain

(05:26) of the movie is a John Lithgow who's playing a reverend Reverend Shaw Moore who is so worried that the people of his small town are going to have sex that he has gotten the Town Council to ban dancing and ban rock and roll music they ultimately start burning books they're doing the whole uh the whole rigmarole in order to prevent any possibility that young people are gonna have fun together and that that fun will lead to sin so historically uh there's been a bunch of Christian churches that have banned dancing like the Baptist Church at least

(06:03) frowns on dancing and in the middle of the 20th century my own church Community of Christ also prohibited young people from dancing and so essentially there was kind of a um you know a joke that there is a slippery slope that holding hands hand-holding could lead to dancing and and nowadays that joke is is reversed that the Baptists have gotten so obsessed with prohibiting dancing uh that they're afraid that uh people having sex could actually lead to them dancing you know so in other words the reversal of the slippery slope that

(06:40) dancing is such a horrible a horrible sin um we have as part of the artifacts here in Community of Christ in the Toronto congregation these old preaching charts we have one anyway I think this is a copy of a different one that were part of the main artifacts in the church how ministers back before they had YouTube like this some could talk to everybody on YouTube they would use these large visual aids which they would take around to Cottage meetings and so forth and they would use these to essentially share their kind of world view and these

(07:19) are designed to show essentially that there are two ways they can go forward the Narrow Path that's going to lead ultimately to heaven and then the broad way that is going to lead to damnation and so I don't know if you can see on this slide it might be too small on your on your point but there are um this preaching chart essentially calls out on the Broadway all these works of the flesh as it's called and they include adultery fornication and lasciviousness and the slippery slope begins with lying and goes to deception

(07:52) it moves right into card playing which leads to dancing which leads to revelry which goes directly to murder you know so in other words there is a very direct correlation here a slippery slope being spelled out and actually drawn as a connection right here with what is being called works of the flesh all the different sorts of things that let's say on the one hand might be unethical things but that are intertwined um with you know revelry dancing card playing and of course sex so sin and sex and Christianity so what

(08:33) is sin sin is a Christian jargon term and it's kind of an important term insect in um in Christianity uh I would say in my congregation we actually very rarely use the word I think in part because we are very uncomfortable that it has so many um just mental associations people are immediately drawn to think of sex which is not what we're trying to talk about usually if we are going to talk about it we talk about Sin we talk about it as being separation from God but Augustine of Hippo so one of the great thinkers in Christianity defines

(09:10) the word sin as quote a word or deed or a desire that a person makes that is in opposition to the Eternal law of God and so that could be obviously a big huge swash of things it encompasses a whole world potentially of unethical Behavior everything from sharing your streaming platform password to buying clothing made by child laborers to over contributing your carbon footprint as the world is is facing the global climate crisis and so forth nevertheless I think when we say the word sin we don't immediately think of all of those

(09:55) potential unethical social injustices all of those kinds of ways that things are done in opposition to the Eternal law of God in separateness from God but rather we immediately jump to the very strong associations that the word sin has with sex uh which I think is quite uh without regard to ethics so in other words sex just all automatically uh jumps out in a lot of people's minds as as Sin and sex being together regardless of whether it's where there's really no ethical concerns at all with any particular sex

(10:34) act or whether there is an ethical concern in some cases um you know there's a list anyway a famous list of the deadly sins the seven deadly sins in Christianity and usually when people are writing out the list the number one sin is is lust or fornication so in other words Christianity fairly deeply rooted in it has this idea that the sin that's most obsessed with is sex um that hasn't stopped with the attention that has been given in the last half in last century or so from the very noisy uh American political right

(11:13) evangelicals who continue to dominate a lot of the American political landscape and have therefore the problematic associations of when you connect religion and politics and end up obviously and because of the anyway the connection's over you have to government always ends up making complicating the reputation of religion in other words you can't stay pure when you're getting involved in governing so Christian leaders from this Camp have done everything from campaigning against equal rights for women a position to

(11:53) women in the workplace opposing Reproductive Rights for women opposing contraception on top of that opposing sex education against lgbtq rights human rights of every kind so that has been the side that this very noisy representatives of Christianity in North America have been on and so I think that while um the focus has been you know supporting patriarchy so trying to make sure that um families are led by men who were Breadwinners women who have to be in traditional supporting subordinate roles and so forth I think that part of this

(12:35) has been about a clear obsession with control of women's bodies and actually making laws that are intended to punish women who have sex especially who have sex outside of marriage um and so here's Jerry Falwell the founder of the Moral Majority um uh whose son Jerry Falwell Jr has kind of shown you know that just the intense hypocrisy of all this with his own sexual escapades and so forth his um um anyway what he's been doing so we also kind of have I think a sense within Christianity that sexual celibacy has been promoted as an ideal so

(13:18) certainly the world's largest Christian denomination the Roman Catholic Church upholds sexual celibacy as an ideal requires its priests monks and nuns to refrain from all sexual activity and of course in the past several decades many Catholics have felt betrayed by their church because of covering up criminal sexual abuses you know by the clergy and so in other words there's this ideal but then there is a also a loss of moral Authority which in a lot of cases has caused you know where in place in locations where you know it's been

(13:59) especially Grievous like Ireland you know it's causes like the collapse of it goes from being just a very strong Catholic country to having collapsing fairly rapidly as a result of that okay so why um is there such a focus on sex I guess is part of part of the question I have for tonight and one of the where and where does it come from so in writing The Christmas Stories the authors of the gospels of Matthew and Luke they one of their whole purposes is asserting that Jesus mother Mary remained a virgin when Jesus was

(14:38) conceived and born why why is that such a big deal what's the point of purpose of that there's all of these things that seem to come all together why Christianity seems to have like I say sort of an obsessive relationship with sex and included in that seemed to be a lot of weird ideas about virginity and Chastity and so where are those ideas coming from so if we look to the teachings of Jesus as they are preserved in the four canonical gospels of the New Testament we find that this is really not a significant focus of any

(15:17) of the teachings that have been preserved for us so I mentioned that list of the seven deadly sins well that is not something that Jesus said from The Sermon on the Mount or something like that here's your top 10 seven sins or something like that and start listing those off that's not his focus at all rather that list originated with ascetic monks who were living in the Egyptian desert centuries after Jesus's death so these are spiritual Aesthetics that are interested in you know denying themselves all sorts

(15:52) of things including you know their fasting all the time they are living very humbly they're they've given up uh giving up wealth and property and among the whole list of things they're giving up is also um you know participating in Sex and so forth you know so that's part of where those ideas are coming up uh coming from um that tradition that list of seven deadly sins was later uh formalized by Pope Gregory the Great Gray the first in 590 A.

(16:25) D and continued then to be used you know throughout the Middle Ages into the present day so like I say Jesus though has comparatively little to say about sex in the New Testament at all um if anything his focus is much more being a proponent of or a person who is spreading love and a gospel of love love your enemies love your neighbor love yourself love God all of those sort of things as opposed to [Music] um bringing up a big points of opposition to lust which is not talked about anywhere near to that kind of extent so for example in the gospels Jesus does

(17:05) not have anything at all to say about masturbation contraception abortion homosexuality Chastity premarital sex transgender issues ETC that's simply not his Focus among the hundreds of recorded teachings that he does have there are only a handful of passages where Jesus talks about anything that relates to sex and so we'll go over those and kind of try to find a pattern from them first of these and one that has had a bunch of effects throughout history is Jesus prohibition of divorce so Jesus prohibited divorce in multiple

(17:46) independent attestations so whenever we are looking for let's say a teaching that is more or less likely to go all the way back to the historical Jesus the gospels as we know were not written by eyewitnesses they only are windows into understanding the historical Jesus so the prohibition on divorce is found on the one hand in the earliest narrative gospel mark it's also found in the Lost sayings gospel Q which is then used as a source along with Mark by the authors of Matthew and Luke so the Q version of the

(18:22) saying is also um is also preserved by those two and finally um in Corinthians Paul's letter to the Corinthians he also cites Jesus as the source for a Prohibition on divorce so Paul writing to the Corinthians says to those of you who are married I give this command he says actually not I but the Lord so in other words this is not coming from Paul he doesn't normally quote Jesus he's actually surprisingly um Paul for our earliest Christian writer is actually kind of surprisingly silent on most of Jesus's teachings but

(19:01) sometimes he does cite him and this is one of those cases he says a wife must not separate from her husband but if she does she must remain unmarried or else be reconciled to her husband and a husband must not divorce his wife so there's a Prohibition on that and the idea of it is if you do separate you're not supposed to get married again so that's the version that is found in Paul the version it is in Mark says Jesus says whoever divorces his wife and marries another commits adultery against her and if she divorces her husband and marries another

(19:38) she commits adultery so adultery is the word here from the Hebrew Bible for sex that married people have with partners that are not they're not married to so essentially he's saying that divorce doesn't stop you from being married and from your original partner which is in other words he's not recognizing divorce as as having legitimacy at all so it's a Prohibition on divorce so from that version the kind of an absolute prohibition on divorce the author of Matthew revises that and adds an exemption for sexual immorality as it says so when the

(20:21) Pharisees in the scene in The Gospel of Matthew are asking Jesus why did Moses command us to give a certificate of dismissal and to divorce her so in other words the Mosaic law that we have in the Hebrew Bible allows men to divorce their wives and Jesus replies though as he's saying no you can't do that even if it is according to Mosaic law he says to them it was because you were so hard-hearted that Moses allowed you to divorce your wives but from the beginning it was not so and I say to you whoever divorces his

(20:56) wife except for sexual immorality and marries another commits adultery and he who marries a divorced woman commits adultery so in other words divorce here is not being recognized and Jesus is actually making this prohibition uh even despite the fact that it's allowed in Jewish law Mosaic law explicitly um that passage in Matthew then continues with a weird and sort of difficult reading on teaching on Unix so eunuchs our men who have been castrated so often in the ancient world slaves were castrated and so that's anyway what

(21:40) the word unit comes from the disciples said to him if such is the case of a man with his wife it is better not to marry but he said to them not everyone can accept this teaching but only those to whom it is given for there are eunuchs who have been so from birth and there are eunuchs who have been made eunuchs by others and there are eunuchs who have made themselves eunuchs for the sake of the Kingdom of Heaven let anyone accept this who can and so anyway it's not entirely clear you know what that what that particular

(22:18) teaching means but it might mean that abstaining here from sex specifically after marriage you know outside or outside of your married after you're married is a positive thing in other words that you were doing that you're having this kind of abstinence for the sake of the Kingdom of Heaven um uh that's what the last thing is saying okay that's the first one of the the mentions that Jesus has uh about sex uh specifically sex and marriage the second is a Prohibition on leering so also in Matthew right in the same

(22:58) area in chapter 5 verses 27 to 28. um uh Jesus prohibits leering at women and this was actually only in Matthew and there's no additional attestation so this is not in Luke or Mark or or cue or any other any other source he says you have heard that it was said You shall not commit adultery so he's quoting always he often does this where he will talk about a mosaic law you know Thou shalt not commit adultery but I say to you everyone who looks at a woman with lusts has already committed adultery with her in his heart

(23:36) if your right eye causes you to sin tear it out and throw it away it is better for you to lose one of your members than for your whole body to be thrown into hell so the juxtaposition here with the offending eye saying which is in actually other sources but not attached to this it seems to raise the stakes here of of leering at a woman with lust looking at a woman with lust uh in your heart or something like that which is the prohibited prohibited here in this saying that's the second one and finally um of the different mentions of Jesus

(24:12) and sex we have the story of Jesus and the woman taking adultery a story that is now found in the Gospel of John at the end of chapter 7 the beginning of chapter eight even though it is there now scholarly consensus is that this popular passage which is sometimes called the pericope adultery in other words the passage about the adulteress was originally a separate free-floating text and sometimes it was incorporated in different places in John sometimes in Luke and so forth in other words it's a story that people liked but

(24:48) it wasn't original to any one of the gospels and It ultimately was incorporated by scribes into this gospel and ended up finally in John so let me read this story because I think it's anyway especially interesting to our topic early in the morning Jesus came again to the temple all the people came to him and sat down and began and he sat down and began to teach them the scribes and Pharisees brought a woman who had been caught in adultery and making her stand before all of them they said to him teacher this woman was

(25:21) caught in the very active committing adultery now in the law of Moses commanded us to Stone such women to execute such women now what do you say they said this to test him so that they might have some charge to bring against him Jesus bent down and wrote with his finger on the ground when they kept on questioning him he straightened up and he said to them let anyone among you who is without sin be the first to throw a stone at her and once again he bent down and wrote on the ground when they heard it they went away one by

(25:58) one beginning with the elders and Jesus was left alone with the woman standing before him Jesus straightened up and said to her woman where are they has no one condemned you she said no one sir and Jesus said neither do I condemn you go your own way so I go your way and from now on do not sin again so I just want to look at these three cases so it's not a lot of different teachings it's not like I say I'm a special emphasis in Jesus's either teachings or stories that show give him as an example of how to behave in each

(26:38) of these though Jesus is actually confronting the context he finds in his Society so the context here in every case is there's a case of Mosaic law that is about marriage it's about divorce and about sex about married persons outside of marriage adultery in other words there's an actually um about any other kind of sex but just married people and sex outside of marriage um each time his solution is to reject literal interpretation of Mosaic law in order to argue for a spiritual ideal so not once does he say yeah the law is

(27:26) that way you should be literalists you should be obeying the law to the letter like that that's what exactly what you should do and yet it's never somehow um somehow uh you know Christians in so many cases and modern times become legalists where they um and argue for this kind of literal interpretation in this case every single example the law is clear Jesus is essentially telling them to either reject the law or by his example or to uh to go above it and so forth so Mosaic law had made divorce easy for husbands who could cast off wives and

(28:02) children and that presumably was causing very serious hardship in Jesus's contemporary society that he was addressing when he decided to essentially reject Mosaic law and prohibit divorce obviously you know over the course of history that's had a lot of consequences because Christians have you know followed that and taken that very again literally and felt that that's a Prohibition that it's very hard to get around and so all of the work that all medieval kings and so forth had to do popes and to to get rid of divorce for actual reasons of state

(28:44) or any other kind of reasons to actually divorce wives and so forth anyway has been part of function of Christian history as a result of that so Mosaic law also prohibited the act of adultery but Jesus called for a more difficult standard avoiding even leering at women in other words looking at a woman with lust so that's um essentially I would say also very tough to take literalistically or to or to actually even achieve but nevertheless is calling for as opposed to focusing on the ACT is calling for let's say a more spiritual uh standard

(29:24) than the literal standard and finally Mosaic law required the woman taking an adultery in adultery to be stoned to death according to Deuteronomy 22 22 actually that should also have included the male partner who was apparently not captured although it would have been been there if they were caught in the act and so forth anyway that male partner does not appear in the story as is so often the case um when patriarchy is enforcing uh enforcing rules about sex it almost always falls upon uh women like obviously we're seeing temporarily right

(30:05) now in Iran and so forth uh outside of Christianity but in a fellow abrahamic religion so Jesus prevents the law from being executed in the story by causing the women's accusers to consider their own sins you know there is to have some empathy and so forth meanwhile his own personal response is forgiveness he doesn't condemn them I condemn her either even though he's there right so that's his response void judgment and forgive so these are pretty rare teachings on sex there's only a handful of them here nevertheless in a comp in opposition to

(30:46) that Jesus actually is almost continually condemning people for judging others for being Hypocrites for engaging in scriptural legalisms he says in Matthew 7 do not judge the prohibition on judging others or you too will be judged for in the same way that you judge others you will be judged and with the measure you used it will be measured to you so that teaching of Judge not do not judge in Matthew is paired with another teaching that is multiply attested about a moat and a beam as it's usually called the moat in your neighbor's eye

(31:27) what why do you look at the speck of sawdust in your brother's eye and pay no attention to the plank in your own eye how can you say to your brother let me take the speck out of your eye when all the time there is a plank in your own eye you hypocrite first take the plank out of your own eye and then you will clearly see to remove the speck from your brother's eye so um I don't know that teaching is pretty clear and yet I think you know and taken with that along with uh the story of the woman taking adultery and so forth

(32:04) um Jesus's position on on judging uh others on hypocrisy on legalism and and indeed the fact that he really has no interest in um the sex Obsession should make uh Jesus's own interest in all of these things um fairly clear um how is it then that Christians throughout history it seems have so thoroughly redefined the word sin as sex how they become so sex-obsessed how they become sex police so what is this origin of this generally negative and I would say unhealthy attitude towards sex that kind of pervades much of Christianity

(32:53) it's often when you ask a question like that the answer is Paul and so it's not too different here so Paul does share a bunch of the blame so as with many similar issues Paul has a role in setting Christians down this path so just by way of background although we never met the historical Jesus Paul is the very first Christian whose writings survive and as such his instructions to the very young emerging Christian communities congregations that he himself had planted obvious he had self-implanted in many times those instructions when preserved were

(33:36) later canonized and became scripture a big component of the New Testament are works that are either authentic letters of Paul or letters written by followers afterwards in his name so um Paul himself is a person who abstained from sex and he also considered sexual celibacy not having sex to be an ideal so in the course in a kind of long discourse that he has on marriage Paul ends up writing a whole bunch of practical things to these congregations that he's either founded or is helping with arguments that they're having so he

(34:14) writes a concerning marriage the husband should give to his wife what is do her and likewise the wife to her husband do not deprive one another except perhaps by agreement for a set time to devote yourselves to prayer and then come together again so that Satan may not tempt you because of your lack of self-control this I say by way of concession not of command I wish that all were as I am so he says that in First Corinthians 7.

(34:50) so it's a little oblique what he's talking about here but he's more or less saying you're a married couple you should go ahead and go ahead and have sex with each other maybe you should take time out to pray and so forth I guess in the middle of all this but in other words don't be tempted because uh you uh lack the self-control to stop having sex just go ahead and you know in other words don't be tempted to have sex outside of marriage because you lack that self-control rather go ahead and Cate your desires with by having sex

(35:17) with each other and he says I'm making this as a concession I'm not telling you you should do it I'm saying if you have to you can but he says I wish that all were as I myself am in other words I wish nobody was having sex at all like I'm I'm celibate and that's what I think the way it should be so you can have sex but you don't need to be having sex Paul continues to those of you who are unmarried and those of you who are widows I say that it is good for you to remain unmarried just as I am unmarried but if you're not practicing

(35:51) self-control in other words if you are having you know sleeping around if you're having sex in other words then you should go ahead and marry for it is better to marry than to be a flame with passion now concerning virgins he says I have no command of the Lord so in other words he doesn't have any teachings here from Jesus because um Jesus doesn't talk about this kind of stuff this is the kind of thing that Paul's obsessed with I have no command of the Lord but I give my opinion as one who by the Lord's Mercy is trustworthy I

(36:22) think that in view of the impending crisis it is good for you virgins that is people who've never had sex to remain as you are continue to never have sex and so the impending crisis here so Paul believes very literally in a literal end of the world and as such part of his ideas about sex and marriage and virginity are potentially because he thinks that the world is literally going to end anyway and so there may not be any point in bringing new children to the world because again why would you do that if the whole world is going to end they

(37:02) won't be able to grow up in that sort of a thing so we okay all right so anyway I can't talk to I cannot possibly list off all of the things Paul has to say about sex because unlike Jesus Paul has many many more musings on sex including unfortunately on homosexual activity which he condemns so he argues that in rejecting the true creator for Idols of false pagan gods God has given pagans over to disorderable dishonorable passions they're females exchange natural intercourse for unnatural and in the same way also the

(37:43) males giving up natural intercourse with females were consumed with their passionate desire for one another males committed Shameless acts with males and received in their own persons the due penalty for their error so he's saying that in a letter to the Romans essentially arguing how Pagan pagans who their admits you know the ancient Greeks who are sort of known for um uh Customs involving uh same-sex activity how that came about so Paul his belief anyway that the source of same sex attraction among pagans um he thinks that that is inspired

(38:21) because the Greeks are busy sitting around looking at these statues of the Greek gods and the Greek gods look like Greek gods right so in other words they're very sexy and so by looking at that that's what's given them the idea uh to be attracted to people of the same sex so he figures that's how that attraction starts and indeed that's a general um Jewish argument at the time nevertheless he has to himself speculate on the source of same-sex attraction in Jews like him so he has to wonder well I don't spend my time looking at Greek

(38:59) statues that wasn't where I was raised to do how would a Jew like me have this kind of a same-sex desire and so Paul concludes and it's actually the Mosaic law itself that is the source of that Temptation he says yet if it had not been for the law I would not have known sin I would not have known what it is to covet if the law had not said Thou shalt not covet but sin seizing an opportunity through the Commandment produced in me all kinds of covetousness so in other words he is identifying Mosaic law as a source of the idea for

(39:39) things like covetousness same-sex attraction and this kind of a thing so Paul's extensive Reflections on same-sex attraction have led a number of Scholars including the late Bishop John Shelby Spong to conclude that the Apostle himself was a celibate gay man Spong argues in his book rescuing the Bible from fundamentalists that Paul was originally controlled gay men gay man gay male he believes who taught the Christian Church what the love of God means so in finding Grace and in in this way uh Paul who is having these kinds of

(40:18) struggles that he was taught through the Mosaic law were wrong nevertheless you know was able to find Grace in God and so forth nevertheless his musings haven't always been very good for gay people in the Christian church subsequently but if we understand them maybe a little bit better this way that we can maybe have some empathy for him uh and the different ways that he's trying to come to terms with it we have an entire um lecture on the on the argument that some Scholars have made like Bishop spawn uh about Paul's orientation as a

(41:01) celibate potentially he's a celibate for sure but anyway potentially homosexual orientation um so in some Paul on sex Paul in general I think sees sex as something that is bad and should be avoided unless you don't have the willpower to avoid it in which case you just got to go ahead and get married so but he doesn't see marriage as a positive thing in its own right it's just a Band-Aid that can have that you have for your un an ability to be celibate which is the higher uh way to live so Paul sees sex outside of

(41:36) marriage including same-sex sexual activity as sinful and he himself lived and advocated sexual celibacy as a higher way of living in his opinion anyway even though like he admitted he doesn't have any teaching from Jesus about that that's just how he sees it okay so where does that come from well six I'm sorry I like Jesus and most of the original disciples Paul grew up as a practicing Jew even describes himself as a Pharisee originally who was very um fervent in the obedience to the law and all the different uh iterations of

(42:15) it so one of the ideas is there's a significant number of Thou shalt knots in the Mosaic law and a lot of those are related to sex as many people have probably read if you've ever read through some of those is it possible that Christians simply inherited their negative attitude towards sex from the Contemporary Judaism the Judaism of the second temple period so it's not quite as easy as that so although Mosaic law regulates sexual activity and prohibits a whole bunch of different types of sex Hebrew Bible unlike Paul does not view

(42:59) sex in general or marriage as inferior to celibacy nor does it hold up celibacy as an ideal so for example unlike priests in the later medieval Christianity and Catholicism today Hebrew priests were not supposed to be celibate so when you go back to the legendary heroic High priests Aaron the brother of Moses and zaduk the high priest under David they and the other high priests in the Hebrew Bible were married with Children and indeed Mosaic law expected priests to marry as it says in Leviticus 21 13.

(43:42) and so in addition to the high priests prophets like Moses and Isaiah were also married so in other words it's not neither the high priests or the priests that are like supposed to engage in celibacy nor these let's say more uh you know Wilder spiritual types the prophets who are coming in and castigating uh the Kings those guys also have have wives they're also married even the um the judges when there's a woman judge she's also married so in other words these leaders are generally understood to be married with children

(44:18) in the Hebrew Bible even if you're going to take um I could follow these kind of ascetic vows as we were talking about later the later early Christian monks going off into the desert and so forth and giving up uh fasting all the time and giving up wine and so forth devoting yourselves to Ritual Purity the examples again in the Hebrew Bible don't involve giving up sex so nazarites like Samson took special vows to consecrate their lives to set themselves apart for God and those included things like abstaining from wine or really anything

(44:59) related to Grape products refraining from cutting your hair very famously Samson's not allowed to cut his hair and avoiding all other sorts of ritual impurity so you cannot go to a funeral even in your mother's funeral because they would be coming into contact with a corpse and so forth you can't go visit your grandmother's grave or anything that would make you ritually impure so you're not allowed to do those things nevertheless if you remember the story of Samson he broke his vow not because he's having sex with Delilah this temptress

(45:35) Philistine temptress who is working to undermine him the issue was not that he had sex with her the issue is that he she cut his hair off and that's what caused him to lose to break his vow loses his strength with God and so forth so in other words that's what ritual Purity was about cutting your hair or drinking wine or something like that it has not about abstinence from sex even in fact in the um in the Old Testament the Hebrew Bible the beginning of Genesis Genesis 1 28 God's very first commandment to humankind is be fruitful and multiply

(46:11) um it's again repeated after the Noah story be fruitful multiply replenish the Earth um the story The Adam and Eve story gets reinterpreted by Christians and Christians add kind of layers to it and that include sort of virginity and sex and and added into the story that isn't really there in the original so the first many centuries the Christian fathers when they would talk about the Adam and Eve story they really wanted to add on to it the idea that Adam and Eve while they were in Eden maintained virginity so in other

(46:48) words nobody none of the animals nothing can eat and everything in Eden was in a state of um of sexlessness nobody was having any kind of sex there prior to uh Adam and Eve eating from the Tree of knowledge good and evil and so forth but that interpretation is not explicit in the original and I mentioned that because some of you who are watching maybe Mormon or post-mormon and this is a very important story to um Mormon LDS theology as it's a version of this story is told as part of the Mormon Temple ceremony Mormons have

(47:25) added the idea that the Commandments given to Adam and Eve on the one hand to be fruitful and multiply and on the other hand to not eat from the Tree of knowledge good and evil that those themselves were contradictory because you had to do in order to be fruitful and multiply you had to have the eat eat the fruit it's in other words um according to the um you know Mormon Doctrine the idea of it is it's actually Adam and Eber actually set up to fail and are meant to do that break that commandment in order to get the whole

(47:57) plan and the whole universe rolling and everything like that again this is our ideas that are much later interpretations that are added onto the story that are not in the original so if it's not drawing from the Hebrew Bible which is kind of generally speaking not opposed to sex or upholding um celibacy and abstinence from sex as an ideal so it's not from that it's not from Jewish practice it's not from Jesus's own teachings other than like I say Paul's particular Hang-Ups about sex what is the source of bias for other early Christian thinkers

(48:36) and how did they get this idea against sex in general or in others viewing sex is negative or lesser than uh anti-sex or not sex and I'm going to suggest that ironically there's an ironic Source in contemporary Trends in the Greco-Roman Pagan or traditional religion that that Christianity and Judaism are existing side by side and I'm saying ironically be given the fact that so many modern people post-modern people associate paganism with sexual Liberation so they kind of think well Christianity has this whole anti-sex going on thing and they

(49:14) it actually Stamped Out paganism which was so you know sex positive or Pro sex nevertheless many scholars directly connect the dots from early Christianity's bias against sex with contemporary Trends in Greco-Roman paganism we say paganism it's actually you know here such a variety of local traditions and and religions and so forth that you know everyone every component of it would be different and it also is spans over you know again hundreds of thousands of years and so forth and so it's not a monolith and it

(49:48) was changing and Christianity was part of those General trends that are happening in the Greco-Roman Empire um I say Greco because the Greek cultural Zone where the Christianity is emerging so specifically the Pagan religion contemporary traditional religion had already been engaged in a centuries-long process of Reform under the influence of the many schools of philosophical thought that emerged after The Death of Socrates so after 399 BC so Socrates and his successors challenged contemporary assumptions made by

(50:36) traditional religion by asking questions about ethics and the way the universe works so the contemporaries their contemporary paganisms it was a thing that is made up of many inherited rules all kinds of rituals concerns that if you don't act in a certain way you will not appease a God and so you will have to You'll engage Misfortune or you will have to do such and such an ax to expiate the the dire fate that you've had put upon you because of some angering some God or other you'll have to do ritualistic things things that we now think of as

(51:18) maybe being superstitious things crossing your fingers or so forth so those were not necessarily none of those things that are acting they don't necessarily include a very clear moral or ethical character they may be just things that you have to do because tradition has demanded that people always do them and it might not be a good thing to do or a moral thing to do or a right thing to do Socrates is asking these questions what is a good thing to do what is good and so forth what is uh how does one live a virtuous

(51:47) life what is virtue and so forth and it may be that all of those things taken together you know what we might draw a giant circle around and just leg label Pagan religion and really be all-encompassing with everybody's lives that all of those things together may not have a very coherent logical philosophy since it all is inherited and existed before the invention of logic and philosophy and when logic and philosophy are invented they start to say wait a second these things are not not logical they were doing all of these

(52:22) so this had an effect on all of the different um ways that contemporary religion was being practiced there became a host of philosophical schools that are founded by Plato's sorry Socrates students and successors and people who also reject Socrates and founded their own schools and so forth so Socrates greatest student Plato kind of famously devised a philosophical system which insisted that immaterial ideas spiritual forms are perfect and eternal and that those ideas consequently are more real than anything in the material

(53:06) world that we can touch and sense everything that seems so real but is actually very mutable and perishable and therefore not Eternal and not important so having made this um kind of very bold uh assertion that really struck everybody's attention for you know many many centuries thousands of years here that also set up a whole bunch of popularizing ideas and so people for example uh what we now calls for example gnostics people who are now taking that away from philosophy and more back into kind of a a religious and a mythologizing sense

(53:48) um they popularize these ideas that the physical the material world is inferior or even bad and evil created by an evil material God and it's capturing our true selves our immaterial souls which are from a world of pure light and so forth and are actually the creation of a true God and so forth and our whole purpose then of for the gnostics and so forth is to eventually be freed from this flawed Material World so that we can rejoin you know the true spiritual Realm of the ideal forms and so forth the Eternal

(54:27) realm where the true Eternal spiritual God is and so forth and so anyway one of the um consequences of starting to have that kind of a philosophy that kind of a mythology that kind of a teaching is kind of the same way as Paul where he was saying well if the Ant World is just going to end anyway why do we need to have new children they're just going to they're not going to get to grow up and everything like that why would we just can go get them to the top of the mountain and wait for the end to come and so forth and so in that same way if

(54:58) the entirety of the material creation as the gnostics understood is is actually bad then having um it's not always gnostics but anyway some gnostics are this way certainly the later the Mana keys and and so on different different Duelists uh are definitely on this on this front then having sex is bad because you're actually imprisoning new Spirits into new prison bodies and so forth and so um and so just doing anything physical and carnal is actually bad you should be doing things that are intellectual and and spiritual that are connecting you

(55:33) with the ideas right um so another school uh and one that actually became the most popular School in the Roman Empire in the time period of you know contemporaneously to Jesus and the early Christians anyway is the school of stoicism founded by Zeno of kittium and stoicism uh emphasized self-discipline self-control this is the kind of um philosophy where you know you argue that with the right attitude a prisoner can understand herself to be a queen or for the wrong attitude a um an emperor can think of himself as as

(56:19) being imprisoned and and so forth in other words by torturing himself so there's a lot of of that sort of mental self-control and that influenced all aspects of life so for example the stoic philosopher Seneca wrote the whole duty of man is embraced in two principles of abstinence and patience and he also argued that abstinence is actually easier than temperance it's a lot easier he says to if you're to just not drink at all than to just drink a couple drinks because once you get going you want to drink too much and

(56:56) likewise it's much easier to just simply not have sex at all than to occasionally have sex so in other words definitely about stoics definitely had an attitude of emphasizing self-control and abstinence it's among a whole host of these then Greco-Roman philosophical backgrounds that um that in many cases are the stoics are not against the material world they actually are materialists but in any event in some cases that are opposed to physical stuff carnal stuff and certainly uh opposed to let's say giving in to passions and and and things

(57:36) and instead trying to emphasize willpower self-control abstinence all of these kinds of things and so those are things that are becoming very popular as people are are contemplating the new ideas of Greco-Roman morality as Christianity is also developing and having its rise so Christian thinkers like origin of Alexandria one of the earliest smartest of all Christian thinkers who was himself a student of a platonist philosopher along with Augustine of Hippo we reference all the time um both of them and many many other

(58:18) early Christian thinkers were directly influenced by platonism much of which along with many stoic virtues were absorbed whole cloth into Christianity or with just a little pruning meanwhile um on the other end of the spectrum so that's the high end of high thought spectrum of Christian Theology and philosophy meanwhile at the kind of popular street level so philosophers who were exercising you know kind of a popular show the same way that Socrates had of going into the marketplace and challenging people by by stewing property and and and

(58:56) trying to find out how trying to argue what makes a virtual virtuous life those guys have already been exercising essentially Mind Over Matter willpower over their material or physical limitations that kind of Blends almost directly into the desert monks who are going away as I mentioned Into the Wilderness they are living on their own they're a chewing Society they are fasting they're doing incredible Feats of fasting on just tiny amounts of of food and so forth they're mortifying their bodies they live on the top of

(59:34) columns for years at a time and so forth and of course they are rejecting any kind of carnal anything so they're not having sex or not having any of these kind of things this they become essentially spiritual Superstars for local people because they're saying wow this person is showing such an amazing degree of willpower and faith that they are someone who is obviously encountered with with god with the spiritual realm they are somebody who can be an intercessor for me and it's those monks and so forth that kind of promote these

(1:00:13) ideals of celibacy and so forth and then also are the kind of shock troopers who go and destroy the last kind of pagan shrines because they're able to say they're able to muster all of this gravitas we've had a whole lecture on this particular topic too I'll help you look that up so just to look at it all history continuity and innovation history always includes continuity and Innovation you know things are never quite as simple as the new name on the map conquerors are often conquered by their subjects so you know we've had

(1:00:52) lectures before on you know what does it mean to say the Roman Empire fell did the Roman Empire ever actually fall was it certainly disappears on a map if you were imagining that the map is really really real modern maps in in point of fact the Roman Empire's actual control over the territory controls you know is always um not not as deep as you'd imagine it is it is you know very wide and an inch thick and so forth there are places where the Imperial government the military when it when it has control of the large military are you know are very

(1:01:30) pervasively powerful and they can do public works but there's a lot of amazing you know self-governing of the Cities at all levels Villas there are there's no local police there's all sorts of things in those institutions that make it not very deep and when um the Barbarian kingdoms replace the empire in various places in Western Europe much of all of the things that are going on underneath continue to exist and all that's been replaced is the Imperial governments and Military which now is replaced by the new

(1:02:05) Germanic military that is otherwise operating in almost exactly the same way and the people still are thinking of themselves as the same so in other words a map seems to indicate this massive change and yet there's all kinds of continuity that underlies what's going on there and that's I think also true in some of these kind of great social trends and so these philosophical ideas are having this massive effect on the Greco-Roman Society of as people are embracing embracing them in their and they're forming their worldview and so forth and

(1:02:42) whether for example then the whole thing then it became Christian or not those Christianity in some ways is co-opted and captured by all of those ideals the same as much as it has conquered or captured uh the whole empire by having it become a state religion you know what I mean so in other words Christianity is is vastly changed by The Experience too and transformed by the experience and in some ways much of what would have happened in the Empire would have happened either way and regardless of whether they all decided that they're

(1:03:17) all calling themselves Christians or not at this point that's my my take on this so let's step back then from this sort of background as we try to kind of look at kind of the history and the origin um regardless of where that all came from I think it's easy to concede that Christianity has nevertheless had a very long unfortunate history of promoting unhealthy attitudes regarding sex and although that's the case none of these really are essential or intrinsic to the religion they are something that has been a part of it for sure

(1:03:57) um but I would say not a good part um like I say these attitudes really are part of Jesus's teaching and indeed over emphasis of them seems to be completely contrary to the examples of how Jesus operated in the gospel I'm not normally one to say well we have this idea and it's actually coming from Plato or it's coming from Greek philosona to say that those we should get rid of them because they're bad actually Greek philosophy gave Christianity all kinds of good ideas but I do think in this case this kind of bias against sex in general

(1:04:35) is not one of the good ideas I think that it's actually caused all kinds of um I don't know unhealthy suffering uh people feeling guilty for no reason people confusing um with supposedly moral issues with um that don't have an actual ethical basis or problematically ethical basis and and therefore avoiding uh thinking about actual ethical problems things that are really important so how do we move forward so I definitely think we should be ditching sex obsession so in Canada here in 1967 while proposing laws that decriminalized

(1:05:19) same-sex activity in Canada the prime minister at the time Pierre Trudeau declared there's no place for the state in the bedrooms of the nation and so I would like to say as a Christian Pastor I believe that the bedrooms are likewise no place for churches to be there's no place for them churches and clergy I think need to get out of the sex Police business and we need to refocus our attention on important social justice issues that are everywhere in our world here in the 21st century so let me affirm again sex is not

(1:06:00) inherently a sin and indeed I would argue that the most common sin associated with marriage is sexism not sex um you know even when you take a little picture here of the traditional wedding cake dolls you can immediately see all of the amazing layers of gender roles that are being imposed you know the history of marriage we should do a whole lecture on this but you know the history of marriage is um essentially one of of property where um the property owner the father is giving uh his daughter to you know the

(1:06:42) other the other family in the form of the sun uh you know I'm sorry the informed son of a new son-in-law and he actually um it's dressed in white to Proclaim again this virginity marched from the father's house to the to the new house and is literally given property wise and then she traditionally assumes and you know loses her father's name and assumes the husband's new name so I mean it is um um the background tradition of this of which the vestiges are still you know kind of even uh rehearsed in a traditional wedding ceremony are are

(1:07:19) pretty Stark uh and also um you know I know that I think it's very very very common for you know people in heterosexual relationships to transcend gender roles women end up doing even though they're both you know both people in the couple are both uh employed and have full-time jobs and things like that women do a disproportionate amount of child rearing and house cleaning even so to this day so it's still very pervasive problem that we need to be worried about as opposed to you know worrying about sex all the time so I would say then here

(1:07:56) therefore consenting adults should make responsible choices that should be the um the standard the principle when thinking about this so acting in ways that are not selfish in other words treating other people involved with empathy and consideration so that's true whether you know you're acting anytime you're acting with other people so involved in sex that's also the same uh it's the same standard in principle whether you're going into business with somebody whether you are in a sexual relationship with somebody

(1:08:29) so sexual abuse is of course immoral but that's because of the abuse part rather than the sex part so that's where the inherent problem is is in the abuse so reforms are still needed and that is actually also true in my denomination in Community of Christ so Community of Christ in Canada this church that Toronto congregation does a part of that I serve as a pastor for that's lgbtq affirming Church you know women now serve at all levels of leadership the presidents of the church here in Eastern Canada is a team

(1:09:04) of three women nevertheless the denomination has its roots and was actually organized by people who were very strong opponents of Mormon polygamy back in the 1840s 1850s and 1860s including Emma Smith who's one of the co-founders of our denomination she was an Ardent opponent of Mormon polygamy and so because of this um you know historic um place that we come out of we're all products of our own history we actually still have on our books something called a priesthood cohabitation policy it's one of our very few uh very kind of like

(1:09:52) rigid policies that we have that are are enforced sometimes anyway when it is enforced or enforced that violate our general principles as a church because it is a historic thing that needs to be um you know reevaluated and re-examined so that policy unfortunately continues to be a source of Injustice in the church and so for example there are people in Canada who should be called to be Ministry who should be ordained to priesthood who have not been because they are in a loving committed relationship with a partner and they're

(1:10:29) not married to that partner and so this policy if it's enforced which it sometimes is haphazardly prevents that ordination from happening again we need to get out of you know people's bedrooms that has nothing to do with anything and that should just be uh that should be relegated to the dust bin of history and I do hope that Community price is going to be able to do that and rescind that policy we are going to have a World Conference next spring and um anyway it's my hope that we recover from this unhealthy distraction

(1:11:04) and we were able to refocus on Mission that is actually essential and relevant uh in the 21st century so all of the many issues of activism that animates us on a normal basis we've taken this little bit of a of a break in reviewing this because I want I've been thinking about this in advance of the conference and so I appreciate you being here with me and I'm interested in any feedback and also any questions or thoughts that you may have had and so I will invite landro to share those with me see what people have been writing

(1:11:50) okay so uh Mr ballarai says what influence do you think books like the Song of Solomon had on any general Western thought as it relates to sex it is such a an interesting and weird part of the tradition you know to have uh the book like you say song of Song Song of Solomon in the um Hebrew Bible in the Christian Old Testament so this is clearly not a um it's not a traditionally let's say prophetic book or anything like that it's a big long erotic love poem but using you know really sort of crazy Iron Age symbolism you know so my love you

(1:12:36) know your teeth are like a row of you know newly sworn sheep and so forth otherwise they're so white like a sheep that have just been freshly shorn in other words things that we would never think of unless you're a Shepherd still to this day but anyway most of us are never never think of as the imagery of it um and you would think that a book like that you know would either kind of get thrown out or ignored and um and certainly that happens in the restoration tradition so um you know in our denomination Joseph

(1:13:05) Smith just wrote you know that it's you know it shouldn't be you know you should just kind of just throw it out it is not anything inspired with it and so forth but it was not ignored by medieval Christians and so uh Bernard of clairvo who was like the greatest um uh preacher of the 12th century you know one of the guys who uh ended up calling the the Second Crusade and so forth um uh wrote like this exhaustive you know like multi-volume commentary on the Song of Solomon and so what does he do he he goes and allegorizes every part of it

(1:13:41) and so it becomes um for so many medieval Christians it becomes an allegory uh the love between you know Solomon and the Queen of Sheba or between the two lovers in the Song of Solomon if it whoever they're identified as becomes the love that Jesus has for the church and so the church is personified as a woman and Jesus is her lover and they are having passionate erotic love with each other and so um I think that part of it is that that what influence do I think it has so I think part of the influence is that on

(1:14:16) the one hand there is a kind of a unhealthy sex Obsession where sex is viewed is kind of just generally bad uh physical sex and yet Christianity somehow is able to kind of layer onto that um in some cases a a kind of a spiritualized sex with you know sexy Jesus Jesus as your lover kind of kind of idea you know which is is a is a weird spiritual allegory or analogy to have um when you know when you're having a kind of a general sense that sex is sin so I guess what you're saying is you've made a non-sinful version of of the same

(1:14:54) kind of erotic thing so what influence do I believe uh miss Mr ballaries also asked what influence do I believe Second Great Awakening had on the Christian view of sex particularly in America and Canada so I think that um so the Second Great Awakening is happening at the beginning of the 19th century I think in general actually at that kind of time period this kind of Proto before the before the about leading up into the Victorian era I think we have an association of victorians with all kinds of of prudence of all kinds of

(1:15:34) um enforced gender roles for women all sorts of um uh just incredible nudity taboos that never existed before because we are still recovering from the Second Great Awakening and the Victorian era I think people inevitably in North America in the 20th 21st century imagine that everything was always more conservative and more repressed and there was more nudity taboo and more anti-sex behavior and so forth in the past but in fact actually this is something that can go ebb and flow and so at that time period I think it

(1:16:18) actually starts to become a fever pitch and it's so much more um there's so much more nudity taboo and there's so much more uh you know kind of a repression of sexuality and and fixture of gender roles that you know if you go back and read you know like in the middle of the Middle Ages in some places they have hardly any nudity taboo people are able to be naked all the time and so forth and and and and and if you're reading Chaucer people are having a lot of a lot of sex as well so I think that actually um if anything that we got to a fever pitch

(1:16:53) at that time uh Ron Wagner says Wagner says was Paul a rabbi before converting to Christianity so I don't think that um I don't think he refers to himself as a rabbi um I think he does referred himself as a Pharisee so he is a person who is a um a proponent of the law but we don't have I don't think we have it listed that he is actually let's say having a whole set of followers ahead of time he seems rather by his own description to maybe be um an officer of some other kind of a Pharisee group who saw himself as a a

(1:17:36) guy who was sent forth to go and debate people because he he in retrospect is upset with what he calls persecuting Christians and so he apparently probably liked to go and debate um Christians and kind of show them where they're wrong and why his version of pharisaic interpretation would have been right until at some point or rather you know his uh he had a conversion experience that's described you know as a you know as later as a vision uh that he has of Christ that causes him to change his opinion so I don't know that

(1:18:10) we have a where he we think of him as a rabbi but he certainly is a person who um uh was somebody who was a proponent of and somebody who was studying and following as much as he could uh Mosaic Jewish law so um Bob Garrison says so Paul thought the love of God was more important than sex was he expecting the rapture um so so the Rapture is a new idea so um uh the Rapture is I think I mean a kind of a late 19th century idea where you read a bunch of um there's a bunch of different texts that are isolated that are written by

(1:18:50) different authors and by reading them all together people have decided that there will be not only will there be a literal end of the world but a certain number of Christians will be taken away you know raptured up to heaven before that happens that is not an idea that um that they wouldn't have understood it that way Paul does think that there's going to be a uh an end of the world and that people who are already still alive will just simply be taken up in other words they won't have to die and be resurrected

(1:19:28) they're just going to be you know made into resurrected beings I guess you know just like all the people who are being um being resurrected into this new world and so anyway but it would it's not that different I mean the Rapture is a new very end of that that as people have come up with less uh two centuries so does pop video also ask does Paul think the love of God is more important than sex so yes he doesn't think sex is important at all and he thinks the love of God is really really important so miscellaneous religion asks do you

(1:19:58) believe it is possible to create Christian liturgical art and songs based on sex within the beliefs framework wow I don't know I guess so yes but but um but boy it would be difficult I guess I don't know I think it would be I guess it's possible um we have had it we I will I'll say that whereas in my congregation we uh uh do not I think I don't we don't talk about Sin very much at all but we when we're thinking of sin like I said we think of it as separation from God and I'm going to be much more likely to think of sexism as Sin than sex as Sin

(1:20:42) nevertheless we do not talk a lot about sex and so that's one of the reasons why I even included in here a slide where I was saying sex is not inherently sin just so that I could actually say it out loud because we don't usually talk about it and so and so we'll we need to I think evolve more culturally before we could have those liturgical songs you know but possibly it's possible we can get there we will eventually get there maybe so uh Raymond Ortiz asked can John explain why there were so many Unix back then

(1:21:17) so uh so the idea of it was that the whole society was a slave Society um and so there was a large percentage of um of the population were enslaved people who had lost their uh you know essentially their right or capacity legal right and capacity to treat it as independent beings and instead were treated as property and so um just one of the Customs that had existed and continued to exist up until modern times I think in um in the in the Greek East it became the ottoman East and so forth is that the court the courts of

(1:22:05) Royal societies would would castrate young male slaves and so that would cause them to um be able to be slaves that are part of the royal household without them being able to have sex with the Royal women right and so the idea of it is the idea of it was a a way that you could have slaves that were entirely loyal to the Royal household and didn't have you know didn't have a life outside of that when you have your own you know the potential for sexual Affairs and and relationships and your own children that even separates you

(1:22:52) from that and so it was a it was a system that developed in in Royal courts in the in the Middle East um Winston barquez says do you think we ought to have sexual ethics and should this be grounded in biblical theology um we should have sexual ethics I think that we need to we have been working on developing uh in Community of Christ for us a a draft um uh document of sexual ethics and we still need to work on it more in terms of being grounded on biblical theology you know I would say so in a in a very in the very kind of abstract

(1:23:37) principles as opposed to um mostly what anything is is said in the Bible about this directly or literally and so what I mean by that is um our understanding of of principles that have been given in former times or or instructions that have been given in four times you know are could be understood in principle but they have to be understood in their context the limitation of the of the time period And so um you know the the Mosaic law code is pretty much like you know the Code of Hammurabi and all the other Middle Eastern ancient law

(1:24:13) codes it is describing a very you know a very different time when uh you know women are do not have fully you know or not have anything approaching full equality um when there was no you know the kind of uh technology contraception uh but also even um you know intravenous I'm not intravenous you know the ability to the ability anyway to uh for people who otherwise wouldn't be able to Bear children to have children in other words there's all sorts of new things that are involved in sexual ethics that you know they're just

(1:24:50) not aware of in the in the Bible um certainly nobody in the Bible is actually aware of inborn um sexual orientation so um Daryl Scott says costly signaling Theory suggests that successful religions must demand sacrifices from their adherence because it's a sunk cost which increases dedication and signals to the community that you're not a freeloader so so yeah that's certainly um that's certainly true for not only religions it's true for all sorts of things when you are when you have all sorts of when you're creating a group

(1:25:25) and you're having very strong boundary maintenance when you're saying uh This Is Us represented this in this in group and them are representing that in the out group and you have as a part of your boundary Nations maintenance like you say a very strong sunk cost then you're going to have a more coherent group identity but then the group will also you know demand more Conformity and there's going to be more suffering in the group and so on when you have looser boundaries like we do in Mike Church then you have less of that internal

(1:25:59) suffering but you have less sung costs so there's less dedication and commitment as you say so it is a attention always with any institution as you are trying to balance let's say identity and justice um Lewis smart says polygamy is one thing but what about polyamory so yeah so like I say we have a historic opposition to um polygamy so polyamory is I think a a new a new word that is in some ways a blanket term that can mean all kinds of different things so um so I don't know it depends on what what you mean so if we're talking about

(1:26:48) um um people having consenting adults having sex with more than one partner outside of marriage then again the principal there that a person should be operating under in my view is uh responsible choices making sure that um they are not you know whenever you're involved with any doing anything with another person you were thinking of them uh as another person you're not you know not engaging like uh in ways that are selfish that are harmful that are abusive or those sorts of things so if it's none of those things then you're

(1:27:25) probably uh just fine I would say Alexander Santos Anderson says I wonder if the depiction of Paul and the acts of Paul and thekla giving a pro Chastity sermon being linked with a woman leader while First Timothy has Paul being a good Minister as as married shows two different views of Paul's sexual teaching that's interesting yeah so that would be um it's I I think that the acts of Paul and thekla are a very interesting um you know apocryphal book like you say uh where um where again like you say we have a female Apostle thekla who is Paul's um

(1:28:08) uh companion she has the immoralist demonstrates the authority to like self-baptize herself so um she's not only Apostle and a leader and so forth but like you say a um uh you know woman missionary companion of Paul and things like that and so it shows um kind of the extent of what early Christians understood women's roles could be in Ministry and Leadership um and so and so yeah I mean like you say then Timothy is also then a led a letter that is written in Paul's name and so on so in the same way that it's it's not

(1:28:47) apocryphal in the sense that it's in the Canon but it's it's um it's departing from how Paul himself is understanding things in the same way that Paul and thecla does um and so like you say when you once you have departed from the original historical author and having people writing in the name it is giving different views um of how uh Paul's uh students and and inheritors people who are thinking about him are themselves re-envisioning these teachings uh nadav Kravitz said with the preoccupation with sex be helped if

(1:29:22) there were a female aspect to the godhead bring back ashara so not as Kravitz would like to have yahweh's wife be back in the godhead so um I think that we can have I mean I think we should understand the godhead as being female as much as male so I never or try never if I ever do I'm making a mistake if I never to use for example gender pronouns when referring to God so I'm talking about the if I'm talking about the Creator God then I can just as easily be talking about our heavenly mother as heavenly father because

(1:30:00) Christian theology I think has God transcending gender so certainly um Christ you know because of Christ's association with Jesus Christ is sometimes you know are often viewed and you know like you say with a in a male aspect and yet um Christ is also um understood to be the whole body of Christ which is encompassing of of all people male and female and all of the other gender expressions and so that is also the case we've had a lecture on um medieval Mystic who kind of understood Christ as the divine feminine

(1:30:39) and as our heavenly mother because of Christ's embodying the loving aspect and so on and so she was identifying that with uh the rules but yeah I know I think that we should definitely be um emphasizing more the divine feminine uh you know whether we call uh the Creator ashra or Yahweh Michelangelo says what is the meaning or interpretation of Jesus writing on the floor so there has been a lot of interpretations of that and different people think that they know what he's writing um so I think that all of that is kind

(1:31:18) of up to you know the many parts of personal interpretation so that is not something where we can like definitively say oh this is definitely what he was doing it seems to be um you know Jesus not taking um so it's a it's what's effectively a a setup a Judicial almost a Judicial setup there is a crisis that's happening all around him and he's essentially refusing to give these Elders the Pharisees um their uh if you're refusing to acknowledge that what they're doing is is actually relevant and that they should be doing

(1:31:56) that thing rather he is um he's essentially not paying attention to them he's writing writing on the floor uh while that is happening they only when they press him that he gives this uh you know this remark about those of you without sin and so forth and so and then when it goes back to it and then more or less is giving them time to walk off so I think it's a um it's a remarkable visual image and there's different ideas that people have about what he's doing but I I think that it there isn't only one interpretation

(1:32:25) of that George from Toronto says is there any connection of the rise in obsession with sex and the marginalization of women in Christianity um I think so so I think that um it can be so um part of it is that um it doesn't so it doesn't have to be but it can be so there's there's two things that um that do happen so whereas early Christian disciples and even Apostles as we've said um uh you know have were both female and male and so we have that pretty clearly in the in the gospels we have that in other parts of the New Testament

(1:33:09) um we have uh very clearly from even the non-Christian external sources um are kind of talking about Christian leaders being um women who are who are deacons and so forth and so so there are early Christian leaders and that gets marginalized and pushed out um and so that's happening simultaneously is generally a general prohibition on sex I don't know that they're fully they're not fully related but part of um part of controlling women is always controlling controlling women's sex lives and so part of society is that Central marriage

(1:33:52) ritual that I was talking about of um the the patriarchal family and and marrying women into that and making sure that the male line is continued by again controlling the woman's sexuality so I do think that that's part of the background of what's Happening um you may want to read these questions before you read them out loud yeah so yeah I'll just say Wayne BRAC says didn't God say I am the father wouldn't that imply that God wishes to be seen as male and so um no I don't think that that would imply that so I think that you can read

(1:34:29) it that way but I think that um uh what God is saying is good is giving an analogy to that and saying um that the Creator one of the ways that you can think of the Creator is as the father God is also referred to in um uh The Book of Proverbs and in the gospels as as holy wisdom as hajiya Sophia that's a divine feminine so um we think of wisdom is female in both Greek and Hebrew and so and Sophia holy wisdom is uh you know again a Divine a vision of seeing God as the feminine um anyway you could just as easily

(1:35:07) um you know it's like when you're saying didn't God say that well Jesus says you know I am Alpha and Omega that doesn't mean that he wants to be seen as a letter it's an analogy so he's essentially saying a father is a kind of creator Punk 2011 emo says do you think that Jesus was a virgin or that he was married um so I don't think we have any I don't think we have any evidence of either of those so there's no particular reason to think that Jesus was a virgin and because it would be weird in other words if he was you would probably point

(1:35:42) it out um and so I don't think that I don't you know if considering how obsessed Christians come with virginity if Jesus was a virgin and he was making a big deal about it then I mean they would probably have written that into the gospel so I don't think that he was a virgin I also don't think he was married because if he was married then we would also have um they would also have talked about it I mean so Peter they talk about Peter's wife and so forth you know if you know there's no particular reason she's not

(1:36:09) an important character in the story but they would mention it and so if Jesus had a wife then they would have mentioned it I think and so that's negative evidence but I don't think that um I don't think there's any reason to think that he was either a virgin or that he was married since we have no no positive evidence of either so um just to end on this lsf says how do you guys interpret Leviticus 2013.

(1:36:36) so one I can just tell you right off hand um Christianity does not um does not follow levitical law so uh you know the law the old Covenant is rejected and uh is fulfilled in Jesus and so none of the levitical laws are part of um are part of levitical law so this is the Commandment about if a Man Lies with a male is with a woman both of them have committed an Abomination they'll be put to death their blood guilt is upon them that has no relevance to Christianity so that is part of the Mosaic law that refers to essentially the Primitive

(1:37:20) um uh near Eastern kind of legal code that applied only to the people at that time and showed that they have a limited understanding of um you know these kind of ethics and so forth and so anyway that's not part of uh Christians who what I would say is Christians who uh quote Leviticus as if that's relevant to Christianity you know are not following levitical law we don't um you know we don't uh we eat pork you know we don't do any of the kinds of things that uh that are incumbent upon Orthodox or or um uh anyway ultra-orthodox Jews who

(1:38:02) fulfill a levitical law all right I think that's the last question thank you so much so I'm very happy to have rejoined all of you to be re-engaging in the lectures and hopefully now I'll get them going week after week and I appreciate you uh logging in and also for the great conversation that we've had thank you so much

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