Sex, Christ, and the End of Time

He's coming, he's coming, HE'S COMING

by James Davisson


One of the most fascinating things about Christianity is that—alone among the major religions of the modern world—it began as a doomsday cult. This has had interesting consequences.

(Quick definition: "doomsday cult" refers to a religion that expects the end of the world as we know it, and soon. When I say Christianity began as a doomsday cult, I mean that most early Christians expected the return of Christ, the resurrection of the dead, and the beginning of a new world, within their lifetimes. I use the term in a descriptive sense, not a disparaging one: the earliest Christians expected, eagerly, the end of time, and acted accordingly.)

One obvious consequence of this is the shape of the New Testament itself. Its earliest documents are not treatises laying out a systematic theology of a new religion, but ad hoc letters from early church leaders, especially the apostle Paul, providing solutions to the particular problems of individual churches (these are books like 1 and 2 Corinthians, 1 Thessalonians, Galatians, and Romans). Paul and his compatriots saw their mission as incredibly urgent—gotta tell as many as we can about Jesus before he comes back!—and they had no time for such detailed projects as systematic theology. After Paul's death, letters were composed in Paul's name (and that of other church leaders, like Peter) by his followers, that started to fill in the gaps in his teachings and wrestle with the delay in Christ's coming (these are books like 1 and 2 Timothy and Ephesians). Finally, recognizing that the end might be a little further off than they'd initially thought, Christians collected stories about Jesus himself and shaped them into narratives that could be used to instruct future generations (the gospels: Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John).

Sometimes, the consequences of early Christian apocalypticism are more subtle than this, at least to modern Christians like me, with little knowledge of early Christian history. One fascinating example: early Christian thought about sex, especially abstinence.

When modern Christians talk about sexual abstinence, it is usually to demand it from either (1) people who ain't married yet or (2) priests and members of certain religious orders. It is not, typically, a practice of ordinary lay people. In this, early Christianity and modern Christianity are distinct.

In general, it's best not to mess with nuns.

Many early Christians chose to become or remain completely chaste for the duration of their lives. While some Christians today choose lifelong chastity as part of their calling to service in a religious order, these early believers predated such Christian institutions as monks, nuns, and even, perhaps, priests. The reasons they chose chastity are complex, but here are a few:

1. As an expression of radical Christian equality: Christian communities were incredibly diverse: people of distinct social class, gender, and social freedom were all admitted, and faced challenges in creating unity among themselves. Christians believed they were supposed to be "one body," that they were a community of "neither Jew nor Greek, slave or free, male or female." Some sought to create this unity by deconstructing social structures like marriage and slavery, and instead tried to live together as one, equal body, renouncing sex. "Only by dissolving the household was it possible to achieve the priceless transparency associated with a new creation," as Peter Brown puts it in The Body and Society, (pg 53). (It is likely that this was what some of the Corinthians were doing when Paul wrote 1 Corinthians; more on that in a moment.)
2. As a way of achieving high spiritual status: In an opposite impulse from the previous one, some sought spiritual excellence and even fame through abstinence. Most early Christians thought of complete sexual abstinence as better than sex within marriage, because they associated sex with the weakness of the human body and its associated temptations.* So living completely sex-free was, in a way, spiritually glamorous.
3. As an announcement of (or preparation for) the return of Christ: Today, society is dealing with the consequences of advances in medicine and food technology that have led to rapid population growth, to the extent that humanity is straining the earth's capacity to hold us. It wasn't always like this, though: the Roman Empire's death rate was such that, just to keep society from collapsing, every woman needed to give birth an average of five times.** So complete sexual renunciation was actually a direct threat to society, a refusal a key social obligation, which pointed to the immanent total re-arrangement and renewal of society at Christ's return.

Complete abstinence from sex was seemingly a part of Christianity from the start, so much so that Paul had to address it in one of the earliest known pieces of Christian writing, his first letter to the Corinthians. What's interesting about the early church in Corinth is that part of it was interested in complete abstinence, and part of it wanted the opposite. Some insisted that "all things are lawful for me," on the grounds that God's grace could be counted upon to cover their sins. In his letter, Paul had to mediate: "Between those who said, 'All things are lawful for me' and others who insisted 'It is well for a man not to touch a woman,' Paul sought a defensible middle ground" (From Shame to Sin, Kyle Harper, pg 88). Paul's solution was to have surprising consequences, not least because it was a temporary solution, created with the understanding that the problems it addressed would soon be swept away by Christ's return.

The "libertines" (the Corinthian faction who said "all things are lawful for me") were probably not interested in crazed orgies or depraved sex acts, but in participating in the normative sexual ethics of the Roman empire—men were expected to have some measure sexual self-control, but were allowed to have sex with prostitutes (or, if they were wealthy, with their slaves). On the opposite side were a group of Corinthians who believed that strict abstinence "was the measure of holiness" (Harper, pg 92). Paul's middle ground between the two is this: (1) don't have sex with prostitutes, (2) it's okay to be married, so that you aren't tempted as much to have sex outside of marriage, but (3) he wishes that everyone could abstain completely from sex—but recognizes that celibacy is a gift.

What Paul wants is to unite the divided Corinthians so that they can get back to the work of bringing people to Christ. He is interested neither in a radically egalitarian, celibate commune (because this would be unlikely to draw new members) nor in adherence to Roman sexual codes (which he and most other early Christians saw as sinful.) His goal is certainly not to set a sexual standard for the rest of Christian history: not only is he explicit that his advice on sex is a temporary measure made in view of "the coming crisis," but he even makes it clear that his advice is just that: advice, not a divine commandment.

This does not stop the early church from developing Paul's words in 1 Corinthians into a full-blown sexual ethic, however. In the centuries that follow, many Christians will conclude on the grounds of 1 Corinthians that sexual abstinence is morally superior to marital sex; some will retreat to the desert for a life of asceticism, others will live by example in the cities, and a few will even insist that marriage or sex of any kind is completely wrong. While these views of sex and abstinence will start to shift dramatically with the advent of Protestantism, there will still be resurgences of the more radical older views.

All of this is a direct consequence of the early Christian belief that Jesus was returning soon. Many Christians still believe this, and while I think that's a belief that's worth examining, what I think is more worth examining is what parts of our faith are the direct result of inhabiting this apocalyptic worldview from the start.

---

*This attitude vis-à-vis marriage and chastity—that is, that chastity was morally superior to marital sex—held sway in the Catholic church for a long time; it was one of the things the Puritans objected to about Catholicism, because they were all about sex (within marriage, naturally). Have I mentioned that I love the Puritans, like, mostly unironically?
**This is about the birth rate of modern Kenya. By comparison, the US birth rate is about 2 births per woman (source). Keep in mind that in both of these places, it is easier to give birth without dying than it was in ancient Rome.

Photo sources:
1. A modification of this, which I've been unable to find an original source for.
2. lucyfrench123
3. Luz Adriana Villa