God of Chastity, Part I

This isn't a particularly easy topic to talk about, but here goes anyway...

Let me put it this way: I believe in God. I also believe that sex should be reserved for marriage. Furthermore, I believe that the truth about God and the truth about chastity, as I'll call the latter, are tightly intertwined.

Once upon a time, it was common knowledge that sex outside marriage was a sin against God. That sex without benefit of marriage was of questionable morality was the understanding I was given as a child in the 1950s, even though I wasn't brought up religious. Then came the Sexual Revolution. Though my contemporaries began availing themselves of "carnal knowledge" at every opportunity — and I was no saint — I never got comfortable with the new idea that "anything goes."

In midlife I became religious for the first time. That was about 20 years ago. But somehow, I never particularly came to believe that being religious necessarily implied being chaste.

Instead, I was of the opinion — see many of my earlier entries in this blog — that the old rules about chastity were passé. Or, at least, they were "optional." They grew out of the same Judeo-Christian tradition that kept women from full equality with men, made abortion and homosexual acts sinful, etc., etc., etc.

Recently, though, I have woken up to the fact that, deep down, I still believe that "family values" are the best values. I never really stopped believing that. I just compartmentalized that idea away from my religious beliefs.

This, despite the fact that I am perfectly well aware, and long have been, that there is no theme more characteristic of Judeo-Christian scripture — the Old Testament and the New — than the sanctity of marriage. It is a bit difficult to detect a "through line" to the narrative of the Bible, but one does seem to be there. In the beginning, Adam and Eve's "marriage" in the Garden of Eden is tainted by Original Sin. In the end, in the Book of Revelation, there is a sacred marriage between Christ, who has come back to this world, and his Church, encompassing all people who are saved.

Along the way, between Genesis and Revelation, we keep getting clues that marriage is sacrosanct. When Abraham and his descendants are told to "be fruitful and multiply," it is within the bounds of marriage that this is to take place. The Old Testament strictures against promiscuity, homosexuality, and masturbation make most sense against this backdrop.

Jesus, with his "one flesh" dictum, took marriage to be sacrosanct. In Matthew 19, we read:

Some Pharisees came to him to test him [Jesus]. They asked, "Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife for any and every reason?" Haven't you read," he replied, "that at the beginning the Creator 'made them male and female,' and said, 'For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh'? So they are no longer two, but one. Therefore what God has joined together, let man not separate."

Though the first post-Resurrection Christians were told by Paul to eschew marriage if they could tolerate celibacy, this seems to have been under the assumption that the Second Coming was imminent and there were, meanwhile, more important things to be done, such as evangelizing the heathen world.

Once the Church began to realize Christ's return might be a long way off, it renewed the ancient Israelite emphasis on the sanctity of marriage, and Paul himself was emphatic in his Letter to the Romans that "anything goes" was not a proper way to worship the Lord. (Paul also wrote in one of his epistles of the need for wives to defer to their husbands ... one of the most resented passages of scripture these days!)

I don't personally claim to know with any certainty how to square scripture with modern-day sexuality is all its most controversial aspects. But I do now claim that it makes no sense to call oneself a Christian or a Jew and not take with the utmost seriousness the claims these religions traditionally make on us to be chaste and to hold marriage sacrosanct.