Is Christianity Hostile
To Physical Appetites?
Part 2
Continued

Once again, we immediately meet with a definitional problem here, as all of these words - and indeed, the concepts the words refer to, and at an even deeper level, the idea of sexual identities or orientations - are a 19th century concept, the invention of forensic psychology.  Prior to the middle of the 19th century, all of these would have fallen under one of two heads, which described practices, rather than personal identities or orientations: "libertinism" and "sodomy."

The former was the broader category, and included oral-genital practices and sadism, masochism, incest, sexual relations with very young partners or animals, and even sodomy when it was an occasional practice - in other words, all sexual practices which broke through social and moral taboos.  These were all viewed as practices to which a person who gave unbridled expression to his or her "normal" lusts would inevitably move, as a result of their excessive sexual appetite.  The latter referred to anal intercourse, and specifically to that between males, although it could also include that between a man and woman or a man and animal.

It therefore makes no sense to ask what the Bible says about, say, homosexuality, as in Biblical thought there simply was no such concept.  Rather, in the Old Testament there are condemnations of any number of specific sexual practices: adultery; incest within a broad range of blood and marriage relations; intercourse with animals (Ex. 22:19, Deut. 27:12); anal intercourse (Lev. 20:13); dressing in the clothing not appropriate for one's sex (Deut. 22:5).  There were also prohibitions against male cultic prostitution.  In all cases the categories are quite other than those in which we think today: a condemnation of homosexual cultic prostitution is obviously a non-starter in a world which doesn't know the practice.

Similarly, regulations based on conceptions involving abhorrence of mixing or "misusing" vital fluids, which forbid placing semen in the anus (in the case of anal intercourse) or in other species (in the case of bestiality), but also which forbade the mixing of blood and semen during intercourse during menstruation (Lev. 18:19), required a sin offering following nocturnal emissions, and for that matter, prohibited boiling the meat of a young animal in its mother's milk (Deut. 14:21), are also far outside our present way of thinking, in which the fluids themselves do not have a sacred meaning.

The prohibitions on cross-dressing may have cultic reference, in that cultic prostitutes cross-dressed, or may have to do with the idea that gender roles were divinely ordained - see St. Paul on hair length (I Cor. 11:14) - but either way, these are irrelevant to contemporary concepts. Analysis of the Greek terms used by Paul, and translated as "sodomites" in older versions, or "homosexuals" in more modern ones, would similarly be seen to indicate that the words referred to effeminate men or those who accept passive anal intercourse; again, something quite culturally tied, and hardly the equivalent of the modern terms by which translators have rendered them.

In short, although unlike the generalized hatred of the body and its appetites, which has no basis in Scriptures, there are Biblical condemnations of acts which society today would characterize as "lustful" or "perverse."  While these condemnations may have been reinforced by Neo-Platonist attitudes attacking licentiousness, which were often as violently abusive on the matter as the Church Fathers were, we cannot attribute Christian attitudes on these matters to some "foreign" influence.  On the other hand, it is notable that Christendom has chosen to ignore regulations from the Old Testament which are based on exactly the same rationales, while still calling on those relating specifically to anal intercourse or cross dressing to condemn the sexuality of homosexuals or transvestites.

While the Judeo-Christian creation story emphasizes heterosexual, reproductive sexuality, and thus implies a hostility to homosexual and other non-reproductive sexual practices, and the tradition has always regarded "excessive" expressions of sexual appetite unfavorably, these facts don't seem to me to be sufficient reason to explain the persistent, and sometimes violent survival of these condemnations of specific sexual practices in Christendom.  One can only suspect that there are other, cultural reasons for this, which have little or nothing to do with Scriptural or theological underpinnings of Christianity.

To summarize, then: Christendom has been and is unfriendly to physical appetites, in both the wider sense of having a general hostility to the body and its appetites, both sexual and physical, and in the specific sense of strongly condemning specific sexual "lusts" which are regarded as perverse, either outside of, or in excess to, "normal" appetites.  Yet in neither case is there really an intellectual justification for Christianity doing so.  The generalized hostility to the body is in fact contradictory to its Scriptures, an import from another cultural tradition which has taken over and made itself master in the house of Christian thought; the specific condemnations, while rooted in the Scriptures, appear to be kept alive by something other than their real integration in the fabric of Christian thought - though I will not deny they are perhaps inextricably interwoven into the fabric of Christendom.

After 1500 years, it is rather dubious that we are going to be able to do anything about either of these issues, either to change Christendom, or escape it, so pervasive has been its influence on Western culture, and within this century, world culture.  Perhaps the best we can hope for is, by being aware of what the situation is and how we arrived at it, to try to find small spaces in which more positive and more rational attitudes can exist and breathe.  That at least is my hope in putting together these remarks.

Donald H. Mader, M.Div., is assistant pastor at the Pauluskerk, and is a doctoral candidate in Literature at the University of Amsterdam.  He has written numerous articles on Christianity and sexuality, and is a regular contributor to Paraklesis.