Lower than the Angels
A History of Sex and Christianity
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- $18.99
Publisher Description
"A magisterial new history."—The New York Times
“Endlessly fascinating.”—Slate
A groundbreaking history of sexual emotion, sexual activity, gender relations, marriage and the family--and how Christianity has interacted with this panorama of human concerns
Few matters produce more public interest and public anxiety than sex and religion. Much of the political contention and division in societies across the world centres on sexual topics, and one-third of the global population is Christian in background or outlook. The issue goes to the heart of present-day religion.
This book seeks to calm fears and encourage understanding through telling a three-thousand-year-long tale of Christians encountering sex, gender, and the family. The message of Lower than the Angels is simple, necessary and timely: to pay attention to the complexity and contradictions in the history of Christianity. The reader can decide from the story told here whether there is a single Christian theology of sex, or many contending voices in a symphony that is not at all complete. Oxford’s Emeritus Professor of the History of the Church introduces an epic of ordinary and extraordinary Christians trying to make sense of themselves and of humanity’s deepest desires, fears and hopes.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Historian MacCulloch (Christianity) notes in this sweeping study of Christian sexuality that the teachings of Jesus contain numerous heterodox statements regarding sex and gender. These include his famous call for mercy toward women adulterers, but also a less well-known observation concerning eunuchs—that some had "been so from birth" and some had "made themselves for the sake of the kingdom of heaven." These words, a reference to the biblical notion that angels are "genderless beings in heaven," inspired some early Christian men to "imitate angels... by surgically dispensing with their genitals." Once Christianity became a state religion, church administrators attempted to steer such "countercultural" depictions of angels as "positioned between gender identities" in a more conservative direction by associating them with the gendered notions of virginity in women and celibacy in men. But the concept retained a radical edge—MacCulloch notes that by the 12th century the practice of chastity had become so extreme that the church had to clarify it "would expect marriages to produce children," a claim so controversial that some medieval theologians refused to "admit" it. As Christianity became "a world religion," it grew more authoritarian and less intimate, McCulloch concludes, with radical expressions of sexuality happening despite the church, instead of within it. Both scholarly rigorous and amiably open to the variations of human experience, this enthralls.
