Birth control and the Bible

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Hello all,

My wife disagrees with the Church on its stance concerning artificial birth control (as does just about every one of her friends, including the Catholics), but she just recently said that she was willing to start a study of “why” beginning with Sacred Scripture and looking into why and how Protestant churches flip-flopped from banning them to accepting them completely. She also was recently enamored with someone who liked going to the original Greek text of Scripture. So…

Can anyone suggest a “study guide” that talks about the historical evolution of thought on birth control, from a scriptural basis (preferably with references to the original Greek), that does justice to the Catholic Church’s position? She doesn’t just want to read a “Catholic book” on the subject – she wants to start with scripture and history. At the same time, I don’t want to just look at Protestant sources, as their opinion is quite clear.

Thanks in advance.

Peace,
javelin
 
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javelin:
Hello all,

My wife disagrees with the Church on its stance concerning artificial birth control (as does just about every one of her friends, including the Catholics), but she just recently said that she was willing to start a study of “why” beginning with Sacred Scripture and looking into why and how Protestant churches flip-flopped from banning them to accepting them completely. She also was recently enamored with someone who liked going to the original Greek text of Scripture. So…

Can anyone suggest a “study guide” that talks about the historical evolution of thought on birth control, from a scriptural basis (preferably with references to the original Greek), that does justice to the Catholic Church’s position? She doesn’t just want to read a “Catholic book” on the subject – she wants to start with scripture and history. At the same time, I don’t want to just look at Protestant sources, as their opinion is quite clear.

Thanks in advance.

Peace,
javelin
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Your wife doesn’t disagree with the Catholic Church. She doesn’t have a clue why the Church teaches what it teaches, so how can she disagree. She objects to the “what” without knowing the “why.” And apparently, you’re pretty shaky on it yourself. You get points for wanting to learn more, and so does she.

This one doesn’t start with Scripture. It starts with natural law, which existed a couple of billion years before a syllable of Scripture was written. You will get suggestive texts from Scripture, but nowhere does it state: “Thou shalt not use artificial contraception.”

Get Christopher West’s book, Good News about Sex and Marriage. It’s short, smart, and accessible. YOU read it. Then translate it for your spouse.
 
This one doesn’t so much start with the Bible (it starts with natural law and Theology of the Body), but to any Protestant the best place to start is the Bible.

Gen 38:7 Now Er, Judah’s firstborn, was evil in the LORD’s sight, and the LORD put him to death.
Gen 38:8 Then Judah said to Onan, “Sleep with your brother’s wife. Perform your duty as her brother-in-law and produce offspring for your brother.”
Gen 38:9 But Onan knew that the offspring would not be his; so whenever he slept with his brother’s wife, he released his semen on the ground so that he would not produce offspring for his brother.
Gen 38:10 What he did was evil in the LORD’s sight, so He put him to death also.

Protestants (NOWADAYS, see below) say that God did not punish Onan for spilling his semen, but for breaking the Levarite law, which said that a man should marry the widow of his brother. However, this is not possible, because the Levarite law also says the brother could refuse to. The only punishment for this was for the woman to spit in his face! Therefore, God would not have killed Onan for this.

As for history, your wife might find it shocking to realize that up until 70 years ago, every single Protestant church condemned contraception and birth control (which, by the way, has been around for hundreds of years[and coitus interuptus has been around since God made man!]) Modern Protestantism has given in to contraception, much like they have given in to almost everything else!

ic.net/~erasmus/RAZ345.HTM#33)) That site will provide lots of information on why the Church teaches what it does about contraception (and if you poke around, everything else.)
 
If she will listen to them, I would recommend a 10 audio CD set by Christopher West called, “Naked Without Shame: A Crash Course in the Theology of the Body”. It’s really inexpensive (I think it’s $3.90) from the The Gift Foundation. Go to: nakedwithoutshame.com

Don’t let this slip by—this is very important. Human sexuality and human marriage are very important instruments of understanding both God and man’s ultimate meaning. Don’t stand by and let it be distorted.

Also, though I can’t remember the exact source, my priest mentioned that in either Scripture or in the Didache (very early Christian writing) the use of “pharmakon”—sorry, don’t have the exact word, but it is basically “pharmaceuticals”—is prohibited, and that is understood to be birth control.
 
Lazerlike42,

Well, as I said I can’t remember the exact source—if you say it’s not the Didache, I’ll trust you on that! Anyway, I’ll ask my priest this weekend what he was referring to. Also, I see that I didn’t make my statement grammatically clear: I gave the impression that it was my priest who said it might be in the Didache or in Scripture: I should have said that my priest referenced a source, and I couldn’t remember if it was Scripture or the Didache. Sorry…
 
I doubt it’s the Scriptures either (though I could be wrong). I’d love (name removed by moderator)ut from anyone who may know about this. It could be from early Christian writings though. Unfortunately, unless someone knows where it’ll be hard to find because there are so many writings.
 
The group One More Soul has some resources online. Here is a link to an artilce on The Bible vs. Contraception that might help:omsoul.com/pamview.php?idnum=146

*Open Embrace: A Protestant Couple Rethinks Contraception * by Sam and Bethany Torode has gotten excellent reviews and The Bible and Birth Control by Charles D Provan might be helpful (the latter is also available at One More Soul).

David
 
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mercygate:
Your wife doesn’t disagree with the Catholic Church. She doesn’t have a clue why the Church teaches what it teaches, so how can she disagree. She objects to the “what” without knowing the “why.” And apparently, you’re pretty shaky on it yourself. You get points for wanting to learn more, and so does she.
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Thank you for replying, but please don’t start with presumptions about me and my wife. I’m pretty solid myself, but she won’t listen to me. I’ve looked into it quite a bit, and have given her basically everything that I’ve found to be true. After discussing it much over the last year or so, she now just says “I know you’re right, and I know ABC is wrong, but…” You can imagine how frustrating this is for me. So please don’t assume she doesn’t have a clue and I’m “shaky on it”.
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mercygate:
This one doesn’t start with Scripture. It starts with natural law, which existed a couple of billion years before a syllable of Scripture was written. You will get suggestive texts from Scripture, but nowhere does it state: “Thou shalt not use artificial contraception.”

Get Christopher West’s book, Good News about Sex and Marriage. It’s short, smart, and accessible. YOU read it. Then translate it for your spouse.
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Yeah, I know this one doesn’t start with Scripture and isn’t explicit in Scripture. I told her as much, but she wants to start there because she doesn’t trust the Church in this regard.

I have the book and started it, but she doesn’t want to “just read a Catholic book about it”. I’ve tried translating much, but it seems to go right by her.

So I figured I’ll take what I can get, especially since she seems willing to look into it a little more.

Peace,
javelin
 
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Lazerlike42:
As for history, your wife might find it shocking to realize that up until 70 years ago, every single Protestant church condemned contraception and birth control (which, by the way, has been around for hundreds of years[and coitus interuptus has been around since God made man!]) Modern Protestantism has given in to contraception, much like they have given in to almost everything else!

ic.net/~erasmus/RAZ345.HTM#33) That site will provide lots of information on why the Church teaches what it does about contraception (and if you poke around, everything else.)
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Actually, I told her about this long ago, and her reaction now is that she wants to know why they flipped on that issue. She’s assuming they must have had a good reason. I’m hoping that looking into it will only show her that they didn’t, but I don’t know anything about why they changed. Thus the request for the historical information on the topic.

Thanks for the link – I’ll check it out.

Peace,
javelin
 
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javelin:
Thank you for replying, but please don’t start with presumptions about me and my wife. I’m pretty solid myself, but she won’t listen to me. I’ve looked into it quite a bit, and have given her basically everything that I’ve found to be true. After discussing it much over the last year or so, she now just says “I know you’re right, and I know ABC is wrong, but…” You can imagine how frustrating this is for me. So please don’t assume she doesn’t have a clue and I’m “shaky on it”.

Yeah, I know this one doesn’t start with Scripture and isn’t explicit in Scripture. I told her as much, but she wants to start there because she doesn’t trust the Church in this regard.

I have the book and started it, but she doesn’t want to “just read a Catholic book about it”. I’ve tried translating much, but it seems to go right by her.

So I figured I’ll take what I can get, especially since she seems willing to look into it a little more.

Peace,
javelin
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My sincere apologies for making such assumptions. But it from your initial post it appeared that youike you were coming from the bottom floor – she rejecting and you accepting on equally slim underpinnings.

Couple to Couple League, I believe, is not Catholic. And they know more about NFP than anybody. Kimberly Hahn is Catholic, but was a stout Protestant when she determined via Scriptural study that nowhere does the Bible claim that limiting the number of your children is a good thing – that they are always seens as a blessing and the inability to have children is viewed as a curse. Kimberly goes to the limit in providentialism: accepting whatever children may come . . . No NFP.

Does your wife state her reasons for not trusting the Church on this? Since everybody else has whimped out on this issue, the Catholic Church is the last man standing. Who else is left?
 
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javelin:
Actually, I told her about this long ago, and her reaction now is that she wants to know why they flipped on that issue. She’s assuming they must have had a good reason. I’m hoping that looking into it will only show her that they didn’t, but I don’t know anything about why they changed. Thus the request for the historical information on the topic.

Thanks for the link – I’ll check it out.

Peace,
javelin
Click to expand...
A Baptist told me they flipped on the issue because it is not specifically mentioned in the Bible. So much for sola Scriptura – since before they changed their minds they must have thought their position was Bible based.
 
I am sure on that link it will say why they changed, specifically, but the real reason is social pressure. It is becoming, and even then was becoming, more and more difficult to maintain membership in a church that sticks up for traditional (and correct) Christian vaules. Nobody wants to believe in something, for instance, that says you can’t sleep around, because it’s just not fun. That’s how society was going, and the roaring 20s almost certainly had something to do with this change. That was the first period of true rebellion against traditional values. Of course there were other things (such as what amounts to victorian aged womens empowerment movements), but the 20s really started things. It makes a lot of sense then that the 30s would begin to exhibit such change, also given the impact of the Great Depression. People just didn’t feel like dealing with things like morals and ethics while going through that.

Essentially, its all an effort to either A) be politically correct (moreso that is the case nowadays), or B) encourage greater membership by accepting more wayward things. Try asking her if they had a good reason, why this good reason didn’t develop for 1900 years! Or why it didn’t fevelop for 400 years of Protestantism? Remember, Ulrich Zwingli, the third Reformer (aside from Luther and Calvin), was SO Biblically strict that he had all the organs in Switzerland destroyed simply because the Bible does not say it’s OK to use music in worship. He was very strict Biblically, and his church did not allow contraception. Luther was the most flexible of the three when it came to Protestantism, and he did not allow it either.

Be very, very careful with this site: libchrist.com/

It is an example of how far people will go to try to eliminate the religious barriers to what they think is fun stuff. Show it to your wife. The claims they make are the result of the very same attitude that led to Protestants embracing contraception. (And btw, all of their claims are bogus. tektonics.org/TK-L.html this site has some of the proof of this, if anybody really needs it[scroll to the Liberated Christians section])
 
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mercygate:
A Baptist told me they flipped on the issue because it is not specifically mentioned in the Bible. So much for sola Scriptura – since before they changed their minds they must have thought their position was Bible based.
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If that’s so then they are being quite hypocritical. They draw their ideas from Zwingli. He said no music was allowed because the Bible does not condone it. They then will say contraception is allowed because the Bible does not prohibit it? It can only go one way!

If you want an overall statement to try to show somebody why Sola Scriptura is possibly the most absurd idea in Theology, try this: lazerliek42.tripod.com/Sola.htm
 
David Brown:
The group One More Soul has some resources online. Here is a link to an artilce on The Bible vs. Contraception that might help:omsoul.com/pamview.php?idnum=146

*Open Embrace: A Protestant Couple Rethinks Contraception * by Sam and Bethany Torode has gotten excellent reviews and The Bible and Birth Control by Charles D Provan might be helpful (the latter is also available at One More Soul).

David
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Thanks, David. The book, The Bible and Birth Control is especially interesting because it is by a non-catholic, which may give it more credibility in my wife’s eyes.

Peace,
javelin
 
An article in the May/June, 2001 issue of the *Our Sunday Visitor *organization’s *The Catholic Answer *Magazine explains how four verses in the Bible expressly condemn use of artificial birth control, and in three of those four instances, the Bible states that (presumably unrepentant) birth control users will simply be damned to Hell!
 
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BibleReader:
An article in the May/June, 2001 issue of the *Our Sunday Visitor *organization’s *The Catholic Answer *Magazine explains how four verses in the Bible expressly condemn use of artificial birth control, and in three of those four instances, the Bible states that (presumably unrepentant) birth control users will simply be damned to Hell!
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Could you by any chance list these verses?
 
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BibleReader:
An article in the May/June, 2001 issue of the *Our Sunday Visitor *organization’s *The Catholic Answer *Magazine explains how four verses in the Bible expressly condemn use of artificial birth control, and in three of those four instances, the Bible states that (presumably unrepentant) birth control users will simply be damned to Hell!
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Perhaps you could provide these verses?
 
HERE’S some bullets for that gun!

The Early Church Fathers
Letter of Barnabas

Moreover, he [Moses] has rightly detested the weasel [Lev. 11:29]. For he means, “Thou shalt not be like to those whom we hear of as committing wickedness with the mouth with the body through uncleanness [orally consummated sex]; nor shalt thou be joined to those impure women who commit iniquity with the mouth with the body through uncleanness” (Letter of Barnabas 10:8 [A.D. 74]).

Clement of Alexandria

Because of its divine institution for the propagation of man, the seed is not to be vainly ejaculated, nor is it to be damaged, nor is it to be wasted (The Instructor of Children 2:10:91:2 [A.D. 191]).

To have coitus other than to procreate children is to do injury to nature (ibid. 2:10:95:3).

Hippolytus

[Christian women with male concubines], on account of their prominent ancestry and great property, the so-called faithful want no children from slaves or lowborn commoners, they use drugs of sterility [oral contraceptives] or bind themselves tightly in order to expel a fetus which has already been engendered [abortion] (Refutation of All Heresies 9:7 [A.D. 225]).

Lactantius

[Some] complain of the scantiness of their means, and allege that they have not enough for bringing up more children, as though, in truth, their means were in [their] power . . . or God did not daily make the rich poor and the poor rich. Wherefore, if any one on any account of poverty shall be unable to bring up children, it is better to abstain from relations with his wife (Divine Institutes 6:20 [A.D. 307]).

God gave us eyes not to see and desire pleasure, but to see acts to be performed for the needs of life; so too, the genital ‘generating’] part of the body, as the name itself teaches, has been received by us for no other purpose than the generation of offspring (ibid. 6:23:18).

Epiphanius

They [certain Egyptian heretics] exercise genital acts, yet prevent the conceiving of children. Not in order to produce offspring, but to satisfy lust, are they eager for corruption (Medicine Chest Against Heresies 26:5:2 [A.D. 375]).

John Chrysostom

[l]n truth, all men know that they who are under the power of this disease [the sin of covetousness] are wearied even of their father’s old age [wishing him to die so they can inherit]; and that which is sweet) and universally desirable, the having of children, they esteem grievous and unwelcome. Many at least with this view have even paid money to be childless, and have mutilated nature, not only killing the newborn, but even acting to prevent their beginning to live [sterilization] (Homilies on Matthew 28:5 [A.D. 391]).
 
Why do you sow where the field is eager to destroy the fruit, where there are medicines of sterility [oral contraceptives], where there is murder before birth?. . . Indeed, it is something worse than murder, and I do not know what to call it; for she does not kill what is formed but prevents its formation. What then? Do you condemn the gift of God and Fight with his [natural] laws? (Homilies on Romans 24 [A.D. 391]).

Jerome

But I wonder why he [the heretic Jovinianus] set Judah and Tamar before us for an example, unless perchance even harlots give him pleasure; or Onan, who was slain because he grudged his brother seed. Does he imagine that we approve of any sexual intercourse except for the procreation of children? (Against Jovinian 1:19 [A.D. 393]).

You may see a number of women who are widows before they are wives. Others, indeed, will drink sterility [oral contraceptives] and murder a man not yet born, [and some commit abortion] (Letters 22:13 [A.D. 396]).

Augustine

This proves that you [Manicheans] approve of having a wife, not for the procreation of children, but for the gratification of passion. In marriage, as the marriage law declares, the man and woman come together for the procreation of children. Therefore, whoever makes the procreation of children a greater sin than copulation, forbids marriage and makes the woman not a wife but a mistress, who for some gifts presented to her, is joined to the man to gratify his passion (The Morals of the Manichees 18:65 [A.D. 388]).

You [Manicheans] make your auditors adulterers of their wives when they take care lest the women with whom they copulate conceive. They take wives according to the laws of matrimony by tablets announcing that the marriage is contracted to procreate children; and then, fearing because of your [religious] law [against childbearing] . . . they copulate in a shameful union only to satisfy lust for their wives. They are unwilling to have children, on whose account alone marriages are made. How is it, then, that you are not those prohibiting marriage, as the apostle predicted of you so long ago *, when you try to take from marriage what marriage is? When this is taken away, husbands are shameful lovers, wives are harlots, bridal chambers are brothels, fathers-in-law are pimps (Against Faustus 15:7 [A.D. 400]).

For thus the eternal law, that is, the will of God creator of all creatures, taking counsel for the conservation of natural order, not to serve lust, but to see to the preservation of the race, permits the delight of mortal flesh to be released from the control of reason in copulation only to propagate progeny (ibid. 22:30).

Caesarius

Who is he who cannot warn that no woman may take a potion [an oral contraceptive or an abortifacient] so that she is unable to conceive or condemns in herself the nature which God willed to be fecund? As often as she could have conceived or given birth, of that many homicides she will be held guilty, and, unless she undergoes suitable penance, she will be damned by eternal death in hell. If a women does not wish to have children, let her enter into a religious agreement with her husband; for chastity is the sole sterility of a Christian woman (Sermons 1:12 [A.D. 522]).*
 
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