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Originally posted by Born Again Catholic:
Homosexuality and contraception are similar sins.
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Surely you jest?
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Homosexuality and contraception are similar sins.
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Yeah, I was floored by that one, too.
Not only homosexuality but others well known theologians compare it to adultery, harlotry and murder. This is not only my view but the unanimous view of all Christianitian denomininations without exception for the first 1900 years of Christianity. (Including Baptists, Catholics, Anglicans, Lutherans, Methodists, etc)> Secular thought has so invaded most christian churches on the subject of sexuality it is difficult for most to even relate how abhorrent all christians viewed this practice as murder before the fact were as abortion is murder after the fact.
The first Christian Church to teach differently were the Anglicans in the 1930's, and it wa further promoted by secular groups such as Planned Parenthood (then known as the Birth Control League). In this case Churches began abandoning the will of God before the courts, Contraception was illegal in some states as late as the 1950's, as the law up until that time still understood the concept of natural law which paul discussed in Romans 2 (i.e. to preform acts against the natural order in which God made them was illegal ie homosexuality, murder, contraception) Then in Griswald vs Conneticut the Supreme Court declared contraception legal based on a made up constitutioal right of privacy. Twenty years later using that same right of privacy they made abortion legal in Roe v Wade.
Here are a variety of quotes from various theologians and authors discussing various acts of contraception again comparing it to sodomy, adultery ,murder, and harlotry
As regards contraceptives, there is a paradoxical, negative sense in which all possible future generations are the patients or subjects of a power wielded by those already alive. By contraception simply, they are denied existence; by contraception used as a means of selective breeding, they are, without their concurring voice, made to be what one generation, for its own reasons, may choose to prefer. From this point of view, what we call Man's power over Nature turns out to be a power exercised by some men over other men with Nature as its instrument.
{C.S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man, NY: Macmillan, 1947, pp. 68-69}
We will go one better, and state that we have not found one orthodox theologian to defend Birth Control before the 1900’s. Not one! On the other hand, we have found that many highly regarded Protestant theologians were enthusiastically opposed to it, all the way back to the very beginning of the Reformation.1
1 Charles Provan, The Bible and Birth Control, (Monongahela, PA: Zimmer Printing, 1989), 63.
The voluntary spilling of semen outside of intercourse between man and woman is a monstrous thing. Deliberately to withdraw from coitus in order that semen may fall on the ground is doubly monstrous. For this is to extinguish the hope of the race and to kill before he is born the hoped-for offspring. This impiety is especially condemned, now by the Spirit through Moses mouth, that Onan, as it where, by a violent abortion, no less cruelly than filthily cast upon the ground the offspring of his brother, torn from the maternal womb. Besides, in this way he tried, as far as he was able, to wipe out part of the human race.3
Calvins Latin Commentary on Genesis 38:10.
[T]he exceedingly foul deed of Onan, the basest of wretches . . . is a most disgraceful sin. It is far more atrocious than incest and adultery. We call it unchastity, yes, a sodomitic sin. For Onan goes in to her; that is, he lies with her and copulates, and when it comes to the point of insemination, spills the semen, lest the woman conceive. Surely at such a time the order of nature established by God in procreation should be followed. Accordingly, it was a most disgraceful crime . . . Consequently, he deserved to be killed by God. He committed an evil deed. Therefore, God punished him.2
Martin Luther, Commentary on Genesis.
Those sins that dishonor the body are very displeasing to God, and the evidence of vile affections. Observe, the thing which he [Onan] did displeased the Lord--And it is to be feared; thousands, especially of single persons, by this very thing, still displease the Lord, and destroy their own souls.6
6 John Wesley, Commentary on Genesis.
It has been left to the last Christians, or rather to the first Christians fully committed to blaspheming and denying Christianity, to invent a new kind of worship of Sex, which is not even a worship of Life. It has been left to the very latest Modernists to proclaim an erotic religion which at once exalts lust and forbids fertility . . . The new priests abolish the fatherhood and keep the feast - to themselves.
{G.K. Chesterton, The Well and the Shallows, NY: Sheed & Ward, 1935, p. 233}
I am supposing, then, although you are not lying [with your wife] for the sake of procreating offspring, you are not for the sake of lust obstructing their procreation by an evil prayer or an evil deed. Those who do this, although they are called husband and wife, are not; nor do they retain any reality of marriage, but with a respectable name cover a shame. Sometimes this lustful cruelty, or cruel lust, comes to this, that they even procure poisons of sterility [oral contraceptives] . . . Assuredly if both husband and wife are like this, they are not married, and if they were like this from the beginning they come together not joined in matrimony but in seduction. If both are not like this, I dare to say that either the wife is in a fashion the harlot of her husband or he is an adulterer with his own wife.7
Augustine, Marriage and Concupiscence 1:15:17, A.D. 419.
