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Take a Cold Bath

Christ himself made barely any pronouncements condemning sexuality. This has not stood in the way of Church authorities...

In the 11th century, as the campaign against married clergy – previously the norm – gathered pace, one defiant annotation in the margin of a sermon protested: ‘It is right that a priest love a decent woman as a bedmate.’ Female mystics moved away from conceptualising God in terms of power and wrath to stress themes of marriage and motherhood. At the beginning, MacCulloch writes that where once ‘ecclesiastical explosions’ were about ‘the nature of the Trinity or the Eucharist, the means of salvation or patterns of Church authority’, we are now living in a time where ‘human genitalia overshadow most other organs of ill-will.’ In other words, where once we debated who could be saved, now we argue about who we should have sex with. Most of the more strident voices in the book belong to men, but there is at the last the luminous hope that ‘in the next two millennia we may be liberated to listen to women’s accounts of the Incarnation more than we have been able to amid the din of male theological voices.’ It is hard to resist the thought that if there is a true Christian message, based in love and forgiveness, humanity has shown a remarkable inability to comprehend it.

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