Lower Than The Angels by Diarmaid McCulloch 

'Readers with time and stamina will be rewarded with a comprehensive view of the history of sex and Christianity, but the book could have been shorter'

Lower Than The Angels - A History of Sex and Christianity
By Diarmaid McCulloch
Allen Lane
ISBN: 978 0 241 40093 7
Reviewed by John Matthews

 
In this book, sub-titled ‘A History of Sex and Christianity’, the author begins by saying that a theme of this study is that there is no such thing as a single Christian theology of sex. He ends by suggesting that what he calls ‘weaponizing’ verses of the Bible’ to address arguments about sexuality has not produced helpful results and that a more flexible and creative exploration of natural law would be beneficial, without saying how or why.

In between these assertions lies nearly five hundred pages of information about the history of sex and Christianity - and much else besides.
 
The gospels are dated between 90 and 130AD and Jesus’ miracle of turning water into wine seen as a metaphor of the Eucharist.  Paul is said to have personally found marriage ‘a distasteful project’, but was unusual at that time in expecting husbands to be as faithful as wives were expected to be.
 
Amongst other things, readers will learn that there were no church weddings for the first few centuries of the Church, that Luther was against polygamy which, he said, ‘is not opposed by the holy scriptures’ and that, in Reformation times, Protestants had double standards when punishing adultery.
 
The few references to Baptists include a church in Virginia being unable to decide whether a slave master who removed a slave’s wife should be censured, Dorothy Hazzard, who began what is now Broadmead Baptist Church, Bristol in 1640 and Martha Gurney who, in 1791, collaborated with William Fox. Neither Baptists nor Congregationalists are mentioned alongside Methodists in relation to ordaining women.
 
From 1951 the author says that he has abandoned any claim to historical objectivity having become a ‘participant observer’ in events. In his final chapter he asserts that through most of recorded Christian history marriage was a contract between two men: the fathers of the bride and the groom and that what is now regarded as ‘traditional marriage’ has very little precedent in the history of the Church. He believes that conservatives do not fully admit what it is they are trying to conserve and why.
 
This is a well-produced hardback of nearly seven hundred pages, with colour plates and black and white illustrations. There are almost a thousand endnotes, comprising references and explanatory notes. It would have been more helpful to have restricted these to the former and have the latter at the foot of the page. There are suggestions for further reading, a comprehensive general index and an index of biblical references, with the books in alphabetical order, which may suggest that readers are no longer assumed to be familiar with the biblical order.
 
Readers with time and stamina will be rewarded with a comprehensive view of the subject, but the book could have been shorter – and would have been the better for it. Whilst it is important to set the debates and disputes about sex in their historical context, there are sections, and even the occasional chapter, where sex is hardly mentioned.
 

John Matthews is a retired Baptist minister living in Rushden, Northants