For many centuries, interpretations of the Bible have led to the ban on divorce, criminalizing homosexuality and prohibiting contraception, among other things. In modern America, theological rules still affect people’s private lives (whether they are Christian or not), where biblical values ​​are often cited to avoid abortion and restrict gender expression. Now, a new book on the stormy relationship between God and desire has come from scholar Macculloch, who believes that Christian concepts about sex have been "shocked" and are not always so inherently punishing.

Since 1995, Professor (now Honorary) at Oxford University is an outstanding historian of Christianity. For example, he tried to distil centuries of debate into long books about Thomas Cromwell and the Protestant Reformation, so he did not shy away from intensive topics. If this makes him sound boring, rest assured that he is not. In his latest book Below Angels: The History of Sex and Christianityhe said distressedly, “If sex is absolutely a problem, it’s also fun.” Macculloch usually writes that the Bible is a “blunt instrument” and is not necessarily ideal for a slippery topic like Lust, on which he is both sincere and playful.

Although he didn't explicitly address it in his new book, Macculloch was gay. After he was appointed as a deacon at the Church in England in the 1980s, he decided to oppose the Priesthood because of the church's attitude towards homosexuality. Today, he describes his relationship with the Anglican Church as a “candid friend of Christianity” – a preconceived notion that is not afraid to bring the ball of destruction to the preconceived notion of religious history. He told New Humanists While promoting his 2015 TV show, Sex and the Church. But because Christian views on sex (all factions vary over time) vary over time, it is possible that even the strictest Christian institutions will once again develop and show resilient tolerance.

exist Below the AngelMacculloch describes several issues in the history of Protestant and Catholicism that seem to have settled today but have been subjected to intense instrumental debate. McCulloch believes that not all Christian clergy favor clergy becoming celibate and do not declare contraceptives immoral-institutional decisions are always political. Allowing room to go with this view is part of the Macculloch project, as his goal is to get those who think that they have always been “in a seamless and incorrect text, called the Bible’s sex.”

Of course, this means that some critics will find Macculloch's approach flawed from the start. To him, the Bible is a “library”, a series of lasting texts that are not necessarily God’s speechlessness. He believes that the book’s explanation is much like a living document, rather than how the primitives deal with the constitution. (His reading of King David and his intimate partner Jonathan may be particularly annoying to fundamentalists; McCullock believes that this passage is quite clearly suggesting an intimate physical relationship between the two.) Thus, McCullock is different from Christian orthodox in many ways. For example, he believed that Jesus was hardly a man with a family, and that his gospel had no particular love for modern nuclear families: "I will fight against his father," Christ quoted a passage from Micah.

In the early churches, the division between Christian theology and Roman law made people anxious about the role of women, for example, the new church encouraged widows not to remarry and might wield widows. Around the first century AD, some churches tried to limit women's movement and political activities. Despite this, ordinary women can still negotiate some power on their own. Macculloch suggested that for female believers and mystics, abandoning sex is a means of playing an agency in a world where they want to marry. He was delighted to document examples of such figures, many of whom were condemned as pagans for their strange epiphany. (A medieval Viennese celibate described himself as “swallowing the foreskin of Christ” in a vision.)

However, no one has been proven to be completely immune to the threat of sexual panic. The fourth-century theologian Jerome believed that even sexual acts in marriage could be contaminated, so (in Macculloch's words) “A man who overly loves his wife is adulterer.” One expects a person to be dedicated to God, and some church leaders believe that mandatory restraints are the only way to be truly intimate with God. In modern Christianity, contraception is equally divided within the Catholic Church - some laymen and pastors are disappointed by the Pope's decree against its use. But the church sometimes changes the doctrines on moral issues, including some that seem to be integrated into one by the texts of the Bible itself. In Christian denominations, in addition to stability in view of divorce, even as state and church officials are looking for ways to defend the system of opposite-sex marriage, many Christians now divorce without worrying about eternal curse.

McLaugh tells many stories about Christians who oppose universal faith. Moravians around the 18th century explained that Protestants’ emphasis on faith rather than action was a sign of their freedom of sin, because they had been forgiven by God. (These sins include extramarital sex, or even some minor homosexual behavior.) These examples are intended to show us the variability of religion: There is no (or) certain that many institutional beliefs can be the result of hundreds of years of misreading and intentional deprivation of teaching. Many of Macculloch's examples depend on the metaphorical questions of translation, literalism and poetry, and the interpretations of modern fundamentalists. For example, he points out that the Bible’s view of homosexuality is rarely compared to the evaluation of greed, although contemporary religious thinkers pay more attention to the former.

Institutions often sway between freedom and limitation, and these oscillations make history interesting. What Macculloch wants is to let modern readers put aside their certainty, even if they are not completely won by his broad claims: “In many Christian regions, the experience of theological and moral reflection is an exercise in ignoring the current imbalances that are created by destroying the reality of divine creation, often through repetition of the old certainty,” he wrote. "It is not to say that strange Christians are actually a common, often accepted group, but that even small deviations with doctrine are illuminating the more fruitful encounters between religious institutions and those outside that seem absolute. If some of the questions that arise now were once debates, can the floor be reopened to consider a modern perspective?

Read: The greatest contribution of Christianity

Macculloch accompanied Protestant and Catholic history through Bombast, extending his theory for thousands of years. It has always been an extensive historical survey, and Macculloch’s last part of contemporary church history—a scandal beyond the Catholic Church’s sexual assault, a struggle for acceptance by the gay Christian movement, and the relationship between homophobia and colonialism—ultimately makes people feel rushed.

But when Macculloch did take the time to draw a Christian case study with a consensus case study, he offers a moving story of how believers can make their vigilance and keep themselves guarding and traveling the world with humility. In one chapter, McLaugh gives an amazing example of a woman who goes beyond prejudice: Tammy Faye Messner, Telecom. In 1985, a few years after she became famous as a conservative talk show host, Messner was interviewed by Steve Pieters, the minister of the gay congregation who died of AIDS. For many, her “sweeping tears to Peter on screen” is crucial (and angered others). By the time she died, her first husband was imprisoned for fraud and she became a gay idol. She told Larry King, “When we lose everything, it’s the gay people coming to rescue and I will love them forever.”

Such grace can illustrate the question of how to cross the difference, not just eliminate it. Although historically the church may bend toward a certain position and agreement, many believers are simply praying conscientiously. Resolving the entangled issues about gender and gender in the religious framework can be a defeated battle, which includes basic anger and wishful thinking examples of liberalism - but the battle itself contains many surprising episodes.