Tending our own gardens

"contraception" and the Christian project

I grow dahlias. They are fussy, beautiful flowers. I start planning for the next year at least by February, when I begin wake up the tubers. I prepare my beds as soon as the ground can be worked, and by mid-May I put the tubers in the ground. It takes me several full days of work, working alone, to get the soil ready and everything planted and staked. Its one of my favorite weeks of the year.

So imagine now, in September, that I bring you a small bouquet. They are exquisite showstoppers. There is just nothing like these plants for their variety and drama. They invite jealousy. Every year people ask how they can grow their own- which I welcome. Some, though, demand their own. They sometimes ask me to sell them, or come to their homes and plant them for them. Something this beautiful certainly draws attention, but what is hidden is how long it took to grow just one flower, and all that it cost, in energy, in effort and sweat, and in the thrice-daily checks I do of my own plants. But this just is what it takes, because this is the world in which such flowers bloom. It has these particular constraints.

Families are like this, I think. Beautiful ones draw envious glances, but much of the labor is hidden. Invisible, too, are the costs that such attention demands. Some of the most demanding children can become the most exquisite. Only the mothers and fathers, and sometimes the grandmothers, know what they cost their parents.

This is important, I think, because the world we live in has its own constraints, and parenting can conceal and reveal them.

Haley Baumeister

and

Katelyn Walls Shelton

are a bit younger than I- the better part of a decade, perhaps- which means they are still comfortably in their childbearing years. (I am 42). They have both received the gift of several young children, close together- and they, as I did, are enjoying the loud, messy, humid and muggy years of early childhood.

They know that young children are good gifts. But they are also heavy ones. They are ones received with joy but also, sometimes, with a bit of trepidation. This is why the Church is so needed to support young families- because an unexpected pregnancy, or one after another after another, can indeed be too much for one person alone to hold.

But the Christian Church (and here I am speaking of the “universal Church”) exists not so much to offer sound teaching and moral instruction on the matters that pertain to young families. If you enter any church on a normal Sunday, there might be some young couples seeking guidance on contraception. There will be many, many more who have used it for years without thought, who have used IVF to receive their children, who have struggled with infidelity or infertility or sexual practices that violate their partners, who bring into marriage sexual histories that make them chase laws when they actually need grace. There will be many, many more who know what families cost.

And this, here, is my main concern. We cannot advise regarding contraception as if such issues derive directly from “nature” and its laws. There is a current resurgence in looking to natural law to cut the gnarly cords of gender and sexuality, but “natural law”, whatever it is, is not a command. It is a fittingness, an orderliness, or a set of ends. Like my flowers, it sets certain kinds of rules- 120 days from planting to digging- but it says little more than this. Due to bad weather, you may have to break this rule, or extend it. Nothing might bloom one year, or everything might be late, even though nature’s rule says you should always have flowers in August. Prudent observers know that nature does not abide its own rules.

This is why I’ve encouraged a minimal view on sexuality, “in accordance with Scripture”. What we need for conversations about such things is a firm sense of the world we live in, including its constraints. Even if “Scripture” seemed to say one thing about contraception, we’d need to pair it with our knowledge of our own, fallen nature. But Scripture does not say anything about contraception, not in any way. The one reference- to Onan- is concerned with breaking the laws about Levirate marriage, and not a parallel to modern contraception. Indeed the one book that seems to be about sex, the Song of Songs, is not at all about reproduction!

The “pressure” of the biblical text toward the doctrines about Christ and the Trinity accumulates throughout the whole text. The storylines and narratives of both Old and New build to the point that teaching about the God-man, or about the Trinity, are conclusions more than novel formulations. This is at least one reason that I think the analogy with speaking about sex, and speaking about God, is mistaken. There simply is not the same kind of biblical pressure to speak about the former, simply because the Bible is not a book about sex, but a book about God.

For the same reason, I don’t think that “sexual libertinism” is a heresy. It is a sin. But sins do not need to be corrected theologically. They need to be confessed and forgiven. Heresies require theological formulations, but sins require pastoral care.

I certainly don’t think “we shouldn’t talk about these issues”. My intention here is not to be “hip and cool”; it is more that I do think that we risk binding consciences in ways that Scripture does not. This is, to me, quite a big problem- and the one that is more likely to lead us to sin against one another.

In this case, I fear we are looking to the Church for something that only God can provide- namely, discernment, solace, and absolution.

The Book of Acts is forever reminding us that the tendency to make law what are matters of conscience is a perennial concern of the Christian. In the early church, it was dietary laws that were of gravest concern.

In Acts 10, Peter has a vision. It’s worth reading in full:

⁹ About noon the following day as they were on their journey and approaching the city, Peter went up on the roof to pray. ¹⁰ He became hungry and wanted something to eat, and while the meal was being prepared, he fell into a trance. ¹¹ He saw heaven opened and something like a large sheet being let down to earth by its four corners. ¹² It contained all kinds of four-footed animals, as well as reptiles and birds. ¹³ Then a voice told him, “Get up, Peter. Kill and eat.”

¹⁴ “Surely not, Lord!” Peter replied. “I have never eaten anything impure or unclean.”

¹⁵ The voice spoke to him a second time, “Do not call anything impure that God has made clean.”

¹⁶ This happened three times, and immediately the sheet was taken back to heaven.

The old religious tradition, which had prohibited eating such animals, was being supplemented by new teaching, which instead taught that such animals were no longer impure.

I suppose Peter was being taught several things in that great vision in Acts 10, but the most important was that God was the one who named things clean or unclean. It was not a Law or a simple observation of nature that allowed or disallowed certain foods. It was God himself. In Romans 14, Paul reminds us of the very same concern-

Quoting, again, at length because its important:

⁵ One person considers one day more sacred than another; another considers every day alike. Each of them should be fully convinced in their own mind. ⁶ Whoever regards one day as special does so to the Lord. Whoever eats meat does so to the Lord, for they give thanks to God; and whoever abstains does so to the Lord and gives thanks to God. ⁷ For none of us lives for ourselves alone, and none of us dies for ourselves alone. ⁸ If we live, we live for the Lord; and if we die, we die for the Lord. So, whether we live or die, we belong to the Lord. ⁹ For this very reason, Christ died and returned to life so that he might be the Lord of both the dead and the living.

¹⁰ You, then, why do you judge your brother or sister^[a]? Or why do you treat them with contempt? For we will all stand before God’s judgment seat. ¹¹ It is written:

“‘As surely as I live,’ says the Lord,
‘every knee will bow before me;
every tongue will acknowledge God.’”^[b]

¹² So then, each of us will give an account of ourselves to God.

¹³ Therefore let us stop passing judgment on one another. Instead, make up your mind not to put any stumbling block or obstacle in the way of a brother or sister. ¹⁴ I am convinced, being fully persuaded in the Lord Jesus, that nothing is unclean in itself. But if anyone regards something as unclean, then for that person it is unclean.

The Romans 14 passage strongly suggests that it is the individual conscience, before God, that is “binding”- and that we ought to honor those convictions before the Lord without holding others to them. The “strong” and the “weak” will very well choose differently on these matters, but neither is forbidden. God himself might allow certain ones to choose one way, and others another. The accountability due is before God, who alone knows how heavy are some of the things we carry.

I am, for one, unpersuaded on the meaningfulness of the “historic Christian prohibition against contraception”. That Luther abhorred contraceptive sex is a matter of personal biography and not doctrine. Augustine, whose teaching on the will remains quite important for theology, also felt that nocturnal emissions were a sign of a divided will. His reflections on conjugal love remain, to my mind, matters of personal biography and not doctrine. To write that “we 21st century Christians are liberal on the issue of contraception with respect to the great cloud of witnesses who have come before us!” treats theology like a time machine, and not a complicated set of judgments that engage church, community, and culture. There is much advice from that great cloud that I have dispensed with, and unless you hold to a quite restrictive view of doctrine and its development, you have done so, too. Repristination is not itself a theological good.

Whether the “great cloud of witnesses” should be used as “the strong” to bind the consciences of modern Christians seems, to me, a flawed strategy. Before Lambeth Christians also did not use computers or cell phones, or cook the same recipes as we do today. This seems to me a matter of historical interest and not doctrinal relevance.

In matters of reproduction, Protestants often want to use sexuality as a cipher that will unlock other teaching about marriage, homosexuality, contraception, and gender. But I think it does not work that way. I think, on some of these issues, what we are doing in the interim is binding consciences in a way that prevents individuals from discerning, before God, the shape of their own lives. Now certainly sexual practices outside of Christian marriage, and those that harm each other, are “sin”. But one gift of Christian marriage is the gift of one’s whole self to the other. This means that we are bound to discern, together, how to be faithful in regard to procreation. We are bound, too, to confess our sins to one another, and to forgive. I think we can trust Christians to do this, and to seek forgiveness when they’ve failed to.

Each of us is granted our own garden. What it demands, and what it takes to tend it, is hidden from most everyone else. You can no more demand that I share my fruit with you, than you can demand I come tend your garden. To bear with such planting and to grant it the long, tedious attention it demands is its own spiritual practice. It requires observing reality, as it is. It requires that we are not blinded by our ideals. It requires becoming acquainted with hard work- but also learning that there isn’t a direct relationship between this hard work and any yield the results. It requires, too, learning to delight in whatever it is you receive. But most of all, it demands that you tend your own garden, and not that of your neighbor. Take of that what you will.