Christian Marriage

https://x.com/nancyrpearcey/status/2045181477139230846?s=51&t=cLq01Oy84YkmYPZ-URIMYw

 

 "It was not easy for any Christians to take the biblical view of marriage seriously: "Such even-handed treatment was genuinely novel, and it was not easy for men to embrace. In the fourth century, Augustine was still preaching sermons on why it was not acceptable for men to commit adultery with their slaves—which, he observed, was “a daily occurrence.” He warned Christian husbands that their wives would hold them accountable for their sexual sin. He also warned wives that in response to being held accountable, husbands may grow angry and abusive: 'Supposing today someone has to put up with rather more sharpness from his wife and more open grumbling than usual, because she used to assume that it was all right for her husband [to commit adultery with his slaves], and now she has heard in church that it is not all right for her husband; so if he has to endure his wife grumbling more freely, and saying to him, 'What you are doing is not right. We both heard him saying so. We are both Christians. Give me the same as you require of me. I owe you fidelity, you owe me fidelity, we both owe Christ fidelity...' When he hears things like that which he is not used to, he gets angry, he becomes abusive.' But Augustine did not let these angry husbands off the hook. He admonished them to hold themselves to the same standard of fidelity that they expected of their wives: “You are told, 'You shall not commit adultery' (Exodus 20:14); that is, do not go to any other woman except your wife. But what you do is demand this duty from your wife, while declining to pay this duty to your wife.” In this way, Christianity laid out a complete mutuality in conjugal rights. As sociologist Rodney Stark explains, it was a symmetry “at total variance … with pagan culture.” As a result, “the Christian woman enjoyed far greater marital security and equality than did her pagan neighbor.” Stark concludes, “Christianity was unusually appealing because within the Christian subculture women enjoyed far higher status than did women in the Greco-Roman world at large.”" https://x.com/nancyrpearcey/status/2044927670236938412?s=51&t=cLq01Oy84YkmYPZ-URIMYw "Why Christian Marriage Was Revolutionary "To appreciate how unique the Christian view of marriage is, we need to set it against the ancient Greco-Roman culture into which the church was born. In the ancient world, sexual promiscuity among men was widespread and socially accepted. The purpose of a wife was to have legal heirs, but it was expected that men would have sex with prostitutes, mistresses, concubines, and, most of all, with their slaves—male and female, children and adults. Demosthenes famously said, “We keep prostitutes for pleasure. We keep mistresses for the day-to-day needs of the body. We keep wives for the begetting of children and for the faithful guardianship of our homes.” Wives sometimes protested, but they were told they had no choice but to accept their husband’s promiscuity.... Men could accuse their wives of adultery, but since it was thought acceptable for men to have sex outside of marriage, wives could not accuse their husbands of adultery. Cato declared, “If you catch your wife in adultery, you can kill her with impunity; she, however, cannot dare to lay a finger on you if you commit adultery. It is the law.” In this historical context, Christianity was nothing short of revolutionary. At its core was a new form of sexual equality. To the shock of the ancient world, both sexes were held to the same moral standard. Christianity condemned promiscuity among men as well as women. It stood out as radically different because it taught that a husband actually wrongs his wife by committing adultery. Jesus said, “Anyone who divorces his wife and marries another woman commits adultery against her. And if she divorces her husband and marries another man, she commits adultery” (Mark 10:11–12). Such even-handed treatment was genuinely novel."" 

 https://x.com/BiblicalBeauty/status/2044857608709058799

 "Historian Tom Holland explaining the revolutionary impact Christianity made on gender and sexuality which is so often taken for granted now in the West: "Because of Christianity, I mean, I think every society has had an idea of binaries, that in sex there are two roles that people have to play to have sex, and for us, it's based on gender. It's based on the idea of there being men and women and that's again an inheritance ultimately from Genesis, God creating men and women separate. But for the Romans, that wasn't the case. For the Romans, the binary was between the male Roman citizen and everybody else, and the male Roman citizen could do what he liked to everybody else... So you know you're a Roman slave owner, you can do what you like to your slaves sexually, any it doesn't matter what the gender of the slave is. It doesn't matter what the age is. You can just treat them as you want, and of course Christianity radically, radically changes that. And you know, if you are a scullery maid in a Roman household (a bit like a Yazidi girl in an Isis household), there's nothing to stop you being raped every day. Nothing to stop you. No legal power, I mean, no sense of moral disapproval at all, and so you can imagine the radical effect of getting a letter from Paul being told, 'you are the like the church.' It's utterly transformative.""