The Book of Genesis teaches that the world of nature is to be honored and cultivated according to the divine wisdom who created it, and this respect should also transfer to the human body—created male and female with the God-given blessing of fertility.
Our modern world, however, treats fertility not as a blessing to be received and honored, but a problem to be solved. In order to get a hold on human fertility, something must be done to the human body—and thus, to the human person, you adopt the neo-gnostic view that says, “Sex organs do not make babies—persons do.” Embedded in this mentality is the idea that the human body—particularly human reproductive organs—are not constitutive of the person. Rather, they are extrinsic to authentic human nature and humanized only when they come under rational control. How contrary this is to the optimistic, joyful outlook of Genesis, which proclaims in a kind of celebration, “Male and female he created them . . . be fertile and multiply.”
At the heart of this conflict is the question of whether the ability to procreate is a true good of the person or just a physical function that may be turned on and off as needed. The latter view sees a baby conceived against the will of the couple as a kind of accident or, even worse, an inhuman intruder—unnatural to the couple’s love-making, somehow unrelated to the very act that by nature is ordered toward life! So the question ultimately involves a true appreciation for natural law. If human reproductive powers are God-designed, God-willed, what it means to be created male and female, when a couple deliberately impede fertility by recourse to contraception, they violate not a mere physical, mechanical process, but rather the integrity of the person. If human fertility is not a true human good or human end, the modern contraceptive/abortive mentality makes sense and logically follows.
But Genesis 1:26 destroys such neo-Gnosticism, affirming that the body and fertility are inherently linked to the creation of man as male and female and are constitutive of human gender. As with the rest of God’s creation, they are not accidents, but are imbued with meaning. They are not mere objects to be exploited, but gifts to be respected. Man’s dominion over them should be not a tyranny, but a cooperation with God’s sovereignty.
St. Paul teaches that even those who do not know the true God nonetheless honor him when they honor the natural law evident in his creation (see Rom. 1:18-20, 2:13-15). In this respect, those without God were tied to divine truths. Christ told the pagan Pilate, “Everyone who belongs to the truth listens to my voice” (John 18:37). Commitment to truth is preparation for the gospel. The Vatican II document Dei Verbum tells us that the first source of God’s revelation isn’t Sacred Scripture or even the initial calling of the Jews. Rather, it is the created order itself, as “God gives an enduring witness to himself in created realities” (II, 3).
Natural human ends are in no sense mere biology propelling the human being to a fate he cannot control. There is no gulf between the body, the intellect, and divine wisdom. Human “animal” nature is filled with divine—one might even say sacred and transcendent—meaning because “natural inclinations” have no other end than God himself. For us, corporeal nature has a spiritual meaning. We can’t know the truth about ourselves, or God, without it.
Immediately after teaching in Romans 1 that God can be known in the things he has made, Paul has harsh words for those who abandon knowledge of the true God in favor of idolatry. Because human beings can know the moral law of God as it is written in nature—true worship is connected to upright moral behavior. Conversely, false worship, the failure to honor the true God by idolatrous practices, leads to immoral behavior.
Interestingly, Paul calls out such people specifically for their immoral sexual behavior. False worship leads to false sexual practices—the “mutual degradation of their bodies”:
They exchanged the truth of God for a lie and revered and worshiped the creature rather than the creator. . . . Their females exchanged natural relations for unnatural, and the males likewise gave up natural relations with females and burned with lust for one another. . . . Since they did not see fit to acknowledge God, God handed them over to their undiscerning mind to do what is improper (Rom. 1:24–28).
According to Paul, sexual rebellion against nature is the consequence of spiritual rebellion against God (see the Ignatius Catholic Study Bible, 259).
Many authors interpret the Pauline passage on women exchanging “natural intercourse for unnatural” as a reference to lesbianism. This interpretation certainly makes sense, as it is immediately followed by Paul’s condemnation of males “burning with lust for one another.” However, Paul’s description of what women do when they fail to honor God isn’t exactly the same perversion of nature as what Paul says about men. Paul doesn’t say that females burn with lust for one another. Instead, he simply states that the females “exchanged natural intercourse for unnatural.” Indeed, the literal Greek renders the passage “for the females of them changed the natural use to the use against nature.”
It is quite possible that here Paul is talking about women who violated their God-given nature by rendering sterile the use of sexual intercourse—contradicting nature by deliberately acting against the good of fertility. Some might think that contraception wasn’t practiced in the ancient world, due to a lack of reliable scientific methods, but this is hardly the case. Besides coitus interruptus, the Romans, Greeks, and Egyptians of New Testament times were known to practice several crude contraceptive methods. In his letter to the Galatians, Paul teaches that several sins proceed from the flesh, such as “immorality, impurity, licentiousness, idolatry, sorcery, hatreds,” etc. (5:19-20). The Greek word often translated “sorcery,” pharmakeia, can refer to the use of drugs, and indeed drugs or potions were employed then in the practice of magic, witchcraft, and sorcery. But as John F. Kippley, an expert on the subject of contraceptive use, points out, pharmakeia may also refer to artificial birth control:
Pharmakeia in general was the mixing of various potions for secret purposes, and it is known that potions were mixed in the first century A.D. to prevent or stop a pregnancy. The typical translation as “sorcery” may not reveal all of the specific practices condemned by the New Testament. In all three of the passages in which it appears, it is in a context condemning sexual immorality; two of the three passages also condemn murder (Gal. 5:19–26; Rev. 9:21, 21:8). Thus it is very possible that there are three New Testament passages condemning the use of the products of pharmakeia for birth control purposes.
Even if Paul used pharmakeia to refer not to contraceptive methods of the ancient world, but to actual occult arts, in a real sense, the condemnation still applies when we consider the underlying philosophy of contraceptive use. The goal of sorcery is to control the world, control the future, control the forces of nature—to cause those forces to comply with one’s personal wishes. Sorcery seeks to alter and manipulate the dispositions of reality. This is exactly the aim of the practice of contraception through modern pharmaceutical methods—a kind of modern “sorcery,” a contemporary “casting of spells,” by which the reality of the human body is altered, manipulated for personal ends.
We may further note that this interpretation gains strength in the fact that lesbianism does not involve sexual intercourse. It is the “use” of sexual intercourse that is rendered unnatural. In any case, homosexual sexual acts and contracepted sexual acts share one common element: they are inherently barren, contrary to the natural good and God’s first blessing in Genesis.
For more like this, check out Monica Miller’s new book, In the Beginning, available for sale at the Catholic Answers shop.