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This thesis details how the Early Fathers of the Church saw contraception as an Anti-life act. They condemned it as they condemned, abortion, infanticide and herbal contraceptives as against life. This details the Early Fathers teaching through St. Augustine on contraception in the context of their age. It explains how this teaching flowed from their Christian faith and rejection of the surrounding culture. It rejects the thesis that Early Christians just took on Stoic ideas of sexuality and were completely negative toward sexuality
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An earlier version of this paper was presented to the Anglican-Roman Catholic Dialogue in the United States (ARC-USA), of which I have been a member since 2006. The final version will be published around September 2015 in the Journal of Ecumenical Studies. The link below takes you to the 2014 ARCUSA agreed statement that is referenced throughout the paper. http://www.usccb.org/beliefs-and-teachings/ecumenical-and-interreligious/ecumenical/anglican/upload/arcusa-2014-statement.pdf Precis: PRECIS “Ecclesiology and Moral Discernment,” the 2014 agreed statement from the Anglican-Roman Catholic Consultation in the U.S., claims that the typical assessment that these traditions have well-established, opposing teachings will not do justice to the complementary ways we teach. Contraception is used as an example of a contentious moral matter about which it is assumed Anglicans and Catholics have settled, opposing teaching. The agreed statement bases this claim on differences in the structure and exercise of authority between the communions. This essay has three goals: (1) It expands the summary of Anglican ecclesiology in the document, clarifying the extent of the ecclesiological differences between Anglicanism (especially the Episcopal Church) and Catholicism on teaching about moral matters. (2) It offers one recognizably Anglican approach to reasoning theologically about the moral complexities of contraception, by an Episcopalian, liturgically and synodically. (3) It explains why Episcopalians “could hold and teach” that the statement’s judgments are “more consonant with Scripture and moral truth, if that were their judgment.”
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Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society
For most of its history the Christian church has viewed the use of contraceptives in family planning with moral suspicion. The arguments against contraceptives varied, but the church’s stance was quite clear, though the issue was never paramount in the church’s thought. All of that changed in 1930 with the Anglican Lambeth Conference giving qualified ethical sanction for contraceptive use under certain conditions. Within a matter of several decades most of Protestantism followed the Lambeth trajectory. With the arrival of the Pill in 1960 the shift became complete. What is most significant about this change is not that it happened, but that there was so little theological reflection in the process. Winds of change regarding family planning in general began to blow in the late 19th century with the revival of Malthusian sentiments regarding world population: “The basic proposition of Malthus that population tends to increase faster than food resources was frequently repeated.”1 By th.
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