History of Sex and Christianity

Grasping at Straws to Overthrow Biblical truth

[Reading time approximately 20 minutes]

BOOK REVIEW:

Lower than the Angels: A History of Sex and Christianity

By Diarmaid MacCulloch. Random House (2024). 660 pages.

Reviewed by Michael Hoffman • www.RevisionistHistory.org

“The poison was never forced — it was offered gently, until you forgot it was poison at all.”

—Mark Twain

Sir Diarmaid MacCulloch is perhaps the most formidable academic in post-modern times to tackle the Bible’s wall of prohibition on “gay” sex. To call him a prize-wining historian is the understatement of the month. He’s the winner of the Cundill History Prize, the James Tait Black Prize, the Whitbread Prize for Biography and the Duff Cooper Prize.

His impressive 2018 biography, Thomas Cromwell: A Revolutionary Life, clocking in at 728 pages, will stand as the definitive account of King Henry VIII’s fixer for many years to come.

At Oxford University MacCulloch was Professor of the History of the Church from 1997-2019. He was knighted by the queen of England in 2012. He is an ordained deacon in an entity that bears the name “Church of England,” though its doctrine would be unrecognizable to the founders of that ecclesia.

Prof. MacCulloch’s seriousness and reputation as a scholar belie the author’s grasping at straws to make the Bible appear friendly toward —or even validating —homosexual acts.

Lucy Wooding, MacCulloch’s fellow professor at Oxford, wrote, “Few​ things expose the potential for illogicality, hypocrisy and cruelty within the Christian tradition more clearly than its attitude to sex. Throughout the centuries, the struggle to comprehend divine instruction and apply it to everyday life has revolved with particular intensity around the question of what people might want to do, and what they should be permitted to do, in their sexual relations. For anyone who thinks that the Bible gives clear directions about this, or that there has been any consistency in the attitudes of the Church, Diarmaid MacCulloch’s Lower than the Angels will come as a corrective” (London Review of Books, March 6, p. 29).

Wooding’s characterization would be branded hate speech if she were to term the Talmudic tradition’s attitude to sex “illogical, hypocritical and cruel.” Bashing our Christian heritage with monotonously dreary agit-prop is guaranteed to win her plaudits among the hierophants of academe.

Witness Wooding’s talking down to the plebes:

Christian authorities in every age have defended their teachings by reference to the Bible. MacCulloch patiently explains the many problems with this, in a fashion that will no doubt leave biblical fundamentalists fulminating…He rejects the claim that there is biblical sanction for homophobia… (citing) the loving sexual relationship between David and Jonathan in the Old Testament (which) has caused generations of biblical translators to tie themselves in knots trying to conceal the obvious.

The professorial arrogance at work: it’s exasperating for elitists to be impelled to transmit the obvious to the ignorant, yet Oxford’s MacCulloch, according to Oxford’s worshipful Wooding, will patiently explain the truth and “…biblical fundamentalists” will be left “fulminating,” and “tied in knots.” In the face of MacCulloch’s supposedly indisputable superior comprehension of the Bible, “Indignant straight men, seeing their hegemony eroded, are seeking vengeance” (Wooding pp. 29 and 30).

Let us discover for ourselves who is “tied in knots.”

The “David-and-Jonathan-Had-Sex” Hoax