Theological Trends Column

This article was published exclusively online in the Christian Research Journal, Volume 48, number 03 (2025).

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Book Review: Summary Critique

Lower Than the Angels:
A History of Sex and Christianity
Diarmaid MacCulloch
Viking, 2025

What do you do if you happen to be a scholar of enormous ability, intellect, and reputation, whose study of church history has resulted in a deep affection for Christianity and, simultaneously, emotional and psychic pain because of its doctrine and practice concerning sexuality and marriage? The options are unhappily limited. You might leave the church through a process of deconstruction that resembles a kind of false conversion. You might choose to stay and painfully bend toward orthodox Christian faith. Or, beset by grief and despair, you might attempt to marry deconstruction to faith, to change what the church and the Scriptures have always said, thus cleverly evading true conversion, body and soul.

Retired professor of Church History at Oxford and author of such noted works as Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (Viking, 2010), Thomas Cranmer: A Life (Yale, 1996), and The Reformation: A History (Viking, 2004), Diarmaid MacCulloch takes the well-trodden third path in his latest work, Lower Than the Angels: A History of Sex and Christianity (Viking, 2025).¹ He undertakes to prove that the church’s relationship to matters of sexuality has been so messy, so nuanced, so up in the air, that it is impossible to say that there is one teaching on the subject, or that Christian bishops, theologians, kings, abbesses, and fathers have spoken with one voice. He begins and ends his nearly 500 pages of main text with the declaration that there is no “single” Christian view of sex (pp. 5, 493).² He hopes that in the wide-open field of personal choice, Christians will embrace a “New Morality” (463) that places self-identity at the center of the church.

For one so well-studied, it is both heartbreaking and ironic to read his heroic historical spadework and to come away believing — because of his attention to detail and his basically faithful representation of two thousand years of church history — the opposite of his conclusion.

God and His Wife, Asherah. The place to begin a discussion of Christian history is the Bible. MacCulloch establishes the Scripture’s geographical and historical context, beginning with Greek language and culture and then roughing out the story of Israel according to his own presuppositions. For those who might be coming at the text as though it were God-breathed revelation, inerrantly written by mortal men superintended by the Holy Spirit, that is not his approach. MacCulloch is determined to dismantle any appeal to divine authorship. The Scriptures “are not the straightforward authority that they might seem” (8). Being written by men, they suffer from the “filter” of “an overwhelmingly male gaze” (10–11). Translation, language, and culture create a vast distance between the reader and the text (9). How they came to be written is opaque. “It would be a mistake,” he announces,

to date the Christian Old Testament’s sequence of books from Genesis to Malachi as if it were a linear historical accumulation from oldest to most recent. The various texts represent a cumulative meditation which manufactured as much as it documents the identity of its writers and readers: a patchwork of texts from different eras, organized on a principle that is not conventional history as practised today. (32)

The most obvious example of the patchwork is, unsurprisingly, the creation narrative in Genesis 1–2, which MacCulloch divides into “two different accounts.” The second account, he says, “was written much earlier than the first, maybe by two or more centuries” (32). Strangely, it took seventeen hundred years after the birth of Jesus to discover this fact, and even so, “commentators have habitually smoothed over the contradictions or used them as the basis of ingenious speculation” (32–33). In a note, he admits that he “will be making some sweeping general claims” that some “readers may find unacceptably iconoclastic,” and that if anyone is having a difficult time, they should read chapter two of his book, Christianity (519n17).

MacCulloch believes the Jewish people only gradually became monotheistic (35), and that “the majority of texts” in the Hebrew Scriptures “took their present form” during the Second Temple Period (40). To establish this view, it was a matter of “sifting through texts that constitute its literary and theological epic: an account of how the Jews discovered themselves through their relationship to their God, who increasingly became one God alone” (33). Though he does believe that Moses might have been an Egyptian who led people northwards out of Egypt (to invent such a name “would have been an unnecessary complication to a purely fictional text”) (33), the Law itself might be “presumed” to be “retrofitted into the account of the Exodus from Egypt in the book of Deuteronomy” (38). Of one thing the reader may be certain:

Most significantly, for centuries the God of Israel enjoyed a wife, Asherah, a fruitful deity who had long been paired with leading west Asian male gods. She emerges as an active consort and object of Hebrew devotion in, for instance, a series of inscriptions from different Judean sites datable to the eighth century BCE. A fragment of poetry has survived in the Hebrew Bible, embedded in later material, in which the divine couple bless the sons of Jacob/Israel. (35)

MacCulloch footnotes Francesca Stavrakopoulou’s God: An Anatomy (Knopf, 2023) and Genesis 49:25–26 to illustrate the novel effort of patching together the history of Israel from various supposed fragments embedded in the text itself (519n21).

After a while, as the people living in that tiny sliver of land became more and more convinced of there being only one God, they “rudely ejected” (40) “God’s wife” out of her “place of honour” (37) because of emerging prophetic literature casting sexual infidelity as a spiritual matter relating to God (37). God’s wife didn’t go away forever, though. She reemerged as Lady Wisdom (40), a personified deity whom scholars like Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza have tried to map over Christ in some kind of gendered way (41).

Elasticity. After summarily dismissing the Old Testament, MacCulloch turns his attention to Jesus, whom he believes did exist on the world stage. However, he pours cold water over the Gospels as a place to find out about His life, death, resurrection and ascension. They were actually “written for different communities now difficult to identify somewhere on the eastern Mediterranean seaboard” (63).

MacCulloch concentrates on the Infancy Narratives as he sets the stage to talk about sexuality. The differing and contradictory versions of Jesus’s birth should not be taken as historical. Rather, they are “early Christian explorations of the meaning and significance of Jesus” akin to parables (66). What early Christians were trying to do was cope with Jesus’s illegitimacy:

‘Low estate’ [Luke 1:48 RSV] renders tapeinōsis, which in its many shades of meaning stretches to ‘humiliation,’ ‘disgrace’ or ‘baseness’: ‘handmaiden’ hardly hits the essence of doulē, which starkly means ‘female slave,’ and which would therefore immediately suggest someone available for the humiliation of sexual assault. It was thus perfectly appropriate for Jane Schaberg to suggest the possibility that, in his use of this vocabulary, Luke is portraying Mary as the victim of rape. (68)

MacCulloch then takes up Jesus’s own teaching on the subject of marriage and sex:

Jesus is proclaiming his own prerogatives of forgiveness; yet this tiny biblical fragment [about the woman caught in adultery in the disputed text of John 7:53–8:11] has wider implications for his followers over two millennia and more. Like his pronouncements on divorce and monogamy, it subverts the ethical expectations and conventions of its age….It has continued to challenge Christianity’s constant reconstruction of Christian ethics up to our own time. We may be in the early stages of exploring its full implications. (80)

Ironically, the rich implications for sex and marriage of Jesus’s posture toward the Mosaic Law and the sacrificial system have taken millennia to plumb. Generations of theologians have added layer upon layer of understanding and knowledge about Christ’s relationship to the church.³ The difficulty both in His day and ours is that He read the Law more strictly than any fallen creature would prefer. MacCulloch, however, is determined to sift through the words of Jesus looking for any grain of exception that would justify same-sex activity: “Besides Jesus’s two interventions on marriage, his voice has not much been preserved on matters sexual — notably he disappoints many conservative Christians by saying nothing whatsoever about homosexuality, about which they would especially love to know what Jesus would do” (79).

It might seem obvious to the Christian that, because Jesus is the Word made flesh (John 1), and the Bible is the Word of God (2 Timothy 3:16), and because both Testaments, with no hint of apology or nuance, condemn all same-sex sexual activity, there is no way to affirm same-sex unions. But if Jesus isn’t the Word, and Saint Paul is a confused person, then perhaps Jesus’s apparent silence on the subject could be meaningful. Except that, one cannot help but observe, while Jesus challenges the easy divorce culture of the pharisees, His supposed silence on their condemnation of homosexuality would seem to argue in favor of His acceptance of their teachings on that subject.

On the surface, MacCulloch doesn’t shy away from this trouble. He admits the supposed conundrum of Saint Paul, who, on the one hand, introduces “equity” into married relationships (90–93), but, on the other hand, condemns homosexuality (93–95).⁴ That condemnation doesn’t matter too much because Paul, for MacCulloch, is someone exercising “independence of thought” and whose “very contradiction of Jesus is a testimony to the authenticity of Jesus’s original saying about divorce in its stark form” (78). It’s OK, in other words, that Saint Paul condemns homosexuality, because he isn’t inspired by the Holy Spirit and isn’t speaking the words of Christ.

MacCulloch’s project is to show that Christians, like every other kind of religious person, exercise elasticity in their faith (492). Elasticity is the ability to live with contradictions — in the Bible, in Christian history, and in oneself. And because Christians are hypocritical and do not live up to their own convictions, and because the past is a confused jumble of beliefs and practices, there is now plenty of room, in the twenty-first century, to drive the truck of progressivism through the traditions of the church with no spiritual consequences.

In the case of the Bible, having set it into its context in the ancient world — one full of sexual promiscuity and tolerance of romantic and sexual relationships between men and boys (50–52) — it remains paramount that Jesus Himself never spoke on the subject. Often taking the part of women who, MacCulloch feels, do not have their voices sufficiently heard in the pages of Scripture,⁵ and by nuancing the question of divorce,⁶ MacCulloch appears self-satisfied.

One Man, One Woman. In all his investigations, however, MacCulloch somehow missed the crucial and disappointing fact that Jesus often condemned porneia (e.g., Matthew 5:32, 15:19, 19:9), a word used in the first century to refer to all the sexual immorality addressed in the Old Testament (Leviticus 18–20).⁷ Rather than remaining silent on so significant a subject, Jesus assumes the authority and goodness of the Mosaic Law. By use of that tiny word, Jesus forbids all sexual activity outside of marriage between a man and a woman. Everything — prostitution, adultery, bestiality, fornication, incest, rape, remarriage to the same partner after divorce, and, most pertinent for the present discussion, two men or two women engaging in sexual relations — is out of bounds according to Jesus, who also believed that Adam was the first man (Matthew 19:4–6), that Jonah was swallowed by a big fish (Matthew 12:39–41), and that Moses gave the Law and that it was about Him (John 5:46).⁸

Indeed, it is Jesus who establishes the union of Adam with Eve as the first marriage and as the model for all subsequent marriages (Matthew 19:4–6, citing Genesis 1:27, 2:24). He is the one, as MacCulloch acknowledges (76–78), who casts marriage after divorce as adultery (Matthew 5:31–32, 19:9). And this was a hard saying, one that Christians have grappled with through the ages.

Perhaps because MacCulloch is a historian and not a theologian, the inclination to revise the twists and turns of church history does not seem quite so strong as his desire to dismantle and demystify the Bible. His writing about the interval between the New Testament period and the twentieth century is gripping. But what, when all the facts are on the board, do we find? Very narrow and contentious arguments about who may get married. Marriage is between one man and one woman, but can priests get married? Should the very rich marry the poor? Is all sex, even within marriage, wicked, the source of “original” sin? Or should married couples enjoy their conjugal duty? MacCulloch documents the myriad times that same-sex relations were clandestinely tolerated in monastic and other ecclesiastical settings. He shows the corruption of the church through the ages. He traces the changing attitudes towards clerical marriage from the Middle Ages and through the Reformation. He tells the fascinating story of monasticism. Along the way, there occasionally emerges a sneering and angry attitude towards those who so eloquently and movingly shaped the Christian conception of marriage through history (140, 465).

In particular, MacCulloch does not appreciate Saint Augustine’s influence on the church (125, 173). He is chagrined that the West gradually embraced the Augustinian view of sin — that the heart is so corrupted that only the supernatural grace of God can mend it. He hints broadly that Saint Augustine might have been sexually attracted to his male friend (171–72). Regardless, Augustine is to blame for current theological tastes:

The Western Church was thus launched on an inescapable association between shame and sex, not excluding marital sexuality, and for many commentators over the last three centuries that has earned Augustine a dark reputation for shaping Western Christianity’s variety of the ancient Christian negativity on sex. (173)

Throughout, MacCulloch confuses description with prescription. And this is strange, for even the merest intelligence is able to apprehend that, for example, the phenomenon of clerical sexual sin does not negate the existence of sexual sin. Because Abraham passed his wife off as his sister no less than twice to save his own neck doesn’t mean that there are no moral laws elsewhere in Scripture with which to assess the rightness or wrongness of Abraham’s behavior (Genesis 12:10–20; 20:1–18). The Bible, as a mentioned above, provides a uniform and clear prescriptive teaching on marriage and homosexuality. That some have violated this teaching does not mean there is no teaching.

A New Morality or Old Lies? Christians did eventually begin to be divided from each other over the question of homosexuality.⁹ If one wanted to pick a neat and tidy date, I would put it on June 26, 2015, which MacCulloch forbears to comment upon, when the Supreme Court granted the right of marriage to same-sex couples in the United States.¹⁰ Until that moment, I do not believe that Professor MacCulloch would have risked his academic reputation on a book like this. While there had been a growing “affirming” movement inside of Christianity until the Obergefell decision, it lacked the strength to divide the church.

The cultural train wreck that Westerners are enduring, represented by the trans movement, by falling birthrates, by the epidemic of porn and abortion, was set in motion a long time ago. The difference is that, until the last decade, almost no one in the church, except for activists along the margins, called it good. Professor MacCulloch, however, calls it “the New Morality,” a term that began to gain traction in the 60s that encompassed family planning — otherwise known as abortion — and affirmation of same-sex relationships and other progressive social positions (463–64).

It strikes me as a little bit ironic that MacCulloch would tell the story of the last century, in particular, in the way that he did — from a purely ideological perspective. This posture leaves him open to the very detailed and precise criticism he is attempting to counter with the sheer volume of historical data.¹¹ This is living memory for us. We know what happened.

And this is precisely how we know the Bible to be true. For the people who wrote about the life of Jesus did it when the people who followed Him, and whom He appointed as apostles, were still alive to say whether or not the accounts were true. That’s how good history works. Our faith is not grounded in theory or ideology but in historical events that people saw, experienced, and wrote down.

Anglicans and Angels. Case in point, MacCulloch does not approve of the Diocese of Sidney, Australia, which he claims “has made its own cultural accommodation with some of the distinctive stereotypes of traditional Australian masculinity, which historians of gender have analysed as ranging from the ‘Lone Hand’ of the Outback, happiest relaxing in an all-male drinking and gambling ambience, to the ‘Domestic Man,’ an abstemious and churchgoing paterfamilias” (478). He accuses them of nurturing “a particularly aggressive stance against male homosexuality” (479). Likewise, he dismisses the entire Global Anglican Futures project as schismatic “on principle” (479).

I am excessively diverted by his caricature of the fissures within Anglicanism. Sidney theologians and clerics guided the Statement Writing process of the last GAFCON meeting in Kigali, which, with one voice, unequivocally condemned the Church of England for trying to bless same-sex unions without being seen doing it.¹² The Sidney Anglicans on the committee were no more aggressively against homosexuality than the Ugandan, the English, or any of the representatives from around the Communion. None of them deserved to be condescended to or dismissed by Professor MacCulloch by means of racial or cultural stereotypes.

Of course, it isn’t what we think in our own lifetimes that bears on eternity. The question is what God thinks. MacCulloch’s parting shot, lightly delivered, is to quote Jesus in the gospel of Mark: “Is not this why you are wrong, that you know neither the scriptures nor the power of God? For when they rise from the dead, they neither marry nor are given in marriage, but are like angels in heaven?” (497). So far from a license to sin, the Lord Himself calls those who would follow Him to set their mind on heavenly things, to cast away the hindrance of sin and sexual immorality, to be so transformed by the love of God that raises the dead, that they gain life that never ends.

Anne Kennedy, MDiv, is the author of Nailed It: 365 Readings for Angry or Worn-Out People, rev. ed. (Square Halo Books, 2020). She blogs about current events and theological trends on her Substack, Demotivations with Anne.

NOTES

1. Professor MacCulloch is a deacon in the Church of England.
2. “There is no such thing as a single Christian theology of sex. There is a plethora of Christian theologies of sex” (5).
3. For a contemporary discussion of Jesus and the church through history and the implications for all facets of life, I recommend Hans Boersma’s Heavenly Participation: The Weaving of a Sacramental Tapestry (Eerdmans, 2011).
4. Time forbears me to engage with MacCulloch’s continual reference to Paul’s so-called invention of the “marital debt”:
   • Paul interjected another startling independent variable into Christian thinking about marriage in his rulings for the Corinthians: an idea for which it is difficult to find any exact precedent. He creatively developed the ‘one flesh’ theme that Jesus had emphasized in marriage. In the word of the Lord, we have seen that it had remained obstinately male-centred: ‘a man leaves his father and his mother and clings to his wife, and they become one flesh.’ But Paul expanded the fleshliness into a surprising reciprocity between marriage partners. More remarkable still, the reciprocity was grounded on marriage as based on sexual expression: ‘the wife does not rule over her own body, but the husband does; likewise the husband does not rule over his own body, but the wife does’ (1 Cor. 7:3–4). This sexual equity in moral expectations is completely at odds with common Mediterranean assumptions in Paul’s time: in his assertion, a woman has as much right to expect faithfulness from her husband as the husband has from the wife. (91)
5. Here is an early, representative sample of how MacCulloch postures himself as the champion of women: “Equally, when women encountered male writings, they could be as capable as any modern scholar of hearing them and appropriating them against the grain. Not merely women: we do not have access to the thoughts in people’s heads that, in their own time and culture, they felt it wise not to express” (14).
6. MacCulloch accuses early Christians of having a “neurosis” about divorce: “In contrast to their neuroses about divorce, Christians did not have nearly so much problem in following the Lord on monogamy” (78).
7. MacCulloch attributes to Philo this catchall, shorthand meaning of the term porneia (93).
8. Robert Gagnon, “The Witness of Jesus,” The Bible and Homosexual Practice: Texts and Hermeneutics (Abingdon Press, 2001), 191.
9. MacCulloch on the word homosexuality: “An innovation with serious consequences occurred in translations of the Bible in the mid-twentieth century which first introduced the anachronistic word ‘homosexual’ into biblical moral denunciations, not just in English but in other languages” (10).
10. Obergefell v. Hodges, 576 U.S. 644 (2015).
11. In the final chapter of the book, MacCulloch abandons any “spurious” (his word) critical and objective distance he might have had, “having become a participant observer in events” (461).
12. The Kigali Commitment, GAFCON IV, April 21, 2023, https://gafcon.org/communique-updates/gafcon-iv-the-kigali-commitment/.