The Light Shineth in Darkness
by
Udo Schaefer
One Paragraph

Baha'u'llah has declared marriage the basis of society and urges his people to marry. At first sight one could say with justice: what is the point of this platitude? But the platitude has often hot lost in the course of history and is today being challenged more than ever. Since Paul, who found it "good for a man not to touch a woman" (I Cor 7:1) and for whom marriage was concession to sinful flesh, a permitted sin, Christianity has been undecided about marriage. Church history can show many examples of extreme hostility to marriage, like Marcion, who forbade sexual intercourse even for married couples, Origen, who castrated himself, Tertullian ("Marriage is based on that which is fornication"), Jerome ("The married live after the manner of cattle and are no different from pigs and senseless beasts"), and the Russian sect of the Skopze, who on the evidence of Matthew 19:12 thought castration was the only way of salvation willed by God and who carried out mutilations even on women and children. But apart from these and similar instances, deliberate celibacy and virginity have been recognized in the Church, especially the Catholic Church, right up to our own times, as superior to marriage. For Martin Luther also marriage was only a 'remedium peccati', a hospital for the chronically sick. Baha'u'llah's express injunction to marry is thus to be understood as a denial of the anti-marriage and anti-sex tendencies of Christianity; it is a discouragement of every sort of celibate living, a healing of the deformities which God's religion has experienced in this respect. On the other hand it is a rebuff to the hedonists of our time, the advocates of an excessive license, who in the immediate present declare marriage an outmoded institution and may even go in for wife and husband-swapping and for group sex. Evidently Christians are gradually straying so far from the obsolete anti-sex ethics of their Church that they are falling into the other extreme. These "prophets of decadence" include some Protestant theologians. (73:2) see

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