ChASTITY

I’m watching a show on the History Channel about the early Christian church. They are talking about writings by, or about, some of the Apostles, like Peter and Paul, that were excluded from the New Testament for one reason or another. A section of the show is on celibacy and how it came to be part of the doctrine of the early church. Which it didn’t. It became doctrine for a few of the churches but not most, until the Nicene Creed, by which time the practice was so entrenched and protected by special interest groups that it was retained.
In one of the apocrypha, something attributed to Peter, the experts explain that while Paul’s admonition in the New Testament to separate from one another for a time for prayer and meditation, then return to intimacy, Peter advises us to “remain chaste and avoid the [putrefaction] of the flesh.” (Brackets indicate I don’t remember the actual word, but that one is close).
It is assumed from this that Peter is demanding we all be celibate to be counted as serious Christians, and that this is the genesis of the practice in the early church and later Catholicism. Nothing could be further from the truth. This is the same misunderstanding Paul suffers from. Chastity is not the same thing as celibacy. Celibacy is the total abstinence from sexual activity. Chastity is maintaining ones purity and virtue, but does not (necessarily) involve abstinence. Chastity is being true to marriage vows, remaining faithful to a spouse, and keeping sexual appetites and activity set within the bounds God gave us. Thus a married woman (or man) who is sexually active and maintaining fidelity, is being chaste. A person maintains his or her virtue through fidelity, not abstinence. Peter was telling the church (assuming the document is authentic) to be chaste in the sense of keeping vows. If they were to stray, they would be subject to the sins of the flesh. Paul was saying the same thing by the way. Neither Christ nor the Apostles ever preached any form of abstinence other than abstinence from adultery and fornication—which are defined as extra-marital sex and pre-marital sex. Indeed, marriage is one of the saving ordinances given us by God. Remember, He didn’t tell Adam and Eve to reject one another, He told them to multiply, and replenish the earth. These days sex is so mundane, promiscuity so common, that it no longer occurs to anyone that the Apostles might have been speaking about pre-and extra-marital sex. Society can now only imagine they must have been talking about no sex at all, because these days the only realities are sex or no sex, nothing in between. It’s too bad really. Makes God’s job that much harder.