Sex Au Naturel by Patrick Coffin Page B

dissent from Humanae Vitae results in the logical acceptance (even if one subjectively finds them repellent) of many other perversions, including bestiality. 10
     
    Despite sincere protestations, those who accept contraception implicitly accept every other sexual coupling that is shorn from conception.
     
    There is a popular misconception that pits the allegedly wrathful God of the Old Testament against the merciful God of the New. The Cliff ’s Notes version of this Old Testament deity might be, “God creates man and everything man does gets God angry.” But this is a false dichotomy. The Father of Jesus is as concerned with justice as Yahweh was with mercy. The New Testament, in fact, records an instance where God metes out the death penalty, and its circumstances bring us full circle back to the Onan incident. It’s found in Acts 5:1–11, the strange case of Ananias and Sapphira.
     
    This seemingly devout couple misled Peter and the apostles about property holdings they were meant to share with the community. They slyly withheld a gift, as it were, and defrauded their solemn commitment as leaders of the Christian community just as Onan defrauded his solemn commitment (or covenant oath) to bring forth new life for his brother. Ananias and Sapphira—not unlike Onan—discovered the hard way how seriously God takes covenant oaths.
     
    At face value, the text in Acts 5 has nothing to do with birth control, but the similarity lies in the fact of lying, of giving the appearance of transparency and truthfulness while really engaged in a deception. Contraception likewise gives the appearance of openness toward the natural link with procreation while severing that same link.
     
    In severing love from life, contraception does what God’s Word never does.
     
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    1 ^ Even when God carries out the death penalty, which He does a few dozen times in Scripture, it is in the interest of protecting and valuing human life or some other good.
     
    2 ^ This chapter relies in part on two books by Protestant authors: The Bible and Birth Control , by Charles D. Provan; and A Full Quiver, by Rick and Jan Hess. These authors do not hold Catholicism in any special affection, and, interestingly, they are providentialists who reject even natural family planning as immoral.
     
    3 ^ A prime example is the tautology, “survival of the fittest.” How do we know which species is the fittest? The one that survived. And why did it survive? Because it was the fittest, of course.
     
    4 ^ Father Brian W. Harrison, “The Sin of Onan Revisited,” Living Tradition , (67) November, 1996.
     
    5 ^ John F. Kippley, “The Sin of Onan: Is It Relevant to Contraception?” Homiletic and Pastoral Review, 107 (2007):16-22.
     
    6 ^ The Levirate tradition is also present in the Book of Ruth, and is also clearly on the minds of the Sadducees who question Jesus about who is married to whom in the Resurrection (Mt. 22:23–32).
     
    7 ^ Protestant scholar S.R. Driver pointed out that the verse should be understood as a frequentative use of the perfect and translated “whenever he went in” instead of “when he went in.” See S. R. Driver, The Book of Genesis (New York: Edwin S. Gorham, 1905), 328; Ronald J. Williams, Hebrew Syntax: An Outline, 2d ed. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1976), p. 85; E. Kautzsch, ed., Gesenius’ Hebrew Grammar , rev. ed. A. E. Cowley (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1910), 336.
     
    8 ^ For a fuller overview of the Bible’s treatment of sexual sin, see Manuel Miguens, OFM, Biblical Reflections on “Human Sexuality” in Human Sexuality in Our Time: What the Church Teaches , George A. Kelly, ed. (Jamaica Plain, MA: Daughters of Saint Paul, 1979) 102–118.
     
    9 ^ Blue Letter Bible, “Dictionary and Word Search for shagal (Strong’s 7693),” Blue Letter Bible , 1996-2010, http://www.blueletterbible.org/lang/lexicon/lexicon.cfm?Strongs=H7693&t=KJV (accessed September 26, 2009). A note of thanks to Father Mitch Pacwa,