Outer Rim Territories

The example of the pastor's family

Mr. Aaron Wolf has an interesting overview of the change in the protestant perception of birth control. He rightly cites Luther, Calvin and later Wesley as being anti-contraception. His goal in the article is chart the change in climate that led to the change in teaching. He deals primarily with history and the exegesis of those he cites but doesn't challenge their exegesis of the Biblical texts. One of the most interesting portions of the text is relating the change in teaching to the change the teacher's own lives. He doesn't leave it to anecdotal evidence but provides some real evidence of decline in the number of children born to pastors. He suggests earlier in the article that the Catholic stand has held because of priestly celibacy. It is a compelling argument and one worth considering. Hypocrisy overwhelms orthodoxy... or lies mask the truth. p.s. I ordered a copy of the 1959 “Planned Parenthood” book from CPH. I look forward to engaging this pro-birth control book from the same era of the third printing of WA Maier's “For Better Not For Worse.” Touchstone Archives: Children of the Reformation:

On doctrine, then, Protestant leaders held firm well into the twentieth century. The weakness of the Protestant position actually lay elsewhere: in the informal institution of the Pastor’s Family. One possible cause of the change in Protestant teaching not often considered is the changed family life of the clergy themselves. In rejecting lifelong celibacy, in casting marriage as the highest order and calling on earth, in elevating motherhood and homemaking, in emphasizing the spiritual authority and practical tasks of fatherhood, in refocusing adult lives around the tasks of childrearing, in celebrating procreation and large families, and in condemning contraception, Luther implicitly laid a great burden on Protestant clerics. They had to serve as examples for their congregations, and specifically, they had to marry and bear large families themselves. Where the Catholic priest or the cloistered monk or nun faced the challenge of lifelong celibacy, the Protestant cleric faced the lifelong challenge of building a model and fruitful home. Luther again supplied the prototype, in his marriage to Katharine von Bora. By the standards of the time, they married late, but still brought six children into the world, and their busy home served as the inspiration to generations of Protestant clerics. This special role of the Pastor’s Family was rarely codified in church doctrine, but the Protestant rejection of both celibacy and contraception created a visible expectation. Barring infertility, a faithful Protestant pastor and his wife would be parents to a brood of children. It was a difficult expectation to satisfy, and would only become more difficult as economic and cultural changes made providing for large families more burdensome and having many children less and less socially acceptable. Not surprisingly, many seem to have turned to contraception to limit their families, and equally unsurprisingly, this affected their articulation of the church doctrine for which they were responsible.