Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- I INTRODUCTION
- II MAJOR INFLUENCES IN ADVENTIST MORAL THOUGHT
- III ISSUES OF HUMAN SEXUALITY
- 5 Marital relations among Adventists: the pursuit of purity
- 6 Adventists and intimacy: the celebration of sex
- 7 Adventists and abortion: early hostility
- 8 Abortion: tensions in the institutionalized church
- 9 Early adventist women: in the shadow of the prophetess
- 10 Adventist women in the modern church: the pain of liberation
- 11 Divorce in Adventism: a perennial problem
- 12 Divorcing and enforcing: problems with principles and procedures
- 13 Homosexuality: the sin unnamed among Adventists
- 14 Homosexuality in Adventism: sin, disease or preference?
- IV POSTSCRIPT
- Notes
- Select bibliography
5 - Marital relations among Adventists: the pursuit of purity
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 29 September 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- I INTRODUCTION
- II MAJOR INFLUENCES IN ADVENTIST MORAL THOUGHT
- III ISSUES OF HUMAN SEXUALITY
- 5 Marital relations among Adventists: the pursuit of purity
- 6 Adventists and intimacy: the celebration of sex
- 7 Adventists and abortion: early hostility
- 8 Abortion: tensions in the institutionalized church
- 9 Early adventist women: in the shadow of the prophetess
- 10 Adventist women in the modern church: the pain of liberation
- 11 Divorce in Adventism: a perennial problem
- 12 Divorcing and enforcing: problems with principles and procedures
- 13 Homosexuality: the sin unnamed among Adventists
- 14 Homosexuality in Adventism: sin, disease or preference?
- IV POSTSCRIPT
- Notes
- Select bibliography
Summary
Introduction
In October 1845, James White, a future leader of the Seventh-day Adventist church, made public his view that to marry at that particular time was to deny faith in the imminent second advent of Christ, which, he believed, would take place later that year. It was, he said, ‘a wile of the Devil’. Although he soon renounced all time-setting, and within a year was himself married, it is clear that for him and his fellow believers the demands of human sexuality had to be strictly sub-ordinated to the requirements of human spirituality.
Given this situation of tense expectation, it would not have been surprising had the sabbatarian adventists adopted an extreme teaching on marital relationships, as did some other religious groups developing at the same time. The Shakers, for example, held that, since the Bible taught that there would be no sexual relations after the resurrection of the just, they should abstain now by way of preparation. The practice of celibacy was an expression of unselfishness and a sign of triumph over sin. The exclusive attachments of normal family life were eliminated, and all energies devoted to the glory of God and the well-being of the community, which was rigidly segregated along sexual lines. While John Humphrey Noyes acknowledged the undesirability of exclusive emotional attachments, he advocated a rather different remedy.
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- Information
- Millennial Dreams and Moral DilemmasSeventh-Day Adventism and Contemporary Ethics, pp. 55 - 71Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1990