Lower than the Angels: A History of Sex and Christianity

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A major assessment of Christianity's encounters with questions of sex, gender and the family over the ages The Bible observes that God made humanity 'for a while a little lower than the angels'. If humans are that close to angels, does the difference lie in human sexuality and what we do with it In a single lifetime, Christianity or historically Christian societies have witnessed one of the most extraordinary about-turns in attitudes to sex and gender in human history, bringing liberation for some and fury and fear for others. This book by Oxford's Emeritus Professor of the History of the Church seeks to calm fears and encourage understanding through telling a 3000-year-long tale of Christians encountering sex, gender and the family, with noises off from their sacred texts. It beckons us to pay attention to the sheer glorious complexity and contradictions in the history of Christianity, an epic of ordinary and extraordinary Christians trying to make sense of themselves and of humanity's deepest desires, fears and hopes.

Reviews

Magisterial ... In Lower than the Angels, Diarmaid MacCulloch offers a history of sex and Christianity that is both confronting and reassuring in its detail and complexity, taking biblical scholarship and theological development seriously at the same time as insisting on the historians independence. A thrilling read -- Financial Times * Lucy Winkett *
A compelling and encyclopedic survey of how Christianity makes sense of sexual desire. MacCulloch is an ideal guide in tracing this story... [he] writes with such liveliness and energy that the reader hardly notices the length of the book or the comprehensiveness of its field of reference His narrative is dispassionate, sometimes quietly and wittily deflationary, careful and generous, its own moral compass neither intrusive nor indecipherable. He is judicious and convincing -- Rowan Williams * Sunday Telegraph *
Incendiary ... a comprehensive and richly entertaining history of the ways in which, for 3,000 years, the church has tied itself in knots over sex (and love and marriage). [It] offers a fabulous catalogue of the babel of voices in the Bible and the ways that they have been interpreted, invariably for political purposes, down the centuries -- Tim Adams * Observer *
Lower Than The Angels [is] an intellectual history of Christian ideas about sex [and] an argument for more flexibility and responsiveness in Christian proclamations on gender and sexuality. Across three thousand years we have the pleasure of MacCullochs erudite company as he explains how Christian thinkers have met the problem of desire. [He] emphasizes the contingency and ingenuity of Christian responses to the difficulties of human sexuality and family life [and] show[s] that so much of what many fundamentalist Christians today understand as ancient, deep-rooted practices are, in fact, relatively shallow ... an epic tale -- Erin Maglaque * New York Review of Books *

Author Bio

Diarmaid MacCulloch is Professor of the History of the Church at Oxford University. His Thomas Cranmer (1996) won the Whitbread Biography Prize, the James Tait Black Prize and the Duff Cooper Prize; Reformation- Europe's House Divided 1490-1700 (2004) won the Wolfson Prize and the British Academy Prize. A History of Christianity (2010), which was adapted into a six-part BBC television series, was awarded the Cundill and Hessel-Tiltman Prizes. He was knighted in 2012 and was awarded the Norton Medlicott Medal by the Historical Association in 2022.