The Church and Condoms

Happy new year. The last two months were not very good months for this blog. The pressure of my “day job” got to me and left me state where I could not write. For the coming year, however, I have adopted a strategy that I believe will allow me to post at least once a week. So lets see how it goes.

Okay, lets pick up where we left off, talking about whether the church should promote the use of condoms as means of preventing the spread of HIV. The people who ask the Church to adopt this policy are generally well meaning people who believe that the spread of HIV is the cause of so much death and misery in this world. In view of this, they hold that the church and other institutions in society should realize that conservative family values that promote sex within the bounds of marriage are largely unobserved. They go on to argue that if institutions such as the Church want to have a real impact on society, in the area of HIV, they should work within the existing situation and promote solutions that speak to the existing situation. In this regard, they say that advocating abstinence will have little impact because society does not ( some hold can not by nature ) live according to these values. The more realistic position according to this viewpoint is to promote the distribution of condoms, which can be demonstrated to meaningfully reduce pain and suffering in this world.

I, however, am of the opinion that the promotion of condoms as a means of preventing suffering is not realistic or moral from the Christian worldview and cannot be promoted by the church.
What is a worldview? It can crudely be defined as a the collection ideas and concepts that a person or group of people uses to interpret reality. Take for example many who argue for the use of condoms to prevent spread of HIV have a naturalistic worldview. This is worldview that holds what is real can be observed and measured by human beings and is caused exclusively by factor that can be observed and measured by human beings. A persons worldview is also the foundation of a persons ethical values. People with a naturalistic viewpoint frequently evaluate the ethical value of actions on the basis of their observable positive or negative consequences. On this basis many have argued that advocating the use of condoms as means of preventing the spread of HIV is more ethical than advocating practicing of sex exclusively in marriage, since according to them on the basis of observed behavior in society, more suffering will be alleviated through the condom solution.

Now while the promotion of condoms might make sense from the naturalistic view I hope to show that from the Biblical worldview the promotion of condoms is unloving and immoral. However, before I proceed to discuss why the Church ought not endorse the use of condoms in fighting the spread of HIV, I would like to point out that the Church IS involved in the alleviation of suffering in our world. In the case of Zambia it is an established fact that the Church was the first group to bring modern medicine to the territory. From the early days of mission to date, Christians in their individual capacities and as groups have alleviated human suffering in Zambia through the delivery of medical services. It should be noted that these services have frequently delivered on a non cost recovery basis.

In the Church’s quest to alleviate human suffering however, the advocacy of the use of condoms to stop the spread of HIV is not an option because of the implications of the Biblical worldview. The Church believes that reality was created by God. It is not moved by big bang cosmologists because at the root of it the idea that everything came from nothing (or that alternatively everything just is and has always existed in some form) can not be scientifically proven beyond a doubt and is ultimately as much of a leap of faith as belief in God. The Church further believes that God created man. Once again the Church is not ultimately moved by naturalism evolution (this is not the time to discuss theistic evolution) that holds through time and chance we came to be here. I believe when the odds (the mathematical probabilities) of the whole chain of events necessary for the natural evolution of man happening would not be accepted by most people. The Church believe that man was created perfect but fell into sin and this can be seen by the fact that we fall short of even our own moral standards. Once again we do not believe that we can by force of will make our selves perfectly good by any standard because we haven’t seen it anywhere. We believe that God has a plan to redeem this world through his son because a reasonable argument can be made for the existence and resurrection of Jesus Christ. On the basis of this we believe that the Christ will return to judge the living and the dead and restore creation. Now I know that each of this points can be debated but in brief that is the Christian worldview and the reasons for holding the worldview.

So why would it be wrong to promote the use of condoms to prevent the spread of HIV from within this worldview? Returning to creation, we believe that God created us as sexual beings that this sexuality is to exercised within the bounds of matrimony. Further in light of the fall we know that human beings rebel against what is right including proper sexual relations. This is why we have the rampant sex outside marriage. Beyond this be believe that there are eternal penalties for rebellion against what is right. Against this perspective while putting a condom into the hands of a man who will have sex outside marriage may keep him from falling ill but will not prevent him from reaping the eternal consequences of sin. To put it another way (and to paraphrase John Piper) we are against suffering especially eternal suffering and for this reason we cannot in good conscience endorse the use of condoms as a means of preventing the spread of HIV.

Be that as it may the civil society organizations may say that is your worldview but people are really suffering and dying shouldn’t we do something as opposed to nothing? Well I will shortly deal with the issue of partnering with groups with opposing worldviews in a pluralistic society.