Natural Family Planning International

This is the first of a series of blogs for NFP Awareness Week, July 19-25.  The contents of the blogs are short sections from Sex and the Marriage Covenant: A Basis for Morality (SMC).  The book started with a 1967 article I wrote supporting the Received Teaching in Casti Connubii (Dec. 31, 1930), an article which forms Chapter 1 of SMC.  That article, Holy Communion: Eucharistic and Marital is also at the website.

In writing SMC, I reflected on the two realities that (1) marriage is the result of unreserved giving—for better and for worse—and (2) contraceptive intercourse is sex with very serious reservation—for better but positively excluding the imagined worse of possible pregnancy.  Marriage comes into being by a couple unreservedly entering God’s covenant of marriage; contraceptive intercourse contradicts the very essence of the marriage covenant.  From these considerations I developed the covenant theology of sexuality described in this book.

I was also appalled by the “arguments” people were using to “justify” using unnatural methods of birth control.  Otherwise sane people were saying things such as, “It must be okay to use the Pill because God gave us the brains to make it.”  Christians who, if asked, would remember the words of Christ about the necessity of carrying the cross daily were arguing that because periodic abstinence was a daily cross for some, it therefore couldn’t be the will of Christ! Such nonsense and other more serious questions called for a response, and Part IV of the present book deals with such issues.

John F. Kippley
Sex and the Marriage Covenant