Word: bainton
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...preacher, Martin Luther gave vigorous, arresting sermons, strong with earthy instances. On the theme of Christmas he sometimes preached for more than a month-from the beginning of Advent to Epiphany. In the recently published Martin Luther Christmas Book (Westminster Press, $2.50), Translator Roland H. Bainton has arranged samplings from these sermons on the Nativity. Excerpts...
Cult of Adultery. Romance, even within the bonds of wedlock, was looked at askance by the early Christians. Writes Historian Bainton: "Women were strongly exhorted not to make themselves attractive." Virginity was highly prized by the more pious counselors. Saint Jerome expatiated on the difficulties and disadvantages of matrimony. But the great Saint Augustine, with a more moderate view of marriage ethics, set the basis of Roman Catholic teaching today...
According to Professor Bainton: "Marriage, said Augustine, is good. Sex as such is not evil. But the purpose of sex is propagation, and anything in excess of that intent is evil. It is an evil, however, from which no married couple is ever free . . . That which outside of marriage is a mortal sin, within marriage is but a venial sin, provided no artificial device is used to prevent offspring...
...Bainton attributes the rise of romantic love to reaction against the Church's austerity. The "cult of adultery," with its emphasis on courtship, began during the Renaissance to romanticize the institution of marriage itself. According to Dr. Bainton, the modern idea of falling in love before marriage often has "the unhappy and unnecessary corollary that if romantic attachment wanes marriage should be terminated...
Puritan Love. The Protestant Reformation was responsible for the development of a third Christian attitude toward marriage-companionability. Martin Luther maintained that, in the eyes of God, a monk may be no more holy than a married man. Luther's own marriage, says Bainton, was chiefly to exemplify this teaching. "I am not madly in love," Luther once said, "but I esteem my wife...