How Christianity Learned to Hate Sex: The Development of a Christian Theology, 100-400AD

A two-session daytime course at the Guildford Institute tracing how early Christian attitudes to love, sex and marriage shifted towards the veneration of celibacy and virginity.

Tutored by Brian Creese, this short course examines the sexual norms of the society Jesus was born into and how, by 400AD, a church once positive about marriage and childbearing came to revere celibacy and virginity above all else. It explores how a complex and fundamentally misogynistic theology developed over the following centuries, and considers its impact on the next 1000 years of the Western Church. The course runs over two Wednesdays, meeting from 10am to 12pm.