Lower than the Angels
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  • Published: 3 December 2024
  • ISBN: 9780241400937
  • Imprint: Allen Lane
  • Format: Hardback
  • Pages: 688
  • RRP: $90.00
Categories:

Lower than the Angels

A History of Sex and Christianity

Formats & editions
Hardback
3 Dec 2024
EBook
19 Sep 2024
Audiobook
19 Sep 2024
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A major new assessment of one of the most controversial topics in history

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? Much of the political contention and division in societies across the world centres on sexual topics, and one-third of the global population is Christian in background or outlook. 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. There have followed revolutions in the place of women in society, a new place for same-sex love amid the spectrum of human emotions and a public exploration of gender and trans identity. For many the new situation has brought exciting liberation – for others, fury and fear.

This book 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. The message of Lower than the Angels is simple, necessary and timely: to pay attention to the sheer glorious complexity and contradictions in the history of Christianity. The reader can decide from the story told here whether there is a single Christian theology of sex, or many contending voices in a symphony that is not at all complete. Oxford’s Emeritus Professor of the History of the Church introduces an epic of ordinary and extraordinary Christians trying to make sense of themselves and of humanity’s deepest desires, fears and hopes.
  • Published: 3 December 2024
  • ISBN: 9780241400937
  • Imprint: Allen Lane
  • Format: Hardback
  • Pages: 688
  • RRP: $90.00
Categories:

About the author

Diarmaid MacCulloch

Diarmaid MacCulloch is Professor of the History of the Church at Oxford and a Fellow of St Cross College, Oxford. His Thomas Cranmer (1996) won the Whitbread Biography Award, the James Tait Black Prize and the Duff Cooper Prize; Reformation: Europe's House Divided (2003) won the Wolfson Prize for History and the British Academy Book Prize. A History of Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years and the BBC television series based on it appeared in 2009; the book won the Cundill Prize, the world's largest history prize, in 2010. His television series How God Made the English aired on BBC2 in March 2012. He is a Fellow of the British Academy and was knighted in the New Year's Honours List of 2012.

portrait photo of Diarmaid MacCulloch

Also by Diarmaid MacCulloch

Reformation
Thomas Cromwell
Tudor Church Militant
All Things Made New
Silence
A History of Christianity
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Praise for Lower than the Angels

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 historian’s independence. A thrilling read.

Lucy Winkett, Financial Times

Compendious

Economist

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

Diarmaid MacCulloch explains in Lower than the Angels [how] many biblical pronouncements on sexuality are ambiguous, if not downright contradictory ... by showing us the bigger picture, MacCulloch allows the reader to fully appreciate the complexity and diversity of Christian experience, and to identify recurrent themes. Those who are offended by the loose morals of contemporary Western society will surely be further angered by this thought-provoking and compassionate book.

Katherine Harvey, Engelsberg Ideas

Wry and original… As a compendious and rigorous guide to the histories that underlie current church debates on sex and gender, this work is invaluable.

Penelope Cowell Doe, Church Times

Immensely broad in scope, incredibly detailed and enormously readable, with no small measure of humour… This is a book which repays the reader time and again. The overarching narrative is fascinating ad the treatment of the subject is magisterial.

William Naphy, Literary Review

[A] magisterial account of three millennia of recorded history, written in both cheerfully irreverent and briskly expository style ... Encompassing everything from marriage to masturbation, from contraception to the immaculate conception, Lower than the Angels is an exhaustive study.

Pratinav Anil, Sunday Times