You can see many lovely mother-goddess figures, ordinarily pregnant, from this period of human history. I have a replica of one such figure, Astarte, and I keep it on my desk to remind me of the basic fact that we are all born of women.

Sex is sacred in religions that regard nature and its cycles as the source of divine power. In this religious perspective, there are ordinarily many gods, not just one. Present-day Wicca would be one such example (though there are varieties of Wicca that worship a single goddess figure); archeological evidence suggests that most religion prior to the second millennium BCE was nature-centered and that sex was in some sense “sacred,” i.e. part of the work of the gods in maintaining fertility.

The rise of monotheism, the idea that God is not multiple but one, arose about 1,000 years before the birth of Christ. Much of the Hebrew bible is about the struggle within Judaism and between Judaism and other religions over a nature-centered religion with multiple gods and a form of Judaism that was becoming increasingly focused on a single God who was transcendent over nature.

The move away from sex as sacred and gods as plural can be seen in Genesis. The story of the Garden of Eden can certainly be interpreted this way, where Adam and Eve are cast out of the garden for Eve’s disobedience and suddenly childbirth becomes a punishment for sin. Sex is no longer sacred, but part of human disobedience of the will of the single God.

Now, this is a simplified version of nearly 5,000 years of human history and scarcely does justice to all the nuances. Sex in marriage, sex that produces more humans, isn’t really sinful in Judaism and not always in Christianity either, though the view of sex as sinful is stronger in the history of Christian thought than in Judaism.

Today our challenge in Christianity is to lift up the nature-affirming, sex-affirming and women-affirming parts of our tradition that have been ignored and to explore more fully the multiple natures of God.