{Love, Sex and Marriage [continued (7)]}[27th August 1990]

[Redbook7:258-259][19900827:1050f]{Love, Sex and Marriage [continued (7)]}[27th August 1990]

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[continued]

Nor* do I believe it certain that Jesus taught that sex outside the limits of formal marriage was wrong: bearing in mind that marriage in his time (and still more in the time of Moses) was differently constituted, limited, and dissolved from today, and considering the quality of his teaching generally, I think he was saying that any lustful thought was equivalent to adultery, and that lust was an inhibition to entering the Kingdom of Heaven.

(This inner emphasis must be so if I am right in ** understanding a major import of his teaching to have been that what counts is not what you do, actions, but what you are: expressed in thoughts, intentions, etc. and revealed in actions. Lust, of course, is sex or sexual desire unmotivated by Love; and Love is at the centre of Jesus’ teaching.[)]

*[See last previous entry]

**ref VI? … []

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