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Paul in 1 Cor. says that he’d prefer if everyone remained celibate just like he was, and that the only people who should get married are those burning with passion and would commit sexuality immorality otherwise. This was taken very seriously in the early church. One of the most popular texts was The Acts of Paul and Thecla, where Thecla left her fiancé to follow Paul because of the attractiveness of Christianity’s celebration of virginity, which actually was very empowering to women in that day, because they wouldn’t be forced into a marriage and become beholden to a husband. Quite a few of the church fathers wrote treatises called On Virginity or something similar, and most all lauded virginity and had very negative things to say about marriage. For the first 1800 years of Christianity, celibacy was the ideal and marriage was a second-rate vocation. It wasn’t until the modern era that marriage (based on European bourgeois images of the family, undergirding the capitalist mode of production) curiously became the standard in Christianity. A great source for this is Mark Jordan’s The Ethics of Sex.

I’m aware of Paul’s eschatology. The church fathers continued to preach the primacy of celibacy after it became clear Jesus wasn’t immediately coming back. This was the pretty unanimous position of the church until at least the Reformation. That’s why I say in my parent comment that the modern celebration of the family and encouragement to marry is a relatively novel development in Christianity. I highly recommend Mark Jordan’s The Ethics of Sex on this.

You fail to quote the three times in chapter 7 where Paul says that it’s preferable for men to remain single though.

And it’s very much not false that this was the stance of the church fathers and the vast majority of the Christian tradition. A great discussion of this history is in Mark Jordan’s The Ethics of Sex, where he traces this teaching from the beginning and how it only started to change in the last few centuries.

Paul gives an out and says that if you burn with lust then you can marry — but it’s only a “concession,” as a prophylaxis against lust for those who aren’t strong enough, in comparison to celibacy, which is a higher vocation

To the contrary, the arguments in your links are quite modern ones. In sections 2 and 3 of her article, Katie Grimes shows how modern heterosexist readings of Genesis diverge from the tradition (she discusses Catholic magisterial teachings, but it applies here too). I’d also suggest Mark Jordan’s The Ethics of Sex for a more comprehensive overview of such changes. And Dale Martin shows how Hays’ reading of Romans 1 is based on modern assumptions as well. He also speaks to arsenokoitai and malakoi here; also see DBH’s translation notes on those terms.

That is not the purpose of man and woman — again, if Jesus Christ didn’t fulfill it, it can’t be the purpose of humanity!

It was unanimous among the church fathers that virginity was superior to marriage. As I said, the conservative reification of the heterosexual nuclear family is one of the largest breaks we’ve seen in modernity from the historical Christian tradition on sexuality. If you want to read more about this phenomenon, I’d recommend Katie Grimes’ article here and Mark Jordan’s genealogical study in The Ethics of Sex.

> the natural complementarity between man and woman, and the sacredness of the nuptial friendship of one man and one woman for life

What’s so funny is that this is a relatively novel Catholic teaching. See the contrast between modern magisterial teaching and, for example, Augustine and Aquinas in Sections 1-3 of Grimes’ article here. For an even fuller survey of history, I’d highly recommend Mark Jordan’s The Ethics of Sex.

We forget that only recently “complementarity” has replaced virginity as the highest vocation in Christian life. The church fathers (see Chrysostom’s On Virginity, for example) were highly skeptical of marriage and fearful of sexuality even within it. Women weren’t considered functionally complementary but ontologically equal. Many bought into Aristotelian ethics, that women were simply deformed men: Aquinas says clearly that it would’ve been better for everyone to be a man, but unfortunately we need women to reproduce.

The historical revisionism shouldn’t be surprising. Anyone who’s studied at length Christian history knows that the church’s teachings with regards to sexuality and gender have changed (developed?) over the years, and passing off the goodness of heterosexual complementarity is one recent development within it.

Yes, precisely which sexual immoralities Jesus was referring to have been widely debated in church history. Plenty of male-female sex within marriage that we take for granted was considered porneia in the early church. For some church fathers, having sex with the woman on top was porneia. For others, any time that the thought of pleasure came before the rational decision to reproduce was porneia. Too frequent sex in marriage was considered porneia too. I’ve already pointed out how intercourse while a woman was menstruating was prohibited in Torah. Same for sex with a pregnant woman. We often forget how denigrated marriage was among the church fathers, taking Paul’s directive in 1 Cor. 7 seriously that it’s better to remain single than marry. Interestingly, having sex with — err, raping — one’s slaves wasn’t considered sexual immorality.

And I’ve only gotten a couple centuries into Christendom. You’re simply empirically wrong.