1,942
edits
Changes
added section on Talk
As the late Orthodox bioethicist H. Tristram Engelhardt wrote, "Despite detailed considerations of sexual offenses by ecumenical councils, and by generally accepted local councils, and despite a recognition that marriage is oriented toward reproduction, there is no condemnation of limiting births, apart from the condemnation of abortion" (''The Foundations of Christian Bioethics'', 265).
== The 1937 Decision by the Church of Greece ==
The one local Church to condemn birth control that I know of was the Church of Greece in 1937. There is a story to that. In his book, ''Orthodoxy and the West'', [[Christos Yannaras]] attributes the decision to the influence of Seraphim Papakostas (1972-1954), writing that Papakostas's books are characterized by "legalistic moralism, spiritual self-interest centered on the individual, and a reliance on a guilt-ransom-justification scheme of salvation.... he wrote like a Protestant pietist. In his book The Question of Conception, Papakostas faithfully follows Anglican and Roman Catholic opinions about contraception, presented as a quintessentially Orthodox view" [229-230). In footnote no. 386, he adds: "The misleading nature of Papakostas's book has been demonstrated by Stavropolous (1977). Papakostas's insidious influence even extended to the official publications of the hierarchy. A Church of Greece encyclical of October 1937 borrowed Papkostas's heterodox theses verbatim." The reference is to Alexandros Stavropolous, ''To provlima tis teknogonias kai i enkyklios tis Ekklisias tis Ellados'' [The Problem of Contraception and the Encyclical of the Church of Greece], Athens, 1977.
