“We are led into the knowledge that our identity is being made in the relations of bodies, not by the private exercise of will or fantasy: we belong with and to each other, not to our ‘private’ selves (as St. Paul said of mutual sexual commitment), and yet are not instruments for each other’s gratification.”
“The Body’s Grace,” Rowan Williams
My hunch: The theological polarization around Amendment One, which does not necessarily track as a liberal-conservative divide, is here to stay. At least for several more years. Decades, maybe. Such is the glacial pace of change in
the ekklesia of God: slavery . . . women . . . human sexuality–it’s a long, slow slog with a lot of heartache and misunderstanding along the way.
And, contrary to the polarizing tactics of soundbyte journalism (and soundbyte religion), there are good people on both sides of the divide. (There are also bigoted, graceless, humorless people on both sides, but there’s a lot of good, too).
And there’s this: a third way of thinking theologically about marriage, including gay marriage–a way that resists the go-to arguments and clichés of both conservatism and liberalism. This third way locates the basis and legitimacy of marriage not in biological complementarity or in the soft logic of ”live and let live” but in the divine trinitarian relations–that is, in the very being of God.
This can’t help but sound a little ridiculous to those outside the Church–and perhaps to many within it–but here’s the thing: The source of a sound theology of marriage cannot be the Bible exclusively or perhaps even primarily, since its witness on the subject is necessarily varied, even contradictory, conditioned by cultures and customs spanning milennia. Which is not to say–as the liberal argument might put it–that modernity now trumps antiquity and thank God for that.
Rather, it is to see the Bible for what it is and for what it isn’t: a richly-varied record of encounter, not a handbook of personal moral instruction. And it is to resist the idolatry that attends so much of our engagement with Scripture–the tendency to worship the book instead of the One (or the Three-in-One, as I’ll get to in a minute) to whom the book points.
A theology of marriage begins, ironically, with the unmarried Jesus. Not the liberal Jesus of fuzzy love nor the conservative Jesus of family values (neither exists in Scripture) but Jesus, the Son, the second person of the Trinity who, with the Father and the Holy Spirit, subsists in relations of divine reciprocity, mutual indwelling, eternal self-giving, ceaseless caritas. Marriage, christologically construed, bears witness to, even as it participates in this divine economy of grace and gift.
Those of us who marry, says Eugene F. Rogers, Jr. (in an argument for gay marriage), give ourselves over to another in order that we may be caught up in God’s own desire for us, that “we may grow into the wholehearted love of God by learning that God loves us as God loves God.” Thus human, sexual, married love bears a trinitarian mark.
But such love is also, always–of course–bodily. So how does this bodily sexual love mirror the Trinity? In my view, no one is more convincing (or eloquent) in answering this question than feminist theologian Sarah Coakley:
What would that involve? Surely, at the very least, a fundamental respect each for the other, an equality of exchange, and the mutual ekstasis of attending on the other’s desire as distinct, as other. This is the opposite of abuse, the opposite of distanced sexual control; it is, as the French feminist Luce Irigaray has written, with uncanny insight, itself intrinsically trinitarian; sexual love at its best is not ‘egological,’ not even a ‘duality in closeness’ . . . As each goes out to the other in mutual abandonment and attentiveness, so it becomes clear that a third is at play – the irreducibility of a ‘shared transcendence.’
There is nothing in a trinitarian theology of marriage which makes heterosexuality normative. In fact, as Rogers insists, embodiment–which is at the heart not just of our sexual selves but of our creatureliness–implies diversity: “As the Spirit forms the bodies of human beings into the body of Christ, she characteristically gathers the diverse and diversifies the corporate, making members of one body.”
* * * * *
Much of the heated rhetoric of the last few days has been driven by fear: on one side, the fear of monumental social change that would unsettle and disrupt a familiar world; on the other, fear of the ever-diminishing dignity of those long-excluded from full participation in the social order. On Sunday, the lectionary for mass will include the passage from 1 John which says that “perfect love casts out phobos.” (Protestants will read from a different chapter of the letter).
This is the third way. The way of love. The way of a God–Father, Son, and Holy Spirit–who has created us for communion with each other and with God’s very self. For those who choose the vocation of marriage, this third way allows the labels to fall away; it refuses the polarizing politics of fear. And it’s where the body’s grace is something we learn to receive–tentatively, hopefully–with gratitude and wonder.
May 10, 2012 at 3:56 am
Unfortunately the third way does not reflect a Biblical understanding of marriage. Yes, we are to worship the God of the Bible but he has given us no other revelation so we are bound to love God and bound to understand him through his Word.
Nowhere in the Bible is marriage described in terms of the Trinity (which is implied rather than stated). The relationship of Father, Son and Holy Spirit is mysterious and cannot realistically be used an example of human love. Our revelation of love is in Christ’s sacrifice for an undeserving and adulterous humanity. God’s reference throughout scripture is to marriage as established in its first 2 chapters.
It makes little difference whether you believe in Adam and Eve as literal or figurative, the message is the same. When two people join together in physical sexual union they are married in God’s eyes and that union can only be dissolved in the death of one of the partners. You can pick the bones out of that as much as you like, it doesn’t turn a snake into a fish.
A same sex couple can put a heterosexual couple to shame and why should they not be able to make a binding legal contract for that reason. But love doesn’t make a marriage (though it cannot survive otherwise). It is God who makes a marriage. The debate must be whether sex between two people of the same sex constitutes a dissolvable union in God’s eyes.
The issue is not to do with equality or even love, its to do with practicability and not whether we are being fair but that God is being honoured.
May 10, 2012 at 4:07 am
It seems to me, Debra, that your essay here would be improved if you were to reference the three Greek words translated “love” in the Bible and perhaps reference to eros as well (which is admittedly implied in Bible texts). Can we merge them all into “love” without being imprecise? I think not so easily.
I also wonder about whether Jesus was unmarried. Do you mean “never-married” or “single.” I’m not aware of any evidence.
Blessings.
May 10, 2012 at 8:07 am
Biblically and practically speaking, “marriage” is not just about the practicability of sexual procreativity, though sex and sometimes procreativity are components. If marriage was just about the practicability of sexual procreation, then marriage is not, theologically speaking, available for those of us who cannot bear children or can no longer bear children. The many prominent biblical stories of bearen couples, of couples who spend a lifetime together in companionship without any children or the hope of any children, only to be blessed by a child through the miraculous intervention of God, suggest several lessons, not the least of which is that when God is so inclined, God will bless infertile, ‘unpraticable’ couples with children, regardless of their procreational inabilities – nothing is impossible for God. The Bible also could be read to endorse surrogacy in the stories of Haggar and the multiple concubines of Jacob (Israel), as alternative ways for divinely favored couples to begat the children God desires for them.
As for the claim that God’s source reference for issues of marriage is the first two chapters of Genesis, that is troubling for several reasons. The first two chapters of Genesis are collated from several sources, and thus may not initially have been intended to be read as a unified statement on anything. Also, a careful reading of the creation of Adam and Eve discloses that God was not focused on creating a procreative partner for Adam but instead on the creation of a worldly companion. Thus God first experiments with other animals as potential companions for Adam. As the designer and creator of the system of sexual reproduction God obviously knew that Adam would not be naturally procreating with anything other than a human female partner. Only after the experiment to find Adam an animal companion fails does God resort to the creation of another human to be a companion for Adam. That the new companion is female and thus will eventually facilitate human procreativity seems to be an added bonus. That companionship and not procreation was God’s primary purpose is evident from the fact that Adam and Eve don’t procreate until after they leave the Garden. Procreational possibilities may not even have been perceived by the couple until after they leave the Garden.
If one is to accept the Genesis creation stories as an integrated whole, human procreativity, while commanded in the first chapter, and then enabled with the creation of Eve in the second chapter, does not seem to have been God’s primary purpose in creating Eve. Biblically speaking, it appears that human procreativity was in fact not part of God’s Edenic ideal at all.
May 10, 2012 at 8:38 am
I am very curious, Debra, about how you would respond to another postition. Does the “third way of thinking theologically about marriage” also raise the question of the legitimacy of other marital arrangements including group marriage? This question is often raised. I have not yet read a good answer to the question or to the implications of the answers to the question.
May 10, 2012 at 11:04 am
I absolutely adore your use “record of encounter”. So direct and powerful and meaningful. Thank you!
May 10, 2012 at 12:04 pm
I am pretty symapthetic to both Coakley and Williams but doesn’t this usage of the trinity look like making God in our own image? It seems one group of conservative scholars wants us to marriage in Trinity as a subordination and the liberal side as holy union. While I am pretty sure the conservative one is an abomination the liberal strikes me of wanting to use the trinity for something it perhaps was attended. If it is helpful for understanding human relations, which I open to the fact it may be about a doctrine of God and not human relations, but if it is, I think it would demand of us an opening towards something other than human sexuality. If Jesus is a sex-less single person opening up to us full humanity wouldn’t it be more interesting to stop placing human sexuality or marriage at the center of our discussions about God, because they don’t even represent fully humanity? Perhaps a community called the church might be a better center for the trinity to come into play rather than vision of autonomous marriages.
That said, the NC Law is a mistake on plenty of other grounds.
May 10, 2012 at 3:34 pm
Thanks to each of you for your responses – much to consider here! A few first thoughts:
I agree, Walt, that more could be said here about the “varieties” of love in scripture. (Coakley brings “eros” to bear on her discussion of the trinity and sexuality in interesting ways, esp. as she draws on early sources like Origen).
John Mc: you’ve written your own eloquent post here on the issue of procreation and marriage! In “The Body’s Grace” In alignment with your position, Williams notes that in “looking for a sexual ethic that can be seriously informed by our Bible, there is a good deal to steer us away from assuming that reproductive sex is a norm.”
Ronnie: I would say that the quote from Coakley indicates (perhaps implicitly, but still) how sexual love can mirror the divine only if two people are involved–not a “group.” Maybe the concern (and your question) have more to do with marriage as a civil contract but that’s not really my focus here. And if “group marriage” loosely defined includes polygamy–notedly polygyny–then the Bible has plenty of examples from heterosexual unions. (Still, I appreciate your thoughtful question).
Mark: I hear your concern but I don’t think Williams and Coakley are guilty of this (I think they were classmates, by the way, at Cambridge or maybe Oxford?). They don’t ever start from the vantage point of human “experience.” But I do agree that the trinitarian relations “open toward something other than sexuality.” The church, as Miroslav Volf (and others) have said, is the image of the triune God. Yet there’s also Zizioulas on personhood and others on the imago dei that get at something important about our creatureliness and the Trinity.
May 10, 2012 at 4:38 pm
[...] Dean Murphy has posted an interesting essay proposing a “third way” to think about marriage, grounded in trinitarian theology [...]
May 11, 2012 at 9:36 am
Let me say, first of all, that as someone who has yet to be convinced that homosexual behavior is consistent with Christian existence, I appreciate Debra’s careful, charitable explication. A necessary condition for serious and civil conversation about matters that divide people who are otherwise in agreement about so much, and even with those with whom we don’t share a wide range of judgments, is that we allow that our position might be in error and thus we may be obligated to modify or even set it aside. I am always interested in the kind of account that Debra has given here as I continue to mull this vexing question over.
That said, her attempt to ground a theology of marriage in the doctrine of the Trinity runs into the same set of problems that all social trinities do. As Kathryn Tanner put it in an excellent lecture given at Princeton Seminary in 2007, “Because God is not very comprehensible to us, and certainly not fully so, discussion of the Trinity, all by itself seems of little help in better understanding human relationships: what is difficult to understand–the proper character of human society–is explicated with reference to what is surely only more obscure–the character of divine community.
“The…problem is that much of what is said about the Trinity simply does not seem directly applicable to humans. The differences between God and humans stand in the way.”
I would commend Tanner’s lecture, entitled “Kingdom Come: The Trinity and Politics,” and ask Debra and anyone else who wishes to engage in edifying conversation on this topic why the problems that Tanner identifies in this article are either in error, or that they don’t apply in the case of gay marriage.
May 11, 2012 at 11:19 am
I was able to find Tanner’s lecture here: (http://journals.ptsem.edu/id/PSB2007282/dmd007). It is quite good and I think she has a valid point. The point that we cannot order society based on a Trinitarian model is strong. But, societal relations are different from personal human relations, and that is where I think Tanner goes too far. Emulation of God is at the center of Christian teaching, and we cannot emulate God well without struggling with the mystery of God’s nature.
Further, I tend to understand the nature of the Trinity to be mysterious, not so much inexplicable or inapplicable. Judaism and (historic) Christianity should feel comfortable with healthy amounts of mystery in their theology. We don’t know HOW God is three-in-One but God has been revealed to be so and therefore we struggle to understand that — as Debrah has done here.
Lastly, Tanner claims that a Christocentric focus is better than a Trinitarian focus. I’m a bit surprised that learned theological scholars would still attempt to pull Christology away from the Trinity, they are inseparable. One cannot have a full Christology without understanding how Christ was God made flesh and prepared the way for the Holy Spirit.
In the end, it is a valuable article and perspective, but it does in deed have a few flaws that I believe still leaves plenty room for Debrah’s application.
May 11, 2012 at 11:34 am
Matt, thank you for your response. Tanner’s comments about the Trinity have everything to do with personal relations, and in particular, with the fact that the “persons” of the Godhead are quite different from human persons. As Tanner puts it, the trinitarian term “person” is “a rather ill-defined placeholder for whatever there might be three of in the Trinity,” and that “Quite a bit more argument than Moltmann offers [we could include the others mentioned in the article at this point] would be necessary to justify the use of a modern sense of ‘person’ here with implications diverging so markedly from previous uses of personal language in trinitarian theology.”
I would restate Tanner’s point by saying that the language of person that is typically used in this debate about gay marriage derives not from that found in the doctrine of the Trinity, but from John Locke. As one intriguing blog stated yesterday put it, “we now define marriage in purely Lockean terms, as the unfettered ability of the fully independent individual to choose and exercise power, to be fully in control of his or her possessions and persons. Marriage, in this sense, becomes a natural right and any prohibition against marriage becomes an unjust act of coercion, especially since there is no apparent competition with the rights of others.” The importance of recognizing this sense of what a person is, according to the author of this blog, is that “this Lockean view also underpins the individualist view of economic relations” that many of us find so pernicious.
http://vox-nova.com/2012/05/10/why-i-am-annoyed-with-both-president-obama-and-cardinal-dolan-on-the-same-day-on-the-same-issue/#more-22532
May 11, 2012 at 12:02 pm
So, this is a very fine thread and I wish this were the nature of the debate in the culture. I’m a bit hesitant to put my two cents in, but here goes. Barry, it is a vexing issue and one of the things that I keep coming back to is being confronted by my youngest daughter, and by confronted, I mean realizing at a young age she was not like my oldest daughter. Everybody else, for the sake of argument, if we can assume that homosexuality is not necessarily a choice, but part of her creation, then does Christian faith deny her the ability to live a moral life that could include exercise of her sexuality in committed relationship? I am assuming that most Christians would answer it does deny her this ability based on their reading of scripture. In fact, and help me if this is a false assumption, almost all resistance to inclusion of homosexuals is based on a particular view of biblical authority.
If I am reading Debra correctly, she is suggesting that the authority of the Bible comes from the encounters with God that persons have over time within cultures. In these recorded experiences we find shifts and changes in perspective that occur because these encounters reveal God in new and fresh ways. The whole basis of the Gentile mission is based on this, not to mention emerging views of women and slaves. Is it impossible that the revelation of God in Christ opens new space for godly life in the present, even though this may exist in tension with the canonical texts? There was always resistance in the Bible when God was doing a new thing, just as there is today. Of course the charge can be made that this is all projection on my part because it’s my daughter; maybe so, though I think the larger argument is how a faithful and truthful life is lived. This makes persons uncomfortable whose relationship to the text is rooted in a particular view of biblical authority, and having been a teenage fundamentalist (I just liked the way it sounded) I get that. If God no longer speaks anew then I am wrong, but if faithfulness, charity, and commitment are at the center of our relationships why do we deny those who are different than we from living into that? Can this be good news? Thanks everyone, I appreciate the comments.
May 11, 2012 at 12:48 pm
Jeffrey, thank you. You’ve radically shifted the grounds of this discussion, and it would take far more time and space than what is appropriate here to respond to all that you’ve said, so I’ll just mention a few. I do agree that sexual orientation is seldom if ever a choice, but that in and of itself does not settle much of anything. Most people recognize that there is much in life that is not a choice, but which we must cope, for example, one’s spouse is ill or injured and can no longer engage in sexual activity. Does this release one from the vows that were taken (assuming here a Christian conception of marriage), since this was a choice either person made? To raise the question of whether one’s appetites and desires are something we choose, it would seem, is not decisive.
Your comments about the authority of scripture seem to ascribe to me a set of assumptions I do not embrace and would not promote, so I really don’t know what to do with them. I do know that, with Rowan Williams, I am suspicious of all invocations of the concept of “experience” as somehow the authoritative backstory behind scripture, because as he puts it in a nice essay “Trinity and Revelation,” that concept, surprisingly like fundamentalist appeals to scripture as though they were the delivery of non-worldly truth to human beings, “is perennially liable to be seduced by the prospect of bypassing the question of how [theology] learns its own language.” What I find most troubling is that combatants on both sides of this particular skirmish in the culture wars are, as Williams again puts it, impatient with debate, conflict, ambivalence, polysem, paradox, and thus are impatient with learning, and with learning about our learning.
Should we be open to God doing a new thing? Of course, but declaring something to be God’s work (as the history of theology shows time and again) does not make it so.
May 11, 2012 at 12:49 pm
Oops, I meant to say that “this was not a choice either person made?”
May 11, 2012 at 3:02 pm
Two things:
One – I’m deeply moved by Jeff’s comment here and I think, Barry, that you might minimize his theological reflections in a couple of ways: to agree that homosexuality is not a choice but then to say we all have tendencies we can either act on or not has always seemed specious and a bit (unintentionally) cruel to me. If sexuality is central to our humanness, indeed if it’s a gift as the Church believes it is, it just rings false to say, just don’t act on this or that tendency.
And the thing about “God doing a new thing”: I didn’t understand Jeff to be making that argument based on “experience” but on the biblical witness itself–the very real, material conditions on the ground when “the Word became flesh.” (But I can also let Jeff respond himself on these matters).
Two – Tanner is always smart and persuasive (and a little intimidating–in a good way) but I think a couple of things would problematize her argument a bit: like Matt above, I don’t see how you can make such a tidy separation between trinitarianism and Christology, which she seems to do.
She also seems to be working with a kind of clunky literalism about the Trinity (which I don’t think she espouses). I’m more persuaded by someone like Nicholas Lash who says that the doctrine of the trinity is more like a grammar than ontological description–a way to guide and constrain our speech about God (and thus about ourselves).
Wouldn’t Zizioulas make things more complex here?
And, finally, though this thought is not fully formed in my brain at the moment, I think we have to consider the Trinity eucharistically, which gets us back to practice again but not necessarily in the ways that Tanner (rightly) says we often “use” the Trinity for social programs. Rather, God’s self given to us in communion sets forth a pattern of living in relationship with others–not a literal correspondence to the immanent Trinity but a pattern (grammar, again) for living into the beauty of God and our creatureliness as those who bear the image of God. Our bodies and thus our sexual expression aren’t separable from this.
May 11, 2012 at 3:48 pm
Debra, if you want to talk about minimizing one’s response let’s start with Jeff’s implicit (but only barely) attribution to me of a literalistic reading of Scripture. I was quite frankly startled by that, and it struck me as an example of caricaturing one’s interlocutor. I know that’s probably what he has been hearing in North Carolina, but it surely wasn’t in anything I said or even implied.
Second, to say that something is not a choice entails necessarily the need to act on it seems to me what is cruel (again, unintentionally). To say that one must act on one’s desires and appetites would seem to belittle those who claim to have no discernible sexual appetite (they’re more than a few; does that mean if sexuality is part of our human nature as you claim, they are not fully human?) and those who do choose not to act on it in order to attend to other goods (e.g., members of religious orders). It would also seem to argue that in the long run we are (or should be) slaves to our appetites and desires (so long as they conform to the Lockean principals around which our commercial republic is formed).
By your logic it is cruel to expect that a married person, whose spouse can no longer engagement in sexual activity, to remain faithful to his or her vow of fidelity. There are those who would say precisely this, because to remain chaste in such a situation would be to violate human nature.
Moreover, I don’t see it as a given that an abstract concept of “sexuality” is part of our human nature (Foucault does a good job of showing the problems with this notion). Part of the disagreement is whether the complex set of affections and behaviors that is sexual orientation can be attributed to human nature as such. Surely the matter is much more complex than that, and to simply assert that it is that simple is to make one’s position a fait accompli. Oliver O’Donovan puts the matter well when he says that our human body has erotic powers, but it is highly problematic to use the word erotic as simply a synonym for sexual desire: “That that is to miss almost everything of interest that has been thought about the erotic. Eros is precisely not sexual impulse; it is an aspect of the spiritual life of mankind, though inevitably engendering bodily experiences to accompny it since we are psychosomatic beings whose every oment is a mediation of the spiritual through the bodily.”
Third, Jeff did in fact make an argument based on the notion of experience: “If I am reading Debra correctly, she is suggesting that the authority of the Bible comes from the encounters with God that persons have over time within cultures. In these recorded experiences we find shifts and changes in perspective that occur because these encounters reveal God in new and fresh ways.” I don’t see how you can read this as anything other than an attempt to get behind scripture to the “real” meaning. Where is the engagement with the biblical witness as you claim?
Fourth, I don’t think Tanner separates the Trinity and christology in the way you and Matt suppose. She points rather (rightly in my mind) to the human Jesus (to which I would add the communion of the church in the power of the Spirit) who allows us to participate in the triune life of God.
Fifth, I agree with you and Lash that the Trinity is more like a grammar, which makes it even more unsuitable for the kind of work you want it to perform. As David Burrell describes theology as grammar, “Its role is…to exercise critical watch over [our conception of God], now unraveling confusions and inconsistencies that arise from it, now checking it with praxis to offset its stereotypical drift, now challenging it as a lazy simplification.” Zizioulas, Moltmann, Volf, et al., certainly do not give us grammatical readings of the Trinity.
Lastly, I would agree with you that eucharistic communion does provide a pattern for living into the beauty of God and our creatureliness, which does involve our bodies, but not everything that we are capable of doing with our bodies conforms to that pattern.
May 11, 2012 at 8:30 pm
Barry: You intimidate me, too, but also in a good way (mostly)
. Two more things:
One – I didn’t mean to suggest that persons should act on every tendency. But I’m not thinking of same-sex orientation as a tendency — or as a set of impulses or even desires — but rather as something more “constitutional” of identity.
Two – I think the O’Donovan quote aligns well with Coakley’s argument and I’d like to know more about what he says regarding eros and identity.
Ok, three things – It seems like so much of this debate (and maybe your last point here) focuses more on “behaviors” than on identity (to use that word three times in three sentences). We’re talking about being human, being in communion, etc. not about particular sex acts. Which seems like a fixation for so many people. I’m not saying that you are guilty of that — please hear me on that! — but Williams’ discussion of “the body’s grace” and Coakley’s insight about sexual love being more than the egological, more than a duality of closeness, being this third thing — all this strikes me as some rich theology worth exploring.
May 12, 2012 at 5:54 pm
Since this is Debra’s blog, I’ll let her have the last word. Peace to all.
May 13, 2012 at 11:18 am
I “re-blogged” this at my blog with a short commentary:
http://www.thechurchstateguy.com/post/22783269231/examples-of-mature-christianity-part-five
So thankful for your voice!
May 13, 2012 at 11:19 am
I “re-blogged” this at my blog:
http://www.thechurchstateguy.com/post/22783269231/examples-of-mature-christianity-part-five
So thankful for your voice!
May 13, 2012 at 12:17 pm
Barry, I am sorry you read it that way. It was certainly not my intent. I was trying to address what I hear in the public discourse about this issue, not what you thought about this. If you read this that I was taking your concerns seriously, but trying to respond to a larger community in thinking this through with theologians on this thread you might not see this as negatively as you read it. I didn’t mean to attribute the majority view to you.