Faith and Theology

Thy neighbour's wife

2008-07-19T13:41:00.004+10:00

Here’s a little dialogue about morality from Tim Winton’s superb new novel, Breath (Penguin, 2008), pp. 207-9. The narrator is a paramedic:

When I was on the ward there was a tall, reedy bloke who carried a bible with him all day. He had a habit of fixing on things you said during group work and hitting you later with a few pithy verses to be going on with. He had me down as some kind of compulsive – not miles off the mark – but I wanted to pull his ears off when he told me that a man who even thinks about having his neighbour’s wife is already an adulterer.

No, Desmond, I told him. Bullshit.

Can’t deny it!

You get ideas. We all get ideas. Thoughts. And most of them come and go without causing anybody grief.

Desmond shook his head and I wanted to get him by the hair, squeeze the poison from his head. Wanted to, but didn’t. I told him he was sad and dangerous, that he shouldn’t say such things, especially not to vulnerable people like us. I was well and truly wigged out at the time, but still sane enough to know there’s a world of difference between thinking things and doing them.

You lack morality, he said mildly enough.

You call that morality? I said, trying not to shout. Robbing people of the distinction between thoughts and actions?

Sport, said Desmond, I tell you this out of love. You are a captive of evil.

Talk like that frightened me because in an unsteady moment you could believe it. I was tired and sad and fucked up but I wasn’t going to give in to bullshit. I’d been prey to false convictions aplenty and I’d had enough. It is possible to believe that as an idea comes into your mind, an act has been born and there’s nothing you can do about it. It’s as if thinking something causes it to happen, makes an action inevitable, even necessary. Sometimes it’s good to remind yourself it isn’t so.

A captive of evil, said Desmond.

No, I said. I’m a voluntary patient. […]

All about there were others watching Desmond and me, waiting for a blow-up. There were people in our midst who believed that babies had died and cities burnt because of thoughts they’d had.

Do you lust after your neighbour’s wife? asked the girl with the slashed arms. Really, she said drolly, you can tell us.

My wife, I said. My wife is now my neighbour’s wife. And my old neighbour’s wife is dead.

Man, that’s fucked up, said someone.

No lust?

Not much, I said. Not now.

Richard Hays and Oliver O'Donovan on same-sex relationships

2008-07-19T13:32:00.002+10:00

Sticking to this week’s theme, Michael offers a critical response to Richard Hays’ views on same-sex relationships; and Halden alerts us to Oliver O’Donovan’s forthcoming book on the gay controversy in the Anglican Church – it sounds like a promising book, and it comes with endorsements from John Milbank and Rowan Williams.

And in case you missed it last year, I should also remind you of Kim Fabricius’ much-discussed 12 propositions on same-sex relationships and the church.

Homosexuality and the church: a meditation on the tragic (Part Three)

2008-07-18T19:43:00.004+10:00

A guest-series by Ray S. Anderson

A Pastor and a Homosexual Christian: A Dialogue

“You spoke earlier of two gay men who acknowledged that same-sex relations were part of the tragic aspect of human sexuality and not what God intended. They accepted the biblical teaching on this point but nonetheless desired fellowship as Christians with other Christians. On this basis they were accepted into the church. But I do not feel that a same-sex relation such as I experience with my partner is contrary to biblical teaching. Our relationship is not promiscuous and we are as faithful and fully committed to each other as any heterosexual married couple. I do not see our situation as tragic. Does this disqualify me from being a member of your church?”

“I understand. If I had only experienced my sexuality as oriented toward the same sex, and if I had felt the same rejection and even hostility directed toward you by society and even the church I would feel the same way. But the two men we are talking about were welcomed into the body of Christ not because their view of the teaching of Scripture conformed to ours, but simply as persons who confessed Christ as Lord and savior. The Kingdom of God places no conditions upon humans in the invitation to enter. Children enter the Kingdom without knowledge of the tragic according to Jesus (Matt 18:2-3). Let me turn your question around. It is not whether or not your sexual orientation and practice disqualifies you from belonging to the body of Christ – but are you willing to enter the Kingdom of God based solely upon the grace of Christ who has already reconciled you to God? (2 Cor 5:19).”

“Suppose I am willing, and become a member of your church on that basis. How do you think I will feel when I am confronted with the biblical teaching that my sexual partner and I are ‘living in sin,’ to go back to the quotation you used from the newspaper?”

“I understand that. Each one of us is confronted by the fact that when the Bible calls us to love our enemies, give to whomever asks of us, set aside filial responsibility for the sake of the Kingdom of God, take up our cross and follow Christ, we enter the realm of the tragic. The demands of the Kingdom of God are not hostile to our humanity, but call us to what it is to be truly human. We seek a truth beyond our own. We are searching for the teaching that calls us out of our sin and places our lives under the promise of redemption.”

“So then, you do say that homosexuality is a sin?”

“Each of us must discover for ourselves what it means to be a sinner. And we cannot discover that nor find redemption from sin apart from a relationship with God. That is the irony of the Kingdom of God. The same grace that welcomes us into the Kingdom, as though we were children, places us under the rule of grace, that is, it exposes what is lacking in our humanity and brings us more and more into conformity with the humanity of Christ. That is the ministry of the body of Christ to one another.”

“Will your church recognize and affirm my ministry to the body? Suppose that I feel a calling to be ordained to pastoral ministry. Will my sexual orientation and practice disqualify me?”

“It is not our responsibility to decide who receives the gift of ministry within the Body of Christ. The Apostle Paul wrote that ‘a spiritual gift is given to each of us so that we can help each other.’ He then added, ‘It is the one and only Spirit who distributes all these gifts. He alone decides which gift each person should have’ (1 Cor 12:7, 11). There is no one qualified by their own life to receive the gift of the Spirit for ministry, and there is no one disqualified.”

“But I asked about ordination. If that is true, does this mean that if I become a member of your church I could be a candidate for ordination?”

“Ordination, as we commonly speak of it today, was not known by the early Church, even though they later began to set apart Bishops and Elders for the sake of doctrinal continuity and pastoral oversight. Actually, each person baptized into Christ is baptized into his ministry and this can be understood as the basis for what we call ordination. We assume that those set apart by the church for full-time ministry through ordination have the gift of the Spirit. In one sense ordination can simply be understood as the way each church (denomination) sets apart some within the body of Christ, ordinarily a full-time vocation, to teach, lead and minister to the body in accordance with the authority of Scripture. While only members are qualified to be set apart through ordination, being a member does not in itself qualify one for this office. There are other requirements.”

“That’s what I was afraid of. If every member who is baptized into Christ is called into the ministry of Christ, and if every member has the gift of the Spirit for ministry, what are these other requirements?”

“It is kind of like the saying, ‘If it’s everyone’s responsibility to do the work, it often ends up with no one doing it.’ Because the church is a manifestation of the Kingdom of God through a human institution, it suffers from the limitations and weakness of all human organizations. The church in its teaching and ministry based on the authority of Scripture brings Kingdom truths to bear through an institution that is fallible, provisional and often failing to live by the very truths it proclaims. Thus the relation between the church and the Kingdom is also tragic. In recognition of this, the church established a polity and structure by which certain members could be set apart as those most responsible to hold the body of Christ accountable to the Kingdom truths as revealed in Scripture. Those who are ordained to this office are really servants of the Body of Christ, not superior to it.”

“You still have not told me what some of these ‘other requirements’ are.”

“Let me try. For example, because we hold that Scripture teaches that sexual cohabitation outside of marriage is not what God intended, a member of the body who is living with someone not their husband or wife would not be qualified to be ordained. In the same way, a member of the body who is known to be abusive to other family members, including children, would not be qualified. Those who are set apart for the office of teaching and leading others in the body are expected not only to uphold by conviction the truths of Scripture that are taught, but to demonstrate maturity and responsibility in their own lives and relationships with others. ‘They must be committed to the mystery of the faith now revealed and must live with a clear conscience,’ the Apostle Paul wrote (1 Tim 3:9). ‘Do not ordain anyone hastily,’ cautioned Paul (1 Tim 5:22). While the church must embrace the tragic in its ministry of the Kingdom of God, excluding no one who has experienced the grace of salvation in Christ, those set apart for ordination must be able, by knowledge and conviction, to uphold and teach Kingdom truth and to hold the body of Christ in conformity to it. Apart from commitment to celibacy, our church holds that a member of the body whose lifestyle is homosexual would not be qualified.”

“That is very interesting. In a recent newspaper article there was a report of the General Assembly of your denomination voting to remove the restriction upon the ordination of homosexuals. Do I assume that your church will follow this ruling?”

“Didn’t I say that the relation between the church and the Kingdom of God is tragic? Well, this may be one instance of that. We feel that our position regarding ordination is biblical and in accordance with Kingdom truth under biblical authority. The denomination cannot force us to change our belief and practice. At the same time, we bear the ‘name brand’ of the national church body, and will be in the awkward position of not being able to support a denominational policy while at the same time holding fast to our view of what the Bible teaches. While there are a variety of views regarding biblical authority and what the Bible teaches within the denomination regarding many issues relating to social, personal and sexual ethics, there is a steadfast commitment to the Apostolic faith as represented in the ancient Creeds. We hold denominational leaders accountable to the confession of faith rooted in these creeds. If they fail at this point, then it becomes a matter of Kingdom truth rather than merely unbiblical practice. Is this not part of our own Protestant tradition? The denomination is our spiritual home, it connects us to each other, though often with pain, and to those who went before us in the faith. It is our family, and to leave would make us orphans.”

“I didn’t realize that belonging to a church is so complicated! I am tempted to find one that conforms more to my own belief and lifestyle. But I have read enough of the Bible to know that Jesus was always on the side of Kingdom truth. That seemed to be what attracted people to him. And I must confess, I’m not sure I want a church that looks just like me. One more question, I have a friend who does belong to your denomination and is considering being ordained. She was quite dismayed at the recent ruling by the General Assembly as she feels that the ordination of homosexuals is not based on biblical truth and questions whether or not she should go ahead with ordination. What would you say to her?”

“Ordination is part of the church culture; it gives access to ministry that might not otherwise be possible. When Timothy, who had a Greek father but a Jewish mother, wanted to accompany Paul on his mission, ‘in deference to the Jews of the area, he arranged for Timothy to be circumcised before they left’ (Acts 16:3). Paul had earlier refused to circumcise Titus arguing that this would appear to make circumcision a requirement of the gospel. Ordination is something like that. In a sense, it is like an admission ticket to the institutional church’s culture of ministry. It is part of the tragic connection between the church and the Kingdom of God. Jesus embraces the tragic for the sake of bringing redemption and hope. If ordination enables you to follow Jesus, and if you understand the tragic, you can make this concession with clear conscience and a peaceful heart.”

Family idolatry, bisexual penguins, and more

2008-07-18T16:59:00.003+10:00

In relation to this week's theme of sex, you should be sure to check out a couple of brilliant posts by Halden: Mark Driscoll, the church, and family idolatry, and Nature, grace, and the prevenience of the apocalypse. Man, I love Halden's blog – I tend to agree with him even more than I agree with myself.

For a critical response to Halden and me, IndieFaith also has some thoughtful and honest reflections. And for a bit of light relief, check out David's post on bisexual penguins.

Homosexuality and the church: a meditation on the tragic (Part Two)

2008-07-17T11:45:00.005+10:00

A guest-series by Ray S. Anderson

The Tragic and Human Sexuality

If love is intrinsically tragic because it offers possibilities of fulfillment to human desire, hopes and needs that can never be met in even the most perfect human relationship, then sexuality itself is intrinsically tragic. The sexual nature of humanity perhaps lies nearest to the core of the self in terms of human intimacy. This is why sexuality is such a profound and yet complicated – and yes, tragic – component of the structure of humanity.

Sexuality itself is tragic because it is a component of the very structure of humanity that is woven through with the tragic. We do not understand what it is to be a human person until we understand that. And we cannot understand the struggle to integrate unfulfilled, sometimes chaotic, and often self-defeating sexual experience into authentic human personhood until we understand that.

When a man in his late 40s tells me, “I always wanted to have children, but after getting married when I was 25 I discovered that my wife could not and would never be able to conceive a child. Yes, adoption was one possibility, but my dream of having a child of my own well never be realized.” I respond: “Yes, I understand that, it is tragic.”

When a single woman in her late 50s tells me, “When I was in my 20s I thought for sure that I would be married. All of my friends found someone, I never did. I have lived all these years hoping for someone to love me in a special way. It never happened.” I respond: “Yes, I understand that, it is tragic.”

When a homosexual person tells me, “I knew that I was homosexual from the time I was a teenager. I tried to deny it, but finally accepted it, and though it is against what the Bible teaches, I have someone to love me and to live in a relationship that I could never have otherwise.” I respond: “Yes, I understand that, it is tragic.”

What each person in these situations has in common is an experience of the tragic as a component of their human experience. We must first understand that before considering the moral implications of their behavior. When Jesus confronted the woman at the well (John 4) he drew forth the truth that she had lived a life of promiscuity. “You have had several husbands and the man you are living with is not your husband.” Jesus perceived the tragic component of a woman’s life lived under these circumstances. The moral issue with regard to living with a man not her husband was never brought up. Jesus did not label her a sinner, but empowered her to confess that he was truly the Messiah sent from God. My point is that to label the sexual orientation and practice of a person as “sinful” fails to understand the tragic construct of that person’s life.

The Tragic and the Kingdom of God

Sin is not a condition that precedes grace. For until one is welcomed into the Kingdom of God through grace, the tragic only is a condition to be overcome, sometimes by religion, rather than by a relationship in which the tragic is brought under the promise of redemption. Until we each have discovered our own sin, always through grace, to be called a sinner by others is not only graceless, it is tragic. It breaks the common bond that makes us human. Saul of Tarsus would never have accepted the accusation that he was a sinner until he experienced the grace of God through his encounter with the risen Christ. Until the tragic nature of sin is revealed though grace, it lies untouched and unredeemed, hidden like a deadly virus that thrives on self-affirmation only to emerge in self-condemnation.

Jesus did not label persons whom he encountered as sinners, but rather offered them the power of his own person and inclusion in the Kingdom of God as an eschatological promise of redemption of the tragic. Looking over the crowd who followed him, he had compassion on them because “they were like sheep without a shepherd” (Mark 6:7). Later that day he instructed his disciples to feed them and, as a result, more than 5,000 were fed. This “miraculous meal” was an eschatological sign and promise of redemption from the tragic. For a meal only lasts one day and holds back the tragic for a time; then hunger again rises up to remind humans that their existence is fragile and weak.

Redemption from sin begins with understanding, not with condemnation. Does this mean that sin is disregarded? Not at all. But then we should understand that we are bound to each other not only by virtue of the tragic, but also by sin. When Paul wrote to the Corinthian church with regard to sexual sin, he placed that particular sin in the same category as greed, worship of idols, and being abusive, a drunkard or a cheat (1 Cor 5:11). Paul only discovered that he was a sinner following his experience of grace through Jesus Christ. It is of no benefit to the Kingdom of God to call someone a sinner; instead, offer the grace of God so that they discover this for themselves.

The Kingdom and the Church

Jesus proclaimed the coming and the actual presence of the Kingdom of God in his own life and ministry. “But if I am casting out demons by the Spirit of God, then the kingdom of God has arrived among you” (Matt 12:28 NLT). But the Kingdom, while bringing redemption within the tragic, did not promise redemption from the tragic until the end of this temporal order and the coming of the Kingdom of God in glory. At the same time, Jesus said that his Kingdom was not of this world (John 18:36). Paul taught that the Kingdom of God is not a matter of living by religious rules and regulations, but of “living a life of goodness and peace and joy in the Holy Spirit” (Rom 14:17 NLT).

The Kingdom of God confronts the world with the reality of what God intended for humanity and the way it is supposed to be, calling what is into a redemptive relation with God as Creator and Redeemer. The church is a sign of the Kingdom and acquires its identity and role in relation to the Kingdom. As such, the church is not the Kingdom of God, but an eschatological extension of the Kingdom into the present world order. In the end, it is not the church but the Kingdom of God that is presented to the Father by the Son in its fullness and completeness (1 Cor 15:17).

The church in its teaching and life, under biblical authority, is not only a place where we can come “just as we are,” but a place where we can experience the redemptive grace of God to become and live as God intended. This is the tragic aspect of the Kingdom of God and the form of the church in the world. It embraces what is tragic in the form of the failure of humanity to be and live in accordance with what God intended. At the same time in its teaching and practice it brings the tragic under the redemptive promise of healing, hope and ultimate overcoming of the tragic. For the church to exclude its neighbor, the homosexual person, is to forsake its own relation to the Kingdom of God and its authentic mission on earth.

Homosexuality and the church: a meditation on the tragic (Part One)

2008-07-16T19:43:00.008+10:00

A guest-series by Ray S. Anderson

Following the recent ruling by the California Supreme Court permitting the marriage of same-sex couples, a newspaper report included a comment by two men following their marriage, “Now we are not living in sin.” The comment sounded somewhat sarcastic and was probably aimed more at the religious community rather than a description of their own spiritual condition. Nonetheless, it reminded me of the impasse created in the discussion of homosexuality when the label “sin” is used to portray same-sex cohabitation as unacceptable to many in the Christian community. It is not that homosexual persons are not sinners, as are all humans. “No one is righteous, not even one” (Rom 3:9 NLT). But to label homosexual orientation and practice as sin in order to justify exclusion from the church and its ministry is too simple. The issue is more complex than that. Is there an alternative?

During the 1960s when I was pastor of a small conservative church congregation, two men living together in a homosexual relationship, both graduates of a Bible school and with a clear Christian testimony, became friends of some in the church and eventually asked me if they could join. They both knew what the Bible taught concerning homosexuality and knew that my position and that of the church was based on this biblical teaching. My response was: of course you can join. This is not a church for those who are perfect but for those seeking Christian fellowship and a place to worship and grow in Christ.

The word “sin” was not mentioned, by them nor by me. If they had asked me if I considered homosexual practice a sin, I don’t know what I would have said. I hope that I would have said something like this. Do you believe that a same sex relation is what God intended when he created humans as sexual persons? They would have answered, “No, but this is the only way that we have found it possible to live and love. While others may say that we have a choice, for our part we feel that this relationship is the only one that fulfills our life and meets our needs.” In several other ways, they had communicated much the same to me.

The Tragic as a Human Condition

It was my former colleague, Lewis Smedes, who reminded me that in the area of human sexuality we should not ignore the tragic as a component of all and every human sexual experience. In the discussion of homosexuality, he said, don’t forget the tragic. Not that a same-sex relation is tragic as opposed to heterosexual relations, but that it is tragic because all human sexuality must be understood as necessarily an experience of the tragic. The key word here is “understood.” The difficulty for many heterosexual persons with regard to homosexuality is that they have no way of “understanding” how such a practice and relationship can be part of an authentic human experience, much less one that is Christian. The concept of the tragic may be one way of understanding the complex experience of human sexuality that underlies both heterosexual and homosexual tendencies and practice.

When I am able to understand what motivates a rebellious child to act out in anti-social ways, I gain insight in how to relate to that child rather than simply use labels to describe their behavior. In somewhat the same way, if homosexual behavior is simply labeled as “deviant” or a “perversion,” one is not only free from attempting to understand, but one makes no attempt. What is needed is an underlying structure of human existence rather than a practice of human behavior to begin to understand and then engage in discussion with homosexual persons with regard to the church and its ministry.

The tragic is not something that happens to humans following their creation out of the dust of the ground and endowed with the divine image – but to exist as that particular human person is tragic. Thus the tragic is not the result of the fall, as though humanity as originally created did not experience the tragic. Rather, the tragic exists precisely because human persons experience the freedom of self-conscious existence with virtually unlimited possibilities while, at the same time, remaining bound by necessity to the dust out of which they are created. The tragic is the result of the fact that humans cannot be in more than one place at a time, and they are aware of that.

When caught in a dilemma in which responsibility to help another is the most important, a decision has to be made. Failure to be able to meet both demands is tragic. Even the first humans were confronted with the tragic. Not everything that is possible, not everything that is good, can be chosen or accomplished or experienced. Being aware of that constitutes the tragic.

Søren Kierkegaard called this irreconcilable tension between possibility and necessity Dread. I prefer to call it the tragic. Dread became for him simply the psychological/spiritual moment of absolute self-awareness. The tragic is more a construct of human existence that underlies all human life, not merely a moment of awareness. As a construct of human existence, the tragic cannot be avoided though it can be denied, as Ernest Becker profoundly described in his book, The Denial of Death (Simon and Schuster, 1973).

True, there is an existential experience of dread, as Kierkegaard argued, that can only be overcome by faith. But if faith can overcome dread, it cannot overcome the tragic. The most significant human relation that Kierkegaard experienced was his engagement to Regina Olsen, an “instant love affair” that lasted for several years until he ended it by his own decision – for her own good, as he put it, even though he continued to love her. In the end, while he could apparently surrender everything to the infinite for the sake of faith, he did not have the kind of faith that permitted him to enact a finite relation of love without losing his own self. “Had I had faith I would have remained with Regina” (Journals, Harper Torch, 1958, p. 86). In the end, I would argue, what kept him from marriage with Regina was not lack of faith, but failure to understand the category of the tragic. Faith cannot overcome the tragic, as if marriage (as an act of faith) would remove the relationship from the category of the tragic.

The Tragic and Redemptive Grace

The tragic cannot be overcome and eliminated without destroying human life as we know it. Redemption of the tragic is an eschatological event. That is, it will only occur when the “new heavens and the new earth” emerge with the end of this temporal order. It is only then that “there will be no more death or sorrow or crying or pain” (Rev 21:4 NLT). Until that time, redemption of the tragic will be provisional and partial with intimations of that eschatological reality illuminating the landscape of the tragic while calling us to embrace the tragic with redemptive grace.

Redemption is always within the tragic, but not from the tragic. Redemption from one instance of the tragic leads to an expansion of the tragic, not the elimination of it. When Jesus healed the paralytic who had been unable to work and had lain by the pool of Bethesda for 38 years, this was a miracle of release from his tragic situation (John 5:1-8). But we are not told what happened to him nor how he was able to make a living, having lived by the charity of others for all those years. If he ended up healed but without the means of making a living for himself, that too is tragic.

When I come upon an apparently homeless person with a sign requesting money for food, I ordinarily pass by. Some would point to that person as a tragic person, an object of pity if not compassion. But the tragic is not an object but a relation. It is my relation to that person that constitutes the tragic. I recognize the demand placed upon me in our common humanity and his uncommon need. If I were to take that demand as an absolute moral demand and respond out of my own means as a way of overcoming the tragic, I have only magnified the tragic in the form of other humans who place their demand upon me and my resources as well. To give everything that I possess in response to the tragic situation of the needy, would be to compound the tragic with regard to my own children. Stanley Hauerwas reminds us of this when he says, “Marriage and family require time and energy that could be used to make the world better. To take the time to love one person rather than many, to have these children rather than helping the many in need, requires patience and a sense of the tragic” (A Community of Character, U of Notre Dame P, 1981, p. 172).

Theologian Wendy Farley says that “Created perfection is fragile, tragically structured” (Tragic Vision and Divine Compassion, WJKP, 1990, p. 127). She goes on to say: “The tragic structure of finitude and the human capacity for deception and cruelty together account for the possibility and actuality of suffering and evil.” Humans are finite beings, they possess awareness of the infinite but cannot fully realize it. In this sense, the tragic is not something from which humans can be redeemed and still be human, but redemption itself must take hold of and suffer the tragic if it is to approach and take hold of humans. Farley puts it this way: “But to overcome the tragic structure of finitude, to be free animate beings from all suffering, to determine finite freedom so that it will always love the good and have the courage to pursue it – these things are not possible. The potential for suffering and evil lie in the tragic structure of finitude and cannot be overcome without destroying creation” (p. 125).

Perhaps Farley would be better to speak of the fragility of humankind rather than the fragility of creation, for the kind of fragility I have described as tragic is peculiar to human beings. We may think it tragic to watch our nonhuman pets suffer and die, but this is a projection of the human tragic sense onto and into the created order. Evil, then, is the intensification of the tragic measured by its power to attack and destroy the good that God intended.

Following Farley’s insightful analysis, I would say that the freedom of creation in its own authentic nature – as differentiated ontologically from the Creator – is only tragic from the perspective of human beings who are endowed with a spiritual nature (imago Dei) which promises a destiny beyond that of its own creaturely nature. For all creatures but the human, their nature determines their destiny. For humans, their destiny lies beyond the power of a creaturely nature, though humans “suffer” from the exigencies of a creaturely nature. In this way, because love is a possibility of human existence which is in itself tragic, love is “intrinsically tragic,” for it is an investment of the self (the power of personal, spiritual being) in the face of the powers of nature, over which it is, at times, powerless.

One cannot consciously live with full awareness of the tragic, as Ernest Becker reminded us. Denial of the tragic may seem to be the only way to survive without losing one’s own existence. Nonetheless, the tragic continues to underlie human existence. Faith will not overcome it as an existential movement of the spirit, as Kierkegaard hoped. Faith itself is an eschatological point of reference that is grounded in the promise of God rather than in an immediate release from the tragic.

This is one reason why understanding homosexuality as part of the tragic construct of human sexuality may offer a more redemptive approach than simply to label it as “sin” in order to deny its right to exist.

Ten propositions on marriage

2008-07-15T09:06:00.009+10:00

by Kim Fabricius

1. Marriage, Edward Schillebeeckx writes, is “a reality secular by origin”; yet, as he continues, it “has acquired a deeper meaning in the order of salvation in which we live.” Because creation is in and for Christ, and because the apocalyptic shockwaves of the resurrection of Christ radiate both backwards and forwards, marriage must finally be understood Christologically. Although Jesus relativised marriage (e.g. Luke 18:29, Matthew 19:12), and although in the consummation there will be no marriage (Matthew 22:30), in his patience and grace God gives us marriage between-the-times as an intimate space for two people to be good and let be, and, for Christians, to bear witness to the new creation. At the marriage in Cana, Jesus turned water to wine – lots of wine! – his first and programmatic sign of the dawning new age (John 2:1-11). In the imagery of Ephesians 5:31-33, Christian marriage reflects the eschatological marriage of Christ and his church (cf. Revelation 19:7). With Bonhoeffer, the ultimate frames but does not negate the penultimate. It is therefore appropriate to speak of marriage as a covenant. To call it a sacrament, however, begs too many questions.

2. A marriage is not to be confused with a wedding. “A wedding is only the regulative confirmation and legitimation of a marriage before and by society. It does not constitute a marriage” (Karl Barth). A ceremony does not make a marriage, consent makes a marriage. And even in the ceremony, and even in the Roman Catholic Church, the ministers of the marriage are the bride and bridegroom, not the minister. Indeed it was only with the Council of Trent in 1563 that the Roman Catholic Church insisted on an ecclesial occasion, and mainly to ensure, through the presence of witnesses, that the marriage was, in fact, consensual. In short, a church wedding does not create a marriage, it recognises and blesses a marriage that already exists. Nor should consent itself be taken as a punctiliar act but as part of an ongoing project of mutual discovery and affirmation. It is always sad to hear a couple say that their wedding day was the happiest day of their lives.

3. If the heart of faith is friendship with God through Christ, active in the love of neighbour, the heart of marriage is maxima amicitia humana, the most intimate form of neighbour-love. This pre-eminent human friendship is normally both expressed and confirmed as a sexual relationship. While eros and agape are certainly to be distinguished (as Beethoven to Mozart, according to Barth – though, as Eberhard Jüngel winks, “We won’t ask what Mozart would say about that”), they must not be opposed (as Anders Nygren argued); nor is sex to be ruefully indulged (as Augustine held) but enthusiastically enjoyed (as Solomon sang). By the way, we should exercise word-care when we speak of “pre-marital sex”: what we usually mean is pre-ceremonial sex.

4. Yet corruptio optimi pessima: sex as the sphere of supreme tenderness and joy is also the sphere of desire at its most distorted (concupiscentia), indeed an arena of violence, as eros morphs into thanatos. In fact the libido dominandi is the regnant Pauline “principality and power” in contemporary western culture. Sex and the City is the iconic text of an age in which sex is everything – there are even parodic Virgilian tours of its virtual Manhattan Inferno – as we amuse ourselves to death-by-serial-fucking. Yet while we must speak of the body’s abuse, we may, in Christ, speak of “the body’s grace”. “The moral question,” writes Rowan Williams, “ought to be how much we want our sexual activity to communicate, how much we want it to display a breadth of human possibility and a sense of the body’s capacity to heal and enlarge the life of other subjects.” If there is the civitas diaboli of Carrie and company, there is also the civitas Dei of Jesus and his friends.

5. Although marriage is complete without procreation (Genesis 2:24) and remains complete after the kids have left home, marriage is the God-given unit for the birth and nurture of children (Genesis 1:28). There is, however, a teleology to raising children, namely that they may grow up to experience the joy and freedom of faith. “This means,” as Bonhoeffer says, “that marriage is not only a matter of producing children, but also of educating them to be obedient to Jesus Christ,” so that they too might become friends of God. The obedience course begins by telling your children that Jesus loves them – even when they are disobedient. As for the learning curve (or slider!), I recommend a Hauerwasian pedagogy: “Start with baseball and also teach them to read. Don’t teach kids a bunch of rules. Help them submit their lives to something that they find to be a wonderful activity that transforms them.”

6. What about divorce? And remarriage? Reviewing the New Testament texts, Richard B. Hays concludes that “the fundamental concern in all of them is to affirm marriage as a permanently binding commitment in which man and woman become one…. At the same time, there are complex differences…. Mark and Luke categorically prohibit divorce, but Matthew and Paul both entertain the necessity of exceptions to the rule, situations in which pastoral discernment is required.” To be sure, mired as they are in the cult of feelings, the myth of sexual fulfilment, and the language of rights, the modern motives for divorce are usually hopelessly un-Christian. However the notion of “indissolubility” smuggles in a metaphysic quite alien to the Bible; divorce is not an ontological impossibility. Nor can or should remarriage be rejected tout court. “Indeed, ”with Hays, “if one purpose of marriage is to serve as a sign of God’s love in the world …, how can we reject the possibility that a second marriage after a divorce could serve as a sign of grace and redemption from the sin and brokenness of the past?”

7. Tina Turner puts the problem – and the question I always put to dumfounded couples whom I prepare for marriage: “What’s love got to do with it?” Stanley Hauerwas: “Christians have far too readily underwritten the romantic assumption that people ‘fall’ in love and then get married. We would be much better advised to suggest that love does not create marriage; rather, marriage provides a good training ground to teach us what love involves.” Thus, most provocatively, to disabuse us of conventional notions of Mr or Miss Right, Hauerwas’s Law: “You always marry the wrong person.” (As Henny Youngman jested: I married Miss Right. I just didn’t know her first name was Always.) Thus does marriage become Luther’s “school of character”, or, better, a “class of character” in the school of the church. Of course a relationship begins with the chemistry of attraction, but unless it does graduate work in the art of loving, it shouldn’t be surprising if it ends in an explosion.

8. Colin Gunton observed that marriage “is at once the most private and the most public of our institutions,” and we may expect marriage to contribute to the enrichment of society and the strengthening of community. The church, after all, exists for the world. Yet in much Protestant thought that takes marriage to belong to an “order of nature”, the conclusion has been drawn that marriage is a purely civil affair, a matter of state for which the church provides the altar. This Constantinian understanding of marriage is a disaster, the collateral damage of which includes the apotheosis of “family values” and the raising of children to be loyal citizens, not faithful Christians. Divorce itself becomes, not a personal tragedy or a failure of witness, but a threat to the “fabric of society”, i.e. the status quo. The church must certainly cease to be Caesar’s chaplain, but not by abandoning its ceremonies, rather by reclaiming them for Christ. Follow the trajectory to a status confessionis and the state would not sanction and regulate church weddings but declare them to be illegal.

9. Am I suggesting that the church restrict weddings only to committed Christians, or to “nominal” Christians only after thorough catechesis? That would seem to be the drift of the argument – except for one thing. John Wesley spoke of the eucharist as a “converting ordinance”, as a means of grace that may bring the baptised (back) to Christ. In my own experience as a minister, church weddings, on a not insignificant number of occasions, have performed a similar function – and not only for the couple but for members of the congregation. In fact, they have been, indirectly, evangelistic events through which some people have been drawn into the body of Christ. They may even be prophetic events. Of course marriage preparation is essential, and that will include catechesis as well as counsel, but I have always seen it fundamentally as an act of hospitality and care. Some may chastise me with Matthew 7:6. I take consolation in Matthew 5:45.

10. Finally, if the heart of marriage is friendship, if marriage is for procreation in a gratuitous rather than an instrumental sense, as overflow rather than essence, then do we not open the way for the blessing of same-sex relationships? I think we do, though I think the term “marriage” is unhelpful. (And by the way, whatever the social and legal conventions, homosexual Christians, like heterosexual Christians, may have a vocation as parents in the church.) This view presupposes that natural law arguments against same-sex relationships are otiose – but then I think that the concept of natural law is otiose in a theology of marriage too! The point is this: if Luke Timothy Johnson is right to suggest that “If sexual virtue and vice are defined covenantally rather than biologically, then it is possible to place homosexual and heterosexual activity in the same context,” it is also possible to see same-sex relationships, blessed by the church, as an analogue of the relationship between God and his people, and a model of the church’s own proper economy of grace. In short, nihil obstat.

Postscript: two clean jokes and a dirty one

Why did Adam and Eve have the perfect marriage? He didn’t have to listen to her talk about all the other men she could have married, and she didn’t have to put up with his mother.
A minister sent a tele-message to his goddaughter for her wedding day: “I John 4:18. Love, Uncle Jack”. Unfortunately, the telephonist omitted the “I”, so that the reference was to John’s Gospel. Check it out!
Finally, as an illustration that (pace von Clausewitz) marriage is the continuation of war by other means, an “order of militarisation”: Reviewing their marriage vows on the eve of their thirtieth anniversary, a couple had a furious row when they came to “as long as we both shall live”. He was so angry that in the morning he went out and bought her a tombstone bearing the inscription: “Here lies my wife – cold as ever.” In retaliation she went out and bought him a tombstone too. The inscription? “Here lies my husband – stiff at last.”

Blog of the week: theology of the body

2008-07-15T08:47:00.001+10:00

Our new blog of the week: Theology of the body.

Sex and more

2008-07-14T09:22:00.003+10:00

Following the interest in my recent post on marriage, this week at F&T will be devoted to sex and marriage: we’ll have a new “Ten Propositions on Marriage” by Kim Fabricius, and a special three-part series on “Homosexuality and the Church” by Ray Anderson. In the mean time, here’s some of the good stuff happening around the blogosphere:

A dialogue with Umberto Eco and Eberhard Jüngel
A response by Bruce McCormack
An opinion about the best Protestant eccclesiology ever written
A quote on the nature of biblical prophecy
A bibliography of Rowan Williams
A review of Mike Higton's new book
Some commentary on David Bentley Hart
A glimpse of the new-look Church Dogmatics
A post on radical theology and Agamben
A chance to win: If you place an order of $300 or more with Dove Booksellers before 19 July, you’ll go into a draw to win one of the following sets: Barth’s Church Dogmatics, the Theological Dictionary of the Old Testament, or Kittel’s Theological Dictionary of the New Testament (the winner gets to choose any one of these sets).

Twenty great clergymen in novels

2008-07-10T15:46:00.005+10:00

by Kim Fabricius

William Collins in Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice (1813)
Arthur Dimmesdale in Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter (1850)
Father Mapple in Herman Melville, Moby-Dick (1851)
Obadiah Slope in Anthony Trollope, Barchester Towers (1857)
Charles François-Bienvenu Myriel in Victor Hugo, Les Misérables (1862)
Edward Casaubon in George Eliot, Middlemarch (1871)
Father Zossima in Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov (1880)
Jean Marie Latour in Willa Cather, Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927)
The young curate in Georges Bernanos, The Diary of a Country Priest (1936)
The unnamed priest in Graham Greene, The Power and the Glory (1940)
Father Paneloux in Albert Camus, The Plague (1947)
Hazel Motes in Flannery O’Connor, Wise Blood (1952)*
Stephen Kumalo in Alan Paton, Cry, the Beloved Country (1948)
Dean Jocelin in William Golding, The Spire (1964)
Sebastião Rodrigues in Endo Shusaku, Silence (1966)
William of Baskerville in Umberto Eco, The Name of the Rose (1983)
Oscar Hopkins in Peter Carey, Oscar and Lucinda (1988)
Clarence Wilmot in John Updike, In the Beauty of the Lilies (1996)
Nathan Price in Barbara Kingsolver, The Poisonwood Bible (1998)
John Ames in Marilynne Robinson, Gilead (2004)

* Okay, Hazel Motes is not a clergyman, but there’s just got to be a place for him: call him an anti-clergyman! And for a great charlatan preacher, there is Elmer Gantry in Sinclair Lewis, Elmer Gantry (1927).

Against marriage: or, why churches should stop performing weddings

2008-07-09T01:29:00.010+10:00

In an interesting post, Jason argues for a religious understanding of marriage, and he cites P. T. Forsyth’s view that marriage is much more than a social contract: “the more one ponders the solemn implicates and slow effects of marriage, moral and spiritual, the more one feels that it has something sacramental in its nature.”

I think this is exactly the wrong thing to say about marriage. In fact, I’d like to see the church stop its custom of benignly validating the institution of marriage. The investment of marriage with a pseudo-religious quality has long diminished the witness of the church: the state authorises a legal union, and then calls upon the church to bless this union with a thin veneer of religiosity. Here, as elsewhere, the church proves itself to be the state’s faithful servant: yes, we will validate state authority with a harmless blessing; yes, we are only too pleased to sanctify the wedding ceremony, and to clothe the social functions of romantic love and family life with a saintly aura.

Notice that the church is not invited here to proclaim its own proper message of judgment and grace. The church is not invited to bear witness. Instead, we are simply asked to add God’s blessing to the social order and to the state’s authority. Here the situation is just the same as in those churches where all infants born into the nation-state are provided with baptism: the church’s witness is undermined completely by its willingness to serve as the state’s lapdog. We are like the comically odious Mr Collins in Pride and Prejudice – that sycophantic clergyman who waits upon the pleasure of his exalted benefactress, Lady Catherine De Bourgh, and is only too pleased to do her bidding whenever the opportunity arises.

If there is anything distinctively Christian to say about marriage, then the first step should be the church’s flat refusal to co-operate in the grim and desperate business of wedding ceremonies, and a flat refusal to provide the state with any so-called “marriage altar.” As Karl Barth has put it, marriage “must be completely divested of the character of a religious doublet to the civil ceremony” (CD III/4, p. 228).

Indeed, far from merely authorising weddings with pious talk about the “spiritual and moral” depths of marital love, the church’s witness demands a critique of romantic love – yes, a critique of marriage itself! As Dietrich Bonhoeffer has incisively argued in Life Together, the sexual relationship is by no means “sacramental in nature.” Instead, in our own societies romantic love functions as an idol which demands absolute subservience.

Halden explores this theme in a brilliant engagement with Bonhoeffer: “The longing to be completed through immediate contact with another is the reigning mythos of romance in our age. It is the object of voracious, often violent pursuit at all costs…. The fact is that in our romantic imaginations we seem to remain disturbingly trapped in the Zeitgeist of our age, hoping that by journeying deeper into the abyss of our selfishness we will somehow find the community that we long for with the other.” In Bonhoeffer’s analysis, the marriage relationship is not “sacramental by nature,” but it is selfish and parasitic by nature. In its hidden depths one finds not the comforting glow of religious sanctity, but an abyss of violence and self-will, a voracious need to find my own image reflected in the face of another.

But such a bleak analysis is not the last word. If the church refuses to sanctify the social order and the state’s authority as “naturally” blessed, it is also true that the church is a community with its own proper practices, its own virtues, its own proclamation of the good as that which has interrupted and reconfigured the natural order through the resurrection of Jesus from the dead.

If we begin to refuse church participation in wedding ceremonies, perhaps the way will be opened for a renewed sacramental understanding of marriage. The church refuses to recognise the marital relationship – or, for that matter, “the family” – as the fundamental social unit. Instead, the Christian community recognises the body of Christ as the fundamental social order of the new creation. And within this new society, within this economy of friendship and hospitality and self-giving, the church also bears witness to particular instantiations of Christian friendship, to specially gifted loci of generosity and hospitality and self-giving love.

Here, Christian marriage is sacramental precisely because it bears witness to the incursion of the new creation. It interrupts the existing order with the glad tidings of God’s new world. It interrupts marriage itself – and all the parasitic violence of romantic love – with the joyful and generous reality of the peace of the body of Christ.

In short: let’s say No to church-sanctioned weddings, No to the culture of romance-at-any-cost, but Yes to the sacrament of marriage, Yes to the body of Christ. To paraphrase St Paul: For in Christ Jesus, neither marriage nor singleness is anything; what counts is a new creation.

Blog of the week: Christians in context

2008-07-08T10:20:00.004+10:00

Our new blog of the week is Christians in Context. If you think conservative Reformed blogging has to be narrow and humourless, then these guys will prove you wrong. While you’re there, you might also like to check out their Theologica forum, and their popular Theological Word of the Day widget.

Giorgio Agamben, theology and economy: Il Regno e la Gloria

2008-07-07T11:14:00.005+10:00

Adam Kotsko (author of a new book on Žižek, which I’ve just finished reading) has been working through Giorgio Agamben’s latest book, Il Regno e la Gloria. Per una genealogia teologica dell’economia e del governo [The Reign and the Glory: A Theological Genealogy of Economy and Government]. You can see a list of the posts here, or you can download the full series as a pdf.

For those of us who don’t read Italian, this is an extremely helpful and remarkably fascinating chapter-by-chapter summary. From the sounds of it, Il Regno e la Gloria is Agamben’s most theologically sophisticated work to date. He engages with theo-political thinkers like Schmitt and Peterson, as well as theologians like Barth, Moltmann, Balthasar, Aquinas, Augustine, Origen, the Cappadoccians, the Arians, and St Paul.

Summarising Agamben’s argument, Kotsko writes: “Agamben’s goal in the book is to investigate the ways that power in the West has tended to take the form of an oikonomia. This aligns his project with Foucault’s, though Agamben hopes to show that there were internal reasons that Foucault’s project remained unfinished. His angle will be an investigation of the initial attempts to formulate the doctrine of the Trinity in terms of a divine economy and to show ‘how the apparatus of the trinitarian oikonomia can constitute a privileged laboratory for observing the functioning and articulation – both internal and external – of the governmental machine’…. The key question, missed by previous scholars of royal pomp and liturgy, is why power needs glory. Though this question has been neglected for the most part, Agamben believes it points toward the relation between oikonomia and glory as ‘the ultimate structure of the governmental machine of the West’. Glory is ‘the secret center of power’.”

Here’s the full index of posts:

Introduction

Law and miracle
The invisible hand

And to whet your appetite, here are a few excerpts from the series:

From the notes on chapter 1: “Schmitt’s famous thesis that all modern political concepts are secularized theological concepts has to be stretched to its breaking point by the notion of oikonomia. It’s not simply a matter of extending the thesis to include economic concepts as well – it’s the more radical move of claiming that the theological concepts already were economic concepts, all along.”

From the notes on chapter 8: “Agamben begins by castigating Hans Urs von Balthasar, who has led astray all theologians by confining glory to the aesthetic realm rather than its properly political place – and this despite the obvious clue provided by the German word Herrlichkeit. By contrast, Agamben sets out to prove that the terms kabod and doxa (glory) are actually never used in an aesthetic sense in scripture, but only in a political one.”

Again, from chapter 8: “Glory as inoperativity is necessary to the exercise of power because of the constitutive inoperativity of humanity. It is because humans don’t have a ‘use’ or ‘job’ that we are enabled to be so incredibly active. Just as the theological apparatus needs the central void of glory to function, so also ‘the governmental apparatus functions because it has captured in its central void the inoperativity of the human essence’.”

Celebrating Independence Day with Hauerwas

2008-07-05T08:32:00.006+10:00

We’ve discussed this before – but, just as a reminder, here’s a remark from Stanley Hauerwas on churches and Independence Day. Addressing a group of seminary students, he said:

“I assume most of you are here because you think you are Christians, but it is not all clear to me that the Christianity that has made you Christians is Christianity. For example: How many of you worship in a church with an American flag? I am sorry to tell you that your salvation is in doubt. How many of you worship in a church in which the fourth of July is celebrated? I am sorry to tell you that your salvation is in doubt.”

Update: Jim thinks Hauerwas is wrong; and Chris and Lee agree.

When God is silent: a reflection by Wolf Krötke

2008-07-04T16:37:00.004+10:00

Marc Batko has been translating some essays by the leading German theologian, Wolf Krötke. Here’s a short piece that he has just sent me: “When God Is Silent” (also available in German on Krötke’s website).

“Our God comes, he does not keep silence” (Psalm 50,3). That is a core sentence of the Bible. God can only be God for us because God is not silent. A speechless God is not God in the sense of the Bible. Contemporary atheists confirm this in their own way. Since they no longer hear God, God does not exist any more for them.

But God’s silence is not entirely harmless. Whoever does not hear God is not simply free of God. Even atheists become irritated when they are called “godless.” “Godless” sounds so contemptuous. If I call someone who does not believe in God a “godless soul,” that sounds like a condemnation in his ears. “You dubious person,” he hears, “your life lacks any good reason.” No one likes to hear this.

That “godless” has this sound for real blasphemers is strange. Our language presumably transports something owed to a biblical experience. The God who by nature is not silent is silent! When this happens, people are spit out, left without any goodness, hopelessly alone and miserable. “O God, do not keep silence; do not hold thy peace or be still,” implores another biblical praying person (Psalm 83,2). When God is silent, the power supply of his spirit and life is missing from our life. Other voices and other powers then fill the empty spaces of God’s silence.

All people do not regard this as terrible. The godless type is repeatedly encountered in the psalms as a careless person who likes God’s silence. “Nothing is lacking to me,” exclaims the confessionless person of today who shuts the door on visitors from the community. Since he never hears God speak, he does not notice when God is silent. Isn’t he better off than those tormented by God’s silence since they have good experiences of God speaking?

We must take this question seriously in a time when God means nothing for so many people. Whoever would open ears and hearts for God’s speaking tells them the reason for deaf ears and closed hearts. God is silent. All who believe have this experience. In faith in Jesus, it is engraved with the cry of the dying Jesus. “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” – this is the desperate complaint of the person through whom God’s love spoke like no other. With the words of Psalm 22, he joined with all the complaints of people about God’s silence. He anticipated something that could not be ignored. To many after him, that was the ultimate question in their life.

God is silent – that is the experience of persons open for God in the discipleship of Jesus. We may not misunderstand this as insensitiveness for God to which people become accustomed in voluntarily chosen distance from God. In such distance from God, people can be concrete walls for God. The Christian community with its testimony of God’s speaking can and should shake these walls. But if God is really silent though people long for his presence, that is shattering. This can put in question faith and trust in God. Doubt and despair begin to settle in our soul.

God’s silence hurts. It sets in like a mysterious wall before us and in us when God’s speaking is necessary. Hope and vigor are taken from persons handed over to the hatred and rage of others. Victims of the elements refuse answers. Gratitude that they are alive is driven out of persons tormented by sickness. Here there isn’t atheist or Christian, religious or not religious. Everyone knows the experience “when we are in extreme distress” and God is silent. Can persons still speak of God in such situations?

When God is silent, God is uncommunicative or closed for us. This can only result in our growing silent. Whoever is struck with suffering or tries to help other sufferers experiences this directly. The word “God” becomes like lead in our mouths. We have the feeling of assaulting God and humankind when we begin explaining his silence. “Be quiet at last,” we’d like to shout to someone who promotes himself when God is silent. There are times when we can only be silent with God. Communities that rediscover the old practice of Easter night have this experience.

On this night, something else comes into play than the mysterious abyss of God’s silence. In the experience of the Easter light, we notice something like God’s own deep affliction from the pain of Jesus Christ and from the suffering of his creatures. Far away from Golgotha, it is nearly impossible to understand God’s silence as enduring pains that make us speechless. The chasm between God and us is too great. Then the Bible speaks of God’s anger and God’s punishment for our misdeeds. We cannot cross out all this. When God is silent, we always discover what cannot be pleasing to him in our life.

Good Friday teaches us that God is with us even in his silence. As he touches us with his silence, he bears the heavy experiences we make when he is silent. In all their gravity, such experiences can stop being ultimate experiences that imprison people in distance from God. They do not prevent us from hearing the words of God’s love in his silence.

Bonhoeffer blog conference

2008-07-02T15:46:00.004+10:00

Halden has issued a call for papers for the inaugural Bonhoeffer Blog Conference, scheduled for November this year. The topic is “Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Ethics and Contemporary Theology.” The conference will place Bonhoeffer’s Ethics in conversation with trends and issues in contemporary theology. Submissions should be between 1500 and 2500 words, and should explore the implications of Bonhoeffer’s work for our contemporary theological, ecclesial, social, and political contexts.