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October 29, 2014
Thinking Critically. Living Faithfully.
WHAT IS
MARRIAGE
NOW ?
A Pa u l i n e cas e fo r s a m e - s ex m a r ri a g e
What is marriage now?
by Gerald W. Schlabach
AMID ENDLESS DEBATES concerning
same-sex relationships and same-sex marriage, one biblical
passage is often curiously absent. In 1 Corinthians 7, Paul
reflects on the merits of married and single life. If unmarried persons struggle with sexual self-control, he says, they
should marry, “for it is better to marry than to be aflame
with passion.”
The King James Version translates Paul’s sentiment more
bluntly: “It is better to marry than to burn.”
Wide embarrassment on all sides no doubt accounts for
neglect of this passage—but also makes it an unexpected
resource. If no side owns it, the passage may offer a rare place
to meet for fresh discernment. If no one likes the passage, its
very neglect might offer an unexpected way out of our
impasse.
That impasse is one I have lived. As a Catholic moral theologian I’ve struggled for more than two decades with the pain
of those with same-sex attractions and relationships who face
rejection from families and churches that claim to offer the
deepest love. To experience such a gap is to sense a betrayal—
a pain that, by cutting into one’s very identity, may wound
more than do bullying and violence.
Yet the pain of others is quite real too. Unjustly dismissed
as homophobic, some are simply reeling from the sexualization
of culture and the corrosion of stable family relationships. They
may unfairly grab on to homosexuality as the ultimate sign of
a breaching of those cultural assumptions and of a natural
order upon which they’ve built their lives. But they have legitimate concerns and valid questions.
I also write as the husband of a Mennonite pastor of a welcoming congregation who is prepared to officiate same-sex
weddings. My wife and I have taken our churches’ pain, struggles, and arguments deep into our marriage over the years.
Because she’s a pastor who is sensitive to local needs, she
focuses on different points than I do as an ethicist seeking to
reconcile an array of positions and concerns.
However improbably, I have found Paul’s approach in 1
Corinthians 7 offers a path out of our impasse and toward
broader churchwide consensus concerning marriage.
Extending the blessings of marriage to same-sex couples by
recognizing their lifelong unions fully as marriage could
allow the church to speak all the more clearly to what
deeply and rightly concerns those who seek to uphold the
sanctity of marriage. But the opportunity opened here is
Christian Century October 29, 2014
also a responsibility—to renew Christian teaching concerning why God’s intention is that full sexual intimacy belong
solely to marriage.
I
n a rare remark within his letters, Paul takes pains to clarify that his counsel in 1 Corinthians 7 may carry no special
authority from the Lord and may only reflect the wisdom
he has gathered from personal and pastoral experience. A turn
to personal experience is striking coming from Paul, an apostle
who’s had a direct revelatory encounter with the risen Lord.
Paul is not talking just
about quenching lust.
Yet here he’s ready both to draw upon the complexities of
messy human experience and to forthrightly recommend a
compromise or concession.
Heterosexual marriage was actually that compromise.
Instead of the indispensable biblical value that some contemporary churches project marriage to be, marriage was a practical solution for Paul and apparently a “second best.” Far more
urgent were the kingdom values and tasks that pressed upon
the community in light of Jesus’ expected return. At least in 1
Corinthians, the main purpose of marriage was not even the
protection and care of children or the benefit that accrues to
society through such care. Marriage was the better choice for
Christians if and when they needed to deal with otherwise
uncontrolled sexual desire.
No wonder the Pauline remark is hardly a go-to text in current debates over same-sex marriage: impassioned advocates
as well as fierce resisters find it embarrassing. Churches that
once held the vocation of celibate religious life to be above
married life (and only reluctantly called marriage a vocation)
now celebrate both ways of life as callings equal in status. Socalled conservatives and so-called liberals agree on this much:
both are glad that today’s church has a more exalted view of
marriage than Paul did.
Gerald W. Schlabach teaches moral theology at the University of Thomas in
Minnesota and is author of Unlearning Protestantism: Sustaining
Christian Community in an Unstable Age (Brazos).
22
and temporarily disproportionate reason for a couple to wed,
marriage channels that energy and desire for closeness into the
sealing of a thousand other bonds of mutual regard and mutual support. This is the unitive dimension of marriage. Then,
building on this foundation, a marriage becomes generative or
fruitful. As spouses support one another they contribute to a
still larger community, prototypically through procreation and
child rearing but also in their respective and shared vocations
on behalf of the common good beyond themselves.
It is in this sense that the Pauline remark turns out not to be
just about quenching lust after all. “To burn” may stand for all
the ways that we human beings, left to ourselves, live only for
ourselves, our own pleasures, and our own survival. By contrast, “to marry” may signal the way that all of us (even those
who do so in a vocation of lifelong celibacy) learn to bend our
desires away from ourselves, become vulnerable to the desires
of others, and bend toward the service of others.
This is a good thing for all.
In the fifth century of Christianity, Augustine defined three
chief “goods of marriage”: permanence, faithfulness, and fruitfulness (sacramenti, fidei, prolis). When ancient church leaders
associated faithfulness mainly with the Pauline solution for
lust, they were citing only one of three goods or purposes.
Likewise, Christian interpreters today may continue to see
procreation and child rearing as the prototypical expression of
fruitfulness, but not as the only one. Every Christian marriage
should face outward in hospitality and service to others.
Together with permanence, therefore, faithfulness has come
to stand for all the ways that couples bind their lives together.
Spouses do not practice faithfulness only by giving their bodies exclusively to one another in sexual intimacy, but by together changing dirty diapers and washing dirty dishes, by promising long and tiring care amid illness and aging, by offering
small favors on very ordinary days.
In comparison, Paul’s stated reason for marriage seems
crass and primal. If controlling sexual desire is the only reason
someone marries, then that desire may invite unhealthy or abusive sexual practices. If one partner sees the other primarily as
a tool for satisfying lust, he or she is treating the other more as
an object than as one truly beloved. Yet although marriage
must be much more than this, the primal creaturely realities of
marriage do not lose their relevance or foundational function.
Social conservatives are right to say that marriage and family are building blocks of society. Family is the place where children are cared for, learn care for others, and thus learn discipline and civility. But first good parents and would-be parents
aid and care for one another as spouses.
If family is foundational for society, then marriage is the
foundation for family. It is the place where spouses cement the
habits, disciplines, and virtues of mutual care that we hope they
began learning in their families of origin. Amid the daily ordinary, they forge a life together “for better or for worse, for richer or for poorer, in sickness and in health, ’til death do us part.”
Even when sexual desire is an overwhelming motivation
F
ar from being only an embarrassing textual artifact,
Paul’s remark encodes the entire civilizational story of
marriage. Anthropologists and paleontologists have various theories of how marriage began—whether roving men
needed the resources of women more or whether childbearing
women needed the protection of men more, how sexual
exchange sealed and contributed to other exchanges of scarce
resources or kinship, and so on. Whatever the case, one can
hardly imagine civilization beginning to form at all without the
fusion and coordination of cultures of women and men. Even
today major social problems result when entire populations,
especially of men, live lives that are unattached, except perhaps through the male camaraderie of gangs and soldiering.
This may be the truth behind the claim that men require the
domesticating influence of women. To be sure, that claim has
too often served to keep women in domestic roles, limit them
to certain kinds of jobs, or cut them off from education and
23
Christian Century October 29, 2014
that are not fatally flawed, when their ‘needs’ don’t seem to be
met at that moment.”
Obviously a legal or even a sacramental wedding is not a
guarantee of sustained and sustaining marital bonds.
Heterosexual divorce rates make that all too clear. The culture
of contingency can seep into and corrode marital bonds even
in what seem to be the strongest of marriages.
“But,” said Brooks, “marriage makes us better than we
deserve to be.” So those who care deeply about the sanctity of
marriage should resist the culture of contingency both by
removing obstacles to marriage and by insisting on the link
between healthy loving sexual practice and marriage.
Brooks proposed that the conservative course is not to banish gay people from marriage. “We shouldn’t just allow gay
marriage,” he wrote. “We should insist on gay marriage. We
self-development. And even where the claim seems to have
evidence behind it, cultural patterns have varied so much
through history and across cultures that it is hard to know what
the precise take-home lesson should be for any given household, much less any given society.
It’s better to focus on the work that all spouses must do to
grow in habits of mutual regard, mutual support, and a shared
vocation of service to others. It is this work that in turn works
on them. It is this ordinary work of ordinary life that makes it
“better to marry than to burn,” whatever one’s culture, household division of labor, gender, or sexual orientation.
New York Times columnist David Brooks put this well in his
2003 column “The Power of Marriage.” “If women really
domesticated men, heterosexual marriage wouldn’t be in crisis,” said Brooks. “In truth, it’s moral commitment, renewed
every day through faithfulness, that ‘domesticates’ all people.”
The real crisis of marriage in modern societies, argued Brooks,
is a “culture of contingency.” Having learned through millions of
consumer decisions to hold up individual choice as the highest
value, modern humans take consumeristic habits of mind into
even the most intimate of human relationships. Youthful sexual
experimentation and adult promiscuity are hardly new, but modern mores and media have transformed perennial temptations
into cultural expectations. Even people who hope to marry for
life will “shop around” first, trying on sexual partners before
committing. And though they may approximate the institution of
marriage through cohabitation, even stable relationships may
retain the dimension of a “trial marriage.”
Within this culture of contingency, as Brooks notes, many
enter into marriage as “an easily canceled contract . . . Men and
women are quicker to opt out of marriages, even marriages
Marriage does not need to be
redefined for gays.
should regard it as scandalous that two people could claim to
love each other and not want to sanctify their love with marriage and fidelity.”
In other words, some of the best reasons to support samesex marriage turn out to be deeply conservative ones. This suggests how the Pauline remark might provide the church with a
framework for proclaiming a message of good news for all
sides. It offers good news for those who are deeply concerned
that we continue to hallow the institution of marriage as the
only appropriate place for intimate sexual union. And it offers
good news for those who are deeply concerned that people of
same-sex orientation be allowed equal opportunity to flourish
as human beings—that the covenanted bonds of sexual intimacy play just as much of a role in their lives.
It’s also good news that marriage need not be redefined for
gays and lesbians. Marriage can and should remain a covenant
and a forming of the one flesh of kinship, rather than a mere
contract forming a mere partnership. Unfortunately, when
advocates of same-sex marriage dismiss critics who insist that
society needs a clear definition, they often default to a definition of marriage that is more impoverished than they intend it
to be. As Brooks observed, they sometimes make gay marriage
“sound like a really good employee benefits plan.”
Marriage will indeed be subject to endless reinvention
unless we recognize it as more than a contract. Instead we
should recognize and insist that marriage is the communally
sealed bond of lifelong intimate mutual care between two people that creates humanity’s most basic unit of kinship, thus
allowing human beings to build sustained networks of society.
Procreation will always be the prototypical sign of a widening kinship network. But as spouses in any healthy marriage
know, including infertile ones, kinship is already being formed
in tender, other-directed sexual pleasuring. Such pleasure
bonds a couple by promising and rewarding all the other ways
of being together in mutual care and service through days,
The Feast of All Souls
November 2
The dead visited this morning: sisters,
parents, aunts and uncles, old professors
and friends—faces so vivid they again
appeared in my room through memory’s lens.
Did families stage a yard sale later
in the Catholic cemetery on Common,
a table set up in the center, orange water
cooler in view? But I am mistaken.
It’s All Souls Day when people assemble
to clean the crumbling graves and to honor
their dead, whose remnant bones sometimes tumble
from ancient crypts, although their souls have soared
like skeins of starlings, whose sudden flight
in sunlight dyes wings a shimmer of white.
Stella Nesanovich
Christian Century October 29, 2014
24
that seem to legitimate purity codes. They’ll have to open
themselves to the possibility that modern science, fresh historical study, and cultural studies require a more complex understanding of what our nature has been all along.
Yet they can welcome this stretching and this framework
because it answers their deepest and most legitimate concerns.
Our culture often seems to take promiscuity for granted.
Although social conservatives may not be the only ones who
worry about the hook-up culture of recreational sex, the wider
culture expects people to practice a kind of slow-motion
promiscuity. Adultery is still considered wrong for married couples, and couples that are dating or “together” should have sex
only with each other, but partners are expected to check out
sexual compatibility as part of a tentative, exploratory commitment. A succession of sexual partners is thus seen as normal, as
long as each relationship is at least vaguely “committed.”
This culture of contingency troubles many of us, and some
react negatively to homosexuality or same-sex sexual activity
because it seems to them the final breakdown of boundaries
and propriety. Gays and lesbians rightly object to the implication that they are especially promiscuous. But at least within
debates over same-sex marriage, they lose nothing by stipulating the concern, if only for argument’s sake. After all, any confirmation of a greater tendency toward promiscuity among
certain demographics, probably male, would provide more
support for same-sex marriage!
years, and decades. The tragedy of abusive sex is that it uses
this capacity only to take pleasure. And the tragedy of noncovenanted sex is that it forms this deep bond only to tear it
apart. Even committed cohabitation leaves an asterisk of contingency on bonds of kinship, either by attempting commitment individualistically and without communal accountability,
or by openly treating the relationship as a trial.
All of this, both the tragic and the good, can be said of both
heterosexual and same-sex sexuality and marriage. And saying
it in a single account with a single standard is one of the best
things the church can do to strengthen all marriages.
Y
es, Paul’s remark requires both advocates and opponents of same-sex marriage to do some uncomfortable
rethinking. Thankfully, Paul has given us a biblical
warrant for letting experience stretch us, for recognizing that
exceptions may sometimes be legitimate, and for returning our
focus to what is the good and the better.
Obviously this will stretch those who have been certain that
the Bible and natural law unambiguously rule out sex and marriage except between a man and a woman. They will have to
take seriously the argument that the Bible never considered
the prospect of monogamous covenanted same-sex relationships. They will have to accept a biblical hermeneutic that gives
greater weight to God’s invitation to people whom even the
apostles considered unclean and less weight to contested texts
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Christian Century October 29, 2014
The stretching that’s required is also an opportunity. Gays
and lesbians might say something like this: “Part of the injustice of the past is that we have not had good options for chaste
courtship, socially and ecclesially supported marriage, or
authentically chosen celibacy. Together these would have given
us the opportunities that straight people have had to explore
their sexual identities without extra pressure for sexual experimentation outside of marriage. Escaping this tragic injustice
allows us to reaffirm that God intends active sexuality to take
place uniquely within marriage. Discarding excuses for refusing to bless same-sex relationships goes hand-in-hand with discarding excuses for sex outside of marriage, straight or gay.”
In this view, marriage is not simply an oppressive institution
to be dismissed as heterosexist. As a heterosexual I recognize
that I cannot help but write this from outside the direct experience of gays and lesbians. But surely this is implicit in the
entire social and legal movement for recognition of same-sex
marriage. All sides will be helped if all sides can affirm this.
An area of consensus begins to emerge: a chief reason for
our uncertainty about gay promiscuity is that for a long time
gays and lesbians had no culturally recognized or legally protected paths by which to develop healthy sexual relationships.
Within the church they could not even embrace a celibate
vocation with a fully human yes because no other healthy and
recognized option was available to them. If they’ve been left to
“burn,” as Paul said, it’s because they could not marry.
Extending the blessing of marriage to same-sex couples will
in fact counter the culture of contingency and promiscuity
among heterosexuals as well as gays and lesbians. The blessing
to all may encourage marriage among heterosexuals—my wife
and I have both heard straight young people say that they hesitate or even refuse to marry until marriage is available to their
gay and lesbian friends. And while a complex array of social
and economic factors contributes to increased rates of cohabi-
Marriage challenges the
culture of contingency.
I
f this proposed framework for a churchwide consensus feels
like a grand compromise, that in itself is not a bad thing.
Uncomfortable concessions can be a sign of having listened
deeply to one another. And anything that allows Christians to
engage society together through a positive and reconciled witness rather than defensive postures will be welcome.
But I believe this is much more than a compromise. It brings
us together in the biblical witness and wisdom of Paul himself.
It allows the church to make its teaching on the nature and
sanctity of marriage clearer. And it allows us to turn our energies to working on the real challenges to marriage in our age.
It would be foolish to claim that this framework alone will
resolve everything. Easy access to pornography, the hook-up
culture, and media portrayals of recreational sex as the norm
are difficult to counter. The social expectations that are producing ever more exorbitant wedding events do not get the
attention they deserve.
The widening practice of cohabitation is vexing in another
way. Young people hesitating to vow themselves to one another permanently are perpetuating the culture of contingency
even though they have often been its victims—for example, as
children of divorce. And even if the contingency of cohabitation makes lasting relationships somewhat less likely, it does
approximate and thus honor marriage in some ways.
So the church and its leaders need great pastoral wisdom to
do two things simultaneously:
tation, withholding the blessing of marriage to gays and lesbians hardly helps. If cohabitation is the only way for them to
live in monogamous covenanted relationships, then it becomes
a more prominent, increasingly normalized model of relative
faithfulness. If Christians are going to continue to insist that
public accountability within communal support systems is an
essential condition for greater and more permanent faithfulness, then weddings should be open to all.
M
eanwhile, those who’ve advocated for same-sex marriage chiefly in the language of rights and freedoms
will also be stretched. They will have to acknowledge
that their opponents have rightly pressed for a clear definition
of marriage and provide much better answers. After all, one
cannot really recognize a right to something without knowing
what it is.
Furthermore, it stretches many in our culture to recognize
that the fullness of human freedom is to be found in capacity
and not simply in autonomy. In other words, freedom requires
more than mere license or freedom from restriction. It also
requires the skills, habits, and virtues to live well and richly—
freedom for. In turn, the freedom of capacity requires a formation that includes discipline. (Think here of all that’s required
to develop the freedom to play virtuoso piano or excel as an
athlete.) Advocates of same-sex marriage should reaffirm that
the discipline of chastity, in preparation for the discipline of
marital fidelity, is actually freeing.
Yet they too can welcome this stretching and this framework because it answers their deepest and most legitimate concerns—it opens up equal access to marriage and acknowledges
the need to correct for limited understandings of the nature of
same-sex orientation. It acknowledges the painful injustices.
Then it welcomes the opportunity for all to thrive, not as gay
or straight, “queer” or “normal,” but as human beings who
need to find life-giving forms of personal intimacy.
• Walk back from the culture of contingency by explaining
and insisting in fresh ways that God intends for active
sexuality to belong uniquely to marriage.
• Work compassionately with those who have embraced
the relative fidelity of cohabitation, even if they have not
yet moved to embrace a covenant of marriage or a vocation of celibacy.
If we aim for these two goals, Christians will be better able
to speak clearly and work energetically because together we’ll
affirm that marriage is good—for everyone.
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Christian Century October 29, 2014