Barth on marriage (some notes from CD III/4)

Over the past few weeks, I have been teaching on a diverse range of subjects – childhood, worship, disability, religious pluralism, and marriage. On each occasion, Uncle Karl has never been too far away. I found his section on marriage in CD III/4 (pp. 225–29) to be a particularly fruitful launching pad. For those who may be interested, here’s a wee summary of that section:

1. Marriage is treated by Barth under the rubric of the divine command. This implies that marriage’s eventuality ‘must have the character of a responsible act outwards in relation to those around’.
2. The material significance of the institutional and formal side of marriage ‘is an event and its substance a reality in virtue of which the two partners thus joined together enter and come to stand in a new and different relationship to those around them, and the latter in turn must adopt a new relationship to them. In relationship to others they are no longer these two individuals. They are now a married couple’.
3. This transition of the couple ‘from affection to love and marriage’ means a change in their place in the ‘framework of the civil and ecclesiastical society to which they belong’. Married, they are now ‘a new life-cell’ in a wider societal structure, a ‘distinct and special circle, a family, a new sociological unity which can be broadened by the addition of children’.
4. Those who enter and live in marriage make a ‘decision’ which has necessary social consequences, effects and implications: ‘Marriage cannot and will not be carried through as a purely private undertaking. Even the smallest cottage of the happiest of lovers cannot be habitable inside unless it has at least a door and a few windows opening outwards. At some point it finds itself implicated in affinities and friendships as part of the Christian and civil community … Marriage would not be marriage were it not for the willingness and readiness to undertake such active participation in the nearer, the more distant and the most distant events of the surrounding contemporary world’.
5. Marriage is not a license or ‘permission to establish an egoistic partnership of two persons, but a new and special commitment to such active participation, in which it may and must be significant and fruitful, an outward witness and help, as the inner fellowship of these two persons, and in which it may in its own place and manner be a factor in human history’.
6. Those who decide to be married may ‘not shrink from this responsibility. And those who wish to live and not languish in marriage will have to take this responsibility in all seriousness’.
7. ‘This outward responsibility of marriage is symbolised in its external form, and from this standpoint it includes the institutional act and status of marriage’.
8. But a wedding does not make or constitute a marriage: ‘the equation of marriage with the wedding ceremony is a dreadful and deep-rooted error. Two people may be formally married and fail to live a life which can seriously be regarded as married life. And it may happen that two people are not married and yet in their precarious way live under the law of marriage. A wedding is only the regulative confirmation and legitimation of a marriage before and by society. It does not constitute marriage’. Barth considers such confusion as ‘the fundamental mistake in the traditional doctrine of marriage’: ‘It despises love, with all the inevitable consequences, because in relation to the genesis of marriage it looks only outwards to the institutional character of marriage, to the actual ceremony, to the formal decision bound up with marriage. From this standpoint it necessarily regards, love as an alien, easily painful, imponderable and probably rather dangerous element. But from this standpoint it cannot without legalism and artificiality vindicate its true and justifiable concern with regard to marriage. From institutional marriage as such there is naturally no way to love, nor to full, exclusive, lasting fellowship in marriage. Above all, the institution in itself offers not the smallest guarantee that a marriage is concluded in responsibility before God. But now that we have dissociated ourselves from this doctrine of marriage which is essentially a doctrine of the wedding ceremony, it is time to give it its due’.
9. This does not mean, however, the privitisation of marriage. Indeed, founding of a new sociological unit in the human demands ‘public advertisement and recognition, and a definite form’: ‘How can two persons try to achieve this transition without confessing themselves to the world around as two who have become one, acknowledging their obligation towards it? And how can they try to be a couple without coming forward and acting in society as such, and without being addressed and treated as such from without?’
10.  It is proper therefore that the wider society recognises the creation of a ‘new sociological unit’ and ‘makes possible their special life’. Those who would be married ought to be prepared to make a ‘public confession of their marriage and desire public confirmation of it’.
11. Such public confession takes three forms – domestic, legal and ecclesiastical – none of which is able to underlie or guarantee the inner reality of marriage as a mutual understanding of the two partners, nor can they secure the essential reality of the couple’s outward relationship, their responsibility before society and active share in its life. ‘The institution in all its forms is only the means of this understanding – an instrument subject to historical variation in its forms, limited in its externality, and unable to bring about the actual approval of a marriage by all the members of the surrounding society. Nevertheless, in spite of its limitations, it is an unambiguous and indeed the only unambiguous means of achieving this understanding. That is the reason why those who desire marriage must be prepared to respect this institution and to desire its order and protection, i.e., not the constitution but the declaration of marriage by the wedding ceremony’.
12. The domestic aspect of marriage normally signifies (for young couples, in particular) a broadening of the relationship in which they stand to their parents as children. ‘It is this which justifies parents in having a part in this act, or the way to it, and obliges children to consult their parents in the matter … Marriage without an understanding with the parents is always an audacious undertaking, and without their consent, or at least an attempt to secure it, will usually be unsuccessful. But in this matter the understanding can only have the character of an intensive – and, if the parents are shrewd, not too intensive– counselling, not of command, prohibition or obligatory obedience. The “Honour thy father and mother” is defined and limited by the fact that the parents are now confronted by respectful and teachable but adult and free [persons], and that even the most well meaning of parents can neither give nor take away from their children what constitutes marriage as marriage – the gift and task of married life-fellowship and the love which lies at the basis of marriage together with its responsibility before God’.
13. The legal side of marriage. True to the Reformed tradition, Barth believes that the state’s demands of notification, ratification and official proclamation of ‘a real marriage’ are legitimate and that the state’s authority ought to be respected by the contracting parties in this matter marriage. But ‘even the declaration of the state cannot constitute marriage. According to the valid and effective formula, it can only declare it to be concluded. It is concluded in heaven by God and on earth by the married couple’. Those, therefore, who seek to be married ‘must’, in Barth’s words, ‘also desire its legal conditions and consequences and therefore its official enactment’. Then in the fine print, which is often the locus of Barth’s hidden gems, Barth states: ‘It should be urged on state officials that they ought to confine themselves to the legal aspect and not invest it with a pseudo-religious character’.
14. The ecclesiastical side. Here Barth insists not only that ‘the conclusion of a Christian marriage has the character of an event in the Christian community’, even though church weddings are  not ‘unconditionally demanded either by a biblical direction or by the nature of the case’, but also that ‘the so-called marriage altar is a free invention of the flowery speech of modern religion. In its present-day form this ecclesiastical action is a survival from the time when the Church and its law took the place of the law of the state and therefore – to the great detriment of its own task – equated its law, i.e., its understanding of what is right before God, with the law of the state, the independence of which was at that time not realised. In obscure vacillation between an act of law and one of pastoral care it is thus widely enacted on and even beyond the border line of what is justifiable in the Christian community. In its presentday form and constitution, it is no less questionable, both from the Christian and the general standpoint, than other occasional offices such as confirmation and burial’. Barth’s logic here is precisely why I – as a minister – no longer agree to be party to the so-called ‘signing of the register’ in weddings. Not only do I reject the notion of the church functioning in a reduced ministry as the state’s (unpaid) chaplain, but also, and more importantly, as Barth rightly points out, the distinction between law and pastoral care, and, we might add, between law and prophecy, is blurred ‘beyond the border line of what is justifiable in the Christian community’.
15. The Church can only say that ‘it is of importance to make clear in some special formal way the responsibility of a marriage concluded in the sight of God as a responsibility before the Christian community’. While Barth concedes that ‘the right form in which to do this has still to be found’, he is unyielding that regardless of form, ‘it must be completely divested of the character of a religious doublet to the civil ceremony. It should honestly assume the character of a pastoral exhortation – not the first, but the final and public one – concerning the conclusion of marriage, of a declaration of the union of these two members, to which the community must respond with a reminder of God’s promise and command and a proclamation of the divine blessing. Such an exhortation needs to be freed from all ambiguous connexion with the social festivity of the marriage celebrations and integrated with or plainly annexed to the regular worship of the community’.
16. There remains ‘the decisive fact, with or without the emphasis of a special sacramental action, that the contracting of a marriage has a spiritual implication and obligation’, and this not only in relation to God, but also in relation of people, and therefore to the Christian community.
17. ‘The conclusion and existence of a marriage honours or dishonours, promotes or disturbs, edifies or scandalises the whole community. It requires the faith, the preaching, the intercession, the understanding and loving interest of the latter. It is an affair of the community and not merely of the married couple. If the declaration of this commitment and obligation cannot be a legal action like the corresponding declaration in the case of the state, it must yet be considered that if the latter is to be seriously effective and powerful it presupposes the existence of this spiritual and ecclesiastical tie and obligation. And although this spiritual tie and obligation cannot be created or guaranteed by any declaration – and the marriage itself certainly cannot be constituted by what takes place between the married couple and the community – the credal declaration of a marriage to the community and the responsive declaration of the latter cannot be evaded in some form, perhaps extremely unpretentious. The event of a marriage in its full bearing on the mutual relationship between the community and the couple must be presented in some way no less to the former than to the latter’.

An anniversary

Today, Judy and I celebrated our wedding anniversary. Ten years ago, we made public vows to one another to ‘establish our marriage in the cross of Christ’, we shared in our first holy communion together as partners-in-covenant, and then we enjoyed another meal together with family and friends, some of whom we still keep in touch with.

Though this morning’s news that parts of the recently-opened Mediterranean Garden at the Dunedin Botanic Garden had again been vandalised left something of a cloud over an already-cloudy Dunedin day, it was good to pack the troops into the ute and drive down to the Taieri Mouth where we sat in the car, ate home-made salami Caesar salad out of old ice-cream containers, drink a bottle of cheap-but-Aussie Cabernet Sauvignon out of chipped plastic picnic glasses, and enjoy knowing that the downpour which was blurring our view of the Taieri River at its low and muddy tide was also filling our near-empty water tank at home. I think we also broke the record in how many knock-knock ‘jokes’ (I use the word loosely) a perfect four-year-old daughter and her besotted-father can author in an afternoon. Samuel appeared unimpressed. A stop at Pier 24 – for hot chocolate, a fluffy and a barely-passable flat white – on the way home was required by all, and was ruined only by watching the seagulls defecate all over the car that I’d just washed for the first time in twelve months. It’s not like they don’t have anywhere else to void excrement from their little sand- and chip-filled bowels!

We decided that dinner tonight would be at one of our favourite eating holes – Fleurs Place. It was a good choice. We began with seafood chowder, and scallops (from Nelson) cooked with mushroom and locally-cured bacon. Then came the main course: a whole blue cod, baked, and served with locally-grown vegetables and four additional fish fillets – sole, moki, gurnard and more blue cod – lightly pan-fried and served with chilli, coconut and coriander. Good Central Otago wine and an appropriate amount of pilsner accompanied a conversation in which gratitude, joy and hope recurred as dominant themes. It’s often hard, but it’s good to love, to keep loving, and to share together in the hope of love’s great victory. There was no room left for dessert.

The drive home was slow, as after-dinner driving should be. The heavy fog on the highway had by now largely lifted, or was blown away. We talked more, and wondered about these two poems by RS Thomas:

Anniversary
Nineteen years now
Under the same roof
Eating our bread,
Using the same air:
Sighing, if one sighs,
Meeting the other’s
Words with a look
That thaws suspicion.

Nineteen years now
Sharing life’s table,
And not to be first
To call the meal long
We balance it thoughtfully
On the tip of the tongue.
Careful to maintain
The strict palate.

Nineteen years now
Keeping simple house.
Opening the door
To friend and stranger;
Opening the womb
Softly to let enter
The one child
With his huge hunger.

– RS Thomas, ‘Anniversary’, in Collected Poems, 1945–1990 (London: Dent, 1993), 103.

A Marriage

We met
under a shower
of bird-notes.
Fifty years passed,
love’s moment
in a world in
servitude to time.
She was young;
I kissed with my eyes
closed and opened
them on her wrinkles.
‘Come.’ said death,
choosing her as his
partner for
the last dance. And she,
who in life
had done everything
with a bird’s grace,
opened her bill now
for the shedding
of one sigh no
heavier than a feather.

– RS Thomas, ‘A Marriage’, in Collected Poems, 1945–1990 (London: Dent, 1993), 533.

 

 

William Stringfellow, Instead of Death – Part III

Chapter Three of Instead of Death is titled ‘Sex and the Search for Self’. Here, the issue is not pleasure or lust but concerns personal identity under the Word of God. Stringfellow’s thesis here is that ‘the search for self is the most characteristic aspect of sex’ (p. 37). And this too is the ‘very theme of the gospel’ (p. 38). Throughout this chapter, he makes the ‘radical’ assumption that people both inside and outside the church are doing it, and nearly doing it, and that sexuality is an element of every human transaction or communication, even when nothing happens to ‘dramatize the fact’. And so he laments the ‘conventional denunciations’ of sex heard so often in the church – of sex as sin and as some something ‘foul or dirty or animalistic’. ‘Nothing that has ever been done in a bedroom, in the back seat of a car, or, for that matter, in a brothel is beyond the scope of the gospel and, therefore, beyond the Church’s care for the world. The fantasies, fears, and fairy tales associated with sex must be dispelled so that, within the Church, sex is admitted, discussed, and understood with intelligence, maturity, compassion, and, most of all, a reverence for the ministry of Christ in restoring human life to human beings’ (pp. 38–9). Stringfellow returns to play this melody later on, this time in regard to pornography and its associated secrecy:

‘If sex in all of its meanings, practices, and rituals is not in the open – frankly recognized, intelligently considered, and compassionately dealt with – then what is to be expected except that sex will be the subject of gossip, rumor, escapism, fantasy, and the lure of that which is forbidden? Recourse to pornography among adolescents is, as far as I can discern, far less the consequence of racketeer activities or abnormal adolescent preoccupation with sex than of the fear of candor about sex among adults, including parents and pastors’. (p. 50)

Stringfellow rightly names the heresy called ‘Christian marriage’ as a ‘vain, romantic and unbiblical’ concept, as pure fiction, and as ridiculous as the notion of a ‘Christian nation’ or a ‘Christian lawyer’ or a ‘Christian athlete’, or, we might add, ‘Christian music’. What might a ‘Christian’ crotchet look and sound like?! These are, like marriage, realities of the fallen life of the world, inherently secular, and subject to the power of death. ‘They are’, Stringfellow writes, ‘aspects of the present, transient, perishing existence of the world’ (p. 41). That clergy are licensed by the State to perform the functions of a civil magistrate only adds to the confusion about ‘Christian marriage’, and, Stringfellow claims, ‘greatly compromises the discretion of the clergy as to whom they shall marry’ (p. 42).

Wipf & Stock have offered readers of Per Crucem ad Lucem 40% off the retail price of any of the Stringfellow volumes. To obtain the 40% discount, just include the coupon code STRINGFELLOW with your order.

Sex and Human Existence (or, Engaging Sex in the Right Places)

Halden’s and Ben’s recent posts on sex and personhood reminded me of Ray Anderson’s essay ‘Bonding Without Bondage’ (in On Being Family: A Social Theology of the Family). Anderson’s essay is on marriage, and begins by identifying a subtle but important distinction between a ‘theological’ view (i.e. that determined by theology proper and its Gospel shape) and an ‘ethical’ view (i.e. that determined by appeals to natural law) of marriage. The former is that held by Karl Barth, the latter by Emil Brunner. Anderson recalls that for Brunner marriage is not good in se, but only as it provides the optimum containment for what is otherwise unbridled impulse. For Brunner, sexuality is sanctified only through marriage, unless one chooses total abstinence. In other words, Brunner suggests that the erotic sexual impulse is an ‘unnatural’ and ‘unbridled biological instinct’ which can only be consecrated through marriage, or the ethical demand of abstinence (Love and Marriage, 183, 195). Barth, conversely, contends that human sexuality is a determination of human existence as the image and likeness of God and thus exists prior to, and independent of, marriage as a true order.

Anderson highlights that whereas for Brunner sexuality is sanctified as an ethical existence under the command of God only in the marriage relation, for Barth the command of God sanctifies human persons by including their sexuality within their humanity. In other words, the sexual relation of woman and man has already been constituted a true order of humanity, as an integral part of total humanity as male and female. Marriage, therefore, however conceived, integrates sexuality into total humanity.

Anderson observes that Brunner’s position of human sexuality ad extra to human personhood has serious consequences for understanding the role of sexuality in the case of the unmarried person as well as for a discussion of the matter of homosexuality. If we follow Brunner and understand the married couple as the basic model of man and woman as a community of love and all other relations as peripheral to it, then marriage will be offered as the highest – if not the only – possibility for authentic personhood. If, on the other hand, we follow Barth that humanity as determined by God is cohumanity, existing concretely as either male or female, then marriage (however conceived) is seen not as a ‘containment’ of that which has no other ethical point of reference, but as the ‘contextualizing’ of that which comes to expression in the total encounter of persons.

One of the main points that Anderson seeks to bring home is that the divine command (‘What God has joined together …’) does not take place behind our backs, independent of human response and recognition. While marriage is grounded in God’s covenant love, it involves the mutual recognition, choice, and commitment of two people who are brought together by God in covenant partnership. God joins together actually as well as theoretically. God joins together in and by the encounter and decision of the two who form the union: not only on the basis of this human act of love but coincidental with it and as its objective validation. What begins as affection and feelings of love is absorbed into personal will expressed as commitment in marriage (with or without ‘a wedding’).

According to Barth, love, in contradistinction to mere affection,

‘may be recognised by the fact that it is determined, and indeed determined upon the life-partnership of marriage. Love does not question; it gives an answer. Love does not think; it knows. Love does not hesitate; it acts. Love does not fall into raptures; it is ready to undertake responsibilities. Love puts behind it all the Ifs and Buts, all the conditions, reservations, obscurities and uncertainties that may arise between a man and a woman. Love is not only affinity and attraction; it is union. Love makes these two persons indispensable to each other’. (CD III.4, 221)

Of course, one could – and indeed should – ask, what has love got to do with it?

Still, while certain to set marriage within the absolute determination of divine command, Anderson is equally concerned to not set marriage above the reality and practice of human existence. In this way, he avoids the idealism(s) often associated with marriage. He also notes that marriage can never be the solution to problems of personal unhappiness or loneliness. It can never be the relational horizon within which one expects to meet all his or her personal needs. Marriage, he contends, offers an expression of love and sexuality not realisable in any other human relationship, but it is no more human than any other human task or relationship. And, in particular, because marriage takes place under the divine command,

‘the sphere of the relationships of man and woman as they are embodied and lived out among us human beings is not simply a labyrinth of errors and failings, a morass of impurity, or a vale of tears at disorder and distress. For by the grace of God … there are always in this sphere individual means of conservation and rescue, of deliverance and restoration, assured points and lines even where everything seems to vacillate and dissolve, elements of order in the midst of disorder … And if there is no perfect marriage, there are marriages which for all their imperfection can be and are maintained and carried through, and in the last resort not without promise and joyfulness, arising with a certain necessity, and fragmentarily, at least, undertaken in all sincerity as a work of free life-fellowship. There is also loyalty even in the midst of disloyalty and constancy amid open inconstancy … Thus even where man does not keep the command, the command keeps man … He who here commands does not only judge and forgive: He also helps and heals’. (CD III.4, 239–40)

Ray Anderson on Marriage

‘Is it impossible for God to work in the life of one who has suffered an irretrievable loss of the “one flesh” relationship in such a way that he cannot or will not join this person together with another in a new marriage? Or, dare we suggest that the command of God can both put to death and raise again persons who experience dissolution of the marriage bond? Would it be too much to paraphrase the words of Jesus and say, “Marriage is made for man and not man for marriage!” If a theology of marriage insists that marriage is a work of God and exists under the command of God, there does seem to be a basis to suggest that in the situation where sinful humanity has experienced brokenness and loss, the commandment of God is the presence of God himself at the center of that person’s life to effect new being and new possibilities. This would be to take the authority of Scripture seriously as directing us to God himself as the one who summons us in Scripture to acknowledge him as the author of life rather than of a “law that kills.”

… Because God joins himself to the temporal social relationship consummated as a marriage and recognized by society and the church, that marriage is indissoluble on any grounds whatsoever other than the command of God. If a marriage comes to the point of utter breakdown so that it is a disorder rather than an order of human relationship, and inherently destructive to the persons involved, one can only seek to bring that relationship under God’s judgment. For Christians, this means that the breakdown of a marriage to the point of utter failure is a betrayal of the covenant love that God has invested in that marriage, and is therefore a sin. To attempt to find legal or moral grounds on which to be excused from the marriage contract is, in our opinion, untenable. The scriptural teaching on marriage and divorce clearly brings the marriage under the judgment of God as the one who has the absolute right of determining its status.

If Christians, and the church, do not have a process to deal with sin and with grace as a work of God, then there will be little hope for those who become victims and casualties of hopeless marriages. But where the work of God is understood as his contemporary presence and power under the authority of Scripture to release those who are in bondage and create a new status where “all things are new,” then the church as the community of Christ will have the courage to say NO to a continued state of disorder and YES to the forgiveness and grace of God that brings persons under a new authority of divine healing and hope. We are speaking here, by analogy, of a “death and resurrection” experience as the work of God in the midst of human lives. To create a “law of marriage” that would deny God the authority and power to put a marriage to death and to raise the persons to new life through repentance and forgiveness would appear to be a desperate and dangerous course of action. What God has joined together, indeed, let not man put asunder. But where God puts asunder as a judgment against sin and disorder, and therefore as his work, let not man uphold a law against God.

… The command of God by which marriage as a human, social relation is given the status of covenant partnership is a positive and rich resource of growth and renewal. What God “joins together” he attends with love and faithfulness. This is a promise and commitment of God himself to the marriage relation as a source of love, healing, and hope. The Christian community participates in this work of God by providing a context of support and enabling grace for each marriage that belongs to the community.

Those who undertake the calling of ministry to families through pastoral care and counseling have as their first priority the ministry of encouragement and support for marriages. This is a constructive and positive reinforcement of marriage and prevents its deterioration into a shell of the love and commitment it is meant to express. God is faithful to weak and problem-plagued marriages – not merely angry at unfaithfulness. God is patient and loving to marriages where love has been lost – not merely angry at our own anger and lovelessness. God is hopeful toward marriages that are ready to crash – not merely angry at our incompetence. God never gives up on his “joining together,” because God is himself the covenant partner of marriage. This produces a bonding that never is allowed to become bondage’. – Ray S. Anderson, ‘Bonding without Bondage’, in Ray S. Anderson and Dennis B. Guernsey, On Being Family: A Social Theology of the Family (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1986), 103–4.

Hauerwas on sex, marriage, politics and love

Jan van Eyck, ‘The Arnolfini Portrait’ (1434). Oil on oak panel of 3 vertical boards; National Gallery, London.

‘The dominant assumption has been that the evaluation of different kinds of sexual expressions should center on whether they are or are not expressive of love. On the contrary, the ethics of sex must begin with political considerations, because ethically the issue of the proper form of sexual activity raises the most profound issues about the nature and form of political community. I am not denying that sex obviously has to do with interpersonal matters, but I am asserting that we do not even know what we need to say about the personal level until we have some sense of the political context necessary for the ordering of sexual activity. Indeed, one of the main difficulties with the assumption that thc ethics of sex can be determined on the basis of interpersonal criteria is the failure to see how that assumption itself reflects a political option. To reduce issues of sexuality to the question of whether acts of sex are or are not fulfilling for those involved is to manifest the assumption of political liberalism that sex is a private matter. The hold this political theory has on us is illustrated by how readily we also accept the assumption that the private nature of sexuality does not involve issues of political theory …

‘We must understand that if Christians and non-Christians differ over marriage, that difference does not lie in their understanding of the quality of interpersonal relationship needed to enter or sustain a marriage, but rather in a disagreement about the nature of marriage and its place in the Christian and national community. Christians above all should note that there are no conceptual or institutional reasons that require love between the parties to exist in order for the marriage to be successful …

The requirement of love in marriage is not correlative to the intrinsic nature of marriage but is based on the admonition for Christians to love one another. We do not love because we are married, but because we are Christian. We may, however, learn what such love is like within the context of marriage. For the Christian tradition claims that marriage helps to support an inclusive community of love by grounding it in a pattern of faithfulness toward another. The love that is required in marriage functions politically by defining the nature of Christian social order, and as children arrive they are trained in that order.

Moreover, Christians should see that the family cannot, contrary to [Bertrand] Russell’s claim, exist as an end in itself nor by itself provide a sufficient check against pretentious rationalism. Such an assumption is but a continuation of the liberal perversion of the family and only makes the family and marriage more personally destructive. When families exist for no reason other than their own existence, they become quasi-churches, which ask sacrifices far too great and for insufficient reasons. The risk of families which demand that we love one another can be taken only when there are sustaining communities with sufficient convictions that can provide means to form and limit the status of the family. If the family does stand as a necessary check on the state, as Russell and I both think it should, it does so because it first has a place in an institution that also stands against the state – the church …

‘ … the ambivalence of the church toward marriage is grounded in the eschatological convictions which freed some from the necessity of marriage – i.e., singleness becomes a genuine option for service to the community. This is a dangerous doctrine indeed, for it is a strange community which would risk giving singleness an equal status with marriage. But that is what the church did, and as a result marriage was made a vocation rather than a natural necessity. But as a vocation, marriage can be sustained only so long as it is clear what purposes it serves in the community which created it in the first place. With the loss of such a community sanction, we are left with the bare assumption that marriage is a voluntary institution motivated by the need for interpersonal intimacy …

‘Many want to treat sex as just another form of communication – like shaking hands. I suppose in response to such a suggestion one can at least point out that sex is often more fun than shaking hands. However, the reason that we seem to assume that sex should be reserved for “special relations” is not that sex itself is special, but that the nature of sex serves the ends of intimacy. But intimacy is indeed a tricky matter to sustain, and that may be the reason why many have argued that marriage is necessary to provide the perduring framework to sustain intimacy.

Moreover, once the political function of marriage is understood to be central for the meaning and institution of marriage, we have a better idea of what kinds of people we ought to be to deal with marriage. Most of the literature that attempts to instruct us about getting along in marriage fails to face up to a fact so clearly true that I have dared to call it Hauerwas’s Law: You always marry the wrong person. It is as important to note, of course, as Herbert Richardson pointed out to me, that the reverse of the law is also true: namely, that you also always marry the right person. The point of the law is to suggest the inadequacy of the current assumption that the success or failure of a marriage can be determined by marrying the “right person.” Even if you have married the “right person,” there is no guarantee that he or she will remain such, for people have a disturbing tendency to change. Indeed, it seems that many so-called “happy marriages” are such because of the partners’ efforts to preserve “love” by preventing either from changing.

This law is meant not only to challenge current romantic assumptions but to point out that marriage is a more basic reality than the interpersonal relations which may or may not characterize a particular marriage. Indeed, the demand that those in a marriage love one another requires that marriage have a basis other than the love itself. For it is only on such a basis that we can have any idea of how we should love’.

- Stanley Hauerwas, ‘Sex and Politics: Bertrand Russell and “Human Sexuality”‘.

The Public Purpose of Marriage

In a recent article entitled ‘Focus on the Public Purpose of Marriage: Protecting Children’, Colleen Carroll Campbell, writes:

‘Battles over same-sex marriage typically turn on arguments about gay rights, judicial activism and views on homosexuality. Absent are answers to a more fundamental question: What is the public purpose of marriage?’

She concludes by asserting that marriage only survives in a culture for as long as a critical mass of the population views it as the socially acceptable context for childbearing and childrearing. When popular support for marriage drops too low and public policy denies the unique value of marriage between a man and a woman as a guarantor of social stability, fewer men and women marry. More children, she argues, are deprived of the presence of their mothers and fathers. Thus marriage ‘no longer serves its civic purpose, which always has been more about defending child welfare than validating adult desires’.

It is only when marriage passes beyond mere consent that it becomes concerned with its real nature as ethical, and so related to matters of family, of kinship, and so of the State. That is why Forsyth argued that we must always bar unions that do not conform to the conditions of the State’s welfare. [I would want to say more here than Forsyth does, especially about the proleptic and prophetic aspects of marriage, and of the life of the church as the foretaste of the kingdom, a life in which all relationship are re-defined]. While it is a lot more, marriage is no less than a social act. The social form, therefore, is not indifferent. Forsyth avers, ‘It is part of the substance. It is a piece of social morality, i.e. of social existence. It is bound up with the safety, honour, and welfare of society’.

Thus what mere civil marriages betray is any sense that the relationship concerns more than the two selves. Forsyth is worth recounting here: ‘If anything is ethical on that universal scale, it has already begun to be more than ethical. On that wide scale, and on such an intimate subject, it becomes also deep and sacred, it becomes religious. Even if you own no more than the religion of Humanity that is so. You cannot treat human society as one whole without your ethic becoming religious. Even the Positivists, since they worship Humanity, treat marriage in their religious ritual as a sacrament. And I do not wonder that the Roman Church treats it so. I do not agree with that Church in so doing, for reasons which would be misplaced here. All I do say is that 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. It may be less than a church sacrament, but it is a moral; it is certainly more than a contract … If not a sacrament, it is a means of grace; and, like every means of grace, it sweetens or hardens according as it is used’.

What Forsyth betrays here in an appreciation that a merely social view of marriage is quite inadequate, even if humanity be all we have in view. Sorry Colleen, but marriage calls for more than social sanction and exists for more (though not less) than ‘defending child welfare’. Marriage calls for divine sanctification (if life do so at all) and exists to bear witness to divine blessing, and to the divine life itself. Forsyth again: ‘If [marriage] means so much for the soul and for society, that is really because it belongs to the Kingdom of God, to the will of the God Who ordered society and its destiny. If it is organic to the structure of society, it is vital to the purpose of God. It is a union which reflects a union deep in the eternal nature of a triune God Himself’.

[There is much that Forsyth fails to say about marriage, and not all that he says will - or should - fly with us today. He was, as we are, a person of his age and who was responding to the pressing questions of his age, and must be read in light of such. This, however, is not to let him off the hook so much as it is to encourage reading beyond the boundaries of his corpus.]

The New Disconnect: Kids and Marriage … and Happiness

‘The nonpartisan Pew Research Center yesterday released an 88-page demographic recap of surveys and interviews of 2,020 adults on the subject of marital satisfaction, including nine factors that make up a happy marriage. In what the report described as “the single most striking finding,” only 41 percent of Americans said children were very important to a successful marriage, a 24 percentage-point drop versus 1990, when 65 percent of Americans described children as very important to a successful marriage. Children still matter – 85 percent of parents with children under 18 described them as a top source of personal fulfillment – but kids are not as integral to a happy marriage’.

Read the entire article here.

The article’s author, Leslie Morgan Steiner, ends her piece by asking her readers, ‘Do your children contribute to the happiness (or unhappiness) of your marriage? Or are the two completely separate as you go about finding “balance” in your life?’

Whatever we make of these findings, one thing remains true. As rich a contribution kids make to our marriages, they ought never be the foundation or the glue of the relationship. One day, I hope, Sinead will leave home. That’s one reason (though not the main one) why we can’t allow Sinead to be the centre and be all and end all of our marriage. To be sure, she is a part of our marriage, and always will be. But she is neither its ground nor its goal. And while she contributes significantly to our joy, our joy is not dependent on her. My deepest joy comes from knowing who I am in God. And from that place, I remain convinced that one of the most loving things I can do for Sinead is to love her mother.

I remember once hearing a paper by Prof. Ellen Charry from Princeton on God and the Art of Happiness in which she engaged with Augustine and Aquinas to offer a voice into a much-neglected theme in the Christian tradition concerning the nature and source of happiness (which she distinguished from joy). Her basic thesis is that true happiness requires a certain level of material comfort in order to truly flow, citing Jesus’ concern for one’s physical needs before attending to their spiritual and emotional needs. I suspect she needs to do a lot more (theological) work if her argument is to stick, but it did raise a number of questions for me. Primarily, what is the relationship between happiness and security, whether physical, political, social, material or spiritual? Is a certain level of safety/security a pre-requisite for human happiness? Can one be both anxious and happy? Frightened and happy? What is the relationship between happiness and forgiveness? And happiness and service? And how does a doctrine of eschatological hope relate to the now-and-not-yet of happiness? What is the relationship between communal and individual happiness?

Against much current thinking that assumes that God’s job in life (if one can put it so crudely) is to make us happy, both P T Forsyth and C S Lewis have written eloquently concerning the fact that God does not save us in order to make us happy. He saves us that we might serve and worship and commune with him. Happiness is what happens in the overflow of that loving relationship. It is never the goal itself.

BTW: found this and this today.