Throwback Archives - Page 2 of 2

April 19, 2021April 20, 2021

The Marriage Debate: Why Christians Lost the Argument Before it Began

https://spiritualdirection.com/2014/02/17/must-catholics-marry-in-catholic-ceremonies

Throwback Post:

I think the question of the continuing deification of the state in modern life is an interesting one. Ultimately, winning the argument about traditional marriage (by which I mean both the belief in man-woman marriage and also the indissoluble nature of marriage- i.e., no divorces aside from Jesus’ single exception) is a daunting task for modern Christians. It is a daunting task because even before the debate begins, Christians are faced with the fact that nearly everyone (including Christians themselves) already have a distorted understanding of marriage.

Prior to the modern era, the basic conception of marriage in Judeo-Christian culture was as an Order of Creation and an economic relationship. Since all property was tied up in land, and land was owned by families, marriage was a way of ensuring intelligent and rational means of wealth transference and (depending on the status of the family) political alliances. Theologically speaking as well, love was secondary in the definition of marriage. In Luther’s commentary on Genesis and in the Catechisms, he understands marriage as an Order of Creation established by God that defines the human self in this age. Here Luther echoed Jesus in Matthew.

Luther writes that God designed the world to function according to three estates after the Fall: marriage / family (including economic or civil life), the Church, and the government to curb evil.  Everyone has vocations within these estates.

Similarly, the Roman Catholic Church understands marriage as both an something rooted in creation, and elevated by the order of grace. Though I may disagree with the Roman Catholic definition theologically, the commonality between it and the Lutheran one is clear: marriage is a reality rooted in legal, creational, and economic relationships. It isn’t about the subjective feelings or personal preferences of the participants. People in the pre-modern world, of course, did experience romance and love (it’s a universal human phenomenon), but such realities had only an incidental relationship to marriage. For perspective on this, read some of the medieval chivalric romances: the authors actually assume that love and romance are only incidental to marriage, or in very extreme versions, very nearly impossible within marriage.

Things changed in the 19th century. Since capitalism made wealth transference and generation possible without handing it down through kinship, western European and American society developed a new rationale for marriage. This rationale was companionship and romance, and marriage was therefore redefined as a public ratification of one’s subjective romantic feelings. After this, divorce became more common. Why? Because if one no longer experiences affectionate companionship with one’s spouse then the whole relationship ceases to serve its function. Hence, why not just move on? Of course there were still legal barriers to divorce, but after the 1960s and the advent of no-fault divorce, rates of divorce went off the charts. Moreover, the theory of companionship marriage also made same-sex marriage and other martial arrangements thinkable in new ways. If companionship and romance are the rationale for marriage, then why shouldn’t individuals of the same sex get married since they can obviously experience love and companionship as well as an opposite-sex couple?

This is why the same-sex marriage argument is so powerful in our context, even though at best it’s an exercise in the logical fallacy of “begging the question.” In other words, what advocates for same-sex marriage already assume is that same-sex relationships are the equivalent to heterosexual relationships. Consequently, denying gay men and lesbians the ability to marry is an act of discrimination. Same-sex marriage is a a matter of “marriage equality.” Nevertheless, the question remains: why can the advocates of same-sex marriage assume that there is an equivalency and appeal to this equivalency with such success? Because most assume that marriage is a public ratification of subjective feelings about another person- i.e., companionship marriage. Since most heterosexual individuals in our society already assume this, such an appeal works. If one, for example, believes that marriage is an Order of Creation and tied to specific heterosexual activities, then the argument doesn’t work. Also, if one assumes that marriage ordains certain goods that are tied to the sexual diversity of the persons involved and that these goods remain good irrespective of the subjective feeling of the partners, then the argument also falls apart.

But almost no one still sees marriage as an Order of Creation, and that’s why the same-sex marriage debate is not winnable for Christians in this society: we abandoned the correct understanding of marriage a long time ago. As a result, we can’t appeal to a model of marriage that even conservative Christians unconsciously don’t ascribe to.

This is a revised version of thoughts first posted May 14, 2013.

Image of Luther and the Three Estates from Bryan Wolfmueller, “Thinking Like a Lutheran: The Three Estates (Quotation Collection Post),” World Wide Wolfmueller, July 30, 2016, https://wolfmueller.co/threeestates/.

April 12, 2021April 15, 2021

The Irony of N.T. Wright’s New Perspective Approach to Paul

Throwback Post

If you’re interested in the Apostle Paul, you should definitely pick up a copy of Anglican theologian N. T. Wright’s Paul and the Faithfulness of God. Though I don’t always agree with Wright (particularly on his interpretation of Paul, as we will see below), I do consistently find him to be an engaging author from whom I have learned a great deal.

A dapper N. T. Wright, Bishop of Durham, 2003-2010 and currently a senior research fellow at Oxford’s Wycliffe Hall

A lot of what Wright says criticizes a certain trajectory of scholarship on Paul that begins with a Church historian and biblical scholar named Ferdinand Christian Baur. Baur taught at Tubingen, in southern Germany, during the heyday of Hegelianism (1830s) about twenty years before the movement collapsed in the wake of the failures of the 1848 revolutions. As a result, his interpretation of the New Testament and early Church history tends to mirror Hegelian dialectic. The “thesis” of early Christianity was Jewish Christianity, as represented by Peter. It was legalistic and backward, and generally not that great. Then there was a Gentile Christianity, as represented by Paul. This had a high Christology (as opposed to the Jewish low Christology) and was generally open minded and tolerant. Moreover, Pauline Gentile Christianity pretty much rejected everything Jewish. These two forms of Christianity fought it out over the first few generations, until the the second century, when Luke wrote Acts in order to pretend that although the Apostles might have had some conflicts, they eventually got along (bear in mind, that Baur dated the NT documents mostly from the second century, something that even secular historical research would not accept at this point!). Acts created the beginning of a synthesis between Jewish and Gentile Christianity, which found its fulfillment in John’s Gospel of love (love being the virtue that reconciles). We see this synthesis take final form in what one might call the “early Catholicism” of Church Fathers like Irenaeus. This, of course, was a betrayal of Paul’s theology and “early Catholicism” for Baur is a kind of Christianity that has lost its nerve. So, the Hegelian dialectic goes thesis (Jewish/Petrine Christianity), antithesis (Gentile/Pauline Christianity), synthesis (Johannine/Lukan/early Catholic Christianity). Bam!

March 26, 2021April 15, 2021

The Shape of Christian Life Part 2: Fleeing from God not Preached to God Preached

Throwback Post Part 2:

Within this situation, what is the Christian to do? Luther tells us that the revealed God of the gospel (the God of grace) is God’s real self, despite what might be considered evidence to the contrary! When we approach God hidden, or God under his masks of law, we can only find condemnation—something actually alien to God in his proper nature (opus alienum). Consequently, we should flee from the God of hiddenness and wrath, to the God of grace. In other words, we must flee from God not preached to God preached. Nevertheless, if both are God, how do we know that God preached is the more authentic of the two? In the Galatians commentary, Luther talks about God in his hiddenness and wrath condemning and destroying Jesus who bears the sins of the world. The law (in a sense) tries to destroy the promise by condemning Jesus who has entered into solidarity with those under the God of hiddenness and wrath. In spite of this, Jesus atones for sin, undoes the power of the law, and reveal God’s true heart. Jesus (the revealed God of grace) has gone up against the hidden God of wrath and law and come out the other side victorious. Therefore, those who are united with him by faith can also share in his victory and therefore have nothing to fear from God not preached.

Faith clings to the revealed God against the hidden God, and therefore the shape of the Christian life is one of trust and flight from one to the other. This can be observed throughout the history of salvation. God establishes his relationship with Adam and Eve through two trees—the tree of life and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. God attaches his promise to all the trees of the garden as means of mediating the good to Adam and Eve (“you may eat…”). He gives them the tree of life as a sacrament of immortality. Nonetheless, he also establish the tree of the knowledge of good and evil as an alternative to the means of his grace. This was not a test (as John of Damascus and John Wesley have argued), or a means of earning their glorification (as Reformed Federal theology argues), but rather a manifestation of the irrationality of God not preached. In other words, the tree is in a sense inexplicable. Why put the possibility of becoming evil in the midst of the good creation? It is a mystery, a manifestation of the hidden God. Nevertheless, it was also formative of the obedience of Adam and Eve, which ultimately constituted a sacrifice of praise to God, as Luther argues. Because Adam and Eve found God not preached in the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, the structure of their believing existence was the flight from God not preached (that is, the God of destructive condemnation) to God preached (that is, his manifestation in the other trees of the garden and the tree of life). Adam and Eve only entered into sin and condemnation when they sought God not preached and ignored God as manifested to them in his Word.

March 24, 2021April 15, 2021

The Shape of Christian Life Part 1: God in His Masks

Throwback Post Part 1:

Before his death, Luther claimed that The Bondage of the Will (BOW) and the Catechisms were the only things that he had written that were worth reading. What I’m interested in focusing on here is Luther’s constant refrain in the discussion of the Ten Commandments that “we should fear and love so that…” How should we take this? If we follow Luther’s own words as a hermeneutical key (namely that the BOW and the Catechism are his best works and therefore a definitive representation of his thinking), “fearing and loving” should be understood in terms of Luther’s own dialectic of the hidden and revealed God.

For those unfamiliar, in BOW Luther speaks of God preached and God not preached. If we look at creation as a whole as a sphere of God’s activity, the logic of God’s action, especially during a pandemic, will appear incomprehensible to us. Whereas God in his revelation in Word and sacrament states “I will not delight in the death of the sinner,” God insofar as he works all things certainly does work death to sinners. Of course, he does this for good reason: All are born with original sin. The difficulty is that through his electing will, God approaches some through Word and sacrament. He converts, justifies, and sanctifies them. Yet he does not work faith within others (who are of course no less sinful) and actually works their destruction.