Tag: Orders of Creation

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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/.

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The “Wolf of Wall Street” and the Orders of Creation: Part II

Part 2 of a throwback post from February 8, 2014

From the perspective of Luther’s Genesis Commentary, the idea that the Kingdom of God comes if we fix politics is all wrong.  In his commentary on the primal narrative of human life before the Fall, Luther shows that God established first the Family and then the Church as the original and most authentic setting of human existence.  They were created before the Fall into sin and therefore are not necessarily a response to the condition of human sin.   Rather, they are a natural setting for human life on earth.  These orders only become unworkable on their own after sin arrived on the scene.  Therefore after the Flood, in Genesis 9 God promulgates the new law of retribution, thereby implying the establishment of the Order of the State, as Paul confirms in Romans 13.  Hence, the State and its coercion are not meant as a means of fulfilling human life.  It is, unlike the other Orders, something created in order to counteract human sin and therefore make up for the failures of the first two Orders.  As a result, it cannot replace these other Orders.

This of course brings us back to the Wolf.  Belfort, like many others in our society, did not belong to the Church and did not have much of a family life (the little he has, he systematically destroys).  In terms of his behavior, he is able to do many, many things which are illegal, but — oddly enough — the government doesn’t care about most of them. When he is finally convicted, the prosecutors have no interest in his use of prostitutes or cocaine!  Hence, the normal and natural settings for human life are barren for him.  They do not function as either a medium of vocation, or as a means of moral formation.  He has no ultimate hope in his life, and so he feels that Epicurean excess is the only reasonable goal of human existence.  He has no sense of the law of God as taught by the natural law and summarized in the Decalogue.  And, hence, the only thing left over to direct and restrain him is the State.  Since the State is not omniscient and omnipresent, it cannot actually regulate his moral and spiritual life — even if that was its role — in a way that could force him to live a productive life.  All it can do is come in and pick up the pieces.  He is free to get away with whatever he can.

Within such a situation then, the State must either remain impotent in the face of a corrupt culture in which the Orders of the Church and Family are non-functional, or it must actually take over those functions and become more and more intrusive, totalizing, and, indeed, tyrannical.  And this latter course more often than not happens.  And so there comes about a kind of symbiotic effect.  The more the Church and the Family deteriorate as Orders of Creation, the more the Order of the State takes over their functions.  And the State must then feeds children and supports families because there are no families or fathers.  The State teaches “virtue” (after a fashion) in public schools.  And to many secularists the State becomes a kind of religion and now brings the kingdom.  Nevertheless, it is likewise the case that as the State takes over these functions and becomes more and more totalizing, it also accelerates the deterioration of the Orders of the Family and the Church as well.

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The “Wolf of Wall Street” and the Orders of Creation: Part I

Part 1 of a throwback post from February 8, 2014

image courtesy of Wikipedia

A few weeks ago, my wife and I went to see The Wolf of Wall Street about the corrupt stockbroker, Jordan Belfort.  Very good, I thought, although not my favorite movie of the year (David O. Russell’s American Hustle wins that honor).  It was a bit long, and I think that certain more lurid scenes could probably have been cut.  That being said, it was an interesting study in personal ambition and the power of human beings to engage in almost limitless self-corruption (Incidentally, although some may doubt the truth of some of Belfort’s stories, the FBI agent who followed him stated in an interview that, to the extent he could verify things, the stories were not exaggerations).  In many respects though, I think director Martin Scorsese got fundamentally wrong why Belfort became corrupt and the nature of his corruption.  The film was never really preachy (something Hollywood often cannot help), but the subtext was quite obviously an indictment of capitalism.  There was even a reference to the 1%, that is, a nod in the direction of the Occupy Wall Street movement.

I would of course make a couple of points about this.  First, of course, any economic system is corruptible, because humans are by nature corrupt.  This is obvious and I need not elaborate on this by pointing to historical examples.  Secondly, there is nevertheless a possibility for capitalism with virtue (one might say).  Certainly the Puritans had a vibrant capitalist culture while maintaining a relatively high level of morality (at least in human terms).  The Dutch did as well.  Historian Simon Schama has documented this in his book The Embarassment of Riches about the Dutch in the 17th century. In my own city, Grand Rapids, this culture of virtuous capitalism has continued, with the old and wealthy Dutch families using their resources to build up the civic life of the city in some very remarkable ways.  One the heirs to the DeVos fortune spoke at Aquinas College’s graduation back in 2010 and gave a talk on business life and Christian vocation that would have warmed Martin Luther’s heart.  So, I think what Belfort’s problem and the problem of current economic system is not really capitalism per se, but capitalism without virtue.

So if it’s not capitalism, but capitalism without virtue that’s the problem, why did The Wolf of Wall Street become the way he did and not like a more virtuous capitalist?  I would argue that part of the problem with Scorsese’s critique is that it doubles down on the problem that created Belfort in the first place.  Scorsese somehow thinks there needs to be more state-control.  Indeed, over the previous 100 years or so, we have developed the notion that the state is really the center of human life.  This is a mistake made not only by the Left of the political spectrum, but also by the Right.  That being the case, in our current political discourse the state is meant to bear weight that it wasn’t established by God to bear as an Order of Creation.  In other words, the assumption is that human flourishing happens if we get politics right.  In fact, not just human flourishing happens, but maybe even the Kingdom of God happens – witness the strange messianic projects that both liberal and conservative Presidents have conjured up in recent decades.  It’s just the matter of invading one more country and converting it to democracy, or it’s a just matter of inventing one more social program- and “Bam!” the kingdom has come!

To be continued…