Presentation

Marriage as a Discipline of Sanctification

Eugene F. Rogers, Jr.
Professor of Religious Studies, University of North Carolina at Greensboro

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An earlier version of parts of this paper appeared in INTAMS Review, The Journal of the International Academy of Marital Spirituality 11 (2005): 28-36. An earlier version of other parts will appear in Mark Jordan, Authorizing Marriage (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2006)

Not for publication or circulation beyond the bounds of the 2005 Covenant Conference without written permission.

In what follows I argue that Christian theologians best understand marriage as a form of sanctification in community over time. Marriage takes time both to expose faults for healing and to develop virtues for incorporation into the trinitarian life. God can use marriage as a means to incorporate human beings into the life of the Trinity. Both same-sex couples and cross-sex couples need that. I argue that by addressing a pair of objections. First an objection from the left that the New Testament devalues marriage, so that alternate patterns of friendship best represent its intent. Then one from the right that same-sex couples are unfit for sanctification. Both deny that same-sex marriages can sanctify: the left because marriage cannot do the job, the right because the job cannot be done.

Against the claim that marriage would satisfy urges to which a same-sex couple would not be morally entitled, I have countered that Christian theologians understand marriage only shallowly as the making licit of sexual satisfaction. They understand it better as a form of sanctification. Sanctification practices a structure that liberates, a discipline or ascesis such as monks and committed couples undertake, in which God uses the perceptions of others from whom one cannot easily escape to transform difficulty into growth, into faith, hope, and charity.1 No conservative has yet seriously argued that gay and lesbian couples need sanctification any less than heterosexual ones.

(Indeed, what moves conservatives is a desire to see visible holiness.2 Both conservatives and liberals want that; they want to see the holiness that God is; they want to see God—or, as the Westminster Catechism famously puts it, “to enjoy God forever.” To see and enjoy: those are sexual metaphors, metaphors of consummation. They imply that consummation lies finally in God, that sex is created not only by God but for God, to be a means by which God brings us to Godself.)

I rehearse that argument below. But I begin with the objection on the left.

Section I

Its critics describe marriage as an exclusive, sexist, heterosexist, bourgeois, capitalist institution. Hopelessly co-opted by structures of power, marriage can no longer carry forward Jesus’s identification of friendship as the greatest value,3 if it ever could. New Testament scholars find Jesus notably anti-family—he refuses to see his mother,4  regards the family as a source of unbelief5 and strife,6 prefers the company of prostitutes and adulterers, and commends not only love of enemies but hatred of families.7 Paul too describes marriage as remedial or second-best and manages to mention children hardly at all.8 The New Testament’s critique of existing social structures suggests, according to those scholars, that same-sex partnerships would make better sense as liberating alternatives to bourgeois marriage.

Such a critique can suffer from sociological naïvté. Arguments on the right suggest that committed same-sex couples should go away, because the partners look the same. Arguments on the left suggest that committed same-sex couples should go away, because the commitment looks bourgeois. In each case the aesthetic finishedness of the argument strains against observable features of socially constructed reality. Given that same-sex couples are not going to go away, two questions press the theologian: How is the Church under the Holy Spirit going to turn the phenomenon to salvific purposes, that is, under what concrete liturgical form?

Obviously, the Holy Spirit can construct human pairs in many and various ways. I have no wish to deny the diversity of social forms that have come and gone, under and without the name of “marriage,” in the history of Christianity and other religions. I want to insist on that variety.

But sometimes the critics of marriage sound as if only they know what marriage really is (a bourgeois power structure), curiously echoing the conservatives who also claim to know what marriage is (a lifelong public union of one man and one woman for the procreation of children). The trouble is, both sides make pseudo-historical arguments that smuggle in an essence. Both sides essentialize something fairly recent and class-bound.9 The critics of same-sex marriage, left and right, ask society either to reject or to repristinate an upper-class 19th C. form.

Furthermore, both sides reject same-sex marriage—whether as same-sex, or as marriage—because they take offense at what they see as a kind of parody. Rightists take offense because they regard same-sex couples as aping conventional forms that should lead to biological procreation. Leftists take offense because they see same-sex couples losing their capacity for improving conventional forms that replicate oppressive power and economic relations.

Yet trinitarians ought to suspect all sorts of binarism. Apply the following remark of Judith Butler’s to marriage:

[My procedure with] the concept of matter or that of bodies [or marriage] is not to negate or refuse either term. [My use of] these terms means, rather, to continue to use them, to repeat them, to repeat them subversively, and to displace them from contexts in which they have been deployed as instruments of oppressive power. Here it is of course necessary to state quite plainly that the options for theory are not exhausted by presuming materiality [or marriage], on the one hand, and negating it, on the other. It is my purpose to do precisely neither of these. . . . [My procedure] does not freeze, banish, render useless, or deplete of meaning the usage of the term; on the contrary, it provides the conditions to mobilize the signifier in the service of an alternative production.10

The present essay undertakes to acknowledge the work of the Holy Spirit in mobilizing signifiers for the production of grace. It is, after all, the Holy Spirit, in Christian discourse, who renews and diversifies, the Spirit who produces sanctification, human beings transformed by grace.

So if, in Butler’s terms, one can only subvert or redeploy, but never freeze or banish a troublesome term, a Christian theologian will ask after the soteriological and trinitarian principles for redeploying this one. Or if, in the terms of Michel de Certeau, marriage now has a margin policed by meanings generated at other sites, how can it become once again a site generating meanings of its own?11 That is: marriage is now something whose meaning preachers and legislators try desperately to protect from draining away. But that is very odd. Marriage should be a source of meaning, something from which meaning flows, not something from which meaning drains away. Why should marriage need protecting? Marriage should protect—shelter—other things (couples, children, hospitatlity): it’s odd that the protector should need protection.

Section II.

Christianity, in several traditions, enacts and deploys a nuptial mystery. In the Bible, God espouses God’s people, with an earthly fidelity and an eschatalogical fulfillment:

“I will betrothe you to me forever. . . I will betrothe you to me in faithfulness; and you shall know [who I am].”12

“The kingdom of heaven may be compared to a king who gave a wedding feast for his son.”13

“Why do [others] fast, but your disciples do not fast?” And Jesus said to them, “Can the wedding guests fast while the bridegroom is with them?”

“Then the kingdom of heaven shall be compared to ten maidens who took their lamps and went to meet the bridegroom.”14

Hallelujah! For the Lord our God the Almighty reigns.
Let us rejoice and exult and give him the glory,
for the marriage of the Lamb has come,
and his Bride has made herself ready . . . .
Blessed are those who are invited to the marriage supper of the Lamb.15

The central nuptial mystery in Christianity occurs when Jesus remarks, “This is my body, given for you.” With that, he subverts and redeploys a structure of violent oppression—crucifixion—and turns it to a peaceful feast. He reverses the movement of the Fall, which began by counting divinity a thing to be grasped and ended by scorning the body. The body at first tells Adam the truth, that he remains a creature, not yet divine; only then does Adam betray the body by treating it with scorn.16 Adam enacts a pattern of seizure followed by scorn, the pattern not of the lover but of the rapist. But Jesus re-befriends the body, and creates the bread of heaven, by counting divinity not a thing to be grasped. At the last supper, he performs a deathbed wedding: “You can’t take my body,” he says: “I’ll give it to you.”17

Jesus’ eucharistic redeployment and subversion of structures of violence mobilizes nuptial metaphors not only here. The Syriac theologian Jacob of Serugh also tropes the Eucharist as deathbed wedding:

The King’s Son made a marriage feast in blood at Golgotha;
there the daughter of the day was betrothed to him, to be his,
and the royal ring was beaten out in the nails of his hands;
with his holy blood was this betrothal made. . .
he led her into the Garden--the bridal chamber he had prepared for her.18

At what wedding feast apart from this did they break
the body of the groom for the guests in place of other food?
Wives are separated from their husbands by death,
but this Bride is joined to her Beloved by death!19

Bloodthirsty, yes. But no more bloodthirsty than the eucharistic meal. And not a model that joins the bride to her beloved in death by suttee, or by a man’s violence against a woman, but by a man’s refusal of violence, on behalf of a woman. No womanly self-sacrifice reigns here. But that is not the main point. Rather, Christianity constructs marriage here as a social form loaded with more meaning than it can bear, a tide of redemption and sacrifice. Further, what you might call nuptial atonement theories make clear that Christ’s sacrifice involves no denial of desire, rather an overwhelming love.

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1. I owe my attention to the transformative perceptions of others to Thomas Nagel, “Sexual Perversion” and its application in Rowan Williams, “The Body’s Grace,” both in Rogers, ed. Theology and Sexuality, pp. 125-136 and 309-321. (return)

2. For a typology of how liberals hear conservative arguments and how conservatives hear liberal arguments, see “The Politics of the People of God,” in Rogers, Sexuality and the Christian Body (Blackwell, 1999), pp. 17-36. (return)

3. John 15:13, 21:15. (return)

4. Mark 3:31-35 and parallels. (return)

5. Matthew 13:53-58. (return)

6. Matthew 10:21, 35. (return)

7. Luke 14:26. (return)

8. 1 Corinthians 7. (return)

9. See the history in Adrian Thatcher, Marriage After Modernity: Christian Marriage in Postmodern Times (New York: New York University Press, 1999). (return)

10. Judith Butler, “Contingent Foundations,” in Seyla Benhabib, et al., Feminist Contentions: A Philosophical Exchange (London and New York: Routledge, 1995), pp. 35-57; here, pp. 51-52, paragraph boundary elided. (return)

11. Cf. Michel de Certeau, “The Weakness of Believing: From the Body to Writing, a Christian Transit,” in The Certeau Reader, ed. Graham Ward (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), p. 218. (return)

12. Hos. 2:19a, 20. For argumentative context, see Sexuality and the Christian Body, pp. 219-36. (return)

13. Mt. 22:2 (parallel Luke 14:16-24). (return)

14. Mt. 25:1 (parallel Luke 12:35, Mark 13:34). (return)

15. Rev. 19:6-9. (return)

16. See Sebastian Moore, “The Crisis of an Ethic Without Desire,” in Jesus the Liberator of Desire (New York: Crossroad, 1989), pp. 89-107, reprinted in Rogers, Theology and Sexuality, pp. 157-69. (return)

17. For a longer account, see Sexuality and the Christian Body, pp. 249-268 and Rogers, “Nature with Water and the Spirit: A Response to Rowan Williams,” Scottish Journal of Theology 56 (2003): 89-100; here, pp. 92-96. (return)

18. Jacob of Serugh, translated as “Jacob of Serugh II,” in Sebastian Brock, The Syriac Fathers on Prayer and the Spiritual Life (Kalamzoo, MI: Cistercian Publications, 1987), p. 287. (return)

19. Jacob of Serugh, Homily on the Veil of Moses, ll. 141-151, translated in Sebastian Brock, Studies in Syriac Spirituality, Syrian Churches Series 13 (Poonah, India: Anita Printers, 1988), p. 95. (return)