Engaging the Doctrine of Marriage. Matthew Levering
derives from, and points to, God’s greater purpose, the establishment of God’s nuptial kingdom of love.
Here it is necessary to underscore that as “a sacrament of and a way to the Kingdom,” Christian marriage involves the Cross of Christ. Schmemann explains that “the way to the Kingdom is the martyria—bearing witness to Christ. And this means crucifixion and suffering. A marriage which does not constantly crucify its own selfishness and self-sufficiency, which does not ‘die to itself’ that it may point beyond itself, is not a Christian marriage.”71 By pointing beyond itself, Christian marriage bears fruit in love unto eternal life. For Schmemann, therefore, the nuptial purpose of creation is not opposed to the truth that Christ is “the one true Priest” and the Church is “the royal priesthood of the redeemed world.”72 To be a priest, whether baptized or ordained, means appreciating “that all things, all nature have their end, their fulfillment in the Kingdom; that all things are to be made new by love.”73 This unimaginably glorious newness in love is what the marriage of God and creation ultimately is.
Is Christian Marriage Outdated?
One final point merits attention before proceeding. Today, the Catholic understanding of marriage has become unpopular and, in many circles, provokes the charge of lack of compassion, unjust discrimination, and self-righteous bigotry. The situation is exacerbated by the fact that many Catholic theologians themselves, having acceded to the cultural norm, argue that scriptural and magisterial teachings on marriage, rooted in male-female complementarity, are essentially meaningless—as though Catholic sexual morality and teaching on marriage could be radically revised without the core of Catholic faith being touched.74
An example is a recent book co-authored by the moral theologian James Keenan. He grants that “Catholics are intensely interested in the nature of marriage as the place where faithful love and procreativity concretely flourish” and that the Catechism of the Catholic Church teaches that male-female marriage is the place for genital sexual expression.75 But in his own constructive discussion of sexuality and the virtues, he leaves marriage almost entirely to the side. Instead, he simply contends that we must “be faithful to the long-standing, particular relationships that we have,” and that we must never “abandon our lover.”76 In an extended discussion of sexual relationships, he never mentions marriage between a man and a woman.77
Similarly, James Martin has recently published a popular book, Building a Bridge: How the Catholic Church and the LGBT Community Can Enter into a Relationship of Respect, Compassion, and Sensitivity. He reports that “LGBT Catholics have told me that they have felt hurt by the institutional church—unwelcomed, excluded, and insulted.”78 The reality that Martin describes is sad: no one should feel excluded from coming to Christ. Yet, Martin knows that the experience of hurt is at least partly due to Scripture and Tradition’s rejection of the sexual acts practiced by non-sexually abstinent people who identify as LGBT.79 In the context of Christian faith, experiences of hurt cannot be overcome by obscuring or denying the nature of marriage and its signification. Martin’s call for “respect, compassion, and sensitivity” on all sides is welcome, but Martin’s approach in his book—acting as though biblical teaching as mediated by the Church’s constant Tradition can simply be bracketed or relativized in discussions among Catholic believers—turns away from what God has revealed about marriage and sexuality in Christ.80
To name a final example, in their Sexual Ethics: A Theological Introduction, Todd Salzman and Michael Lawler bestow a Catholic theological blessing upon homosexual intercourse, cohabitation, masturbation, contraceptive sex, divorce and remarriage (without annulment), and indeed upon almost everything that the Catholic Church has consistently rejected as incompatible with the vocation of marriage and virtuous human sexuality. Either the Church has never understood its own sacrament, or else, as I think, a strong current of worldly accommodation threatens Catholic marriage today.81
The Orthodox theologian Vigen Guroian has noted that at the core of this worldly accommodation is a rejection of the teleology found in the created ordering of male and female human persons, a rejection that distorts the sacrament of marriage by removing its necessary “grounding in creation.”82 Guroian recognizes that marriage is a sacrament not merely of human sexual coupling, but specifically of male-female human sexual and personal union: the “male and female are the essential and nonsubstitutable elements of that sacrament.”83
***
There is no need to end this introduction on a depressing note. In Christ, we look forward to the glorious consummation “when there will appear the Spouse of the Lamb, the predestined Church, united to the Lamb in all his glory. That is the time when the entire creation, assembled round the new humanity . . . will be reunited to its creator in the Son, itself son of the Father with Him and in Him, and temple of the Holy Ghost.”84 The failures of the Church over the centuries, failures that sometimes have obscured the proclamation of the gospel but have not miscarried its truth, cannot blind the eyes of faith to the reality of the inaugurated kingdom present even now. “The daughter of the king is decked in her chamber with gold-woven robes; in many-colored robes she is led to the king, with her virgin companions, her escort, in her train. With joy and gladness they are led along as they enter the palace of the king” (Ps 45:13–15).85
1. Evdokimov, Orthodoxy, 102.
2. Sacks, The Great Partnership, 172.
3. Levenson, The Love of God, 132.
4. Bouyer, The Meaning of Sacred Scripture, 198.
5. King, Ravished, 80.
6. Lang, Turning Towards the Lord, 102, drawing upon Schönborn, Loving the Church, 203–6.
7. I am aware that many theologians and biblical scholars today, including many Catholics, allow for human experience of the divine but are unable to speak of divine action: see for example Natalie Kertes Weaver’s contention that “[w]hen we combine the findings of Scripture scholarship . . . we can reasonably conclude that ‘revelation’ in the Old Testament refers to the Israelites’ interpretation of their experience of history as an experience of God working within and directing that history” (Weaver, Marriage and Family, 9). Revelation is a properly theocentric concept, even though of course human mediation is always involved.
8. Bonaventure, On the Reduction of the Arts, 57 (emphasis added).
9. Przywara, Analogia Entis, 610.
10. For discussion see Mangina, Revelation, 251.
11. Von Balthasar, The Spirit of Truth, 343.
12. Bonaventure, The Triple Way, 180.
13. Bonaventure, The Triple Way, 180.
14. Bonaventure, The Triple Way, 180.
15. Bonaventure, The Triple Way, 181.
16. Przywara, Analogia Entis, 611.
17.