Engaging the Doctrine of Marriage. Matthew Levering
target="_blank" rel="nofollow" href="#ulink_7784cc7e-0b8c-5793-bf24-0a80166a50db">18. Brugger, “Reason’s ‘Wax Nose,’” 155.
19. Levenson, The Love of God, 129.
20. See the excellent overview provided by Stoyanov, The Other God.
21. Wheeler-Reed, Regulating Sex in the Roman Empire, 73, 82. Wheeler-Reed considers that Ephesians and the Pastoral Epistles, all of which he finds to have been written much later, go in the opposite direction. Wheeler-Reed is especially influenced by Dale Martin: see Martin, Sex and the Single Savior; Martin, “Familiar Idolatry”; Martin, “Paul Without Passion”; Martin, New Testament History and Literature. For a contrary view, see Collins, What Are Biblical Values?, 97–98. Collins notes that Jesus “certainly did not reject the institution of marriage for most people,” although he goes on to say that in a certain sense at least (and literally at least for some), “Leaving family was the price to be paid for membership in the new community of the kingdom” (What Are Biblical Values?, 98, 100).
22. Waters, The Family, 9 (emphasis added). See also Bromiley, God and Marriage, 38: “Jesus is for marriage, not against it. He can be for it, however, only by being against it in the form in which it is attempted by those who do not put the commitment to God first.” Commenting on 1 Cor 7, Bromiley adds that Christians must not “absolutize marriage nor anything else that belongs to this passing order,” and in this sense “[t]he married, who are tempted to put husband or wife or children first, find greater difficulty in achieving the primary commitment to Christ which lies at the very heart of faith and discipleship” (Bromiley, God and Marriage, 59).
23. Waters, The Family, 9. Waters also points out that in the first-century context of severe disruption—the context of many of the first hearers of the written Gospels—the tension would be much less. He states, “The teachings against the family are harsh only to an audience that has placed its hope and confidence in a social, economic, and political order derived from stable households” (Waters, The Family, 10). Regarding Paul’s privileging of singleness, Waters cites Brown, The Body and Society, 55–56.
24. Pennington, The Sermon on the Mount, 293.
25. For Calum Carmichael, Jesus intends to imply that “marriage is a return to the original androgynous state that God created at the beginning of time” (Carmichael, Sex and Religion in the Bible, 9; cf. 102). This argument is not persuasive. Jesus is teaching his disciples about the indissolubility of marriage between a man and a woman. For a similar attempt to get beyond the male-female binary, but from a Greek and Heideggerian philosophical and literary perspective, see Hemming, “Can I Really Count on You?” It seems to me that what Carmichael and Hemming are looking for is simply the unity of men and women as humans. See also the remark of John J. Collins in his What Are Biblical Values?, 86: “It has been argued that before the creation of Eve, Adam was undifferentiated, neither male nor female. The argument has a certain logic, but it is undercut by the use of the same word, ‘Adam,’ for the male after the creation of Eve. It is ‘the man’ (ha-adam) who acknowledges Eve as ‘flesh of my flesh and bone of my bone’ in Genesis 2:23.”
26. Rubio, A Christian Theology of Marriage and Family, 29.
27. For reflection upon eternal life in terms of the joy of weddings, see McKnight, The Heaven Promise, 95–96, 109. For McKnight, admittedly, God resides “[h]igh and lifted up” (The Heaven Promise, 109) in his consummated kingdom—an image that does not describe “marital” intimacy.
28. For a similar argument against Baumann, see Levenson, The Love of God, chapter 3.
29. Thus I do not agree with the criticisms of the Augustinian doctrine of the imago that von Balthasar voices at various places, as for instance in Truth of God, 37–43, 85, 161–65.
30. Piper, This Momentary Marriage, 29.
31. Keating, Remain in Me, 79. See also the reflections of Wright, “The Christian Spiritual Life and the Family,” 189: “The Christian life means treating others as one would like to be treated. It is also a life marked by the capacity for forgiveness. The dynamic pattern of that life is kenotic, or self-emptying, as was the life of Jesus. It thus consists of expanding beyond our present, limited capacities for love. . . . The domestic church is an intimate laboratory in which this kenotic pattern can play itself out, if we would but let it. Any parent knows that the advent of a child, even one welcomed with joy, is a stretching, sometimes painful process of growing beyond one’s present capacity to love. Love grows as the heart is pried open to welcome a new life. This sort of love is neither generic nor intrinsically self-referential. Rather, parental love, in the majority of people, creates a capacity to care for another in a way that is radically generous, radically new. Sometimes the process feels like ‘dying to self’ but, if genuinely realized, that dying is in fact a being born into a new, more spacious self, a self whose interest includes, even privileges, another self.”
32. Originally, I intended to include one further chapter, on marital indissolubility. That chapter grew into a separate book, The Indissolubility of Marriage. In that book, I respond to the approaches to marriage represented well by Bernard Häring’s complaints about the formation of Gaudium et Spes: see Häring, “Fostering the Nobility of Marriage.” Some readers have interpreted the book as a defense of Amoris Laetitia. Let me be clear, therefore, that I affirm that Amoris Laetitia teaches the doctrine of marital indissolubility and also rightly insists upon the need for compassion toward people whose sacramental marriages have failed and who are in a new civil marriage without annulment. But I think that there are formulations and theological arguments in Amoris Laetitia that are not adequate to the doctrine of the indissolubility of marriage. Furthermore, the new pastoral strategy regarding Eucharistic communion runs counter to the reality of marital indissolubility, as I show in the book. In favor of the view that knowingly violating the bonds of an indissoluble marriage should not necessarily be an impediment to Eucharistic communion in charity, a view that is mistaken, see also Cantalamessa, The Gaze of Mercy, 73. Cantalamessa’s arguments are uncharacteristically simplistic. For a representative argument against marital indissolubility, see Lawler, Marriage and Sacrament, 75–97, 104–11. See also Lawler’s Marriage and the Catholic Church, 103–4, where he argues, along surprisingly ultramontanist lines, that there is “a more-than-human power in the Church to dissolve a failed ratified and consummated marriage. . . . There is a power in that Church [the Catholic Church] that extends to the binding and loosing of sin and to the transformation of bread and wine. That momentous power surely extends also to the reformation of a reformable doctrine the Church itself inaugurated. If a non-consummated marriage between baptized believers, that is, a sacramental marriage which falls under God’s law, ‘can be dissolved by the Roman Pontiff for a just reason’ (Can 1142), a ratified and consummated marriage which falls under the Church’s law can also be dissolved by the Roman Pontiff for a similarly just reason.”
33. Wallenfang, Metaphysics, 48–49.
34. In my Aquinas’s Eschatological Ethics, I take up this issue a bit further in discussing chastity. The Evangelical