Sex, death and marriage

In case anyone is interested, this is the paper I gave at an ETS panel on theological methodology for discussing marriage; many of the arguments have or will appear in print elsewhere, but I’m not going to publish this, so it may as well be here.   And I say to you, that whoever puts away his wife  – except on account of porneia – and marries another woman commits adultery. [His] disciples said to him, ‘If that is the way it is for a man with his wife, it is not a good idea to get married!’ Mt. 19:9-10 (my tr.) This retort from the disciples fascinates me, as does its neglect in recent commentary and ethical reflection. Let me pose my question straightforwardly: can any of us here imagine Christian leaders in our own context responding to a description of a Christian sexual ethic by asserting it is better not to marry? If, as I presume, the answer is no, it might be worth us asking why there is this difference: what did the disciples know that the we don’t, or what do we know that they didn’t? Jesus has been challenged over the famous, if probably apocryphal controversy between R. Shammai and R. Hillel; he responds by citing Genesis, affirming marriage as a creation ordinance intended by God, and so not to be broken by human beings – ‘what God has united, let no-one untie’ (6b). They cite Moses’ stone tablets; he cites their stony hearts – a concession, but it was not so at the Beginning and now at the beginning of the End it will not be so again. Matthew’s Jesus then offers an exception – porneia[1] – and so offers a much more liberal reading than we discover in Mark or Luke; the disciples still however, recoil at the strictness of the interpretation – so hard it would be better not to marry at all. Jesus responds with the strange saying about varieties of eunuchs, and then turns to play with some children. Someone – a rich young ruler, on Luke’s telling – arrives and leaves, sorrowful, and we hear about camels and needles’ eyes, and Peter’s protest about how much he has given up already. There are some textual variants, mostly apparent assimilations to the similar text in Mt. 5:31-32; none of them change the force of the teaching, or the strength of the disciples’ rejection. So how might this be read? Badly, would seem to be the general answer amongst us moderns. Some commentators – France (TNTC) for example – assume the disciples cannot mean what they say: ‘[w]as this a serious suggestion, or were these words spoken with a wry smile which the printed word cannot convey?’ Well, Jesus took it seriously, speaking of Kingdom castration with his next breath. Morris (Pillar) is equally weak: ‘[t]he disciples envisage problems in maintaining the marriage relationship with this hanging over their heads. They probably had no intention of making use of the provision for divorce, but they found it comforting that the provision was there in case of need.’ Hagner (WBC) does a little better, at least acknowledging the plain meaning of the disciples’ objection: ‘[t]he risks … were too great in their estimate’. But the risks of what? He says ‘becoming inseparably linked with an unsatisfactory wife, in whatever way’. Is that really it? ‘Unsatisfactory’? I think we need to recall the strength of the Jewish commitment to marriage at this point, and insist that whatever worries the disciples, it is a bit stronger than this. Hays[2] offers something more plausible: for a man to renounce the right to divorce would be, he comments, ‘startling … within Matthew’s patriarchal cultural context’, but it can, he suggests, be placed alongside renunciation of anger, turning the cheek, loving the enemy, as a principled embrace of powerlessness which is a mark of the Kingdom. Older readers listened to the text more carefully. Calvin makes two fairly characteristic moves in his commentary on the harmony: he blames the devil, and he is surprisingly feminist.[3] For the latter, he criticises the disciples for not thinking about what wives have to endure – all assumed in the day that wives had no right of divorce, of course – ‘why do they not consider how hard is the bondage of wives?’ he asks. And he answers ‘devoted to themselves and their own convenience, they are driven by the feeling of the flesh to disregard others, and to think only of what is advantageous for themselves’. Warming to the theme, he asserts ‘it is a display of base ingratitude that, from the dread or dislike...

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’Shadows and Broken Images’: thinking theologically about femaleness and maleness

I’ve been reading Megan DeFranza’s new book, Sex Difference in Christian Theology: Male, Female and Intersex in the Image of God (Eerdmans, 2015). In response, I want to argue that our best way of thinking through an adequately postmodern account of human sex-difference might come from reflecting on medieval commentaries on Lombard’s Sentences.

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At Lazarus’s Tomb: An Easter poem

He wept, the man who I had learned to trust, And spoke: ‘he who believes will never die.’ My brother, who for four dead days did lie, Rose, stripped, and lived again. This we discussed Endlessly – how could we not? The years went by He married, prospered, then, as all men must Grew old. He stooped and sickened. Returned to dust. And now once more we watch his tomb and cry. ‘The resurrection and the life’ he said, But I await the last of days again. ‘Though die, will live’ – strange words he spoke, and hard; What has he changed, who on the cross once bled? He rose. And rose. Made gates of death, through pain, A door held open by the hands still scarred.

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The consolations of faith: on leading on non-religious funeral

Today I led a funeral service for my grandmother; in accordance with her views, and the wishes of her children, the service was devoid of any ‘religious’ content. I found this odd. Not difficult, but odd. Obviously, when asked to do it, I said yes; it did not take any thought to decide to help family members at such a time, and I rapidly worked out that, whilst I could not lead a ceremony speaking words I did not believe, I have no problem (indeed, a fair amount of experience, one way or another) in acting with integrity in public whilst not saying certain things that I do believe. What difficultly there was lay in working out what the service was for, in order to construct an appropriate form of words (I keep saying ‘liturgy’ in my head, although that’s the one thing it definitely wasn’t…). But for a funeral that was not so hard: we come to remember; to say goodbye; to stand together in grief. There is little trouble in finding words that speak well to these purposes. Inevitably, I looked around for help; I’ve done enough liturgical work to know that there are always riches from which to borrow. That said, the Humanist material I discovered surprised me – although on reflection the problem was predictable. Like most contemporary ‘humanism’, it all failed rather badly to be nonreligious. I looked at half-a-dozen or more published patterns for a humanist funeral; every one borrowed central Christian texts, deleted the obvious references to God, and then used the filleted remains to shape the service. (Even Scripture was not immune; Eccl. 3 was several times in evidence. John Donne’s Divine Meditation XVII was also referenced more than once.) This of course reflects the reality – and the tedious banality – of too much contemporary Western atheism: take a philosophically-rich account of things; delete surface references to the divine; and assume that what is left will be meaningful or coherent or interesting. Nietzsche, the world hath need of thee… The experience itself was interesting; the defiant rebellious joy of a Christian funeral was of course absent (‘Where, death, thy sting? Where, grave, thy victory?’ (a phrase I recall Graham Tomlin describing as the liturgical equivalent of ‘You’re not singing, you’re not singing, you’re not singing anymore!’); ‘Thine be the glory, risen, conquering Son – endless is the victory thou o’er death hast won!’), but that did not feel like a huge problem. We came to say goodbye, and goodbye was said; if I personally could have said so much more, that was the absence of a wonderful bonus, not the presence of a yawning absence. I know the philosophical stuff on the obscenity of death, but my grandmother died old and full of years, and it did not feel like that. My mind went to various nonreligious weddings/civil partnerships I have attended. They were far worse; duty was heaped upon duty, and responsibility upon responsibility, and not a finger was lifted in promised help. The offering of prayer for a couple newly-wed; the humility and confidence expressed in the confession, ‘by God’s grace, I will’; the sense that these open-ended and absolute promises are undergirded by benevolent divine power – all of this, for me, is necessary to the uttering of wedding vows, or their equivalent. To commit oneself in one’s own strength to such things is an act of promethean courage, of which I at least would not be capable. All of which makes me reflect: for me – I do not generalise – the point at which I find God’s grace to be necessary for existence, and not merely a wonderful bonus, is not in thinking about what happens beyond death, but in thinking about how it is possible to live before death. I desperately need grace and strength and assurance of the forgiveness of sins not for eternity, but for tomorrow, and for tonight, and indeed for this moment right now. I respect and admire those like Nietzsche who, with eyes wide open and with no self-deception, can live and die in their own strength; at the same time I know that I am not one of them (and I recall Nietzsche’s own last years). That said, I suppose that dying will be relatively easy; everyone seems to manage to do it adequately in the end. Living is the challenge. I do not propose a general rule, but, as far as I know my own heart, for me the reality is this: I need grace to live more than I need it to...

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Adaptive theologies for a changing climate

My friend Ruth Valerio has a typically thoughtful and well-written blog post up about the need for adaptive theologies in the face of our changing climate, to which she drew my attention when we were talking about something else. (If you don’t follow Ruth’s blog, you should; she offers intelligent and important comment, and also delicious recipes!) Ruth draws on a distinction now standard in discussions of climate change between ‘mitigation’ and ‘adaptation’. We can, and should, attempt to mitigate the damage done to the environment by radically reducing fossil fuel use, extensively planting trees, or whatever; at the same time, we have to acknowledge that climate change is already irreversible, and so there is a need to adapt our lives and practices for the new reality of a warmed world: we should ask what patterns of crop planting in tropical zones will be most resistant to spreading desertification as the temperature continues to rise, for example. In her post, Ruth suggests that most of our theological responses to climate change have so far been about mitigation: we have tried to highlight the issue, and to commend low-carbon strategies as a part of Christian discipleship. This is not wrong – indeed, it is profoundly right – but, Ruth suggests, we need to go further, and think about theology for a warmed world – an adaptive theological response. My initial reaction was to suggest to Ruth that what she was looking for was a Christian ethics more than a theology; I now think that reaction was wrong, or at least only half right. Clearly, there are ethical issues to do with adaptation: can we run conferences the way we do? is our practice of mission, even, which increasingly involves regular air travel, something that needs to be changed? should we already be thinking of alternatives to the ‘attractional’ church model, which assumes that people from a wide area will drive to a large building to enjoy an energy-hungry service? These, and broader, ethical issues have to be on the table. I think, however, that Ruth is right to suggest that there are theological issues also, and that I was wrong to try to deflect that suggestion. It is not possible to read the literature on climate change without quickly tripping over a third term added to ‘mitigation’ and ‘adaptation’; the third term is ‘suffering’. Every mission agency worthy of the name is already trumpeting the fact that climate change is causing serious suffering to the poorest people in tropical regions: patterns of subsistence farming that were precariously adequate are being rendered impossible by global warming. The suffering caused by our changing climate is destined only to increase, in one way or another: at worst, rich Western nations will be able to maintain our standards of living by inflicting astonishing levels of suffering on our sisters and brothers in less developed countries; at best, we will all share in a painful re-alignment of our patterns of life as part of our mitigation of, and adaptation to, the changing climate (and other realities, such as oil reserves running out). It is not hard to spot the general historical response to increased suffering theologically: Christian populations who find life hard in this world look increasingly to the next world, and to the promise of an easier time in the coming Kingdom. This is, of course, not wrong and, where the suffering was imposed from without, it can be read as a testimony to the explanatory power of the Christian worldview. Slaves in the southern states of America, for instance, constructed a spirituality (enshrined musically in the spirituals) that focused extensively on the promise of good things in heaven, and that spirituality enabled at least some to maintain their hope and dignity in the face of brutal injustice in their present life. Such a spirituality might be criticised for being too ‘other-worldly’, but the critic must acknowledge that the experience of suffering in the present is such that there is great theological power in holding out for a better future. There is a degree of distortion in such theologies, but for the one suffering brutally through no fault of her own, that distortion appears appropriate, and she should continue to preach in such terms to her congregation. What, however, if the suffering of the present life is caused precisely by our own culpable neglect of the Christian mandate for creation care? Here, I am talking not about people in Africa whose traditional agricultural practices are being rendered ineffective by climate change, but about people in Europe and North America whose lifestyle choices – en masse – have caused and are causing...

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