#readings

[fearfully-dusty]

I think we can work out a calculus with this lmao. "Alright scumbag, that fine is gonna run you one shield, one berating, and 2/3 of a mouse hole with the rest used on your next crime"

[fearfully-dusty]

Yeah......

[a-queer-seminarian]

Excerpt on marriage theology in Blessing Same-Sex Unions by Mark Jordan (2005)

Perhaps the deepest controversy surrounds the status of marriage as a Christian path or calling.

Only a few Christians have argued that the Gospel prohibits marriage. Many more have held that marriage is an inferior Christian status. The higher way is the way of virginity or, at least, chaste singleness after the death of a spouse. 

The conviction is powered both by a suspicion of sexual pleasure and a conviction that marriage, with its property and preoccupations, belongs to “the World” rather than to “the Kingdom.” 

Marriage is the mainstay of perishing “flesh.” When it is permitted to Christians, it is granted as a concession to the present order. “‘For in the resurrection they neither marry nor are married, but are like angels in heaven’” (Matt. 22:30).

In parallel accounts, marriage has appeared as a natural institution purified or elevated by Christian demands. Most Christians have believed that there was marriage outside the church and, indeed, outside of Israel. Marriage originated with the created order and belongs to the “law of nature” (to use one Christian idiom). So the early churches could accept Christians who had been married either in Jewish or pagan ceremonies. At the same time, the churches could view marriage as something that happened outside the church—or at the church door, on the boundary between church and civil regime. Marriages were not restricted to the Christian revelation and so were not contained within it.

Even the New Testament’s most Christocentric passage on marriage recognizes an outside. Ephesians 5:22–33 constructs a famous analogy: as Christ is to the church, so is a husband to his wife. The analogy has force because marriage is presumed to be familiar already to the readers and hearers as not specifically Christian in its essence. Christ’s relation to the church can be illuminated by marriage only if marriage is not already conceived in Christocentric terms. Once the analogy is established, it can be reversed so that Christ’s love for the church adds a further ideal to the relation of husband and wife. Still the marriage must already exist before the analogy can begin. Marriage is not created out of Christ, however much it can be raised up through his example.

The analogy crosses into the next topic for perennial controversy: whether or how far Christian churches should regulate marriage. 

…When the churches began to develop marriage laws, rites, and (finally) theories or theologies, they began to exert increasing jurisdiction over how marriages were begun, conducted, and ended. In western Europe, the jurisdiction was exercised through a swelling network of church courts. It was also exercised by writing Christian notions about marriage into the “civil” law of Christendom. …

The changes become clear around the next topic of perennial controversy, the indissolubility of marriage. To say that a marriage is indissoluble is to say that the couple cannot be uncoupled. “What God has joined together, let no one separate” (Matt. 19: 6; cf. Mark 10: 9). Only rarely have Christians understood the claim absolutely, as allowing only a single marriage for all eternity and without any possibility of separation. There are traces of this understanding in 1 Timothy 3: 2, where the requirements for an overseer (later read as “bishop”) include that he have been married only once. Why only once? Partly because it is a proof of temperance, but partly because some held that Christians in general should be given only one chance at marriage.

Many more Christians have allowed remarriage in the case of the death of the spouse and separation (if not remarriage) where the spouse interfered with either the believer’s faith or ministry (1 Cor. 7:12–16). Christians have disputed for centuries whether adultery in a spouse gives adequate grounds for separation or divorce and remarriage. The canonical Gospels record Jesus saying different things about the case (Mark 10:11–12 and Luke 16: 18 against Matt. 5: 32 and 19: 9). More recently, many churches have followed civil law in recognizing a much wider range of reasons for divorce, including little reason at all. This is the flip side of collaborating with states on Christian marriage: when states change, churches can be led to change too—and rather abruptly.

[fearfully-dusty]

Scary times...

[weather-pics-and-stuff]

[a-queer-seminarian]

Excerpt from "Finding some marriage theology" in Blessing Same-Sex Unions by Mark Jordan, 2005:

A collective illusion, suffered by some queer activists and by Focus on the Family among others, declares that there is or has been a single theory of Christian marriage. To sustain the illusion you have to discard most church history and to strap on big blinders for the present. Otherwise you will notice that there is no coherent Christian tradition to claim, much less a Judeo-Christian one. ...

Christians have disagreed with Christians about the value of celibacy and the grounds or procedures for divorce. They have disputed the role of civic authority in marriage and the spiritual value of married life. Disagreements about the nature of marriage were at the heart of Protestant and Anglican reformations, as they are now at the heart of increasingly disruptive quarrels between “liberals” and “conservatives.”

Any honest discussion about blessing same-sex unions within Christian communities must admit these old tensions...It is not honest to claim that there is a unanimous “Judaeo-Christian tradition” of marriage that is now being assailed, for the first time, from the outside. ...

Claims for a unified tradition...are in fact claims about something else. They may be claims for a certain definition of Christianity that excludes a host of alternate scriptural interpretations and most of the Christian communities known in history. They may be claims on behalf of a church structure or agency deputed to rehomogenize tradition from day to day. Often enough, and most confusingly, “Christian tradition” is the name given to an amalgamation of whichever political platforms, social prejudices and journalistic scraps are now being preached in the church of one’s choosing.

To locate the theology of marriage in relation to same-sex unions requires considerably more honesty about what Christians have actually said and done. In what follows, I begin from some of their actual confusions, not to homogenize them, but to show how hard it is to stage an encounter with any coherent set of speeches called “Christian marriage theology.” ...

[cavatas]

"How astonishing it is that language can almost mean, and frightening that it does not quite. Love, we say, God, we say, Rome and Michiko, we write, and the words get it wrong. We say bread and it means according to which nation. French has no word for home, and we have no word for strict pleasure. A people in northern India is dying out because their ancient tongue has no words for endearment. I dream of lost vocabularies that might express some of what we no longer can. Maybe the Etruscan texts would finally explain why the couples on their tombs are smiling. And maybe not. When the thousands of mysterious Sumerian tablets were translated, they seemed to be business records. But what if they are poems or psalms? My joy is the same as twelve Ethiopian goats standing silent in the morning light. O Lord, thou art slabs of salt and ingots of copper, as grand as ripe barley lithe under the wind's labor. Her breasts are six white oxen loaded with bolts of long-fibered Egyptian cotton. My love is a hundred pitchers of honey. Shiploads of thuya are what my body wants to say to your body. Giraffes are this desire in the dark. Perhaps this spiral Minoan script is not a language but a map. What we feel most has no name but amber, archers, cinnamon, horses and birds."

— Jack Gilbert, The Forgotten Dialect of the Heart