Sex, Marriage and Family in World Religions (21 page)

In his first letter to the Corinthians (Doc. 2–6) Paul repeats Jesus’s prohibition of divorce even when partners do not share the faith. Couples who separate should seek reconciliation. Marriage is a way that partners and even their children can be sanctified. Yet if an unbeliever chooses to leave a marriage, the believer in that case is not still bound. In his letter to the Ephesians (Doc. 2–7) Paul gives particular attention to the marriage relationship. Once more the Genesis account is invoked, but now the marriage between man and woman is configured to the relationship between Christ and the church. Just as Christ gave himself for the church, so should the husband love the wife, and as the church obeys Christ so should the wife obey the husband. Marriage is now more than an analogy to covenant. It is a
mysterion
that expresses the covenant between God and humans: “This is a great mystery. I speak it with regard to Christ and the church. But you also, each of you, thus should love his own wife as himself, and the wife should reverence the husband” (Eph. 5:32–33).

Ephesians is the high-water mark of a positive view of marriage in early Christianity. But such intense Christological symbolism can actually serve as a solvent of the actual human bond. If Jesus is the bridegroom, and one’s relationship with the Lord Jesus renders relative all other relationships—as Paul argues to the Corinthians (Doc. 2–6)—then cannot marriage as a sign or symbol be transcended by an even more dramatic form of embodied commitment?

Would not a direct relationship with the bridegroom be more impressive than the marriage of man and woman? Similarly, if marriage and its indissolubility are based in the order of creation, what happens when there is a new creation, initiated by the resurrection? Which creation counts the most?

Paul’s own struggle with this tension is poignantly shown in 1 Cor. 11:2–16.

In his discussion of women praying or prophesying without traditional head-wear, he argues for the subordination of women based on the order of creation in Genesis 2. But he can’t do so consistently because of the new creation found “in the Lord” (1 Cor. 11:11–12). And in 1 Corinthians 7 (Doc. 2–8) Paul finally chooses celibacy as preferable in the present eschatological circumstances, because it allows an undistracted devotion to the Lord. Those who are married are conflicted by anxiety for their loved ones. In such circumstances, Paul says,
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“even those who have wives [should] be as though they had none.” In this new creation virgins and widows do not need to be attached to a man to have worth.

They are under no compulsion to marry. Eschatology calls all human institu-tions into question. Resurrection gives a life biology can’t supply. Jesus is reported as telling the Sadducees, “Those who belong to this age marry and are given in marriage, but those who are considered worthy of a place in that age and in the resurrection of the dead neither marry nor are given in marriage”

(Luke 20:24–38 [Doc. 2–5]; Doc. 2–7).

Despite demanding that the married stay married forever, Jesus himself is unfettered by spouse; he is the “bridegroom” of his followers (Matt. 9:15; John 3:29). And when his followers complain of the difficulty of staying married forever, Jesus holds out as an (implicitly) higher state being a “eunuch for the sake of the kingdom of heaven,” adding, “Let anyone accept this who can”

(Matt. 19:10–12 [Doc. 2–6]). Nor does Jesus support the institution of marriage when he demands of his disciples that they abandon parents, spouses, and children (Luke 14:26; Doc. 2–7). Just as the New Testament offers some support for the natural family while at the same time undercutting its significance, so it praises marriage even while proposing celibacy as a legitimate and perhaps superior alternative.

The New Testament is also remarkable for its lack of interest in aesthetics, pleasure, or the erotic. Yet the sexual body is a cause of considerable concern, most notably in Paul’s complex discussion of the dangers of
porneia
(Doc. 2–6).

In Jesus’s teaching, desire and lust are equivalent to actual fornication and adultery (Matt. 5:27–28). The sexual drive appears as dangerous (1 Cor. 7:9

[Doc. 2–6]; 1 Thess. 4:5; 1 Pet. 2:11). The concept of
porneia
includes a catalogue of sexual sins from adultery to homosexuality (see Rom. 1:18–32). On this whole side of things the New Testament is emphatically Jewish. Sex is to take place only in marriage, and marriage must be faithfully monogamous. Sex is not a matter of health or recreation. It is viewed entirely within the framework of moral and religious commitment. Sex is serious.

Sex is serious rather than playful because the sexual body is regarded as powerful, both negatively and positively. Against those who would regard sexual intercourse as no more significant than eating, Paul insists that sexual intercourse engages personal and even cosmic powers (Doc. 2–8). Negatively, therefore, sex with a prostitute damages the social body of the church. Positively, sexual intercourse between husband and wife can sanctify both partners and their children and should therefore be relinquished only by mutual consent and for a short time, in order to pray. Human sexuality is located within the context of the resurrection body of Jesus and the “body of Christ” that is the church. Thus, virginity can be a symbol of dedication to the resurrected Lord (Acts 21:9; 1 Cor. 7:34 [Doc. 2–6]; Rev. 14:4), and marriage can be a symbol of the relationship between Christ and the church.

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In the historical elaboration of various versions of Christianity, family norms depend in part on the writings compiled as the New Testament—but only in part. The teachings and practices were determined by the engagement of church beliefs and practices with other competing religious prescriptions, civil laws, family customs, and community expectations. The conditions under which Christianity first spread increased the range and complication of these engagements. Christianity began as a minority within a minority: it was a per-secuted sect of Judaism, which was itself increasingly under suspicion by Roman authorities. Christian communities decided early on to spread beyond the Jewish homeland. They translated Jesus’s teachings into Greek, one of the international languages of the time, and they relaxed the expectation that one should live as a Jew in order to be a Christian. These decisions and others encouraged the growth of Christian communities around the Roman Empire, but they also underscored some salient facts: Christians did not have a national homeland with laws or even uniform customs regulating human relations. During the churches’ first centuries, converts to the new religious way brought their own marriage customs or rituals. Outside the churches imperial and local laws regulated sex, marriage, and family. Christianity did not have detailed rules for marrying, and it did not need them.

For reasons of their own, Christian communities were happy to stand back from the business of regulating marriages. To many believers the “good news”

of Christianity implied separation so far as possible from the demands of pagan governments and decadent societies. Conversion could easily require separation from one’s birth family, at least for a time, and especially when they disapproved.

Without a sharp skepticism about family obligations, Christianity could never have separated from Judaism or sought converts from other religions. The church was offered as a new family, with its Father and its founder in heaven and a growing number of new brothers and sisters here on earth. The church family was unbounded by biological connection. In fact, it was often quite suspicious of the demands of reproduction and the bodily pleasures they implied. So even after Christianity was tolerated and then adopted by the imperial government, it was slow to develop marriage liturgy or theology. In the western churches there is no solid evidence of marriage rites performed in church before the fourth century ce and no surviving wedding liturgy earlier than the seventh or eighth century. To elaborate a theology that counted marriage a sacrament of the same genus as Eucharist and baptism took until the thirteenth century.

Then theology and liturgy had to be redone from the sixteenth century on, in the course of the Protestant Reformation and the Catholic Counter-Reformation, not to mention the challenges of modernity.

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Telling the story of Christian marriage as a sequence of developments and reforms can make it seem that there was only a single story to be told. Yet one of the hardest things to decide for the historian is who should be counted into the story. The definition of Christianity is a topic of endless dispute for Christians. The disputes sometimes concern matters of high doctrine, like the “nature” of God or Jesus Christ, but they often center on morals or church organization. Sex has figured in a surprisingly large number of these debates, either as the main topic or as a supplementary accusation. In many Christian communities deviation from the prevailing sexual norms (that is, ideals) has often been counted both the cause and effect of heresy. To preach alternative sexual arrangements makes one a heretic. All heretics, whatever they preach, are often accused of committing sexual indecencies. Some Christian individuals and groups did teach radical alternatives for marriage (such as polygyny) or sex (such as ritual promiscuity), but then they were immediately declared not to be Christians. Before efforts at ecumenical reconciliation, similar declarations would be made across the largest divisions in Christianity. Eastern Orthodox, Protestant, Anglican, and Roman Catholic Christians have often traded charges of heresy around issues of marriage and sex. Even today, some of the sharpest denominational boundaries are set by these issues.

When Christians rehearse these old disagreements among themselves, they often forget how much has changed since the disagreements began. The changes are hardest to see when the parties in dispute take them for granted.

For example, many Christians assume that when the Christian Bible and other ancient authorities speak of marriage and family, they mean something like the “nuclear family” of the American Dream: Dad, Mom, and their children living in their own house. The truth is very different. Domestic arrangements and definitions of “family” have changed markedly across time and place in the history of Christianity. Christian teaching and practice have changed with them. In medieval European Christianity, for example, great importance was given to “spiritual kinship,” that is, to family relations created by the performance of Christian rites other than marriage. A woman who stood as sponsor or God-mother at an infant’s baptism became kin to that child. She took on the serious duties and severe prohibitions of being family. Christian churches have also recognized choices about spiritual kinship with rites that most Christians have now forgotten. Until fairly recent times, to take another example, Greek and Slavic churches performed a rite for blessing “spiritual” brotherhood or sisterhood. The rite was typically used to bless vows between friends of the same sex who wanted to become family to each other. It should also be remembered that many Christians have long fostered and praised single-sex religious “families,” whether monasteries or religious orders or devotional organizations. The history of Christian marriage cannot be understood without remembering these networks of alternate kinship.

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Can anything be said about Christian teaching on sex, marriage, and family across this complex history of (often neglected) disagreements and changes?

Some principles or professions do run through the teaching of most churches, at least until very recent times. The most important of these is the claim that sexual activity can only be justified within marriage. The principle can be argued on different grounds. Some Christians hold that sexual organs or capacities were made for having children and that children can only be cared for properly within a marriage. The nature of sex implies marriage. Other Christians contend that sexual desire has been essentially disordered since human beings fell into sin and that it can only be excused now when ordered to the greater good of procreation or community. The sinfulness of sex requires the remedy of marriage. Our suggestion is that the great principle that marriage justifies sex is really the product of other convictions and concerns that reappear regularly in Christian thinking. Without pretending to be exhaustive, we iden-tify five of these themes or commitments: fidelity, reproduction, mutual giving, self-control, and social order. The five have often played against each other; they have certainly received different emphases over the centuries. Yet each persists as a motif in Christian thinking.

The first theme,
fidelity,
still means sexual exclusivity in common English usage. To be unfaithful to a spouse or partner is to have sex with someone else.

This is a remnant of a much fuller Christian notion of fidelity. It specified monogamy or sexual exclusivity, to be sure, but also uniqueness or permanence of the couple’s bond and solemn commitment to it by a vow or promise. The Hebrew Scriptures use marital faithfulness as an image for God’s commitment to Israel or (in Christian eyes) the church. Christian churches have invoked God’s singular commitment to believers in Christ as the high ideal of earthly marriage. In the early centuries this was expressed in the maxim “one husband”

or “one wife.” The maxim not only excluded polyandry or polygyny, it prohibited remarriage even after the death of a spouse. Over time the maxim proved too severe and a series of mitigations were introduced to allow not only exit from a marriage but also remarriage after the death of a spouse or if there had been an essential defect in the first marriage (such as fraud, coercion, or incest).