What's marriage for?

Christian Century, August 24, 2004 by David H. Jensen

AMID THE FUROR over gay marriage, Eugene Rogers has added a wise voice. No theologian on the contemporary scene has offered reflections so thoroughly grounded in classical tradition with an ear to the question of what God is doing in marriage. His article "Sanctified unions" (June 15) is a restatement of themes more substantively developed in Sexuality and the Christian Body. While I continue to learn from Rogers with each fresh piece he writes, I have two reservations about his recent proposals.

One reservation concerns his relative inattention to marriage--gay and straight--as a public good. Granted, Rogers is offering an ecclesial argument for gay marriage. Lest one consider the church primarily as an enclave withdrawn from the world, however, more attention needs to be paid to how church practices foster the common good. This emphasis on the public welfare is at the heart of both the biblical narrative of creation ("It is not good that the man should be alone"--Gen. 2:18) and my own Reformed tradition's understanding of marriage.

When the Westminster Confession heralds marriage as an "institution ordained by God, blessed by our Lord Jesus Christ, established and sanctified for the happiness and welfare of mankind," it claims marriage partnerships as public goods, intimating the healing of brokenness and the covenant relationship that Cod establishes with creation. Marriages are never private matters--neither between two persons nor between that couple and God. Rather, a marriage expresses public claims of God's covenantal love, witnessed in mutual human love. One way that the ecclesial practice of marriage fosters the public good is its embodiment of radical hope: while a commercial culture treats relationships as disposable commodities, the church blesses a covenant between persons that endures under God, sustained by Christ's marriage to the church. When one considers marriage as a public good, it seems highly odd that so much effort is being spent trying to prohibit gay marriage, when it could foster stability and the hope that relationships can endure.

A second reservation that I have about Rogers's proposals is his consideration of the body as a way into the Triune life. My concern here is not with the premise: no Christian theology can claim that the body is not claimed, blessed and destined for God. Rather, my concern is that the body is seen primarily as a vehicle for heavenly places rather than as an earthy promise of communion. In Sexuality and the Christian Body, Rogers writes: "The body is the way of the creature into the Triune God. Because in Jesus, God takes on a body to pave him the Way." We are creatures made for God; our bodies are to be penetrated by the divine. God desires us. The entire spool of salvation history--creation, covenant, incarnation, resurrection and new creation--expresses God's unabashed preference for communion with bodies. Thus far, I have no quibble.

In "Sanctified unions," however, marriage is described as a "way of participating in the divine life not by way of sexual satisfaction but by way of ascetic self-denial for the sake of more desirable goods." We are meant--body and soul--for communion with God, communion that flows out into the interpenetrated life of two people who have entered the covenant of marriage. Marriage requires discipline and restraint--a focus of desire on one person--for life. This focus is but one manifestation of God's desire for us, a longing that consistently reveals itself in the particular: a covenant with Israel, a Son who is the embodiment of God's grace, love and power, a church claimed as Christ's body in the world. God desires particular bodies.

The problem with Rogers's account here is that it freights the gift of sexuality with such theological baggage that it no longer becomes playful. Passion for one's partner drowns in an oceanic quest of oneness with the Creator; the particular detail of one's spouse--his face, her arms, Iris emotion, her dreams--becomes a means of communion with God. Play with one's partner, the irreplaceable difference of one's partner, suffocates under the weight of theological pilgrimage. Might we see sexuality--gay and straight--less as a way into God and more as a delight in the partner with whom one stakes one's life? If God is the giver of all gilts, then this delight in the other is also God's own; indeed, God's delight in us is what makes us capable of play in the first place.

We are always more than our sexuality, yet we are identified, in part, by our sexuality. If a Christian understanding of marriage is to reclaim sex, body and mystery, I would hope it would not shroud sexuality in mystery, but amplify the mystery of God who graces the couple in their difference and the playfulness and delight of each partner with each other. The mistake in both the Christian erasure of desire and in the contemporary celebrations of desire is to treat desire as sexual. The desire of marriage, by contrast, is desire for the whole person, to be present for and with an other, to journey with that other under God's grace, for life.