For some years, I've slowly been getting out of the marriage business.
I'm bound by church law -- and by conscience, if I'm completely honest -- to have "due counsel" with both parties of a couple. And I've found, over those years, that most folks only want that counsel when there's a financial incentive: My home state (Tennessee) offers a discount on the price of the license if you go through with only a minimum (which is to say modicum) of counseling.
But the older I get, the more determined I become: I'd like to see the church stop its custom of benignly validating the institution of marriage. The investment of marriage with a pseudo-religious quality has long diminished the witness of the Church: The state authorizes a legal union, and then calls upon the Church to bless this union with a thin veneer of religiosity. Here, as elsewhere, the Church proves itself to be the state's faithful servant: "Sure, we'll validate state authority with a harmless blessing; yes, we are only too pleased to sanctify the wedding ceremony, and to clothe the social functions of romantic love and family life with a saintly aura".
I've noticed, over the years, that folks don't want me to proclaim, as a representative of the Church, the good news. No judgment, no grace. The Church isn't being invited to bear witness to Jesus in most weddings. Instead, we're simply asked to add God's blessing to the social order and to the state's authority.
Thank you, Constantine. (And in good 90s Barthian fashion, I hasten with my, "Nein!")
The situation, I fear, is just the same as when families are provided a baptism for little Lollie or Ollie at birth, as part of their entrance into the nation-state.
Make no doubt about it: The Church's witness is undermined completely by its willingness to serve as the state's lapdog.
We're like Mr Collins in Pride and Prejudice. That sycophantic clergyman who waits upon the pleasure of his exalted benefactress, Lady Catherine De Bourgh, and is only too pleased to do her bidding whenever the opportunity arises.
If there's anything distinctively Christian to say about marriage, then the first step should be the Church's flat refusal to co-operate in the grim and desperate business of wedding ceremonies, and a flat refusal to provide the state with any so-called "marriage altar". As Karl Barth has put it, marriage "must be completely divested of the character of a religious doublet to the civil ceremony" (CD III/4, p. 228).
Indeed, far from merely authorizing weddings with pious talk about the "spiritual and moral" depths of marital love, the Church's witness demands a critique of romantic love -- you heard me right, a critique of marriage itself! As Dietrich Bonhoeffer has incisively argued in Life Together, the sexual relationship is by no means "sacramental in nature". Instead, in our own societies romantic love functions as an idol which demands absolute subservience.
Don't believe me? Witness all that nonsense in purity culture.
The longing to be completed by someone else is the reigning mythos of our culture. It may be the Zeitgeist, but it's not the spirit of God that's taken us in it. Because, as CS Lewis knew all too well, the modern romantic relationship is selfish and parasitic.
But all that's too stark for a genuine Christian theology of marriage.
If we begin to refuse church participation in wedding ceremonies, perhaps the way will be opened for a renewed sacramental understanding of marriage. The
church refuses to recognize the marital relationship -- or, for that matter, "the family" -- as the fundamental social unit. Instead, the Christian community recognizes the body of Christ as the fundamental social order of the new creation. And within this new society, within this economy of friendship and hospitality and self-giving, the church also bears witness to particular instantiations of Christian friendship, to specially gifted loci of generosity and hospitality and self-giving love.
Here, Christian marriage is sacramental precisely because it bears witness to the incursion of the new creation. It interrupts the existing order with the glad tidings of God's new world. It interrupts marriage itself -- and all the parasitic violence of romantic love -- with the joyful and generous reality of the peace of the body of Christ.
In short: It's time for the Church to start saying "Nein!" to state sanctioned weddings. "Nein!" to romance-at-any-cost. But "Yes!" to sacramental marriage. "Yes!" to the Body of Christ.
To paraphrase St Paul: For in Christ Jesus, neither marriage nor singleness is anything; what counts is a new creation.
I'm bound by church law -- and by conscience, if I'm completely honest -- to have "due counsel" with both parties of a couple. And I've found, over those years, that most folks only want that counsel when there's a financial incentive: My home state (Tennessee) offers a discount on the price of the license if you go through with only a minimum (which is to say modicum) of counseling.
But the older I get, the more determined I become: I'd like to see the church stop its custom of benignly validating the institution of marriage. The investment of marriage with a pseudo-religious quality has long diminished the witness of the Church: The state authorizes a legal union, and then calls upon the Church to bless this union with a thin veneer of religiosity. Here, as elsewhere, the Church proves itself to be the state's faithful servant: "Sure, we'll validate state authority with a harmless blessing; yes, we are only too pleased to sanctify the wedding ceremony, and to clothe the social functions of romantic love and family life with a saintly aura".
I've noticed, over the years, that folks don't want me to proclaim, as a representative of the Church, the good news. No judgment, no grace. The Church isn't being invited to bear witness to Jesus in most weddings. Instead, we're simply asked to add God's blessing to the social order and to the state's authority.
Thank you, Constantine. (And in good 90s Barthian fashion, I hasten with my, "Nein!")
The situation, I fear, is just the same as when families are provided a baptism for little Lollie or Ollie at birth, as part of their entrance into the nation-state.
Make no doubt about it: The Church's witness is undermined completely by its willingness to serve as the state's lapdog.
We're like Mr Collins in Pride and Prejudice. That sycophantic clergyman who waits upon the pleasure of his exalted benefactress, Lady Catherine De Bourgh, and is only too pleased to do her bidding whenever the opportunity arises.
If there's anything distinctively Christian to say about marriage, then the first step should be the Church's flat refusal to co-operate in the grim and desperate business of wedding ceremonies, and a flat refusal to provide the state with any so-called "marriage altar". As Karl Barth has put it, marriage "must be completely divested of the character of a religious doublet to the civil ceremony" (CD III/4, p. 228).
Indeed, far from merely authorizing weddings with pious talk about the "spiritual and moral" depths of marital love, the Church's witness demands a critique of romantic love -- you heard me right, a critique of marriage itself! As Dietrich Bonhoeffer has incisively argued in Life Together, the sexual relationship is by no means "sacramental in nature". Instead, in our own societies romantic love functions as an idol which demands absolute subservience.
Don't believe me? Witness all that nonsense in purity culture.
The longing to be completed by someone else is the reigning mythos of our culture. It may be the Zeitgeist, but it's not the spirit of God that's taken us in it. Because, as CS Lewis knew all too well, the modern romantic relationship is selfish and parasitic.
But all that's too stark for a genuine Christian theology of marriage.
If we begin to refuse church participation in wedding ceremonies, perhaps the way will be opened for a renewed sacramental understanding of marriage. The
church refuses to recognize the marital relationship -- or, for that matter, "the family" -- as the fundamental social unit. Instead, the Christian community recognizes the body of Christ as the fundamental social order of the new creation. And within this new society, within this economy of friendship and hospitality and self-giving, the church also bears witness to particular instantiations of Christian friendship, to specially gifted loci of generosity and hospitality and self-giving love.Here, Christian marriage is sacramental precisely because it bears witness to the incursion of the new creation. It interrupts the existing order with the glad tidings of God's new world. It interrupts marriage itself -- and all the parasitic violence of romantic love -- with the joyful and generous reality of the peace of the body of Christ.
In short: It's time for the Church to start saying "Nein!" to state sanctioned weddings. "Nein!" to romance-at-any-cost. But "Yes!" to sacramental marriage. "Yes!" to the Body of Christ.
To paraphrase St Paul: For in Christ Jesus, neither marriage nor singleness is anything; what counts is a new creation.