Marriage,family,the Bible and the gospel

Introduction

In times like these, to be thinking about marriage and family in Christian social teaching requires little justification. Especially in the West, human patterns of intimacy, identity and belonging are changing rapidly, often accompanied by legal and constitutional changes. ¹ The recent, unprecedented referendum in the Republic of Ireland giving the go-ahead for legislation permitting gay marriage is the most recent example. So it’s important for Christian leaders and communities to seek wisdom. My own search for wisdom in this area is ongoing. ² It began with doctoral research for a thesis on Discipleship and Family Ties in Mark and Matthew, ³ and continued in the early 1990s, with participation in the Church of England Working Party on the Family, which produced the report Something to Celebrate: Valuing Families in Church and Society, published in 1995.

It’s impossible to say too much in a short presentation, so what I’d like to do is simply to pass on some of the things I’ve learnt about marriage and family in the light of biblical studies and the Christian gospel, in the hope that they will be useful for theological reflection and pastoral practice.

Culture wars

One thing I’ve learnt is that marriage and family are caught up in what’s become known as the ‘culture wars’ of modernity and postmodernity. What people believe and practise in relation to sex, marriage and family is a kind of litmus test of wider issues to do with identity, politics and worldview, not least because sex, marriage and family concern everyone in one way or another. That’s why emotions run high. It’s why people often feel angry or hurt or fearful. It’s also why there’s a strong tendency towards polarization between (for want of better terms) radicals, liberals, traditionalists and fundamentalists.

But can I say on this, that in the perspective of history, culture wars of this kind are not new. As anthropologist Mary Douglas has taught us, the natural body is a potent symbol of the social body: so the norms and customs governing the interaction of natural bodies are ways of representing the self-understanding of the social body. ⁴ Her observation is borne out from earliest times. In early Judaism, for example, a key strategy for identity maintenance was the boundary-marking purity rule prohibiting so-called ‘mixed marriages’ between Jews and non-Jews. In early Christianity, a key strategy for signalling that the end of the ages had come was not to marry at all! And these strategies attracted the suspicion and hostility of outsiders. Pagan Romans accused Jews and Christians of ‘hatred of mankind’ because of their refusal to accommodate to wider social norms.

So ‘culture wars’ are not new: which is not to say that they don’t matter. Only that we shouldn’t be surprised; and indeed, that perhaps we can learn from what’s happened before.

Wise interpretation

A second thing I’ve learnt, speaking as a biblical scholar, is that the Bible is a wonderful resource for thought and practice in relation to marriage and family, if it’s interpreted wisely. Consider how impoverished we would be without the sense of divine providence in the story of creation, with the man and the woman created alike in the image of God. Reflect on what food for sober thought there is in the biblical stories of fratricide, spousal abuse, adultery, rape and murder. Recall what social and moral seriousness there is in the commandment to ‘Honour your father and your mother’ (addressed primarily, of course, to adult children). Wonder at what depth is conveyed in the relationship between David and Jonathan (1 Sam. 18.1–4), or between Ruth and Naomi, and what delight there is in the eroticism of the Song of Songs. But how provoking, then, to hear from the lips of Jesus, that, ‘whoever comes to me and does not hate father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters, yes, and even life itself, cannot be my disciple’ (Luke 14.26)! Or, in the opposite direction, to read in Ephesians 5 of marriage as a ‘mystery’ signifying the relation between Christ and the Church! There seems to be something for everyone.

But how to take the biblical material? To take an analogous area – namely, what the Bible says about slaves and slavery – it’s sobering to realize that in the debates in the nineteenth century, on both sides of the Atlantic, for and against abolition, it was the anti-abolitionists that had the stronger biblical case. The letter of the biblical text was clearly on their side and could be supported by a general appeal to the providential ordering of society for the common good. Indeed, the debate over abolition is an early example of modernity’s culture wars. Listen to what James Henley Thornwell, one of the leading pro-slavery intellectuals, said in a sermon on Colossians 4.1 preached in 1850:

It is not the narrow question of abolitionism or of slavery – not simply whether we shall emancipate our negroes or not; the real question is the relations of man to society – of States to the individual and of the individual to States; a question as broad as the interests of the human race … These are the mighty questions which are shaking thrones to their centres – upheaving the masses like an earthquake, and rocking the solid pillars of this Union. The parties in this conflict are not merely abolitionists and slaveholders – they are atheists, socialists, communists, red republicans, jacobins, on the one side, and the friends of order and regulated freedom on the other. In one word, the world is the battle ground – Christianity and Atheism the combatants; and the progress of humanity the stake. ⁵

So what I’ve learnt is that, to read wisely, you often have to go below the surface level and ask, What’s the bigger picture, and how does that bigger picture allow the text still to speak today? This means that the Bible has to be interpreted in the light of the gospel, for the gospel is the bigger picture. To put it another way, the words of the text have to be interpreted in the light of the Living Word, who is Jesus Christ. In turn, that means that the Scriptures have to be read fundamentally as a call to conversion of life, a call to die to the slavery of sin and to rise to the freedom of new life in Christ through the Holy Spirit. ⁶

How that works out in relation to particular biblical texts is a matter of spiritual discernment – better, of discernment in the Spirit. The exercise, in community, of the evangelical imagination is essential. ⁷ ‘The Bible says’ is not sufficient as a warrant for the Christian moral life, including marriage and family. Historically informed reading reminds us that there is no such thing as ‘the biblical family’ – or if there is, it is patriarchal, polygamous, multi-generational, slave-owning and authoritarian, with women and children the property of the male household head. Such a vision does not, and should not, commend itself to people today – and that, because the gospel is judgement on structures of oppression and liberation for the oppressed and marginalized, not least, women, children and strangers.

The eschatological perspective on sex and marriage of Jesus and Paul

A third thing I’ve learnt (and it’s related to what I’ve just been saying) is about Jesus and Paul and the overwhelming importance of eschatology in early Christianity – the sense that history had reached a turning-point, even (in some sense) come to an end. ⁸ What seems clear is that Jesus and Paul weren’t very interested in sex or marriage or family. ⁹ Contrary to normal custom and expectation for Jewish men, and as far as the evidence allows, neither Jesus nor Paul married. Jesus, probably to deflect criticism on this score, speaks of those ‘who have made themselves eunuchs for the sake of the kingdom of heaven’ (Matt. 19.12). Paul commends his own single, celibate state for imitation (1 Cor. 7.7, 8), with marriage a second-best option for those whose sexual passion threatens to overwhelm them, ‘for [he says] it is better to marry than to be aflame with passion’ (1 Cor. 7.9b). Jesus only teaches about marriage in the context of a dispute over the interpretation of Mosaic divorce law and characteristically gives a more rigorous ruling, going behind Moses to what was ‘from the beginning’, the undivided unity of male and female in the Garden of Eden (Mark 10.2–9). In other words, it’s an eschatological ideal, so provocative that even his disciples can’t fathom it and require a remedial class ‘in the house’ (Mark 10.10–12).

Jesus shows wonderful beneficence towards children (Mark 10.13–16), and draws them into his teaching (Mark 9.36–37; 10.15; cf. Matt. 11.16–19 par Luke 7.31–35). But neither Jesus nor Paul commends marriage for the purpose of procreation, and Paul mentions real children only once, and that’s in passing, in the context of his advice about mixed marriage (1 Cor. 7.14b). Jesus’ relations with his own family were distinctly ‘rocky’. ¹⁰ His true family, he says, is made up of ‘whoever does the will of God’ (Mark 3.35); and when he goes back to his hometown, he meets hostility. ‘Prophets [he says] are not without honour, except in their hometown, and among their own kin, and in their own house’ (Mark 6.4). Similarly, Paul’s ‘brothers and sisters’ are his brothers and sisters ‘in Christ’: we hear little or nothing of his biological kin.

The question that follows is, why weren’t Jesus and Paul all that interested in sex or marriage or family? And here we are reminded again of sharp differences between their worldview and ours. For Jesus, as probably for John the Baptist before him, it was a matter of prophetic celibacy and holy war. In the light of his conviction that the kingdom of God was imminent, and that battle with Satan and the forces of darkness have been engaged, eschatological priorities displaced normal marital and familial patterns. So: ‘Follow me, and leave the dead to bury their dead!’ (Matt. 8.22); ‘I have come, not to bring peace, but a sword!’ (Matt. 10.34). And when asked about marriage in the life to come, he replies, ‘When they rise from the dead, they neither marry nor are given in marriage, but are like angels in heaven’ (Mark 12.25). The point here is that sex isn’t needed in heaven because procreation isn’t needed because there is no death. So the celibate life on earth is a way of bringing the world to an end by bringing procreation to an end. And it’s a way of living the pure, angelic life now.

Paul’s motivation shares that eschatological orientation, not least, because he believed that, with the death and resurrection of Jesus, the end of the ages had come, and the ‘new creation’ had begun already (2 Cor. 5.17). So the Christian life was to be a life of holiness, and this is played out in the body in terms of the avoidance of porneia (sexual immorality) of every kind; the control of desire through the purity disciplines of marriage, singleness or the virgin life; perpetual battle against sin, the flesh and the devil; and participation with the angels in Spirit-inspired worship (1 Cor. 11.10; 13.1).

Nor will Paul’s preference for the single, celibate life have been completely foreign to his contemporaries. On the Jewish side, there are close analogies in the Qumran sect whose members separated themselves from women and established a community of purity in the Judean desert, there to prepare, as ‘sons of light’, for holy war against the ‘sons of darkness’ (including the Romans). On the pagan side, we know that philosophers sought, by a regime of self-discipline, to control the passions; women were viewed as a threat to their pursuit of happiness in a life lived according to reason; and a common debating point was whether it was expedient for a philosopher to marry. For the Cynic school of philosophy, it wasn’t expedient. For the Stoics, marriage should be undertaken on the grounds that it was a civic duty, with procreation (and therefore the production of the next generation of citizens) the only justification for sexual intercourse.

It becomes apparent, then, that the teaching and practice of Jesus, Paul and their contemporaries are provocative in relation to modern values of romantic marriage, gender equality, sexual intimacy as an expression of mutual love, and children as human beings in their own right to be loved and nurtured for their own sakes. We have to acknowledge a complex and problematic side to the legacy that has come to us from the period of Christian beginnings. I do not subscribe to a ‘Golden Age’ view of how things were in the beginning, as if all we have to do is somehow get back to how things were then.

But there is also another, more positive side, allowing fruitful implications and analogies to be drawn. Here, I’m thinking of the recovery of the single life as eschatological witness to the primacy of union with Christ and life in God. I’m thinking of Christian eschatology as a witness against idolatry, including idolatries of sex, marriage and the family. I’m thinking also of the critical relation between family and Church in the light of Christ: ‘Here are my mothers and brothers [says Jesus to those sitting around him]. Whoever does the will of God is my brother and sister and mother!’ (Mark 3.35). There’s a suggestion here that Church is ‘first family’; and that’s a way of thinking that can be liberating if it calls us out of ourselves into participation in a wider community, and encourages us to allow our individual stories to be informed by the story of Christ and the Church. ¹¹

The New Testament household rules

A fourth area of learning for me has to do with what are conventionally known as the ‘household rules’ of the New Testament. These are the prudential rules offering guidance in relations between wives and husbands, children and parents, and slaves and masters. The relations are ordered hierarchically, and the subordinate in each pair of relations is consistently addressed first. The rules are a recurring element of early Christian social teaching. I’m sure they’ll be familiar to you: ‘Wives, be subject to your husbands … Husbands, love your wives … Children, obey your parents … Fathers, do not provoke your children … Slaves, obey your earthy masters … Masters, treat your slaves justly and fairly …’ (Col. 3.18—4.1; cf. Eph. 5.22—6.9; 1 Pet. 2.18—3.7; 1 Tim. 2.8–15; 6.1–2; etc.).

Although they have novel elements, what I understand more clearly now is that these rules stand in a venerable moral tradition that goes back to Plato and Aristotle, mediated to Christianity through Hellenistic Judaism. They share the common assumption of ancient constitutional thinking that the well-ordered household (oikos) is the essential foundation of the well-ordered city-state (polis) within a well-ordered universe (kosmos). Interestingly, assuming that Colossians, Ephesians and the Pastoral Epistles were not written by Paul, the rules come, not from Jesus and Paul, but from later, post-Pauline traditions. Arguably, they reflect a shift in a more conservative, patriarchal direction in church order, possibly motivated by a concern that too much innovation in church life would unsettle everyday Christian family life, as well as making outsiders hostile. ¹²

In positive terms, what the household rules demonstrate, I think, is that the early Church was not slow to appropriate the best social wisdom of the day, giving it what we might call a Christian ‘baptism’. Wives, for example, are to be subject to their husbands, ‘as to the Lord’ (Eph. 5.22); husbands are to love their wives ‘as Christ also loved the Church’ (Eph. 5.25). So Christians have engaged in the ‘public square’ from the beginning and learned from their contemporaries, not least in relation to marriage and family matters. The first Christians did not cut themselves off, sect-like, from the wider society, even in the area of social morality. That ecumenical spirit – that sense that the wisdom of God may be known in the best thinking of pagans and Jews, as well as Christians – is noteworthy. ¹³

Nevertheless, a rider needs to be added. In the light of our own moral intuitions, including our embrace of gender equality, respect for children and abhorrence of slavery, we can by no means take the household rules as a blueprint for today: a prototype, perhaps, but not a blueprint!

The problematic normativity of maleness

This brings me to one other thing I’ve learnt as a student of early Christianity. It has to do with the normativity of maleness, the subordination of women and hints of a struggle for gender equality. In the Old Testament, the Levitical purity rules concerning bodily fluids and bodies that were not intact placed a heavier burden on women than men. Most notably, the threat to the sanctuary of pollution arising from menstruation and childbirth functioned to exclude women from leadership in the cult. On a wider social front, the patriarchal ordering of Israelite society (as of ancient society as a whole) confined women’s influence largely to the household. ¹⁴ In the Wisdom literature, women are cast as temptresses and a source of folly: the good woman of Proverbs 31 is the skilled household manager. God is generally imaged as male, as are angels; and nuptial imagery, used of God’s covenant relation with Israel, has God as husband wooing Israel as his (often errant!) bride.

In the Gospels, women are among Jesus’ entourage and benefactors, as well as being the object of his compassion: but he deliberately chooses twelve men as the key figures in the new constitution he is anticipating for Israel (cf. Matt. 19.28). In Paul and the Pauline churches, the eschatological identity conferred in baptism and empowered by the Spirit finds expression in a radical level of inclusion – Gentiles as well as Jews, women as well as men, slaves as well as free (Gal. 3.27–28) – but ‘equality’ as we understand it is hardly the issue. ¹⁵ Ironically, it’s because identity markers of gender, race and status become matters of indifference (adiaphora) ‘in Christ’ (cf. 1 Cor. 7.17–24) that they remain largely undisturbed: which is why, for example, ‘uppity’ women in Corinth are put in their place (1 Cor. 11.1–16; 14.33b–36).

In the Pastoral Epistles, furthermore, a conservative reaction to the spiritual authority of Christian women is setting in. Women are forbidden to teach, and are to ‘learn in silence with full submission’ (1 Tim. 2.11); they are now burdened with the guilt of Eve who, unlike Adam, ‘was deceived and became a transgressor’ (1 Tim. 2.14); and they will be saved in the end by having babies (1 Tim. 2.15; cf. 5.14) – which, of course, rules out the Pauline option of the virgin life! In terms of leadership as episkopoi, only male household heads need apply (1 Tim. 3.1–7). In the Book of Revelation, the 144,000 holy ones are those who ‘have not defiled themselves with women, for they [i.e. the holy ones] are virgins [parthenoi]’ (Rev. 14.4).

The normativity of maleness is clear, along with the ongoing subordination of women (even if ameliorated at points); and we have to acknowledge that its legacy in Church and society has not only been oppressive across the millennia, ¹⁶ but has also hindered the growth of countervailing redemptive relationships. One step towards growing those redemptive relationships, it seems to me, is to listen to the victims, those whom traditional patterns and practices have silenced – and to listen in ways that lead to repentance and conversion of life.

Conclusion

Against this backdrop, what we must hold on to, and make the touchstone for all that we think and do, is the gospel of the crucified and risen Christ as the revelation of the saving wisdom of God. Such a gospel is judgement on cultures of oppression and all that is death-dealing – however entrenched in religion and rooted in scriptural texts they may be. But that same gospel is also the power of God bringing resurrection life, and drawing us, by the Spirit’s guidance, into patterns of sociality that are life-giving. An important part of our calling as the Church is to be the kind of association or community where we learn the virtues, habits and skills that will equip us to flourish in our personal lives, our intimate relationships and our societal engagement. ¹⁷