Abstract
This fascinating volume acknowledges from the outset the interactions between Church and state throughout Christianity’s history, not least in the context of empire, and the way these have shifted over time and have provided flashpoints when one or the other was seeking to assert its dominance. Most significant of all, according to the editors, has been the break since the mid-nineteenth century, when liberal secular reforms relegated the Church’s authority to pronounce on matters of sexual ethics and family law on behalf of society at large once and for all, or so it seems.
The editors acknowledge that there were other figures on whom they could have focused, but that in their selection of ‘titans’ of theological thought on marriage, sex and family they have aimed to balance church tradition (Catholic, Protestant and Orthodox) and background: academic theologians, philosophers and jurists sit alongside clergy and kings. They have been less successful, however, at presenting gender balance: only two of the 25 chapters have female subjects, and, even more troublingly (since the tradition itself might reasonably be said to have been strikingly male-dominated), only four have female authors. This is a particular irony given how much of the history of family law has sought to explicate the role of women, in particular, in the domestic sphere and in parenthood, and how much Christian anxiety about marriage and procreation has stemmed from fear of excessive female sexuality. The two chapters that do focus on women – those on Mary Wollstonecraft (Eileen Hunt Botting) and Jean Bethke Elshtain (M. Christian Green) – are, along with Mark Jordan’s chapter on Derrick Sherwin Bailey and Peter Sarris’s on the Emperor Justinian, among the most successful at highlighting the interactions between disruptions of authority structures more broadly, and the liberating potential for those oppressed in some traditional formulations of marriage and family life, particularly children, slaves, and non-heterosexual people.
The order of the chapters is chronological, beginning with Moses, the prophets and the rabbis (by Jewish legal scholar Elliot N. Dorff), and ending up with Elshtain in the early twenty-first century. I would have appreciated a more thorough introduction: a longer, more outworked overview of the field by the editors themselves, or else a survey chapter by another scholar. This would have made the volume – which, after all, describes itself as an introduction – more attractive as a teaching resource. That said, the quality of scholarship across the board is excellent, and the tone clear and accessible throughout.
With its discussions of consent, sexual misconduct, abortion, the contractual versus sacramental understandings of marriage, and monogamy versus polygamy/polyamory, the volume successfully shows that many issues that still exercise us today have long histories in canon law. At the same time, discussions of the erstwhile standout problems of relationships between those of spiritual affinity, universal clerical celibacy, divorce and children’s rights (now either resolved or at least less freighted issues) remind us that each age has its preoccupations and that today’s dominating concerns will likely be relativized in due course.