Engaging the Doctrine of Marriage. Matthew Levering

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СКАЧАТЬ the Nobility of Marriage.” Some readers have interpreted the book as a defense of Amoris Laetitia. Let me be clear, therefore, that I affirm that Amoris Laetitia teaches the doctrine of marital indissolubility and also rightly insists upon the need for compassion toward people whose sacramental marriages have failed and who are in a new civil marriage without annulment. But I think that there are formulations and theological arguments in Amoris Laetitia that are not adequate to the doctrine of the indissolubility of marriage. Furthermore, the new pastoral strategy regarding Eucharistic communion runs counter to the reality of marital indissolubility, as I show in the book. In favor of the view that knowingly violating the bonds of an indissoluble marriage should not necessarily be an impediment to Eucharistic communion in charity, a view that is mistaken, see also Cantalamessa, The Gaze of Mercy, 73. Cantalamessa’s arguments are uncharacteristically simplistic. For a representative argument against marital indissolubility, see Lawler, Marriage and Sacrament, 75–97, 104–11. See also Lawler’s Marriage and the Catholic Church, 103–4, where he argues, along surprisingly ultramontanist lines, that there is “a more-than-human power in the Church to dissolve a failed ratified and consummated marriage. . . . There is a power in that Church [the Catholic Church] that extends to the binding and loosing of sin and to the transformation of bread and wine. That momentous power surely extends also to the reformation of a reformable doctrine the Church itself inaugurated. If a non-consummated marriage between baptized believers, that is, a sacramental marriage which falls under God’s law, ‘can be dissolved by the Roman Pontiff for a just reason’ (Can 1142), a ratified and consummated marriage which falls under the Church’s law can also be dissolved by the Roman Pontiff for a similarly just reason.”

      33. Wallenfang, Metaphysics, 48–49.

      34. In my Aquinas’s Eschatological Ethics, I take up this issue a bit further in discussing chastity. The Evangelical theologian John K. Tarwater has aptly pointed out, “Scripture presents two main purposes of our sexuality, to be united and to generate. Following both creation accounts in Genesis, God enunciates the two purposes. First, he commands the couple to ‘Be fruitful and multiply’ (Gen 1:28). Second, God says that ‘Therefore a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and they shall become one flesh’ (Gen 2:24). . . . In his discussion with the Pharisees concerning divorce, Jesus linked these two creation mandates, procreation and unity” (Tarwater, Marriage as Covenant, 104–5).

      35. See Eberstadt, How the West Really Lost God.

      36. Cahill, Sex, Gender, and Christian Ethics, 193. See more fully Cahill, Sex, Gender, and Christian Ethics, 193–94, quoting Kasper, Theology of Christian Marriage, 30. See also the cognate view of marriage offered by Porter, “Contraceptive Use and the Authority of the Church.” For the development in marital practice (in Europe) in the medieval period, see Goody, The Development of the Family and Marriage in Europe; Herlihy, Medieval Households. See also the remarks of d’Avray regarding medieval marriage sermons: “The marriage mysticism of [thirteenth-century] model sermons was of a different kind from the Bernardine [monastic] sort: more matter-of-fact, less high-flown, less about brides and bridegrooms and more about wives and husbands” (Medieval Marriage Sermons, 2). For further discussion, see d’Avray, Medieval Marriage; d’Avray, Papacy, Monarchy and Marriage; Brooke, Medieval Idea of Marriage; Parmisano, The Craft of Love.

      37. Jenson, The Triune Story, 331. As Jenson puts it earlier, “[T]he analogy between the Lord’s relation to Israel and conjugal love appears early and often in Israel’s Scripture. But now, if the sexual relation of spouses can provide an analogy for the Lord’s relation to Israel, the analogy must have some impact also the other way around. And in that direction it will open as a moral opportunity: the sexual relation of spouses can be modeled on the relation of the Lord and Israel” (Triune Story, 280). This means that self-surrendering love and the healing power of the Cross will come into play, as will the fact that God’s fallen people fell, in Adam and Eve, as a primordial marital communion of persons. Indeed, this relationality belongs to the order of creation. Jenson states, “Our creation as two different kinds of bodies, paired to each other by the paired shape and function of blatant bodily phenomena, is the way God keeps our reality as communal beings from being a mere mandate or ideal, and makes it be a fact about the actual things we are” (The Triune Story, 281). Or, put more bluntly, “it is as bodies inescapably ordered to each other by vagina and penis that our adaptation to correspondence with the himself communal [i.e. triune] God is made part of what we simply and without choice are. . . . There are of course other bonds of mutuality, most of them also in one way or another bodily. But marriage is the only one that creates an actual new bodily unit—the old myth of the creature with two backs who was forcibly divided to make woman and man rested on simple observation. The two bodies envelop and enter each other in a fashion provided for not only by shape but by their function beyond pleasure, the function of this orifice and this member of maintaining God’s human creation” (The Triune Story, 282).

      38. Middleton, The Liberating Image, 51.

      39. Middleton, The Liberating Image, 295.

      40. Lossky, In the Image and Likeness of God, 128.

      41. Wright, Surprised by Hope, 208.

      42. Wright, Surprised by Hope, 279.

      43. Wright, Surprised by Hope, 161.

      44. Walton, The Lost World of Genesis One, 87.

      45. Walton, The Lost World of Genesis One, 88.

      46. He cites Weinfeld’s “Sabbath, Temple and the Enthronement of the Lord.”

      47. Walton, The Lost World of Genesis One, 98.

      48. Walton, The Lost World of Genesis One, 123–24.

      49. Ephrem the Syrian, Hymns on Paradise, Hymn III.16, p. 96.

      50. Ephrem the Syrian, Hymns on Paradise, Hymn III.16, p. 96.

      51. Ephrem the Syrian, Hymns on Paradise, Hymn XV.7–8, p. 184.

      52. Ephrem the Syrian, Hymns on Paradise, Hymn XV.8, p. 185.

      53. Ephrem the Syrian, Hymns on Paradise, Hymn XIII.13, p. 173.

      54. СКАЧАТЬ