Engaging the Doctrine of Marriage. Matthew Levering

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ that ground the act of creation and about the rationes seminales embedded in creation, Bonaventure concludes that “the highest and noblest perfection cannot exist in this world unless that nature in which the seminal principles are present [the created order], and that nature in which the intellectual principles are present [the soul], and that nature in which the ideal principles are present [God] are simultaneously brought together in the unity of one person”—namely, in the incarnate Son, Jesus Christ.8 If so, it seems that the volume on creation might best be followed by a volume on Christ.

After the present volume, the next two volumes of this series will focus on the doctrines of Israel and Christ. The doctrine of marriage sets the scene by identifying the purpose of creation and the purpose of God’s covenantal work in Israel and its Messiah. Erich Przywara remarks that “nuptial love . . . is the fundamental mystery of the Old and New Testaments: from the prophets to the Song of Songs to the gospel of marriage declared by the evangelists from Matthew to John, to the inwardly nuptial theology of the Pauline epistles, and right up to the ‘wedding and wedding feast of the Lamb’ as the ultimate meaning of Revelation.”9 In inquiring into the goal of creation, it is necessary first and foremost to hear the call to Christ’s wedding banquet: “The Spirit and the Bride say, ‘Come’” (Rev 22:17).10 We cannot wait for marriage to appear as a topic within sacramental and moral theology. It should be brought to the front of the line, as the “final cause” of creation and redemption. Thus understood, the doctrine of marriage combines reflection upon the wedding banquet of “Christ the Bridegroom and the Church, his Bride,” with a new theological vision of “Christian marriage [as] measured by this highest union.”11

Not surprisingly, Bonaventure himself appreciates the centrality of the eschatological wedding. Reflecting upon “[t]he steps leading to sweetness of charity via the outpouring of the Holy Spirit,” he places at the highest point the marriage of God and his people through the Bridegroom Christ.12 In each step toward the attainment of this goal (through perfect charity), we must “have firm confidence in the Groom.”13 We must be inflamed spiritually with desire for union with the Groom (Christ), and through contemplation we should experience God lifting us up to the spiritual “heights of the Groom” so that we can behold interiorly “the beauty of the Groom” and rejoice in “the bounty of the Groom.”14

Throughout his reflections, Bonaventure cites the Song of Songs, which for Bonaventure is about Christ’s longing for spiritual union with the Church and the Church’s longing for spiritual union with Christ. Ultimately, he concludes that we (the bridal Church) must be bound to Christ with “a bonding strong as cement, one with the strength of the Groom’s love.”15 The perfection of our “marriage” with Christ will come from Christ’s divine strength, not ours; and yet we will truly be indissolubly bound to Christ, such that we will never renounce our union with him. As John of the Cross makes clear in his hymns (according to Przywara), the purpose of the “chromatic plenitude” of creation is to serve as “an ‘image and likeness’ of the one marriage”—accomplished on the Cross—“in which the totality of creaturely reality is wedded to the ‘God who is all in all.’”16 Here Christian marriage obviously takes on its deepest meaning, but one that is at the same time closely related to the meaning of sacramental marriage.

Thus, to affirm the marriage of God and creation as the very goal of creation, the purpose for which God created the cosmos, does not sideline Christ. On the contrary, Christ is the Bridegroom. Having discussed God’s creative work in the previous book of this series, I therefore turn in this book to the purpose of God’s creative act: the marriage of God and creation—and so also, more centrally than some previous dogmatics have allowed, the nature and importance of Christian marriage as a sign of the eschatological marriage that Christ has inaugurated.17

Christian sacramental marriage bridges creation and redemption. As a created reality, “the good of marriage is intelligible in part precisely as a union of persons sufficiently stable in which to welcome new life and whose acts of bodily communion are per se aptus for the generating of new life.”18 When this central element of the created order is forgotten or neglected, as it is by many Catholic theologians today, the result is to compromise both marriage as a created reality and marriage as an eschatological sign of the marriage of Christ and the Church. For one thing, as Levenson remarks about biblical Israel and the two lovers in the Song of Songs, “the assumption that there is a significant dichotomy between love for its own sake, on the one hand, and love leading to marriage and children, on the other, is false.”19

      Jesus, Paul, and Human Marriage

Some theologians and biblical scholars today, like the Gnostics, Manichees, and Cathars of old,20 find in the New Testament a sharp dichotomy between the eschatological marriage of God and humanity, on the one hand, and human marriage, on the other. The former is thought to negate the latter. For example, David Wheeler-Reed holds that in 1 Thessalonians 4 and 1 Corinthians 7, “Paul’s advice created a strategy of power that challenged marriage itself”; and Wheeler-Reed also thinks that the Gospels of Matthew and Mark (and perhaps Jesus himself) are “antifamily, antimarriage, antihousehold, and antiprocreation.”21 Given that the kingdom has been inaugurated, all earthly ties have indeed been relativized. But positions such as Wheeler-Reed’s, while understandable up to a point, distort the New Testament’s testimony. As Brent Waters observes, Jesus “commends marriage in prohibiting divorce, insisting that its one-flesh unity embodies a mutual and lifelong fidelity, and his love of children conveys a blessing upon parents. . . . Jesus is calling together the subjects of God’s new, universal reign, and familial bonds are condemned only when they prevent, instead of permitting, this more expansive loyalty” to God and his kingdom.22

      Certainly, for Christians awaiting the fullness of the eschatological marriage, marriage and family must not be posited as the ultimate end. Jesus firmly cuts the ground out from under such familial idolatry: “Brother will deliver up brother to death, and the father his child, and children will rise against parents and have them put to death” (Matt 10:21). We sometimes deceive ourselves into thinking that our familial responsibilities stand above all else. In fact, Christians must remember that our primary allegiance is to Christ, keeping in view Christ’s words that “whoever does the will of my Father in heaven is my brother, and sister, and mother” (Matt 12:50).

No doubt, then, there is an inevitable tension between the temporal duties and pleasures of family life and bearing witness to the in-breaking of God’s new kingdom—but “the tension need not be debilitating” and it should not be exaggerated beyond its real dimensions.23 The goal of Christians must be nothing less than the eschatological marriage of God and humankind. But along the way, we must be careful not to fall into “false and unfortunate dichotomies.”24 For example, with respect to the “marriage at Cana in Galilee” (John 2:1), the revelation of the inauguration of the kingdom (“the good wine”) hardly means that Jesus refused to share in the celebration of the human wedding to which he and his disciples were invited. On the contrary, the eschatological marriage and human marriage (healed and elevated by Jesus) go together, which is why Jesus can say with profound approval, “So they are no longer two but one. What therefore God has joined together, let no man put asunder” (Matt 19:6).25

      The Plan of the Work

The first four chapters of this book lay theological grounding for any Christian understanding of marriage; and the final three chapters explore in more detail the practical and sacramental side of actual Christian marriages. The first chapter explores the “marriage” of God and his people, or Christ and the Church—the consummation of the whole of salvation history. Julie Hanlon Rubio notes that, by comparison to other contemporary understandings of what a wedding should be, “a Catholic wedding has a somewhat different focus, which, if read correctly, yields a theology of marriage built on relationship but rooted in and oriented toward God and community.”26 Emphasizing this distinctive focus, I foreground the marriage of God and creation that stands at the heart of biblical revelation. I don’t think that Christian marriage can be understood outside this context.

However, a fundamental question arises at the outset: is the God of Scripture an abuser? СКАЧАТЬ