Many conservative Presbyterians and Reformed believe – along with the idea that no neutrality exists – that secular America is intolerant of red-blooded Christianity. The current alarm over gay marriage and abortion on demand is evidence of the Reformed-sky-is-falling-world-and-life-view.
Could it be that consolation might come to these upset souls from the secularized (as opposed to hallowed) pages of the New York Times? It could if conservative Protestants would take a gander at the columns written by Ross Douthat. When the Times hired him away from the Atlantic Monthly, some conservatives worried that Douthat, a smart, Roman Catholic, and remarkably wise-for-his-age-writer, might succumb to temptation to fit with the liberal intelligentsia (as if Atlantic is Chronicles) in by soft pedaling his conservatism. But this has hardly been the case. Within the past month Douthat has posted at his Times blog (in addition to columns) a number of serious and thoughtful posts against gay marriage that conservative Protestants should well consider, both for encouragement in culture-war well doing and for learning how to make an argument with people who don’t share your faith (or any).
On August 9th, Douthat wrote in response to a post by Noah Millman who explained why he was supporting gay marriage:
What I would strongly dispute, though, is his suggestion that it’s possible to escape entirely from ideological conceptions of marriage, into a world where it’s all just people loving people, and the way we treat one another is the only thing that matters. This seems like an extremely naive view of how ideas intersect with human action, and how cultures shape behavior. Of course all ideals and ideologies are imperfect descriptions of reality, and semi-quixotic attempts to graft order onto the inherent messiness of human affairs. But you can’t escape them just by declaring that they’re “artificial,†because such artifice is itself natural to man, and inherent to culture-making and social order. Every society has its ideals and ideologies, about marriage as much as about any other institution. And the fact that wedlock was once somewhat more about property and somewhat less about love than it is today doesn’t mean that our ancestors didn’t have their own theories of marriage, and their own arguments about what the institution meant and ought to mean.
Read the Greeks and Romans; read the New Testament; read Shakespeare and The Book of Common Prayer. There was never a time when human beings weren’t building ideologies of marriage, and there was never a culture where those ideologies didn’t have an impact on how people wed and parented and loved.
This means that if the ideology that justifies defining marriage as lifelong heterosexual monogamy gets swept into history’s dustbin, we won’t suddenly be flung into a landscape where the only real things are people and the people they love. We’ll just get a different ideology of marriage in its place, one that makes a different set of assumptions and generalizations and invests the institution with a different kind of purpose. And we don’t need a judge’s ruling (though Judge Vaughn Walker’s analysis was certainly clarifying!) to know what that ideology will look like: It’s the increasingly commonplace theory that marriage exists to celebrate romantic love and provide public recognition for mutually-supportive couples, with no inherent connection of any kind to gender difference and/or procreation, and with only a rhetorical connection to the ideal of permanence.
Because Douthat is thoughtful and because he writes for the Times, lots of people pay attention to what he writes and so various bloggers and op-ed writers responded to his August 9 post. One of those came from Glenn Greenwald, who argued that whether or not the state supports heterosexual marriage, the ideal of one-man-and-one-woman marrying could still prevail without legal sanction. One example to which Grennwald appealed was racism. Nearly everyone believes racism is wrong even if the state protects the rights of racists to speak freely and associate voluntarily.
Douthat responds this way:
. . . take alcohol and cigarettes. Why are Marlboros more stigmatized than Budweisers in contemporary America? Well, in part, it’s because there’s been a government-sponsored war on tobacco for the last few decades, carried out through lawsuits and public health campaigns and smoking bans and so forth, that’s far eclipsed the more halting efforts to stigmatize alcohol consumption. Here again, public policy, rather than some deep empirical or philosophical truth about the relative harm of nicotine versus alcohol, has been a crucial factor in shaping cultural norms.
And the same is true, inevitably, of marriage law. Culture shapes law, of course: Judge Walker’s decision last week would be unimaginable without the cultural shift that’s made gay marriage seem first plausible and then necessary to many people. But law tends to turn around and shape culture right back. And this is particularly true when the law in question is constitutional law, because constitutional rights carry a distinctive legal weight and an even more distinctive cultural freight. (To take just one example, I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the cultural space for making a moral critique of pornography has shrunk apace in the decades since the Supreme Court expanded First Amendment protections for pornographers, and limited the reach of obscenity laws.)
So if Anthony Kennedy follows Walker and finds that the traditional legal understanding of marriage is unconstitutional — and, by extension, that it’s irrational and bigoted to think otherwise — it’s just naive to say that this won’t have a ripple effect in the culture as a whole.
The point here is not to discuss the merits of Douthat’s arguments – though they are considerable. It is instead to take notice and see that people of faith do speak up in public secular life and do not lose their jobs for doing so, even at the New York friggin’ Times! I wonder if more of the anti-2k crowd were to take a page from Douthat the public debates over hotly contested issues would be not only more “fair and balanced†but also more people would “decide†to regard favorably (rather than as kooks) those who defend the way that Westerners have practiced the family lo these many years.
68 Comments
CVD, I’m in no position to answer your question about Machen. But my guess is that it’s your way of asking if I think your vocation is a violation of a 2k wisdom principle. If so, no, I do not. I simply think we may have different outlooks about the goings on in the civil sphere; 2k wants to protect you and me to co-exist in this way. So a violation of 2k would actually be for one of us to pass judgment on the other about the way he elects to (lawfully, of course) proceed in the civil sphere. And strong disagreement isn’t the same as judgment.
CVD,
Thanks for the response, it definitely clarifies how this process will unfold in the coming months. While I can’t articulate this quite like you can, it seems to me that the advent of “no-fault” divorces brought (or recognized) a major shift in the legal understanding of marriage. No longer does the state recognize marriage as a sacred union between a consenting man and woman, where each has certain responsibilities to the other to uphold. Now, the state is dealing with a more basic property arrangement with certain parental concerns.
This is why I have maintained the position I have on Prop. 8, because it seems like the divorce laws (in CA specifically) indicated the state’s generally amoral stance on marriage. Obviously this is light years from our Christian understanding. On this basis it seems to me that the state would be duplicitous to recognize one type of union and not another. So in a sense, the moral debate over the validity of traditional marriage versus homosexual marriage lies outside of the concerns and expertise of the state.
I have stated in the past, and still maintain that the state should only recognize civil unions, and should be out of the marriage business altogether. Marriage should then be performed by ministers, and others authorized to do so. In this structure the state could recuse itself from religious ceremonies, which marriages are, and stick to the civil unions that it can adjudicate competently. I think this would diffuse a lot of the hostility between those who want the state to define marriage.
Jed, you might consider that the state of California never recognized marriage as a sacred union. The only thing required by the state is a solemnization ceremony that impresses on the couple the solemnity of the vows they are taking, and a statement by the officiant that he/she declares “under the authority vested in my by the County of ___, State of California, I now declare you husband and wife.” It never had a religious component. Marriages as recognized by California are far from religious ceremonies — a judge can do it, in fact any private citizen can perform a wedding for a day by getting a one-day license from his/her county office.
There are innumerable practical problems with the state withdrawing from marriage and leaving it only to churches. The state must enforce a myriad laws dealing with community property, confidentiality, privilege, inheritance, intestate succession, child custody, parental rights over children, to name just a few. The state has to be able to recognize a couple as married in order to administer these laws. Very few legal commentators, even of secular persuasion, believe that these problems can be surmounted without wereaking social and legal havoc. Almost everyone agrees that there should be state-sanctioned marriage. This is one case where well meaning Christian theorists, theorizing in the abstract, could perhaps do better to inform themselves about how the law works at the practical street level.
Civil unions don’t get the state out of the marriage business as a practical matter. All these myriad of laws are premised on marriage. What civil unions do is say all the legal benefits of marraige are conferred on civil unions. But when all these laws are applied to civil unions, they in effect become marriage by another name. It really becomes a distinction without a difference. You can call marriage a “hedgehog,” but it’s still marriage. To get the state out of the marriage business, you’d have to change to laws to create a more or less state of anarchy in relationships and their legal consequenses.
Finally, I would argue that marriage is a creation ordinance. It was established before the Fall and survived the Fall as an ordinance applicable to all of human culture, believers and unbelievers, within the civil sphere (not merely the Kingdom sphere). The state has historically administered creation ordinances to do good in recognition of their serving as a God-ordained foundation of human culture. Marriage is therefore a fundamental part of the role of the state ordained by God (Rom. 13:1-7). WCF 24: God, the supreme Lord and King of all the world, hath ordained civil magistrates to be under him, over the people, for his own glory and the public good; and to this end hath armed them with the power of the sword, for defence and encouragement of them that do good, and for the punishment of evil doers.”
How is marriage in general a sacred thing? I agree it’s important, but how is it sacred?
Alberto,
Marriage is considered a covenant that God himself is witness to (Malachi 2:15-16); it is as a result of God’s doing (Matt. 9; 5-6); it is a profound mystery referring to the sacred union between Christ and his Church (Ephesians 5: 22-32); the wedding bed (a metonymy for the sexual relationship between man and wife) is to be undefiled, implying that the union is holy (Hebrews 13:4). However, as Calvin notes in the Institutes (IV.19.34-37) marriage isn’t a sacrament like Baptism and the Lord’s Supper. Designating marriage as sacred is to recognize the sanctity of the relationship, that it stands apart from all other human relations, and that in the context of the covenant family it is the instrument that God often uses to produce holy offspring. Marriage is also a common creational ordinance, so the designation “sacred” has to be qualified so as not to make more of marriage than is proper, however it also should not be made less of than is proper as well.
Jed, you said, “…the state…should be out of the marriage business altogether. Marriage should then be performed by ministers, and others authorized to do so.”
I agree with CVD that marriage is a creational ordinance, etc. If the state gets out of the marriage business altogether then how do people without ministers get married?
Zrim, CVD,
Zrim: to your question, w/o a minister, they don’t get married per se they enter into a civil union, at least form the angle I am looking at it. I am not adamant about this, rather exploring some options.
CVD, this initial answer will be brief. I know there is precedent in Europe where marriages take place in the church and are a ministerial function, however, the state recognized union is a separate affair where the civil union is officiated by the state. In effect there are two ceremonies, where the civic end of “marriage” is governed by the state, and the religious and spiritual union is officiated by the church.
It is in this sense that I see the state vacating jurisdiction over “marriage” as a moral/spiritual/religious institution. And yes CVD, to your point, I do see the “distinction without difference” as a valid concern. But I would argue that how the state views marriage and how the church views it is distinct. Since we have departed from a theocratic model of government into a governance that distinguishes between the role of the church vs. the role of the state, it is bound to affect institutions such as marriage that straddle the two kingdoms.
What I am arguing/exploring here is the state governing the civic concerns of what we call marriage (which is its de facto role presently) through civil unions, and to leave the defining here up to individual and/or religious bodies. I am not convinced that the state can adequately define marriage in the way we are asking it to. It seems that we are in the middle of a definitional shift in the role of the state in marriage. The questions I am interested in are jurisdictional and definitional, and what can we reasonably expect the state to govern with respect to marriage and/or civil unions. Obviously there would have to be qualifications here to protect minors from coerced marriage. But again, bear with me as I run down some sources and as I try to give a clearer response to the issues you both raise here. I definitely value your input here, since I have drawn no hard conclusions, but from a 2k perspective, how do we approach an institution like marriage and family which obviously occupies both kingdoms?
Jed, your project to replace marriage for non-Christians with civil unions reminds me of the British prisoner of war in the Japanese POW camp leading all the POW’s in constructing for the Japanese a bridge over the River Kwai with robust enthusiasm, when he was unwittingly helping the Japanese war effort. (The Allies eventually destroyed the bridge.) I don’t know why we would be eager to help unbelievers deny and circumvent God’s creation ordinance and plan for all humanity? Help me understand what good you see come from that? Since God wants marriage for believers and unbelievers alike, why would you want to help them avoid God’s intention? Most unbelivers I know want to be married, and for that I’m glad. Even gay persons I know don’t want to settle for civil unions; they want to be married. I don’t know why we in the U.S. would be eager to mimic the European model, when Europe is a moral wasteland in full rebellion against God.
I’m not sure it’s wise for us to think we’re smarter than God, who invented and ordained marriage as a foundation for family and human civilization. It seems self-evident to me, at least, that on balance, marriage and the commitment and monongoy that it entails is on the whole better for couples — especially women — and better for raising children. A civil union is a too casual thing, as evidenced by the civil union experience in other countries, and its devastating effect on children. It lacks the sense of commitment and single-minded devotion that is key to human felicity and the protection of women and children. If you think the divorce rate is bad, have you checked the dissolultion of civil union rate among gay couples? It’s exponentially worse. Granted the divorce rate is bad, but if you’re not even aiming at permanence, stability, fidelity, and monogomy for life, how much worse would it be? And that’s saying nothing about the innumerable legal problems that would ensue if the state got out of the marriage business.
Jed, with all respect, this seems like a horrid idea, which would not please the Lord. A creation ordinance is intended to be as permanent as this age, and we dare not mess with them. If marriages are in trouble, the solution, it seems to me, is to find ways to solve the problem rather than to exacerbate it.
…from a 2k perspective, how do we approach an institution like marriage and family which obviously occupies both kingdoms?
Quoth VanDrunen:
“There are many more things that Kloosterman said that I might respond to, but I must address just one more before making some concluding remarks. Kloosterman says: ‘Illustrative of the problematic two-kingdom construction being advocated by VanDrunen is the question: To which of the two kingdoms, worldly or spiritual, must we assign marriage and the family?’ He apparently thinks that he has me locked on the horns of a hopeless dilemma, but I reply unambiguously: to the ‘worldly’ kingdom. Marriage and family are part of the original creation order, they have been sustained by common grace, and my unbelieving neighbors’ marriage is just as valid in the sight of God and society as mine. Christ’s redemptive work is not the origin of marriage. The church did not establish the bearing of children. Marriage and family are institutions common to believers and unbelievers alike. The church recognizes these institutions, commends them, and gives some general instructions about them, but it does not create them.â€
http://opc.org/os.html?article_id=78
So, Jed, I think a lot of your questions can be simply answered in saying that marriage is ever and always grounded in creation. That may cause some hard decisions, but your only other option is to say that it’s grounded in redemption—we may as individuals toggle between two kingdoms, but institutions have to be grounded in one or the other—which seems to put you a step closer to thinking it’s a sacrament, or at least not having much a response to those who say it is. It also runs the risk of creating some sort of confused class system amongst all people with regard to marriage: some are married, some are sorta married but not really, they get to play married. I understand that resolves some tension for those of us who think Prop 8ism has problems, but the price to be paid seems to be a big chunk of Protestant orthodoxy.
Zrim, good points and helpful observations. I think DVD is spot on. (I now remember why I like him so much.)
Back up the blasters CVD, other than the weird WW2 reference, I get where you are coming from. Here’s a few thoughts that come to mind: throughout human history the state has had varying roles in marriage, and marriage law has by no means been monolithic. Since there has been no clear statement in scripture as to how the institution is to be governed is it entirely inappropriate to ask questions about the effectiveness of our current system. Like I said, in Europe there are two ceremonies, and I’m not even saying that I agree with the system, but I’d hardly call it wresting God’s creational prerogatives, its simply a different mode of governance. All I am saying is that the state might want to consider how it adjudicates marital law, and if the fact remains that all they are ruling over is civic, then what is all of the shouting about? You have to admit that the secular state does run into issues, especially with the advent of “no-fault” in enforcing any creational norms within the institution. Like it or not Prop. 8 has uncovered a great deal of the state’s inability to uphold even the most basic creational norms such as fidelity. It is awfully hard to champion the solemnity and exclusivity of an institution that is so easily broken.
Zrim, the DVD excerpt is actually quite helpful in seeing how marital and familial relationships are a “this-world” affair.
More thoughts to come…
Jed, thanks for your thoughts. (The River Kwai reference was an allusion to unbelievers warring against God, as they are in rebellion; just it was odd for the Allied POW to help the Japanese war against the Allies, so perhaps it’s odd for Christians to help unbelievers war against God by repudiating his creation ordinance of marriage.)
I’m not sure it’s merely a “mode of governance” if the mode does away with marriage in favor of civil unions, which is what I understood you to be proposing by saying the state should perhaps get out of the business of marriage and leave it to the churches. I think we want to promote obedience to creation norms, including marriage. In a sense we have dual tracks in the U.S. for marriage, don’t we? Unbelievers have their marriage ceremonies, in which Christ is absent, and believers have their ceremonies in which Christ is present, his name invoked, a homily is delivered, etc.
I wouldn’t say marriage is ready to be retired because of the prevalence of divorce or attacks on it. Unbelievers have the law written on their conscience and can obey that law, externally, to a remarkabele degree. I have lots of non-Christian friends with wonderful marriages. They are lovely people. Divorce rates/marriage rates rise and fall with shifting cultural fads and norms. We may yet see a return to strengthened marriage among both believers and unbelievers. The instituion has been around since the Garden, and that’s a long tradition. Not ready to give up on it yet.
Apropos of nothing here (because there isn’t a thread for it), but I’m ticked off.
On pp. 106 – 107 of vanDrunen’s Natural Law and the Two Kingdoms, we find this:
Calvin insisted that sin makes the natural knowledge of God insufficient and therefore that moral understand requires a revealed written law.
[for Calvin] … human sin rather than the limits of human nature is the principal reason why supernatural revelation is necessary.
I’ve been arguing the same point here for two years! And all I get is <voicemode=”immature mockery”>> “You’ve got a low view of creation” </voicemode>.
VanDrunen says it and gets recommended.
Harrrrrumph.
ah, the HTML taggery failed. *sigh*
Jeff, I’m sure you can find many points in DVD with which you agree. It could be though that you don’t put those points of agreement together in the same way. I don’t see any problem with maintaining this. But where do you go with it?
Well, as I march further into NLTK, I do go somewhere seemingly different with it than he.
So it’s clear that DVD reads Calvin as affirming the sufficiency of NL in the civil realm and the insufficiency of NL in the spiritual. So I can see Zrim peeking out of the page here.
He doesn’t cite this claim, interestingly, and I’m not sure he’s correct on Calvin on this one point. (His earlier points are spot on –pp. 67-82). In particular, I’ve not seen yet any treatment of one of the most crucial passages, Inst. 4.20.9, in which God is held to be a person, with rights to be respected. I believe this will be a crucial distinction as the core difference between Calvin’s Geneva and a modern pluralistic society, such that NL transplanted into the latter takes on a widely different character from Calvin’s view.
At least, that’s my working hypothesis.
You’re right, BTW — vanDrunen is definitely the guy to read here. Very well written, anticipates (most) objections, well researched. I’m favorably impressed. I found his treatment of Calvin’s consistencies and inconsistencies in Geneva (82ff.) to be thought-provoking and thought out.
Jeff, let me lay a little Grabill on you as well. After rehearsing the usual citations that plainly show Calvin’s view that God is naturally known to all men (e.g. “There are innumerable evidences both in heaven and on earth that declare his wonderful wisdom; not only those more recondite matters for the closer observation of which astronomy, medicine, and all natural science are intended, but also those that thrust themselves upon the sight of even the most untutored and ignorant personsâ€), he writes,
“Nevertheless, Calvin acknowledges without hesitation or ambiguity that post-lapsum the natural revelation of God in conscience and the created order has been obfuscated, and thus is impotent in itself to bring people to a true and saving knowledge of God. Accordingly, he observes, ‘In this ruin of mankind no one now experiences God either as Father or as Author of salvation, or favorable in any way, until Christ the Mediator comes forward to reconcile him to us.’ [ICR 1.2.1] But how is the true knowledge of God attained? ‘No one,’ says Calvin, ‘can get even the slightest taste of right and sound doctrine unless he be a pupil of Scripture.’ [ICR 1.6.2] Or, speaking, from a different but complimentary perspective, ‘[H]owever fitting it may be for a man seriously to turn his eyes to contemplate God’s works, since he has been placed in this most glorious theatre to be a spectator of them, it is fitting that he prick up his ears to the Word, the better to profit.’ [ICR 1.5.12, Cf. Commentary on the Acts of the Apostles, vol.2, pp. 112-14, 118-19] Notice that on the one hand Calvin repeatedly affirms that humans can know God salvifically only through Jesus Christ as found in Scripture, while on the other hand he repeatedly denies the claim that without Christ there is no valid knowledge of God whatsoever.”
Stephen J .Grabill, Rediscovering the Natural Law in Reformed Theological Ethics (pp. 81-82)
““There are innumerable evidences both in heaven and on earth that declare his wonderful wisdom; not only those more recondite matters for the closer observation of which astronomy, medicine, and all natural science are intended, but also those that thrust themselves upon the sight of even the most untutored and ignorant personsâ€
So we have medicine, science, cooking and plumbing, as evidencing God’s existence and declaring his wisdom?
Anyway, just a note, it seems the conceptual distinctions between natural law and natural theology are being blurred in the last few posts.
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