In the last blog I offered that God reveals God’s self in scripture as the creator of order, indeed of overlapping orders that define the natural world, the social world of humans, and the church. I also stated that the Christian understanding of those orders has been continually revised up until today under the twin influences of natural revelation and the ideals of God’s Reign as described in scripture.
American Christian progressives, as I read them, are most anxious to continue revising the traditional understanding of the social order to allow for same-sex marriage, and of the ecclesial order so as to allow the blessing of such marriages. And they maintain that this revision is in keeping with the ideals of God’s reign as revealed in God’s Word; ideals usually characterized as love and inclusion. These ideals, love and inclusion, are interpreted to mean accepting and affirming LGBTQ persons with their distinctive sexual identity and including their committed relationships into the institution of marriage within the larger order of God’s Reign.
Which raises a question about just how the orderliness of God’s Reign is conceptualized.
Regardless of how one revises the Biblical picture of God’s order, at the foundations one finds distinctions and boundaries, and in particular distinctions between types of behavior and bounds of behavior beyond which humans are not to transgress. The very concept of order in the Bible is an interplay between creative generatively and the creating of distinctions and boundaries. Night and day have their bounds, as do earth, sky, and water and the various types of creatures. And of course these bounds extend into human relationships as they unfold in the Biblical narrative.
One can argue that from the standpoint of natural revelation as interpreted by modern science (physical, social, and psychological) that these bounds were rather naively drawn, but this does not speak against the idea of boundaries as fundamental to God’s order. Male and female as distinctions and boundaries around identity are more complex than previous generations thought, but they are still distinctions. And marriage, even for progressives, appears to form a kind of boundary around permissible forms of human sexual behavior. At least as I read them progressives would say that covenanting in a “committed relationship ‘forsaking all others so long as you both shall live?’ creates boundary outside of which certain kinds of relationships are not permissible.
But is marriage itself, as described above, an unrevisable context for committed human relationships? We read in scripture that in Heaven there is no marriage, so it clearly isn’t a permanent feature of God’s Reign. Is it a necessary institution prior to the consummation of God’s Reign? Or can the process of revising the meaning of marriage between two persons, based on the demands of love and inclusion, eventually revise it out of existence, removing the boundary that it represents so as to not hinder individuals from realizing their full sense of sexual identity?
And while we think of such social institutions as marriage, the meaning of which has been and apparently continues to be the subject of revision by progressives, what about other distinctions and boundaries? In the order of the church is the distinction between clergy and lay subject to revision, and with it the boundaries around the ministries of each? The distinction between clergy and episcopacy? (After all, Wesley appeared to transgress this boundary) Is there a distinction between Christianity and other religions? Are there boundaries between them that persons in each cannot transgress? On what basis do you define such boundaries and is it permanent or also subject to revision?
These are not idle questions. Every one of the distinctions I’ve listed above has been denied and the boundaries of belief and belonging tested in recent years and decades by Christians who revise the traditional interpretation of the Bible to include everything from Buddhist metaphysics to accepting Muhammad as a prophet of God.
I have asked of traditionalists why they stopped revising. I ask of progressives: is there any limit beyond which would not revise? What are the criteria that will determine where you stop? And do those criteria emerge from the Bible itself as revelation or from some outside set of standards to which it is subject? It seems to me that this is at the heart of the debate over revision, given as I’ve stated that everyone revises.
It appears that for progressives the answer to these questions are found in the ideals of love and inclusion themselves rather than particular limiting commandments found in scripture. Marriage as an institution is defined by, bounded by the demands placed on it by the love of those within it within the larger network of loving friends and relations. One could even argue, although I have not seen this argument articulated, that the demands of inclusion create boundaries that ultimately exclude. For example, a Christian congregation that wishes to include the weak and powerless will need to exclude those who prey on the weak and powerless. Paul seems to make an argument like this in his letters. So it is at least imaginable that limitless revision can still maintain some form of order, albeit one that seems rather tenuously answerable to human affections and social norms.
But with regard to marriage there is one further question I need to ask. You want to revise the Christian concept of marriage to include marriage between two persons of the same sex. Yet marriage isn’t just a Christian institution. It is a human institution found across all cultures. Very recently in the United States this institution has been legally revised so as to include two persons of the same sex. But the United States wisely limits its sovereignty to its own borders and doesn’t insist that societies outside the US accept same-sex marriage. What about United Methodist progressives? Will you accept limits to your sovereign right to revise the institution of marriage; recognizing that other cultures and religions, not to mention other United Methodists may not accept your revisions. Put another way, is there a cultural limit to your revisions of the concept of marriage – or do you regard them as universally valid even if they are not universally accepted?
This is a key question for a Christian witness in a culturally and religious plural world. And particularly so when Christian minorities in many parts of the world live under the accusation that they are simply the advance guard for Western cultural hegemony. Indeed such accusations come from within the LGBTQ communities in other cultural contexts when that community sees American progressives pushing a distinctively American agenda of homonormativity.
It seems to me that while one can imagine an almost limitless revision of the interpretation of scripture under the influence of God’s Spirit it is harder to imagine it when confronted with the boundaries placed on us by culture on one hand and the claim of the universality of God’s Reign on the other. It appears to me that the truths that are most universal are of necessity the most primal and limited. Marriage as a relationship between a man and a woman is certainly limiting and exclusive. It is also universally comprehensible and transcends all cultural differences. The same can be said of different forms of bounded communities and the limits they place on human behavior.
I want to stress that asking questions is not the same as suggesting that they have no answers. Nor does it signal that I agree with traditionalists in these matters. It is simply my way of suggesting that our discourse needs to push toward the root disagreements which, unexposed, make it impossible to find common ground; or at least identify whether common ground might exist.
And I ask because I believe that people should speak for themselves. Right now both sides in the major debates among United Methodists spend more time attacking straw men of their own devising than engaging one another. Small wonder both sides believe they have won yet take neither comfort nor pleasure in their victory.
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