Why division over marriage is good for the Church

St. Paul wrote that heresies are good for the Church: There must be heresies among you in order that those who are genuine among you might be made plain (1 Cor. 11.19, my trans.).

In other words, heresies sharpen the Church’s thinking.  They push the Church to distinguish truth from error.

In his classic Essay on the Development of Christin Doctrine, John Henry Newman argued that heresies are used by God to develop the Church’s doctrine.  They stimulate the Church to go deeper into Scripture and its implications to see more clearly important aspects of God and the Church’s life in Him.

Ryan Anderson has an excellent piece at First Things on how the current culture war over marriage is doing just that.

Just as the early church dug down to discover the doctrine of the Trinity in its battles over the Godhead, he argues, and just as the sixteenth century debated justification, so today we are arguing about human nature.

I would add that each of these three debates answered a question.

1. Were the Greeks right about God?  The Greeks were convinced that God cannot change.  So most of the early church heresies arose out of this conviction.  Arius knew that Christ could not be fully God because Christ was born, suffered and died, and all these things involved change.  So he could not be fully divine.

Athanasius countered that the biblical God was not the god of Aristotle and Plato, and was fully capable of being both changeless (in character) and changing (the eternal Son entering time).

2. Were the Greeks right about salvation?  The Greeks  believed that heroes and superstars gained immortality by extraordinary action.  Or, following Plato, philosophers could join the eternal Forms by strenuous thinking.  So salvation was achieved mostly by human effort.

Luther and Calvin insisted that salvation is what God does for us, not what we do for God.

3. Was the Sexual Revolution right about human nature?  That it is finally malleable?  That gender need not be tied to sexual difference?  That sex need not be tied to babies?  That sex has nothing intrinsically to do with marriage?

The orthodox Church–Protestant, Catholic, and Eastern Orthodox–is now getting clarity about these things.  In ways it did not before the Sixties. In short, it is realizing that the Sexual Revolution was wrong in the way it answered all of these questions.

We can give thanks for that.  And we need to, lest we despair that this massive cultural deception is only destructive.