New evangelical book on gay marriages
Submitted by Heather on October 31 1999 at 21:46:09
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This isn't about boylove, but I know that gay marriage is an issue on the minds of some people here. A gay evangelical acquaintance of mine has alerted me to a new book that is causing great controversy in the Canadian Evangelical Theological Society: Sexuality and the Christian Body, by Eugene Rogers. My acquaintance says that the innovative aspect of the book is that it departs from Protestant and Catholic views of marriage, instead approaching the subject from the Eastern Orthodox point of view. The CETS is in an uproar because the book supports gay marriage. The book offers a very sympathetic view of traditionalist arguments against homosexuality but ultimately find them lacking. Below is a section where Rogers discusses the ideas of the Russian theologian Evdokimov. Heather Marriage in Christianity is best understood as an ascetic practice of and for the community by which God takes sexuality up into God's own triune life, graciously transforming it so as to allow the couple to partially model the love between Christ and the Church. . . . Edminov argues forcefully that it is not the case that marriage is for satisfaction, and monasticism for celibacy. . . . Rather both marriage and monasticism are for sanctification; both involve a commitment to living with others in which one cannot escape being transformed by their perceptions, which by the grace of God will be for the better. In both cases, "to marry, just as to become a monk, means to take an absolute risk." . . . The trouble with most conservative accounts is not that in denying same-sex couples the rite of marriage they would deny them true self-satisfaction, although they might. They trouble is that in denying same-sex couples the rite of marriage, they would deny them true self-denial. . . . If marriage is not about satisfaction of sexual desires, but about a mutual sanctification by ascesis, gay and lesbian Christians who desire it can hardly be accused of self-centeredness; rather they seek to participate in a particularly vivid way in the self-emptying that Christ exemplified for the Church. If marriage is not about procreation, although it promotes the virtue of hospitality to the stranger, then there too gay and lesbian Christians suffer no disadvantage, but can carry forward the great tradition of those other same-sex communities, the monasteries, in caring for the sick and oblate. No one complained about foundlings being raised by communities of women or men, but hospitality to oblates was the great Christian transformation of the exposure of infants in antiquity. If marriage is about transforming eros into agape, then why should gay and lesbian Christians be deprived of that ascesis? . . . Indeed, talk of children as a necessary goal of marriage risks idolatry. Here Eastern Orthodoxy's critique of Western Christianity is telling. So Paul Evdokimov writes, "Both the preservation of the species and selfish sexual pleasure reduce the partner to a mere tool and destroy human dignity." |