Lesson 5: Scripture II

AGENDA

• Review from Last Time
• Human Community and Marriage: Scriptural Themes

• Discussion of Case #4: Marriage, Sex, and Procreation

REVIEW FROM LAST TIME

1. First, a note on inclusive language and God language (protocols from the Theology Department).
2. Second, regarding our discussion of the parietals case. You seemed to be in general agreement that parietals are most basically about fostering community life, against the common outsider misperceptions that these rules are attempts by the administration to keep students from having sex. The problem we faced is that we did not seem to be in agreement about what that community life should look like, or how important administrative policies are to cultivating community life.
1. This raises the question of what part laws (or more broadly, a particular community's customs and regulations) do play or should play in cultivating moral development in a community. Are such laws essential or do they do more harm than good in achieving the goods they aim to advance?
2. Some of you suggested that there seems to be a particular vision of the good Christian community embodied in the Constitutions of the Congregation of Holy Cross that influences social life on this campus, but that this should be made more explicit in the administration’s thinking.
3. Some of you suggested that there seems to be a model for proper male/female relations that parietals encode but that this model implies certain norms about male/male and female/female friendship, gender roles, and sexuality that not all on this campus would affirm. This focuses our attention on the possibility that laws are always based on some vision of what is good for human beings (individually and collectively) and that part of ethical thinking involves making explicit the goods implied in any set of laws or community regulations.

HUMAN COMMUNITY AND MARRIAGE—SCRIPTURAL THEMES

1. We have talked already about the vision of social life and male/female relations that parietals seem to reflect. What if any themes pertaining to social life are contained in scripture? Are they clear and do they affirm or complicate this vision? This provides us with a case study for how scripture is used as a source for ethical thinking.
2. Descriptive Dimension
1. What is the purpose of human social life?
1. Genesis 1-2: to love God in this life, to exemplify in one’s life the sort of person that God has created one to be, and through this to return to God in time.
2. The whole process of each human history can be understood as a struggle with the experience of distance from or exile from God (think here of both the image of loss as a result of disobedience but also of a return to God through obedience).
3. This is only possible if we are able to recognize God as our final end and if God has given us an intelligible order that facilitates our efforts to return to God through loving our neighbors justly.
4. Exodus 20: God’s law is intended to facilitate our life together, such that through properly ordered relations with each other we come to know and love God more closely.
5. Note also the form of God’s first revelation: of all the ways that God could have chosen to reveal God's self, God chose law (a point emphasized especially by the great reformer John Calvin in his Institutes)..
6. Law, as it is expressed in the Exodus readings, is intended to regulate both our relationship with God and also our relationship with each other (the so-called “two tables”).
2. What description do these passages contain about the problems we have in our attempts to live peacefully together?
1. Disorder, lack of order, lack of a right perception of order.
2. Misunderstanding nature, or what (if anything) nature intends (think of the historical category of "sins against nature").
3. Loving other things in place of God (lower goods in place of higher goods).
4. Note here that scripture is being used to diagnose some human ill, which we need not understand as the direct result of some past sinful act but rather as something being not quite right with the world.
5. What goods do people seek that are not, ultimately, consonant with their growth in love of God and justice to others?
3. Normative Dimension
1. What are the specific goods people ought to seek?
1. Order: You will recall from your Foundations course that the Bible contains two creation stories. The first emphasizes the Cosmic, transcendent God, who brings order out of chaos, light from dark, male and female together, and the variety of living beings all under the judgment that what has been created is good.
2. Freedom: But we also have a second creation story, which emphasizes the nearness of God, forming the first man out of the dust as if with hands, and then the woman from the man. Both God and the tempter have human traits: mobility, speech. The couple gives in to temptation and brings upon themselves their own destruction. But what is emphasized is the freedom that God allows to chose against one’s own good (that is, to chose against God as the final end)
3. Yet freedom is only given for the purpose of love within the boundaries of the intended order. There are certain commonalities in these sources: God creates in freedom (human beings are not necessary but life is a free gift of divine love). Moreover, the created world is “good” and this goodness is exemplified both by the fact the creatures exist (it is better, on this score, that something exist rather than not exist) and by the fact that they are happy when they are obedient to a natural order which God places before them.
4. Many elements of this scene are natural goods, that is good if used in accordance with their intended purpose. So food is good when the proper food is eaten. Sex is good because it perpetuates existence (a good) and because it fulfills a command of God (be fruitful and multiply, fill the earth and subdue it). Ordered relations among creatures are good as are properly ordered relationships among human beings. Sociality is a good. (It is not good to be alone.)
4. What do the life, death and mission of Jesus mean for these goods of social and married life?
1. Marriage is a good gift of God: In Mt 19:1-12, Jesus affirms the good of marriage. God has instituted this as a natural good, and it is meant to be life long. The Pharisees then question him about why Moses had made an apparent concession in allowing divorce (notice an appeal to scripture and to tradition), and Jesus points to the difference between the basic goods at stake (marriage is good, instituted by God, and in the social and biological interest of the couple), and then points to the pastoral concession that Moses made: he was not, says Jesus, doing this because it was the right thing to do absolutely but as a practical decision (in the interest of the community, perhaps, although he does not really speculate on this). He ends this by meditating on the different states of life and the different callings of human beings.
2. Nonetheless, marriage and children are not the highest good: Compare this to Luke 14: “Whoever comes to me and does not hate father and mother, wife and children, brother and sisters, yes, and even life itself, cannot be my disciple.” This would seem to be in direct opposition to Jesus statement about the natural good of marriage. Would it not have been easier to leave out one or the other instead of perpetuating this problem? Is marriage a good, or are children a good? Some, like St. Augustine whom you will read later, resolved this apparent problem by saying that we should love completely only higher things (namely, God) and that we should love in a subordinate way the lower things. We have a natural inclination to care for those closest to us, but because we are creatures who are unities of body and spirit we are always falling into the trap of loving lower things as if they were God. (Trying to find our ultimate happiness in marriage or family when ultimate happiness is found in God alone.)
3. The goods of marriage and keeping God’s commands do not exhaust the life of discipleship: In Luke 18, we are told that one needs to give up all that one has if one wants to follow Jesus completely. Keeping the commandments is a good (they were given by God, after all) but such actions do not exhaust what it means to love God. Moreover, it emphasizes that, left to our own devices, we will ultimately fail in finding human fulfillment. It is only through God’s aid (God’s presence in our own histories, namely grace) that can bridge this gap.
4. Need to be vigilant about our natural tendency to absolutize relative goods: Consider the experience of “making your parents proud” and the frequent tendency of parents (especially those of ND students) to treat their children as their idols. Or Luke 20, which tells us that marriage is a natural good, a good of this age, but is not sufficient to capture the ultimate happiness for which human beings are destined.
5. For Augustine, marriage is a natural state but also one which has been elevated to a higher status by Christ.
1. The procreation and rearing of children is one good of marriage
2. Fidelity is another good, because it turns the evil of carnal lust into the good of children.
1. Is carnal lust an evil? Yes, for Augustine, because it is directed toward inward self-fulfillment rather than love of God and love of neighbor
2. Marriage, ideally, facilitates modesty and self-control (presumably in all areas of life)
3. Or compare 1 Cor. 6:1-9 with 1 Cor. 13: On the one hand we have a model of marriage as a concession of weaknesses of the flesh. Because human beings are prone to sexual morality, marriage is a kind of fire-extinguishers for lusts of the flesh. It is better to marry than to be aflame with passion. The model is that each person helps the other get to heaven by getting sexual distractions out of the system. But this is not the real good. The real good is the life of the celibate (as Paul is). But this same Paul gives us this beautiful meditation on love that you hear in way too many Christian weddings, and is at least theoretically applicable to married life.
3. Unity is also a good of marriage. So too is the “natural companionship between the two sexes” where sociality and inter-personal relationship between the couple is also a good.
1. Natural Unity: both bodily unity but also a closeness in friendship.
2. Unity that Transcends the Natural: So in the Catholic tradition, marriage is a Sacrament (efficacious symbol) of the love between Christ and the Church. The unity of Christ with the Church.
4. Augustinian Theme: marital goods, and all other lower goods, should be used rather than enjoyed so that people can focus on what is higher. Evils are nothing more or less than goods misordered or misranked.
1. For Aquinas, he begins asking the question (unfortunately we get only the man’s perspective) if a man has sex with an unmarried woman and she consents to it, is there a sin?
5. Note that he argues this on the grounds that sex has a natural end (the procreation of children) and so that human beings approach their final end (in part) through the natural end (exercise of natural faculties in accordance with their final end). [a theme also picked up by Paul VI ]
6. But the production of children is not an end in itself apart from their care and education. (So here, masturbation [solitary or mutual] or fornication are considered evils because these acts separate the sexual act from its intended purpose, the procreation and education of children. But so is absentee parenting, because the existence of children is not a complete good but rather their education to righteousness must also be considered.)
7. Reason is able to ascertain the natural end, and understand it in light of the ultimate end known through revelation.
6. In recent papal teachings, we find the same theme: Paul VI, Humanae Vitae (1968 encyclical letter)
1. Purpose: to examine how to discharge the duty of transmitting life. (par. 1)
2. Motivating Concern: the human tendency to want to control and manipulate all aspects of human life to one’s own personal preference. (par. 2)
3. “Total Vision of Man”: dual vocation—natural/earthly and supernatural/eternal vocation (calling to fulfill the created purpose)
4. Conjugal Love must be understood with respect to both ends, and has the following characteristics:
   1. Fully Human—exercise of free act of will, not the rush of instinct.
   2. Total—a specific form of friendship, sharing and giving themselves fully to each other.
   3. Faithful and exclusive—until death
5. Responsible parenthood—allows one to refrain from transmitting life for a time for grave reasons (illness, financial insecurity), but only through appropriate means.
6. Marriage Act (use of marriage)
   1. “each and every marriage act must remain open to the transmission of life” (par. 11)
   2. “the inseparable connection, willed by God and unable to be broken by man on his own initiative, between the two meanings of the conjugal act: the unitive meaning and the procreative meaning.” (par. 12)
   3. “To use this divine gift to destroy, even if only partially, its meaning and its purpose is to contradict the nature both of man and of woman and of their most intimate relationship, and therefore it is to contradict also the plan of God and His will.” (par. 13)
7. Cannot do evil that good may come: “In truth, if it is sometimes licit to tolerate a lesser evil in order to avoid a greater evil or to promote a greater good, it is not licit, even for the gravest of reasons, to do evil that good may follow there from, that is, to make into the object of a positive act of the will something which is intrinsically disordered, and hence unworthy of the human person, even when the intention is to safeguard or promote individual, family, or social well-being.” (par. 14)

Discuss Case #4: Marriage, Sex, and Procreation