Blog of the week: theology of the body

Our new blog of the week: Theology of the body.

Sex and more

Following the interest in my recent post on marriage, this week at F&T will be devoted to sex and marriage: we’ll have a new “Ten Propositions on Marriage” by Kim Fabricius, and a special three-part series on “Homosexuality and the Church” by Ray Anderson. In the mean time, here’s some of the good stuff happening around the blogosphere:

• A dialogue with Umberto Eco and Eberhard Jüngel
• A response by Bruce McCormack
• An opinion about the best Protestant eccclesiology ever written
• A quote on the nature of biblical prophecy
• A bibliography of Rowan Williams
• A review of Mike Higton's new book
• Some commentary on David Bentley Hart
• A glimpse of the new-look Church Dogmatics
• A post on radical theology and Agamben
• A chance to win: If you place an order of $300 or more with Dove Booksellers before 19 July, you’ll go into a draw to win one of the following sets: Barth’s Church Dogmatics, the Theological Dictionary of the Old Testament, or Kittel’s Theological Dictionary of the New Testament (the winner gets to choose any one of these sets).

Twenty great clergymen in novels

by Kim Fabricius

1. William Collins in Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice (1813)
2. Arthur Dimmesdale in Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter (1850)
3. Father Mapple in Herman Melville, Moby-Dick (1851)
4. Obadiah Slope in Anthony Trollope, Barchester Towers (1857)
5. Charles François-Bienvenu Myriel in Victor Hugo, Les Misérables (1862)
6. Edward Casaubon in George Eliot, Middlemarch (1871)
7. Father Zossima in Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov (1880)
8. Jean Marie Latour in Willa Cather, Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927)
9. The young curate in Georges Bernanos, The Diary of a Country Priest (1936)
10. The unnamed priest in Graham Greene, The Power and the Glory (1940)
11. Father Paneloux in Albert Camus, The Plague (1947)
12. Hazel Motes in Flannery O’Connor, Wise Blood (1952)*
13. Stephen Kumalo in Alan Paton, Cry, the Beloved Country (1948)
14. Dean Jocelin in William Golding, The Spire (1964)
15. Sebastião Rodrigues in Endo Shusaku, Silence (1966)
16. William of Baskerville in Umberto Eco, The Name of the Rose (1983)
17. Oscar Hopkins in Peter Carey, Oscar and Lucinda (1988)
18. Clarence Wilmot in John Updike, In the Beauty of the Lilies (1996)
19. Nathan Price in Barbara Kingsolver, The Poisonwood Bible (1998)
20. John Ames in Marilynne Robinson, Gilead (2004)

* Okay, Hazel Motes is not a clergyman, but there’s just got to be a place for him: call him an anti-clergyman! And for a great charlatan preacher, there is Elmer Gantry in Sinclair Lewis, Elmer Gantry (1927).

Against marriage: or, why churches should stop performing weddings

In an interesting post, Jason argues for a religious understanding of marriage, and he cites P. T. Forsyth’s view that marriage is much more than a social contract: “the more one ponders the solemn implicates and slow effects of marriage, moral and spiritual, the more one feels that it has something sacramental in its nature.”

I think this is exactly the wrong thing to say about marriage. In fact, I’d like to see the church stop its custom of benignly validating the institution of marriage. The investment of marriage with a pseudo-religious quality has long diminished the witness of the church: the state authorises a legal union, and then calls upon the church to bless this union with a thin veneer of religiosity. Here, as elsewhere, the church proves itself to be the state’s faithful servant: yes, we will validate state authority with a harmless blessing; yes, we are only too pleased to sanctify the wedding ceremony, and to clothe the social functions of romantic love and family life with a saintly aura.

Notice that the church is not invited here to proclaim its own proper message of judgment and grace. The church is not invited to bear witness. Instead, we are simply asked to add God’s blessing to the social order and to the state’s authority. Here the situation is just the same as in those churches where all infants born into the nation-state are provided with baptism: the church’s witness is undermined completely by its willingness to serve as the state’s lapdog. We are like the comically odious Mr Collins in Pride and Prejudice – that sycophantic clergyman who waits upon the pleasure of his exalted benefactress, Lady Catherine De Bourgh, and is only too pleased to do her bidding whenever the opportunity arises.

If there is anything distinctively Christian to say about marriage, then the first step should be the church’s flat refusal to co-operate in the grim and desperate business of wedding ceremonies, and a flat refusal to provide the state with any so-called “marriage altar.” As Karl Barth has put it, marriage “must be completely divested of the character of a religious doublet to the civil ceremony” (CD III/4, p. 228).

Indeed, far from merely authorising weddings with pious talk about the “spiritual and moral” depths of marital love, the church’s witness demands a critique of romantic love – yes, a critique of marriage itself! As Dietrich Bonhoeffer has incisively argued in Life Together, the sexual relationship is by no means “sacramental in nature.” Instead, in our own societies romantic love functions as an idol which demands absolute subservience.

Halden explores this theme in a brilliant engagement with Bonhoeffer: “The longing to be completed through immediate contact with another is the reigning mythos of romance in our age. It is the object of voracious, often violent pursuit at all costs…. The fact is that in our romantic imaginations we seem to remain disturbingly trapped in the Zeitgeist of our age, hoping that by journeying deeper into the abyss of our selfishness we will somehow find the community that we long for with the other.” In Bonhoeffer’s analysis, the marriage relationship is not “sacramental by nature,” but it is selfish and parasitic by nature. In its hidden depths one finds not the comforting glow of religious sanctity, but an abyss of violence and self-will, a voracious need to find my own image reflected in the face of another.

But such a bleak analysis is not the last word. If the church refuses to sanctify the social order and the state’s authority as “naturally” blessed, it is also true that the church is a community with its own proper practices, its own virtues, its own proclamation of the good as that which has interrupted and reconfigured the natural order through the resurrection of Jesus from the dead.

If we begin to refuse church participation in wedding ceremonies, perhaps the way will be opened for a renewed sacramental understanding of marriage. The church refuses to recognise the marital relationship – or, for that matter, “the family” – as the fundamental social unit. Instead, the Christian community recognises the body of Christ as the fundamental social order of the new creation. And within this new society, within this economy of friendship and hospitality and self-giving, the church also bears witness to particular instantiations of Christian friendship, to specially gifted loci of generosity and hospitality and self-giving love.

Here, Christian marriage is sacramental precisely because it bears witness to the incursion of the new creation. It interrupts the existing order with the glad tidings of God’s new world. It interrupts marriage itself – and all the parasitic violence of romantic love – with the joyful and generous reality of the peace of the body of Christ.

In short: let’s say No to church-sanctioned weddings, No to the culture of romance-at-any-cost, but Yes to the sacrament of marriage, Yes to the body of Christ. To paraphrase St Paul: For in Christ Jesus, neither marriage nor singleness is anything; what counts is a new creation.

Blog of the week: Christians in context

Our new blog of the week is Christians in Context. If you think conservative Reformed blogging has to be narrow and humourless, then these guys will prove you wrong. While you’re there, you might also like to check out their Theologica forum, and their popular Theological Word of the Day widget.

Giorgio Agamben, theology and economy: Il Regno e la Gloria

Adam Kotsko (author of a new book on Žižek, which I’ve just finished reading) has been working through Giorgio Agamben’s latest book, Il Regno e la Gloria. Per una genealogia teologica dell’economia e del governo [The Reign and the Glory: A Theological Genealogy of Economy and Government]. You can see a list of the posts here, or you can download the full series as a pdf.

For those of us who don’t read Italian, this is an extremely helpful and remarkably fascinating chapter-by-chapter summary. From the sounds of it, Il Regno e la Gloria is Agamben’s most theologically sophisticated work to date. He engages with theo-political thinkers like Schmitt and Peterson, as well as theologians like Barth, Moltmann, Balthasar, Aquinas, Augustine, Origen, the Cappadoccians, the Arians, and St Paul.

Summarising Agamben’s argument, Kotsko writes: “Agamben’s goal in the book is to investigate the ways that power in the West has tended to take the form of an oikonomia. This aligns his project with Foucault’s, though Agamben hopes to show that there were internal reasons that Foucault’s project remained unfinished. His angle will be an investigation of the initial attempts to formulate the doctrine of the Trinity in terms of a divine economy and to show ‘how the apparatus of the trinitarian oikonomia can constitute a privileged laboratory for observing the functioning and articulation – both internal and external – of the governmental machine’…. The key question, missed by previous scholars of royal pomp and liturgy, is why power needs glory. Though this question has been neglected for the most part, Agamben believes it points toward the relation between oikonomia and glory as ‘the ultimate structure of the governmental machine of the West’. Glory is ‘the secret center of power’.”

Here’s the full index of posts:

Introduction
1. The two paradigms
2. The mystery of the economy
3. Being and act [Essere e agire]
4. Kingdom and government
5. The providential machine (translation of “threshold” to this chapter)
6. Angelology and bureaucracy
7. The power and the glory
8. Archeology of glory (threshold)

Appendix: The economy of the moderns
1. Law and miracle
2. The invisible hand

And to whet your appetite, here are a few excerpts from the series:

From the notes on chapter 1: “Schmitt’s famous thesis that all modern political concepts are secularized theological concepts has to be stretched to its breaking point by the notion of oikonomia. It’s not simply a matter of extending the thesis to include economic concepts as well – it’s the more radical move of claiming that the theological concepts already were economic concepts, all along.”

From the notes on chapter 8: “Agamben begins by castigating Hans Urs von Balthasar, who has led astray all theologians by confining glory to the aesthetic realm rather than its properly political place – and this despite the obvious clue provided by the German word Herrlichkeit. By contrast, Agamben sets out to prove that the terms kabod and doxa (glory) are actually never used in an aesthetic sense in scripture, but only in a political one.”

Again, from chapter 8: “Glory as inoperativity is necessary to the exercise of power because of the constitutive inoperativity of humanity. It is because humans don’t have a ‘use’ or ‘job’ that we are enabled to be so incredibly active. Just as the theological apparatus needs the central void of glory to function, so also ‘the governmental apparatus functions because it has captured in its central void the inoperativity of the human essence’.”