jsburbidge (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
jsburbidge) wrote2016-01-18 02:16 pm
jsburbidge) wrote2016-01-18 02:16 pm
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Not Angels, but Anglicans
So the primates of the Anglican Communion have imposed some minor sanctions on the ECUSA (essentially booting it off some committees -- stronger sanctions were voted on but failed 15 to 20) for allowing a redefinition of marriage to include same-sex couples. No steps were taken regarding other churches within the Anglican Communion which, at least de facto, allow for same-sex blessings.
The oddity of this may be summarized by saying that the groups pushing for sanctions do not recognize marriage as a sacrament -- they are overwhelmingly Evangelical and Protestant, and, now that Rowan Williams has gone, there may be no primate firmly enough in the Anglo-Catholic camp to worry about the special status of marriage, derived from its sacramentality, per se, which is the only concern specifically addressed by this particular line in the sand.
There's a whole sheaf of issues which swirl around the question of the sacramentality of marriage in the Church, and there are a number of ways of framing them.
One is to point out that the solemnization of marriage was not (until after the Reformation) a function of the clergy (this changed with the Anglican Canon Law and in the Roman decree Tametsi both of which were put in place to put social control on the problem of forced or "unauthorized" marriages (i.e. elopements). This has led to the proposal in some quarters (to which I am sympathetic) that the Church should get out of the business of conducting marriages altogether, leaving that to the state (following the Civil Law model) and merely bless unions once created. (See, for example, Mtr. Maggie Helwig's submission to the Commission on the Marriage Canon (PDF warning).) This recognizes that in this day when most marriages are by licence (and where the licence is a superior control to that provided by the traditional banns) the rationale for a clerical involvement in the marriage itself (as opposed to a blessing or recognition of the union) is long past.
This neatly sidesteps the immediate practical problem regarding having to make a decision regarding how to treat civil same-sex unions from a sacramental position. It remains open to somebody concerned about this to treat a same-sex blessing as a sacramental with a similar external form to the sacrament of marriage, just as a blessing of a "traditional" marriage by the church would be another sacramental (the marriage, the sacrament itself, having been performed outside the church). It means that discussion about marriage as a sacrament become a side-issue to the broader social justice issues.
There are two problems with this. The first is that it is unlikely to be adopted: Mtr. Helwig's submission was not picked up by the final report of the commission, and the sentimental / social attachment to marriage in a church setting is too strong to get it easily accepted. The second is that taking as a ground to stand on the historical fact that requiring solemnizations of marriage "by" the Church is a late development ignores the fact that the Church was heavily involved in the regulation of marriage after the ceremony (not only in its handling of annulments but in e.g. the regulation of allowed periods during which sexual activity was curtailed such as Lent). (See Haw, The State of Matrimony for a treatment of the rules regarding marriage and annulment in the late mediaeval and early modern English Church.) The "clericalization" of marriage is not directly tied to the church's concern with marriage. Even if we push the period of focus back to the late Roman period, and shortly after, when the actual rules governing marriage were those of the old Roman Law (or Germanic customary law in some cases: see Julia M.H. Smith, Europe After Rome, for some discussion of this) the theological analysis of marriage was built up on a different basis.
It is sometimes said that marriage was a civil institution which the church recognized and (eventually) treated as a sacrament. This is not really true. In none of the relevant contexts for the Church in the first four centuries could marriage have been considered purely "civil". Jewish marriage customs and rules followed the Jewish Law, which was emphatically religious; the Roman marriage was equally grounded in (pagan) religion, as it treats the family as a cultus of which the paterfamilias is a domestic priest (see La Cité Antique by Fustel de Coulanges). However, it is certainly true that the institution of marriage as Paul found it (critically Paul, as his writings on marriage are the primary basis on which a sacramental understanding has been built) was one having an existence external to and independent of the Church. And the Dominical words regarding marriage (which the East has taken as one of the counsels of perfection and the traditional West as binding legislation) make no claims about the institutional nature, or the specific implications of the vows themselves.
This is where things begin to become interesting, long before we get to the issue of the sacramentality of same-sex unions. What Paul extracts from the institution of marriage as he encounters it, and what was common to "marriage" in its various forms from Jewish through Hellenistic to Roman, through the Germanic period and that of Christendom until the last half century of so is the idea that an essential inequality in the relationship whereby the husband is dominant but loving ("the head") and the wife is submissive and loving is a sacramental mirror of the relationship between Christ and the Church, and more generally between the human and the divine. The sacramental theology of marriage has been built on this particular feature.
However, just as the previously unquestioned assumption that a primary purpose of matrimony was "for the procreation of children, to be brought up in the fear and nurture of the Lord, and to the praise of his holy Name" began to be questioned in the early 20th Century (note the Lambeth declaration on contraceptives as early as 1930) and has now run head on into issues of overpopulation as a violation of the stewardship of the earth, so the assumptions of the inherent inequality of women within the estate marriage have been under attack for well over a century (the first Married Woman's Property Act, which deep-sixed the concept of coverture, was passed by the Imperial Parliament in 1882), and it would be fair to say that in much of the West (or at least the urban West -- there are definitely holdouts such as the Southern Baptists) the majority view of marriage is that it is a relationship between equals. (It would not be overdoing it to say, though, that this is still an ongoing war, given the virulence of the dismissive and/or abusive language directed at women in many fora who act as equals in general social contexts, let alone marriage.)
You can see the traces of this changing in the early parts of Busman's Honeymoon where Peter and Harriet are arguing over using the 1662 or the 1928/1929 marriage vows (which removed the word "obey"). It is on that changed underlying understanding of marriage that same-sex unions are based, socially and in law.
Does the "matter" of the sacrament, the one that Paul knew, continue to exist with such a changed understanding? Or is it the case that an inherently "better" (on other grounds) state as a norm has succeeded it (one which can at most claim to be a sacramental, with a special status as a successor to one of the seven sacraments? Because the Dominical commendation of marriage is not the basis of the way in which its sacramentality has been understood, and it is not an exclusive statement.
Yet this is effectively the particular line in the sand that the Primates' meeting drew. It will please nobody: the conservative block do not regard it as nearly enough: they want a thoroughgoing purge of the liberals, along with an equally thoroughgoing protestantization of the Anglican Communion -- many of the really conservative ACs have already left for Rome or points East and are not a significant force outside Forward in Faith in the UK, and they are probably the only conservative group for which a defence of marriage as a sacrament is likely to be the primary issue (in principle, ACs on the left can share the same concern while generally supporting LGBTQIA-friendly endeavours in just about every other way. The progressive block is outraged at this level of sanction and given the history of social change (in England in particular) on this matter and there will still be the question of what to do when the three-year sanction of the ECUSA is finished.
The oddity of this may be summarized by saying that the groups pushing for sanctions do not recognize marriage as a sacrament -- they are overwhelmingly Evangelical and Protestant, and, now that Rowan Williams has gone, there may be no primate firmly enough in the Anglo-Catholic camp to worry about the special status of marriage, derived from its sacramentality, per se, which is the only concern specifically addressed by this particular line in the sand.
There's a whole sheaf of issues which swirl around the question of the sacramentality of marriage in the Church, and there are a number of ways of framing them.
One is to point out that the solemnization of marriage was not (until after the Reformation) a function of the clergy (this changed with the Anglican Canon Law and in the Roman decree Tametsi both of which were put in place to put social control on the problem of forced or "unauthorized" marriages (i.e. elopements). This has led to the proposal in some quarters (to which I am sympathetic) that the Church should get out of the business of conducting marriages altogether, leaving that to the state (following the Civil Law model) and merely bless unions once created. (See, for example, Mtr. Maggie Helwig's submission to the Commission on the Marriage Canon (PDF warning).) This recognizes that in this day when most marriages are by licence (and where the licence is a superior control to that provided by the traditional banns) the rationale for a clerical involvement in the marriage itself (as opposed to a blessing or recognition of the union) is long past.
This neatly sidesteps the immediate practical problem regarding having to make a decision regarding how to treat civil same-sex unions from a sacramental position. It remains open to somebody concerned about this to treat a same-sex blessing as a sacramental with a similar external form to the sacrament of marriage, just as a blessing of a "traditional" marriage by the church would be another sacramental (the marriage, the sacrament itself, having been performed outside the church). It means that discussion about marriage as a sacrament become a side-issue to the broader social justice issues.
There are two problems with this. The first is that it is unlikely to be adopted: Mtr. Helwig's submission was not picked up by the final report of the commission, and the sentimental / social attachment to marriage in a church setting is too strong to get it easily accepted. The second is that taking as a ground to stand on the historical fact that requiring solemnizations of marriage "by" the Church is a late development ignores the fact that the Church was heavily involved in the regulation of marriage after the ceremony (not only in its handling of annulments but in e.g. the regulation of allowed periods during which sexual activity was curtailed such as Lent). (See Haw, The State of Matrimony for a treatment of the rules regarding marriage and annulment in the late mediaeval and early modern English Church.) The "clericalization" of marriage is not directly tied to the church's concern with marriage. Even if we push the period of focus back to the late Roman period, and shortly after, when the actual rules governing marriage were those of the old Roman Law (or Germanic customary law in some cases: see Julia M.H. Smith, Europe After Rome, for some discussion of this) the theological analysis of marriage was built up on a different basis.
It is sometimes said that marriage was a civil institution which the church recognized and (eventually) treated as a sacrament. This is not really true. In none of the relevant contexts for the Church in the first four centuries could marriage have been considered purely "civil". Jewish marriage customs and rules followed the Jewish Law, which was emphatically religious; the Roman marriage was equally grounded in (pagan) religion, as it treats the family as a cultus of which the paterfamilias is a domestic priest (see La Cité Antique by Fustel de Coulanges). However, it is certainly true that the institution of marriage as Paul found it (critically Paul, as his writings on marriage are the primary basis on which a sacramental understanding has been built) was one having an existence external to and independent of the Church. And the Dominical words regarding marriage (which the East has taken as one of the counsels of perfection and the traditional West as binding legislation) make no claims about the institutional nature, or the specific implications of the vows themselves.
This is where things begin to become interesting, long before we get to the issue of the sacramentality of same-sex unions. What Paul extracts from the institution of marriage as he encounters it, and what was common to "marriage" in its various forms from Jewish through Hellenistic to Roman, through the Germanic period and that of Christendom until the last half century of so is the idea that an essential inequality in the relationship whereby the husband is dominant but loving ("the head") and the wife is submissive and loving is a sacramental mirror of the relationship between Christ and the Church, and more generally between the human and the divine. The sacramental theology of marriage has been built on this particular feature.
However, just as the previously unquestioned assumption that a primary purpose of matrimony was "for the procreation of children, to be brought up in the fear and nurture of the Lord, and to the praise of his holy Name" began to be questioned in the early 20th Century (note the Lambeth declaration on contraceptives as early as 1930) and has now run head on into issues of overpopulation as a violation of the stewardship of the earth, so the assumptions of the inherent inequality of women within the estate marriage have been under attack for well over a century (the first Married Woman's Property Act, which deep-sixed the concept of coverture, was passed by the Imperial Parliament in 1882), and it would be fair to say that in much of the West (or at least the urban West -- there are definitely holdouts such as the Southern Baptists) the majority view of marriage is that it is a relationship between equals. (It would not be overdoing it to say, though, that this is still an ongoing war, given the virulence of the dismissive and/or abusive language directed at women in many fora who act as equals in general social contexts, let alone marriage.)
You can see the traces of this changing in the early parts of Busman's Honeymoon where Peter and Harriet are arguing over using the 1662 or the 1928/1929 marriage vows (which removed the word "obey"). It is on that changed underlying understanding of marriage that same-sex unions are based, socially and in law.
Does the "matter" of the sacrament, the one that Paul knew, continue to exist with such a changed understanding? Or is it the case that an inherently "better" (on other grounds) state as a norm has succeeded it (one which can at most claim to be a sacramental, with a special status as a successor to one of the seven sacraments? Because the Dominical commendation of marriage is not the basis of the way in which its sacramentality has been understood, and it is not an exclusive statement.
Yet this is effectively the particular line in the sand that the Primates' meeting drew. It will please nobody: the conservative block do not regard it as nearly enough: they want a thoroughgoing purge of the liberals, along with an equally thoroughgoing protestantization of the Anglican Communion -- many of the really conservative ACs have already left for Rome or points East and are not a significant force outside Forward in Faith in the UK, and they are probably the only conservative group for which a defence of marriage as a sacrament is likely to be the primary issue (in principle, ACs on the left can share the same concern while generally supporting LGBTQIA-friendly endeavours in just about every other way. The progressive block is outraged at this level of sanction and given the history of social change (in England in particular) on this matter and there will still be the question of what to do when the three-year sanction of the ECUSA is finished.