Here’s Stanley Haeurwas’ answer to the question, ‘How do we learn to speak the truth to each other about Marriage, about singleness, about sexuality?’
The first thing we need to say is that we want to make marriage difficult for people to enact. The idea that falling in love is sufficient for getting married is just a deep bedevilment. In order for two people to be married and have their marriage witnessed by the church, we need to know how their marriage is going to build up the holiness of the community. In practice, this means they may not be terribly attracted to one another. We forget that for centuries Christians married one another and had sex on their wedding night even though they didn’t know one another; they may well have never met one another until the day of the wedding. And yet the church blessed it because the community would hold them to the promises they had made. That’s why divorce and remarriage is such a serious issue.
So marriage is not something to be done because two people think they love one another. Rather it’s based on faithfulness to one another in the community such that over a lifetime, we’re able to look back on the relationship and call it love. Faithfulness becomes the defining mark of Christian marriage.
And the follow up question, ‘And how do you define marriage?’
Well, I don’t define it but I will describe it. Marriage is the lifelong commitment to be faithful to one another, not only in terms of sexual relations but in terms of being attentive to your first responsibility to the person to whom you have pledged your life. Marriage gives witness to the same kind of faithfulness of Christ to his church. Part of this commitment includes hospitality to new life, which results from sexual relations.
That is the sticking point I have toward gay marriage. Not every marriage between a man and a woman is necessarily procreative. But marriage as an institution of the church of Jesus Christ is only intelligible in terms of the Christian willingness to have a child.
Read the rest of the interview here.
Related Post
- Welcoming the Baby by Matthew Hosier
- How Many Children Should Christians Have? by yours truly
The post Haeurwas on Marriage appeared first on The Simple Pastor.
This post first appeared on The Simple Pastor | Write. Read. Run. Lead., please read the originial post: here
