Blessing: A Scriptural and Theological Reflection (part IV)

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Blessing: A Scriptural and Theological Reflection

by Ephraim Radner, Wycliffe College

part IV of V (read parts I, II, III)

7. Contested Blessing
Let me be clear that from my own perspective (and speaking on a purely linguistic level here) there is no such thing, in a Christian context, as a “marriage” between people of the same sex. I am not speaking here on the question of the morality of the matter, but simply about what words mean: marriage refers to the union of a man and woman in a certain way. People can, of course, change the meaning of a term; it happens all the time, and in cultures all the time over time. And the word “marriage” has been adopted metaphorically to all kinds of things – two colors, two ideologies, a political alliance, and so on. But the linguistic question in this case has to do with the sacramental question: when marriage is called a sacrament – deriving from the “mystery” language of Ephesians chapter 5 (this is a great “mystery,” Paul says, or sacramentum in the Latin Vulgate) – that description in fact applies to the marriage of a man and a woman; and it is, in fact, this understanding that undergirds the Church’s tradition on the sacramentality of marriage itself. Marriage is not defined as a sacrament or as sacramental on the basis of some general notion of sacramentality, since that will simply lead to everything being sacramental (as, of course, it has become in many people’s minds). At least in Anglicanism, sacraments and the sacramental derive from the “ordinance” of Christ – they are deontological, as we say, externally commanded, rather than metalogical, or conclusions inductively or deductively drawn according to a line of sequential reasoning. The civil state can call whatever it likes a “marriage” – with any number of potential social consequences, to be sure. But what the state calls marriage has no intrinsic bearing on the specifically Christian meaning of the term.

One can – and we have been doing so! – debate this judgment of mine. But our task does not impinge upon this debate about marriage, but upon the question of blessing: what is at stake in blessing a “marriage,” as I have described it, and blessing a gay couple? Marriages take place with or without a blessing – the two things are distinct, at least from a “ritual” perspective. We all know this as priests: our blessing of the marriage does not “do” the marrying; rather, the vows themselves between the couple constitute this act. So the question is: What we do when we “bless” a marriage, or bless something that is not a marriage, but is another kind of sexual relationship?

To reiterate my on view of the nature of the church’s blessing, there is a kind of “test” that needs to be met, which resolves around answering positively the following kinds of questions:

  • Does God “do it,” and does it accord with God’s being and character and will?

  • Is it in conformance with creative life?
  • Is it obedient according to the common Christian understanding of divine command?

According to this scheme, the human blessing of a marriage, understood traditionally, is rather obviously not only congruent but almost necessary. If we take the very language of blessing in the Old Testament as we saw it, the notion of divine blessing is in fact essentially bound to the act of God’s creating human beings as male and female and ordering their existence procreatively within the earth. “And God blessed them, and God said to them, ‘Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the air and over every living thing that moves upon the earth.’” (Genesis 1:28). And when, subsequently, we are given the shape of this creative ordering, we are told: “Therefore a man leaves his father and his mother and cleaves to his wife, and they become one flesh” (Genesis 2:24). The fact that someone – a priest, the church – “blesses” this reality is but the human affirmation of something truly already present. “All your works praise you, O Lord.” One could look at a marriage service as this kind of inevitable praise, “ascribing” to the Lord the honor due to his own work.

The contested issue with same-sex coupling is: Is this in fact the “work” of the Lord? If our blessing of something “displays” what God has already more fundamentally enacted in his creative purposes, how would one know, thereby to “bless” it? The question, obviously, has got to get way beyond the silly rhetorical claims that “the Church blesses all kinds of things – fox hunts and submarines – why not this?” Because, as we have seen, the Church ought not to bless all things, if in fact some things are not aspects of the creative purposes of God’s life-giving and life-extending character and will, and do not accord with God’s “command.” If the Church does this, she becomes like the false prophets, trading in lies and ultimately engaging the deep “rebellion” against God: divine blessing and cursing are humanly and woefully reversed.

And in this light, I believe that the issue of blessing same-sex unions cannot be construed in terms of whether this is a moral or a doctrinal issue. The distinction between the two, while it may have some canonical bearings within the Church’s decision-making process, has no theological rationale: there is no clear difference, Scripturally speaking, between “moral” and “doctrinal” reality, whether in the Old Testament or New Testament as a whole. And the terms “moral,” “doctrinal” and even “ceremonial” have no Scriptural basis, nor Scriptural distinction. When St. John writes that “by this you know the Spirit of God: every spirit which confesses that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is of God” (1 John 4:2), he is not limiting truth to a “core doctrinal” message (e.g., about the Incarnation); for he immediately goes on to say that “knowing” God is inseparable from “loving one another” (4:7ff.). And, more integrally, he summarizes his argument at the beginning of 1 John chapter 5 by writing this: “Every one who believes that Jesus is the Christ is a child of God, and every one who loves the parent loves the child. By this we know that we love the children of God, when we love God and obey his commandments. For this is the love of God, that we keep his commandments. And his commandments are not burdensome” (1 John 5:1-3). Keep the law and knowing God rightly cannot be separated, even in New Testament terms.

So, back to the question of “blessings”: the test is the particularity of God’s will and purpose in creation and creation’s extension. It will come as no surprise to you that I do not believe that the blessing of same-sex couples can meet this test. I will not go through each element that leads me to this conclusion, because it is the purpose of this discussion that each person should do this him- or herself. Furthermore, I have perhaps set the matter up in such a way that the conclusion is obvious: for the Church to bless same-sex unions is to have the Church do something that she has consistently understood, through the Scriptures, that God has forbidden, as being inconsistent with the will of his life-creating purpose for human beings. All that our analysis of blessing has done is to demonstrate that such a will undergirds the act of blessing of any kind.

But having said this, I need to be fair in pointing out that the discernment of this matter is not always straight-forward. And I raise two issues here: First, are there aspects of same sex coupling nonetheless that the Church might bless? Second, is there a realm in which same-sex partnerships might exist in the Church’s eyes wherein at least the anti-blessing worries might not arise so fully – that is, the realm of “pastoral response,” and how think of this?

Ephraim Radner is a priest in the Episcopal Church, USA (Diocese of Colorado) and Professor of Historical Theology at Wycliffe College, Toronto, an Anglican seminary affiliated with the University of Toronto. He holds a doctorate in Systematic Theology from Yale University. Following work in Burundi (East Africa), Radner served congregations in Brooklyn, Cleveland, New Haven, Stamford, and Pueblo. He has taught at Yale University and Iliff Seminary, and is the author and editor of several books, including The End of the Church, Spirit and Nature, Hope Among the Fragments, and a recent theological commentary on Leviticus. He lives in Toronto, Canada with his wife, the Rev. Annette Brownlee, and their two children.

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