Covenant and Calling: a review (part ii)
In the first part of his book, Song has explored some of the dynamics of matrimony and sex activity in scripture and theology, and along the way has dismissed the most popular arguments for accepting same-sexual practice unions as on a par with marriage.
He and then turns to the question of 'covenant partnership', and appears to hit another nail into the common arguments for same-sexual practice marriage. Some relationships which are not heterosexual, information technology is said, tin express the same virtues of marriage in a generic but ungendered relationality. Vocal appears to have in mind here the position of Jeffrey John, which parts of his previous argument actually seem to parallel. But this is also close to the 'kinship' view of James Brownson, though Song does not mention him. Whilst Song is 'sympathetic' to this approach, information technology volition non do for him, since 'it is in danger of denying the goodness of the material creation' (p 24).
This includes non just the materiality of creation merely also the form in which it is made…To abandon the notion of sexual differentiation entirely in favour of a generic relationally…is to run the take a chance of denying whatever meaning at all to the phrase 'male and female he created them.'
This has consequences for theological thinking about marriage, and removes us from the biblical understanding.
In particular, [this approach] may come to serve as a legitimation for modern notions of abstract individuals contracting together for reasons of common benefit (p 26).
Vocal then goes on to explore the significance of his earlier conclusion that procreation is 'theologically redundant' in marriage. He highlights the differences betwixt Roman Catholic and Protestant teaching on the question of childlessness, distinguishing between marriages which happen to be childless and marriages which are entered with the intention of being childless. Catholic theology explicitly rejects the latter, but Protestant theology has given such marriages more than recognition; might deliberately childless marriage offer a pattern for a non-procreative covenant human relationship? To open up the discussion on this, Song summarises his statement so far in these terms:
If we are to introduce the category of covenant partnership at all, the fundamental distinction it connotes is not between heterosexual and homosexual relationships but between procreative and non-procreative relationships.
This then leads to the fourth section (affiliate 3) on sexual differentiation, sex and procreation. Here he argues that sexual differentiation is cardinal to union. This is not about hierarchy between the partners, since the most persuasive reading of the biblical texts is that marriage is about mutual subordination in a context of basic equality. It might, though, be about complementarity—so Song lists, then questions, the three main articulations of this. Outset, the form of male and female person bodies in particular the class of the genitals suggests comlementarity—simply 'without an understanding of their function, namely reproduction, their construction is meaningless' (p 45). Second, complementarity could exist found in psychological difference—just mayhap the next batch of research will undermine this. Thirdly, nosotros might turn to marriage as a theological model (as in fact Song has earlier)—but most who do this return to its procreative nature.
Covenant relationships clearly exercise non accept to be sexually differentiated, and we observe examples of them in scripture, such every bit betwixt David and Jonathan. Simply could they be sexual? It seems clear that procreation is not the only purpose of sexual practice; we come across in Genesis 2 the language of 'spousal relationship' and in the Song of Songs sex equally an expression and fulfilment of desire. This, combined with the notion that contraception is acceptable,
…is to admit that sex may accept, intrinsically and objectively, a different and separable meaning from procreativity. And this in turn implies that covenant partnerships, whether heterosexual or homosexual, may be sexual in nature (p 59).
And the nature of desire in sexual activity ways that (as Rowan Williams has argued) sexual activeness tin can as well point towards our desire for God.
It is in this section that Song does near of his piece of work 'towards a theology of same-sex relationships.' Simply it is not clear to me that he is being entirely consistent with his previous argument. If heterosexual marriage-with-sex has such an important role in offering an analogy for God's relationship with humanity (every bit he has before argued), how tin we at present simply carve up sexual activity inside marriage leading to procreation from sexual activity without marriage equally an expression of pleasure? In what sense does the latter point to God when removed from the former? What God has joined (the act of sex and the context for sex of heterosexual covenant relationship) allow not theologians divide! This division arises from Song's ain dividing of Gen 1 from Gen 2, rather than seeing both of them together every bit providing a theological agreement of sex-inside-marriage. If sex is expressed genitally, how can nosotros and then easily dismiss the form of the created body the moment we focus on desire—something over again Vocal himself has argued against?
On the other hand, that which God has divided let not theologians join! In his discussion of the pregnant of sexual activity here, Vocal makes no reference at all to one of the most striking features of the biblical approach—and one that makes both the OT and the NT distinctive inside their social and cultural contexts: sexual activity is a strictly bounded affair. At that place are certain relationships within which sex may occur, and a skilful number of relationships and context where information technology may non occur. In other words, in that location are strict boundaries around the kinds of relationships, covenant or otherwise, that tin become sexual. Yous might regret or resent this (as Diarmid MacCulloch clearly does in his electric current TV series Sexual activity and the Church) but it is impossible to ignore information technology when considering the pregnant and purpose of sexual activity from a theological perspective.
Then when Song draws the line of demarcation between procreative and non-procreative relationships, he is doing then over an already existing demarcation between sexual and non-sexual relationships. This ways he is creating not 2 but 3 categories: not-procreative not-sexual relationships; procreative sexual relationships; and the centre category of non-procreative sexual relationships. Since Scripture locates sex as pleasance and sexual practice every bit wedlock firmly in the second area, and these relationships are heterosexual, Song is left without any clear justification for why the third area might include same-sexual practice relationships—other than reasons he himself has previously ruled out. If the theological logic of NT eschatology has led Paul and Jesus to see celibacy as an advisable culling to wedlock, rather than sexual, aforementioned-sex covenant relationships, what has inverseat the level of theology which would lead us to come to a dissimilar decision?
In his last major section, Song returns to the exegesis of item passages. He sets out a fairly conventional reading of Romans one, whilst noting Paul here is non 'providing a complete, considered sexual ethic' (p 67). What is slightly odd is Song's failure to note the importance of the 'visible creation' in Paul's rhetoric, which as Robert Gagnon has noted is a fundamental part of Paul'southward argument, and chimes with what Vocal himself has said before about the goodness of the fabric creation, including its form in the male and female person bodies. Lev 18 and 20 'are difficult to meet as referring to something other than homosexual anal intercourse' (p 69), and cannot be dismissed as no longer applying to Christians. This is because we cannot throw out OT constabulary in full general, only likewise because nosotros find NT texts reapplying these particularprinciples. In 1 Cor 6.9 and 1 Tim 1.9, 'Paul is restating the Leviticus example, which in turn is based on the claims in Genesis near sexuality in creation' (p seventy).
How and then does Song fit the previous argument within this reading of the texts? Information technology is by 'drawing a contrast betwixt the surface meaning of texts and the deeper structure of the biblical story' (p 63). Song is clear that, in trying to do this, he has his work cut out for him.
We can therefore be open to taking the criticism on the chin: fifty-fifty if in that location is no surface trajectory in the New Testament towards aforementioned-sexual activity relationships, there are nonetheless a variety of reasons for finding such a rationale that arise from within the New Testament and that are in sympathy with its fundamental commitments.
Song needs to be given credit here; he is quite honest in admitting that the NT texts themselves offer no trajectory whatsoever in the direction that he wishes to travel. Merely in doing and so, he is creating yet more challenges. In relation to the text of the NT itself, he is in result arguing that information technology is theologically and semantically incoherent—that what we read on the surface really points, not just at right angles, simply in the opposite direction to the 'deeper structure' of the biblical story. That would hateful that, on this vital question of human anthropology, and the implications for sexual ethics in the low-cal of eschatology, the actual texts of the NT are fundamentally misleading.
He is besides arguing that his own agreement of the implications of eschatology for sexual ideals are to exist preferred to either Jesus or Paul's. Jesus offers no revision of the Jewish agreement of Lev 18 and 20 or the creation narratives in this regard, and Paul, seeing himself every bit in continuity with the teaching of Jesus, relocates the Levitical prohibitions precisely within an eschatological context of the coming kingdom. Yet Song suggests that both Jesus and Paul take failed to empathise the 'deeper construction of the biblical story'.
Despite having, from the outset, rejected the 'programmatic liberalism' of prioritising experience over Scripture, it is hard to see that Song has not done something similar, by prioritising a theological pattern over against what Song agrees is the pregnant and significance of the relevant texts. In among this, what we are left with is a lucid, elegant and powerful theological case for retaining much of the church'south current teaching on the nature of matrimony.
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