Embodied Humanity: Biblical and Theological Reflections – Dr. William Weinrich

Transcript (edited for readability).

No one ever said before that I was an expert on sexuality, but it's good to know, I suppose. Actually, what I'd like to do today is a little different than what Hal just indicated that I was going to do. I'd like to do some reflections — if you looked at the material in your book, you will see something on marriage as an ecclesial reality.

As you know, we live in very strange times, in which family and marriage have become a problem. And just looking at it historically, it is quite striking that the homosexual agenda has become so powerful, not only in terms of dominating cultural discourse, but of governing laws, now even transnationally. Western Europe is completely submerged in this idea. Brazil, I understand, recently also has okayed homosexual marriages. These are things that, whatever the perversions of the ancient world might have been, they never conceived of. And it'll be a lot of PhD dissertations on how this ever really came about — what were the sea shifts of conception and understanding that bring this to the fore, and oftentimes in quite violent ways.

I'm not very big on YouTube. I know you are. But about a month ago, I did watch on YouTube a music video entitled "Same Love," by a duo called Macklemore — are you familiar with this? — and also Ryan Lewis. I don't know who they are. I kind of still don't know who they are, but it was a single record to support same-sex marriage in Washington State. And at the time when I saw it, it had apparently had over 50 million views. Okay? Fifty million views. This is to say that it is powerful and persuasive. And here's just a little bit from it: same-sex marriage — it says that only right-wing conservatives hold to homosexual marriage as illicit, and these people inhabit a world so hateful, some would rather die than be who they are. And these guys apparently were past Catholics. So they sing, "When I was at church, they taught me something else. But if you preach hate at the service, those words aren't anointed. The holy water that you soaked us in was poison," right?

Now, it needs to be explained somehow how this traditional, universally accepted and experienced reality of marriage — as of a man and a woman, with children as naturally and expected progeny and fruitfulness — comes to be vilified like this. That doesn't happen immediately. That happens over time. And at the very beginning, I just want to give you some kind of vignettes about antecedents to this way of thinking, which debunks the intrinsic reality of the body. Because when the intrinsic reality of the body is debunked and done away with, the concrete specificity of the human being is gone, then something abstract assumes centrality, like the idea of the person. And so if personhood is abstracted from the concrete realities of the human body, with its natural distinctions, then two persons can marry — whether those are two men, two women, a man and a woman, it doesn't matter. The persons are abstractions that have really nothing organically to do with the specificity of being female or male.

And today, as you know, even by way of the highest powers of our government, now we are into transgender issues. Just five days or so ago, I was reading State Department material in which our government is pushing homosexual and transgender freedoms on countries, in some way tied to whether we give them aid or not. That's wicked. But how do we get there? Antecedents.

Well, already in the eighteenth century, there was a shift from labor that was of the body to labor by way of machine. And as you can see, especially in Marxist critique, that had brought forth an idea that the distinction between husband and wife — that is to say, family distinction, such as that was worked out economically — was a problem. And so here's a quote from Friedrich Engels: "Modern society is a material mass consisting of molecules, that is to say, families." One can, of course, see the materialistic idea, but if you keep in mind that matter was for a person like Engels infinitely malleable, it could be molded, and that was the purpose of economic and political structures — to mold this matter. Okay? In this case, the family was matter. And so one can already see the implication that family, as husband and wife, was not a natural order — that, in fact, it was an imposed order, a historical phenomenon only.

A Marxist German philosopher, Helga Hortz: "Differences in behavior between the sexes are determined not by nature, but by social conditions." How often do we still hear that today, right? And of course, in some sense, that's true. Okay? But for her, there's no such thing as a fixed female nature. And what we have, then, is the gradual dissipation of the concept of nature as anything other than an imposed political construct. Nature does not exist.

In the twentieth century, these ideas, or ideas similar to them, were carried forward. Jean-Paul Sartre, the famous existentialist philosopher: "Human beings are nothing other than what they make of themselves." The only obstacle to freedom — this is an important point I want to return to — the only true obstacle to our autonomous will and freedom is the other. Okay? Because the other sets limits to what I can do and will. And, of course, for Sartre, the great other was God. But also our neighbor was another; our wife was another; any other person was another — those set limits upon freedom.

Simone de Beauvoir, his female compatriot, who spoke especially of feminine issues, women's issues, thought that the female body is itself her other, right? You can see here the philosophical underpinnings of modern ideas about abortion. Why? Because my body is mine, I can do with it what I want — it is an object of my will. And anything that impedes it or confronts it, I can do away with. The values of this kind of thing: freedom as autonomy, the absence of limit, the person as that which is a separate, autonomous center of will, and, of course, then the primacy of will as the power to make one's self.

Later in the twentieth century, you had social critics such as Robert Bellah, writing about the American experience, which was more and more inculcating these attitudes. The family itself was losing its public function. The rise of love as an expression of spontaneous inner freedom. Peter Berger, the Lutheran sociologist — you may not have heard of him — in his interesting book, noted, to date, 1983 — this is almost, what, thirty years ago — when they already saw what we now have seen come to fruition: "The family ceases, or has ceased, to be an objective given, and becomes simply a locale, a place where miscellaneous individual subjective motives intersect. The family has ceased to be an institution in the full sense of the word, but rather a project for individuals" — thus always susceptible to redefinition, reconstruction, and, obviously, termination. This was, of course, during the time when divorce was being made easier and easier.

The values that these social critics saw as beginning more and more to inform American habit and American understanding: self-love, hedonism — that doesn't necessarily mean sexual license, but the constant search for what pleases me, my goals — then self as center, and the primacy of romantic love. If you know C.S. Lewis and his Four Loves, you will have learned that the idea of romantic love was a medieval chivalrous idea that always had within it the idea of illicit love. You always loved the woman you could not have, you know — the beauty that was always peering down at you from the window of the castle. That's about as much of my sexual expertise as St. Boyle was talking about.

But the quo vadis — where are we going from here? This debunking of the concreteness of the human body, where the person is abstracted from the machine of the flesh — have you ever heard of transhumanism? Raise your hands if you've heard of this. Well, a few. Okay, why don't you Google it and see what this is all about. This is crazy. But posthumanism, the cyborg as ideal — that is to say, the mixing of the human body, increasingly transformed and transcended by technology. Okay? And its ideal — this is its vision and goal, which I've taken off one of their websites: "A new and radically different chapter of the evolution is about to begin. This new and radically different chapter will be a burst of self-noted, self-directed, hyper-evolution, in which we must leave the flesh and most of its evolved habits behind. This will occur through enlightened self-fabrication" — that is to say, the mixing and mutual constructing of the human and the technology, "in which we become one with our technologies, guided by our rational desire to become like our finest imaginary gods: omniscient, eternal, and omnipotent."

If this sounds bizarre, note that billions of dollars throughout the world are in this project. Major universities in Europe and the United States are already — Yale, for example — already deeply entrenched in bringing this to pass. And three years ago, under the auspices of the United States government, the issue of what does it mean to be a person was discussed along these lines: transcending the body, which, as one transhumanist thinker calls it, "The body is but the first and totally inefficient prosthesis of the mind." Okay? The body is an add-on, okay? It's the mind that is the true center of personhood, and the body is eminently cast-awayable.

A good friend of mine — some of you may know him — Pastor Scott Stiegemeyer, in Chicago, is doing a lot of work in this in his doctoral dissertation, at Wheaton, I think it is. He's very interested in films, in the theological aspects of the body in films — especially cyborg, Dracula, things like that. And he told me once, and I think it's very insightful: this is kind of a new and different Gnosticism. The ancient Gnosticism asks the question, why matter? Matter was a problem as such. But this raises the question: why this body? Why the potentialities and capacities, as well as the limitations, of this body which God has given to us at our birth? What is the meaning of this body — not just body? And this is why we need to think, I think, very new thoughts about what it means to be as we are, and hence issues of the passions, issues of our own limits — and I want to talk a little bit about that now.

The values of transhumanism: subjectivity, human identity as the outcome of ongoing self-creation, malleability — one of my favorite words. All matter is plastic. The body is a first prosthesis. The human as pure information — here you see computer technology becoming a primary category for understanding what it means to be human — and mastery, the refusal to accept human limitations, the transcendent possibilities of technology.

But the Scriptures and the Christian tradition present to us very, very different ideas. And I'd like to talk a little bit about those under the category given by John Chrysostom in his twentieth homily on Paul's letter to the Ephesians, where he discusses the family as a small church. Note immediately, the ecclesial concept dominates the understanding of family, and we will see why that is in a moment. The family is not simply a natural order. Nor, as we see so much today and hear so much today, is the family primarily a good and helpful unit for the upkeep and the preservation of society. The family is fundamentally not here for the betterment of society as such. It may also do that.

[Sound check interruption: "Am I on or off? Can you hear me back there? Can you hear me back there? No. Can you hear me now? I thought I had just checked them. I feel cyborgian. Oh, my gosh. I'm trying — you are trying — okay, try now. Am I okay now? Okay, there we go. All right. Back into the stratosphere of my human identity. That's great. Okay."]

Marriage is not, in the first instance, a mere natural social unit which exists for the sake of this world. The biblical claim — and here I'm working especially, of course, off of Genesis 2 and Ephesians 5 — is that the family is, in fact, a deeply eschatological and teleological fact. It points forward to the consummation of divine purpose, and hence is to be understood fundamentally in terms of the mission of Christ. The biblical claim: marriage is a given institution, or a state, intended to prepare one for life in the kingdom of God. It is, as it were, a workhouse by which God gives us the opportunity to be sanctified. He presents us with another, which is the focus of our freedom, and apart from which the exercise of our freedom is impossible, or at least seriously limited.

Let's take a look, if you will, briefly at Genesis 2:18–25 — that's, of course, the story of the creation of Adam, and the creation from him of Eve. And if you take a look at that story and read it, you will see, I think, that it is not just kind of the ending segment of a previous story of creation. It is, in fact, the end of the story of creation — not just in terms of its placement, but in terms of its conceptual meaning. One could even say God created man and woman, indeed all things, for that union of one flesh. That's the whole purpose of things. And so it already points beyond itself. It is not good that man should be alone. The individual cannot be perfected as autonomous.

It's a strange but wondrous fact that one can see in Christian iconography and Christian writing — if you want to be truly alone, if you want to be truly autonomous and unto yourself as such — somebody was speaking of some of their parishioners as incurvatus in se, that famous definition of sin by Luther: being turned in upon oneself. That's the dynamic of autonomy. I am to myself what I am. But in Christian thinking, if that is true of you, you are in hell. Hell is the place of the autonomous person, who is so within himself or herself that there's no relation — no relation.

And we have to think like this if we are to understand why it is that the Christian church confesses the church. The church is the natural and necessary eschatological fact of God's purpose to make us true persons — that is to say, those who live, and can live, only as themselves to the extent that they are united to another. The point — and we don't know this enough — did you know that the notion of personhood, such as that was developed and understood by the Christian church, came by way of the doctrine of the Trinity? Where, according to Aristotle, to be in relation was to be part of a secondary category. Substance was primary; relationship was a secondary category. Substance could move into relation, but need not. It was the Christian mind that said, yes, substance is a primary category, but relation is too. It is as primary as substance itself. And therefore, when we say one God, and we say three persons, we are speaking of equally fundamental facts of the divine person. There's no Father apart from the Son, no Son apart from the Father. They exist as who they are only in that they are united in relationship to the other.

And that's exactly the language of the meritoriality of Genesis 2. Certainly the early fathers were attuned to the Christological intimations that therefore it is not good for a man to be alone, and therefore what? He should — what — leave his father, right, and cleave to his wife, and they shall be — not two persons in mutual agreement by way of a civil contract — when they speak of one flesh, one sees that this — they enter into a union which transcends each, not in that it leaves them behind, but their nature, man, woman, has now been given a teleological purpose, which in the biblical diction is called love. You are truly human when you bind yourself to another in love. And if that union is indeed to be inseparable, that love unbroken — that is to say, if into all eternity you are to be truly a human person, then, in fact, that bond of love cannot be broken.

If you would look at, say, how St. Augustine sometimes talks about the Holy Spirit as the bond of love that binds Father and Son together eternally — and it's in the Spirit that the Father and the Son are indeed one, and so one that they cannot be separated. If you think about the unitive character of love — not simply as romantic affection, which can wane and fall away and grow old, but the unitive love that commits yourself to another, so that you adopt for your own life the life of another — that's exactly why, then, the incarnation of Christ was thought of as a marriage between the Word and the flesh, which is what Paul speaks about in Ephesians 5. "Husbands, love your wives as Christ loved the church" — his flesh. He assumes the flesh of Mary into himself, so that the life of the flesh now becomes his life. Okay? The life of the other becomes your life, because you are united, so that you cannot say, "It's your life, not mine. Your damn problem, not mine." Okay? United in love, you are not just obligated, but it is you who now must be manifested by the work of love in that union. Bone of my bone, flesh of my flesh. This other that Adam now sees is not — it's not an alien other. He doesn't say, "What the heck is that?" He recognizes himself in her: bone of my bone — distinction, yet identity. One flesh within which there's distinction, and a distinction that finds its meaning only — that is to say, their individual identity only — in the unity of one flesh. Bone of my bone, flesh of my flesh — this other, yes, is a limit. But not like Sartre's limit, which thwarts freedom and gives an obstacle to my autonomy. Rather, this limit is a grace, for it allows the activity of love. It is a limit that allows the focusing of my own freedom.

Way back in the second century, when Irenaeus was discussing — and, I suppose, cussing — the Gnostics: the Gnostics were talking about the majesty of God in his transcendence. He is so transcendent that no name bespeaks him. And so we must refer to him as father, we must refer to him as mother — he is an old man, a young man, a woman. The many names begin more and more to approach his transcendent otherness that can never be named. He's always higher than anything — to which Irenaeus said, "Oh, no, no. He is never higher than anything, for he is in everything." In other words, the transcendence of God is not to be seen in terms of his expansive indeterminacy. The transcendence of God is to be seen in the fact that he can relate to everything. And so Irenaeus understood what Jean-Paul Sartre never did: to be truly free, to be truly transcendent, to reach your eschatological purpose as a creature of God is, in fact, to focus your freedom on another. That limit, then, is not a limit — it is a possibility, which opens up the future of God's purpose, namely that all things be encompassed in divine love. One flesh.

One leaves, then, the natural order. A husband is no longer a male only — thank God — nor a woman simply a female. They are husband and wife. They have to be talked about differently. A marriage is not between a male and a female — that happens in every bar on Friday night. It's a husband and a wife: those who are united by way of a conviction and a commitment. So this one flesh, again, points them beyond themselves. In marriage, if you are truly married, you are never unto yourself. You see yourself in that other — bone of my bone — and that is that which brings the human creature forward to the divine purpose, that — as was said very nicely this morning — life under the cross: repentance, long-suffering, patience, all those things by which we show ourselves to be true persons.

And that's how the Bible speaks. Our culture says if you want to be a free person, you must be able to decide for yourself, choose what you want, and if you cannot choose what you want, then you are limited, you are oppressed, you are put down. But the Bible speaks of true personhood in terms of the various virtues: faith, hope, charity, long-suffering, patience — much of what Paul talked about in the passage we read this morning.

Marriage, then, is an institution. It's not a contract. It's a thing: one flesh. And if you get these ideas into your head, you can understand why, for the church, divorce was always problematic. It could be allowed, to be sure, but it was always problematic. Think of it: one flesh, now split in twain — that's one bloody mess. One person cleaved in half from top to toe. That's the image. One is greater than two.

A couple years ago, my daughter Rachel was getting married, and she had some friends and other persons there who, at least in my estimation — maybe uncharitably, but in my estimation — didn't have a clue as to what was going on. And the Lutheran pastor, in the liturgy, spoke of marriage as the estate of marriage, and I just knew they really didn't know what that meant. So I explained it as a big word concerning God's arithmetic, in which one is greater than two. That's where I get this. Marriage is not contractual. The civil code might make you think it is, but one flesh is not contractual. It is not a mutually agreed relationship with certain rights and duties. For such a unity exists only in the will to be together. The two remain autonomous, and hence fundamentally and always separate, in that they determine the goods of the relationship.

Way back when I was a doctoral student in Switzerland, my wife worked for the Center for Immunology, part of Hoffmann-La Roche, a big pharmaceutical house, and there was a young Latvian woman who was a scientist, and she was the technician for a Jewish scientist by the name of Ronald Citronbaum, who was associated with a Southern California university. They invited Barbara and me over one evening — he was a very good cook. And so pretty soon — I mean, I wasn't even ordained — but pretty soon they wondered whether I'd be willing to marry them. And I said, "Well, I don't think I can, 'cause I'm not ordained." "Oh, it doesn't matter," they said. "Yeah, we want you to marry us." And now came the big prenuptial problem: we don't know whether we want to get married on the seashore or in the forest. I said, "Well, let's take first things first here — what about your vows?" And they had written out some vows, and the vows were kind of like this, at least in meaning: "We pledge each other to love one another and to help each other in the fulfillment of their needs, and when this is no longer possible, we agree to separate on good terms." That was the general gist. And so I began to talk about the oath that Barbara and I made, about one flesh, and until death do us part, for better or worse — and this good Jewish boy, I remember, said, "Wow. Wow." He'd never heard it.

We ought not to assume that people know what we're talking about. And that's why it's important for us to model it, to exemplify it, and, of course, to praise it whenever we can. Marriage is of two made one. The individual is transcended into personhood — important point. In biblical understanding, the individual is the autonomous thing which, as yet an individuum, does not move outside. To move outside and find oneself in the other — now you are a person. The modern cultural notion of the person, in Christian understanding, is a fundamental heresy. The notion of personhood is one who finds himself and knows himself to be himself only in the unity of love with another. And, of course, within our own context, we should add: in that unity, and not apart from it, does God grant his own creative powers.

It is an incredible conundrum how it is that in our culture the potential fruitfulness of marriage no longer matters — children utterly divested from this. From the Christian point of view, that's a movement into the dust. It's a lifelong commitment because one's identity is found in the other. In the union of conjugal love, men and women together are invited to participate in the creative and redemptive activity of God. The marital union is a place of redemptive living — forgiveness, patience, and all the rest. So marriage is an icon of Christ and the church, the incarnation. Of course, that was also extended in Christian thinking to baptism — there, we become a member of Christ's body, the church, his bride. Marriage is an icon of God's final purpose. Hence marriage is not a good unto itself. In heaven, we are told, there will be neither marriage nor giving in marriage. Marriage is a fundamentally prophetic, teleologically directed fact, which finds its truth, its reality, in the marriage of Christ and his church. Christian marriage is a workshop for life in the kingdom of God.

I thought you might be interested to just have at your disposal, if you want them — you can do with them what you want — but I have some quotes here from various Eastern rite marriage litanies and prayers, which present, I think, in wondrous ways, what Paul is about in Ephesians 5 and what is implicit in Genesis 2, but is, I think, not quite so explicit in our own. But that's something for you to judge.

From the Armenian rite of holy matrimony: there is this wonderful moment when the bride and the groom are brought together, and as a cross is placed over their heads, a crown is placed upon their heads. That is to say, they now sit with Christ in his victory — a victory, yes, that is still going to be shadowed by the cross, but nonetheless they are in Christ. And then they are enthroned — they actually set up thrones, and they are brought to them, and they sit there as a royal couple. Marriage is nothing degrading. It's royal. It elevates. It makes that which is common into that which is regal. That's a great image. "We beseech you, O Lord, bless this marriage as you did bless the marriage of the holy patriarchs, and keep them spotless in spiritual love and in one accord during their lives."

If you look at these prayers and others, you will note that the great spiritual blessings of marriage — the great blessings of marriage — and the purpose of marriage are spiritual: spiritual love, concord, harmony. There's nothing pragmatic about it. "Bless, O Lord, and make their marriage fruitful with offspring, if it be your will, so that they may inherit a life of virtuous behavior for the glory of your all-holy name, and make them worthy to attain the undespoilable joys of the heavenly nuptials, together with all your saints."

Interesting prayer, because it notes that children are tutors. "If it be your will, give them fruitful offspring, so that they may inherit a life of virtuous behavior." Children make you humble, as we are learning back there in the corner. They teach humility and patience. And they hire such bothers that if they bother you in the middle of the night, dad nab it, you have to get up — otherwise you won't even get sleep at five o'clock. That's, I think, kind of God bringing us to real levels, right — forcing us to be a person at three o'clock in the morning. I never quite saw it that way, but now that they're all over twenty-five, I see it more clearly.

The Coptic rite of holy matrimony — this is the prayer of crowning: "Holy Lord, who crowned your holy ones with untainted crowns, and joined things heavenly with things earthly in unity, bless these crowns which we have prepared in order to place them on your servants. May these crowns be for them the crown of glory and honor. Amen. The crown of blessing and health. Amen. The crown of rejoicing and good fortune. Amen. The crown of jubilation and gladness. The crown of virtue and justice. Amen. The crown of wisdom and understanding. Amen. Grant lavishly on your servants who wear them the angel of peace in the bond of love. Deliver them from every wicked thought and evil assault of the devil. May your mercy be over them. Hear the cry of their prayer. Set the fear of you in their hearts. Rule their lives, so that they may live to a long old age. May they rejoice in gazing upon sons and daughters, and whoever they may bring to birth, may they be useful in your one and holy, catholic and apostolic church, confirmed through orthodox faith."

Did you see what the purpose of children is? The purpose of children is to evangelize the world and make sure the church continues. The family is a little church. The family is a way in which Christ extends his kingdom in the world and makes it there. Marriage entails both personal and corporate destiny. Yet marriage is under the cross. It's a struggle against sin in view of final perfection.

The Armenian rite of holy matrimony — during the crowning ceremony, the best man holds a cross over the heads of bride and groom, and this prayer is said: "Guard us, O Christ, under the shadow of your holy and precious cross. Deliver us from enemies visible and invisible. Make us worthy to give thanks to you and to glorify you with the Father and the Holy Spirit, now and forever and into the ages of ages. Amen."

Then I give some quotations to ponder — marriage as an ecclesial reality, a little church. May I, especially since I'm running out of time, may I especially point to the longish quote by Methodius of Olympus, on the passion, baptism, as true marriage. Note the intertwining of marital themes, creation themes, Eucharistic themes, baptismal themes — the idea, of course, of the church coming from the side of Christ, with the blood and the water. There's the image of the marriage of the Lamb. It's a wonderful and complex, but I think incredibly beautiful, quotation. "The command to increase and multiply is duly fulfilled" — the church increasing daily in greatness and beauty. Again, the mythological character of marriage, and not just, of course, by way of one's own children.

Divorce, then, finally, as sin. Why? Whatever its cause, which may lead prudentially to separation, it's always problematic, for it is a rupture of the iconic reality of marriage and a loss of that relationship in which one practices the life of holiness.

From the Byzantine order of second marriage — it's an interesting fact that in the Eastern rite they don't use the same prayers for a second marriage as they do for the first marriage. The first marriage, as we noted from these previous prayers, has a predominant note of royalty, of sitting with Christ — you are now going to regally love one another with patience and love. But a second marriage — that is in view of a rupture, and so the prayers for the second marriage are noted by repentance and forgiveness. It's not now exactly like — something has died for this one to live.

In the rite of holy matrimony, the virtue of fidelity is emphasized. In the order of second marriage, this is replaced by a distinct note of penance and forgiveness. Note this prayer: "O Master, Lord of our Lord, our God, who shows pity upon all men, and whose providence is over all your works, and who knows the secrets of man and understands all men, purge away our sins and forgive the transgressions of your servants, calling them to repentance, granting to them remission of their iniquities, purification of their sins, pardon for their errors, whether voluntary or involuntary. O thou who knowest the frailty of man's nature, as thou art his maker and creator, who didst pardon Rahab the harlot and accept the contrition of the publican, remember not the sins of our ignorance from our youth, for thou only art righteous, sinless, holy, plenteous in mercy, of great compassion, and repentest thyself of the evils of men. And do thou, O Master, who hast brought together in wedlock your servants, such and such, unite them to one another in love. Vouchsafe to them the contrition of the publican, the tears of the harlot, the confession of the thief, that repenting with their whole heart and doing your commandments in peace and oneness of mind, they may be deemed worthy also of your heavenly kingdom."

That is to say, this marriage may, in fact, be, as the first, an improvement — not to be the workplace of the spirit. Interesting things to think about. So I thank you very much for your attention.