Here's the difficulty: I disagree with the argument writer Lisa Miller makes; but, when I started writing a rebuttal I found myself disagreeing with myself, at least in tone. The exercise has sharpened my view that an understanding of marriage cannot be isolated from a wider vision of the world and the church. The vision I'm increasingly enamored with is the "catholic" Christian one (hmmm ... to capitalize the "c"?), which understands marriage as being between a man and a woman, but that's not the foundation of the catholic vision.
The weakness I see with Miller's case is that it rests on a thin vision of the church. She repeats the mainline liberal mantra of "inclusion." Inclusion is all well and good -- as I understand it, Islam, the Communist Party and the College Republicans are all happy to include you, too. The question is, inclusion into what? The liberal Protestant answer is "inclusion in an accepting community". And that seems about where the visions ends because to say anything more specific runs the risk of not being inclusive or accepting. There's no problem with that vision as such, it just doesn't seem specifically Christian in its detail, nor does it set my heart on fire.
The problem with making such a point is that it appears to argue against inclusion and acceptance, which is certainly not a Christian attitude and is understandably a turn off for some. Also, it argues against, which is to say it is presented as a reaction to the liberal vision. As bland as "inclusion and acceptance" are, the (stereotypical) conservative mantra of "don't change things" is even less appealing. It is cast primarily in the negative and has the incredulous assumption that the world hasn't or won't change. Of course it will, and so a full vision of the church must be forward facing, in addition to embracing tradition.
Here's where I use that rhetorical tool of sympathetically presenting a third option after having pointed out the shortcomings of two others. You already know its the catholic vision. It's anthem is the unity and singularity of the church across time and space. There are many, many implications of this, and of course I'm not equipped to articulate them. For my own thinking on the subject of marriage, two are most important: surrender of sexuality and authority of the church. The first addresses homosexuality in a way that is kind and comprehensive mostly because it does not particularly address homosexuality. It addresses all Christians in saying that your bodies are set apart for God -- temples for the Holy Spirit -- and so your sexuality is not meant ultimately meant to be managed for pleasure and/or convenience no matter if you fit easily into the 1950s American nuclear family ideal or not. As Christians, we have three "lifestyle" options until Jesus returns: the priesthood, marriage or a religious order. Each has its discipline for turning sexuality from manipulation and harm towards holiness. (Note that "mutual joy" is not the only dimension to the discipline of Christian marriage.) None affords a special privilege to middle class heterosexual couples.
The second aspect of the catholic vision, authority, speaks to what's actually the bulk of the Newsweek article, interpretation of scripture. Miller picks her way through the Bible and church history with the help of some liberal theologians and not surprisingly comes to the conclusion she set out to reach. And frankly I take her point that she's just doing what conservatives having been doing -- finding the parts of the Bible that suit their case. Now, for what it's worth, I think there's more intellectual integrity in the conservative position that the communities that produced the Bible, Jewish and nascent Christian, understood marriage as only being possible between opposite genders. But, that said, part of Miller's argument is that the world changes and Christian and Jewish understandings of their scriptures unfold over time. Indeed. However, a problem arises when Christians see that unfolding occurring in such different ways. Enter the authority of the church. By the scriptures own account, the church, small as it was, was the community that the Bible (the New Testament anyway). It is the church -- and there can be only one -- that decides the faithful range of interpretation of scripture. She discerns the ongoing implications of the resurrection.
Such a personification of the church, in a catholic mode, may well raise more questions than it answers, but I increasingly see it as the only viable alternative. Admittedly, I've caricatured only two alternatives; I've not tackled visions of the church such as new evangelical, pentecostal, deliverance (prosperity) and emergent. (My short answer is that each of those emphasize a characteristic of the church, but are not comprehensive visions of the church's full character.) There very much remains the "one true church question". What is it and how do you recognize it? Well, raising that question has sufficiently made my point for this post, which, remember, is about marriage. The point is you have to see marriage within the church.
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