Marriage, Singleness, and the Divine Image

Theology of Gender 2

When I was single, I felt betrayed by my friends who went off and got married. In my defense, it was the Lutheran Church—Missouri Synod. When people got married in my neck of the LCMS, they tended to get married really young (“ring by spring”). And because they were so young, often times marriage didn’t quite fit them. They thought that they had to be mature in order to be married, or they thought that all of their emotional energy had to go into their relationship with their spouse, or that marriage meant a complete revision of themselves and their values, so they could no longer have any “fun.” Or—especially at seminary—marriage meant moving out of student housing: so all of a sudden, when you got married, you got a whole new host of friends, those who rented around the Fort Wayne area and participated in events for married couples.

Marriage was a social and theological good on campus. It meant two orthodox Lutherans coming together to repopulate synod, passing on the faith to the next generation. And before you ask, yes, this is pronatalist rhetoric sung in a synodical key. Combined with this synodicized pronatalism was of course a Lutheran version of purity culture. While I was there, I had a professor write on the board “it is better to marry than to burn” in big letters, an indication that marriage was the only antidote to lust, especially pornography use. It was also the only reason a man and a woman would sit together in chapel, the lunch room, at coffee hour, or during weekly fellowship get-togethers. I myself nefariously had a decent number of close deaconess friends, and this of course caused some rumors to crop up from time to time.

So I think when I had friends who got married, I would get nervous. Nervous that they had left me behind; nervous that they had accepted the rhetoric; nervous that the friendship was, for all intents and purposes, over. And in some cases, this did indeed prove to be the case. I had a friend who, once he got engaged, told me that now that we had spent time apart, he realized how much of a jerk I am (only he didn’t say jerk) and that he didn’t want to hang out with me anymore, now that he had grown more mature. This same friend later told me that I needed to force a woman to marry me, because women are naturally emotional and need strong intellects to guide them towards what is good. Both of these interactions were devastating (and terrible!); and then I found out that he had adopted the pronatalist and purity culture rhetoric hook, line, and sinker. Marriage had changed him; and it wasn’t for the better.

This is just one instance. There are of course more—the deeply morose legalism of some of the seminarians around me, constantly attempting to implicate the early church and Lutheran orthodoxy itself in their awful appropriation of the most egregious excesses of American fundamentalism: it was a thing to behold! All of that became reason to distance myself from anything that smelled like pronatalism or purity culture; not, of course, to the extent of those who try to teach Christianity and sexual immorality as two compatible things. Rather, I went the ressourcement route, trying to bring to the fore the diversity of the early church’s opinions concerning issues of marriage and sex. Peter Brown’s The Body and Society: Men, Women, and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity was textbook reading for me at this point. As were David G. Hunter’s Marriage, Celibacy, and Heresy in Ancient Christianity: The Jovinianist Contoversy, Elizabeth A. Clark’s The Origenist Controversy: The Cultural Construction of an Early Christian Debate and J. N. D. Kelly’s Jerome: His Life and Writings. I was also reading Augustine’s writings on Marriage and Virginity and Jerome’s controversial writings. The Origenist, Jovinianist, and Pelagian Controversies all had something to say about what it means to be human, what it means to be married and single, and how these things work together. I thought at the time that if I could present an alternative to what I was seeing around me, via the antiquity these people said they revered, then maybe we could get to a place that was less… crazy.

For anyone who hasn’t studied these things, they’re actually pretty cool. All of these controversies arose from misunderstandings, of course; but the theology they inspired had a lot to do with what a human being is and what happens when he is brought into the Christian Church. Add to this list the theology of Gregory of Nyssa’s On the Human Image of God and you have a very bizarre, very ‘fifth century’ Christian approach to humanity, complete with the primordially androgynous image of God, a foundational typological relationship between Adam and Christ, and an eschatologically-constituted asceticism based in Mariology, all set within the context of a neoplatonic return to the one. This is very different from purity culture and pronatalism: in fact, I can safely say, it undermines their very foundations, with the very weapon of “antiquity.”

When you got married, did you bring any baggage with you? I think that I might have brought baggage with me…

When we do theology, we always put something of ourselves into it. And this is only natural: theology, thinking about God, doesn’t happen in a computer; it happens in a human being, one who lives in such a way that he is either turning towards or away from the object he theologizes on. It’s like in The Princess and Curdie, when MacDonald tells us that Fairyland follows the Plotinian metaphysics of ascent and descent: man is always on the way somewhere, whether towards the bestial or the supernatural; and his theology, how he speaks and thinks about God, is said within the context of this spiritual life. My friend I talked about was immature; therefore, he theologized immaturely. The way to fix his theology wasn’t by reading more, but by living more.

I’m currently married, and my wife is seven months into her pregnancy with our first child. And it’s interesting to see the changes that have happened in myself, changes which I feared when I began to see them in others. No, I haven’t become obsessed with ecclesial and national demographics, nor am I intent on saving the institutions around me through exercising the ‘virtue’ of reproduction. But I have gotten a lot more comfortable saying that I think having babies is a good thing. Talking about “babies” used to make me embarrassed, like it was the most inconvenient ‘old person thing’ in the world. But now, I’m starting to really like babies (we’ll see if this holds up once we finally take ours home from the store… I mean “hospital”).

I think, at least for me, there’s been an uptick in maturity (Elizabeth might be able to let us know if I’m being objective or not). Not everybody needs the push of a coming child; single people and DINKs have gotten along without such pressures just fine. But the coming baby has really helped me pay a little more attention to the things I participate in, the media I consume, the stories I tell myself, the ways I act. Over the last seven months, Elizabeth and I have had more intentional conversations than I can count, especially about how we want to raise our little one; and it actually feels really good. Because, well, I’m starting to see that there are ways to be pro-family and pro-birth that don’t necessarily implicate one in conservative politics or the denigration of the single way of life. There’s a way to say “this is good” and “this is good, too.”

So yeah, I was a little apprehensive about getting married. Not because of Elizabeth—she’s absolutely lovely. But because of what I saw marriage was in my home church body. But once I participated in marriage, I realized that God is working in both marriage and singleness toward a common goal. And this was difficult for me, because I had often associated askesis and virtue with singleness; but now I find it really comforting. I’m finding that the mystical end is the same for both the one who is single and the one who is married: and that end is deification, participation in God. And further, this is carried out by the three pillars of God’s economy, the creation, the incarnation, and the glorification. Marriage and Singleness are actually both signs of each one of these pillars in God’s perfect plan of deification. Marriage isn’t more or less a sign than singleness is. Both ways of life are in the end a seal of God’s faithfulness towards us and a plan for our life of virtue in him (which, interestingly enough, is where St. Augustine ended up, too).

Let me elaborate, beginning with singleness. Singleness is a sign of Adam’s original purity, his state of being without shame or sin. It is also a sign of Adam’s integrity, that is, that he was not scattered in will or body by a fall from his contemplation of the original unity. Singleness embodies the original man, who was in some sense androgynous, before he was split into ish and isha, man and woman. In his originality, as Ha Adam, he is the image of God, a picture of both humanity at the beginning and humanity at the end. In it, we see mirrored the faithfulness of the saints, those who have been washed clean and spotless in the waters of Baptism, bound into one in the Body of Christ. Remember: many of the saints that we revere are single—no less than Jesus himself! And though Jesus was single, he bore much fruit in good works, in virtues, in the redemption of mankind and the reheading of all things. Singleness gets to bear this beautiful promise in its body, as a type of the original integrity and purity of the human nature and the promise that it will someday be so again under the One Head, Christ.

Now, marriage. Marriage is a picture of ish and isha, man and woman, in all their sexual differentiation. In each marriage, through the masculine embrace of kenosis, Adam is once again laid out, killed, and from his side is fashioned one according to him. And in each marriage, the feminine Eve, too, is sprung from his side, as his glory, the picture of a beatified humanity, which is life-bearing. Each marriage is a picture of the Cross, which recapitulates this image by creating the new cosmos from Jesus’ riven side. It is also a picture of divine erotics (think Song of Songs): in marriage, we see the coming together of difference, of two things that were far off that have now become close through an unstoppable love. We see a close participation in one another, which symbolizes the union between the two natures in Christ, the union of Christ and the Church in faith, and the final recapitulation of the cosmos on the last day. And we see motherhood, which lends itself to childbearing, which is an image of Eve, of Mary, and of the Church in their blessed spiritual fruitfulness, as they bear life and joy itself.

In both singleness and marriage, we imitate Christ, his Apostles, his saints, and the blessed Mother of God. This is because they participate in both sides of these holy mysteries: both the integrity and purity of singleness and the unitive participation of marriage. Regardless of the state of their physical bodies, they experienced the good of both ways of life. And so in our singleness and our marriedness we enter more and more robustly into the communion of saints. The Mother of God illustrates this perfectly: she is both the Virgin and the Mother, physically and spiritually. By our singleness and by our marriages, we remember and imitate her and all the saints after her.

I’ll leave off there. All I really wanted to say was that I’ve changed my thinking on marriage and singleness over the years. Marriage and Singleness are deeply implicated in the divine image of God; and so, when they are used spiritually, they can be opportunities to grow in our communion with God and with the goal of our completed or redeemed humanity. I used to have a hard time with the married life. But now that I’m married, I’ve begun to recognize it as something really good. I hope that wherever you’re at, married or single, you can see God at work in your everyday life. I hope that you can look at the place you’re at and see the possibility to be a unique reflection of the divine life, that God is constantly drawing you closer and closer to himself in all of the messiness of the everyday.