He basically, as far as I can tell, believes that the account of God's creation of man and woman in Genesis does not undergird, or does not primarilly undergird, Christian marriage. This belief of his, of course, is a step in his syllogism concluding with something like "...therefore men may marry men, and women may marry women."
The Scotist takes aim at the following passage from Barth, cited by Dr. Harmon in the original article:
Man never exists as such, but always as the human male or the human female. Hence in humanity, and therefore in fellow-humanity, the decisive, fundamental and typical question, normative for all other relationships, is that of the relationship in this differentiation.The Scotist helpfully observes, pace Barth and Harmon, that not "ALL" relationships are undergirded by gender difference. For example, the relationship between men and angels is presmuably not so undergirded, and neither is that between men and God (who is essentially not-gendered). Here is my question, and maybe someone with a copy of the Church Dogmatics (III.4, p. 117) can answer it: is Barth not talking about all HUMAN relationships being undergirded by the gender differentiation of Genesis? He starts the sentence, after all, "Hence IN HUMANITY, and therefore IN FELLOW-HUMANITY," etc.
That would be a much more sensible construal of Barth. Of course God's transcendence of gender is not governed by God's having created man male and female. Why should it be? And likewise with angels. On the other hand, God's relating to humans IS governed by the facts surrounding him as they are revealed in Scripture. Just so with Angels. And so too are Inter-human relationships governed by the facts surrounding humans, as those facts are revealed in Scripture. Such a fact is that "male and female he created them." Another such fact is "the husband is the head of the wife as Christ is the head of the church, his body, and is himself its Savior" (Ephesians 5.23).
But here is the meat of the Scotist's critique:
If our reading of Genesis is to be normative among Christians, it should start with the revelation of the Person of Christ in Scripture.And skipping down a bit, after a citation from Ephesians 5, we find that
The mysterious eschatological union of Christ and the church is normative for marriage. The Word left the Father to be joined with us, to become one with us, the church. That pattern of action is a model for human marriage...I would have said "That pattern of action is THE model for Christian marriage," but nevermind. It all seems well and good, but if I haven't given it away already, what do YOU think is the theological error here? Or is there an error? I think there is. Hint: I think this error is one of, if not THE most fundamental Protestant error. The error, in fact, separating Protestants from Catholics, and possibly construable as constitutive of Prot / Cath differentiation itself. Another hint: Cf. John 1.
3 comments:
KF-
Very helpful. Thank you for the KB contextualizing. And I quite agree: a healthy dose of biblical literalism (always, of course, governed by the Church's interpretive parameters) can very often have a salutary effect on theological illness. And I quite agree that it would do so in this particular (i.e. the Scotist's) case.
And you are circling the error that I take to be at the heart of this thing, and at the heart of the Protestant Catholic distinction. This also, I believe, is a clear case of Anglicanism's historically having come down definitively on the Catholic side of the divide.
Funny, I thought the Lutheran doctrine of justification was at the heart of the Protestant/Catholic divide. That and, of course, the hatred of women.
... A Stab:
The Error could lie in the otherwise laudible tendancies of such contemporary Barthians as Hauerwas and his deputees (aka Rodney Clapp) to re-read and relativize Scripture's "basic" narratives in light of Christ and His Gospel: as Clapp states in his "Families at the Crossroads,"
“For Christians, the primary creation account is not Genesis, but the first chapter of the Gospel of John. There Genesis' opening words are directly quoted, only to be modified in light of Christ: "In the beginning… was the Word." (John 1:1) There we learn that 'all things came into being' through the Word, and that the Word became flesh and lived among us, bearing the name of Jesus.”
Etc.
On its face, this insistence is great. On the other hand, the same "Christian" reading can lend itself to a destructive relativization of the realities in which God has written His immutable truth, which was present, with the slain Lamb, from the foundation of the world (- IE, cf liberal insistence on reading ALL modern sexual ethics issues in light of Galatians 3:28, "There is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus...")
The probem is perhaps a Protestant refusal to recognize reality as ontologically located in physical substance. Hence Protestants have symbols instead of the Real Presence, and "attributed" righteousness instead of "infused," etc. etc. Hence, sadly, Protestantism may have also have allowed a view of humanity whererin the physical realities of maleness or femaleness are (falselyl) deemed meaningless, constructed, inessential and non-intrinsic.
... and this is very sad.
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