Mtf 3 uffman critique

Uffman critique

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https://docs.google.com/document/d/1nszcRO7a87GG2Tg6S2_WfzR-S...

Uffman critique

The Church’s New Theological Clothes A response to Craig Uffman At the invitation of my brother Tobias Haller, I read Craig Uffman’s “Reimagining a Theology of Marriage”. I concur with Br.Tobias’s description of the essay as a helpful and thoughtful article.

But, while in its context, the article is indeed helpful and thoughtful, and represents in one sense a serious engagement with the issues it confronts, at the same time, it left me feeling as though I was seeing an imitation of theology, not the real thing. It was similar to watching a lab-coated scientist in a sci-fi movie from the fifties, on a set complete with a “Jacob’s ladder” and a fake computer and the rest. All the actual lab stuff was missing from the set, and the chance any real science could happen there was long gone.

This is not Uffman’s fault; it is not as though the climate could have produced a better or different essay. It is endemic of the times we are in that we are fundamentally unable to produce a coherent theology of marriage.

The Problem We can see what is most telling about the problem here by examining one of the most stunning conceits in Uffman’s piece, and what’s wrong with it. Toward the end, in a somewhat self-congratulatory tone, he says, “it seems clear to me that it is indeed possible for us to imagine a theology of marriage that incorporates all the data - not just potentially procreative unions, but also non-procreative heterosexual and homosexual unions.”

There is a sense in which it is, of course, possible, in the wild-eyed American conviction that anything is possible if only we set our minds to it. But I think what Uffman means is that a theology of marriage is possible on the basis of the reasoning he has already given, and that he genuinely believes that he has presented and discussed “all the data” in some meaningful and relevant sense.

I have become convinced that a theology of marriage must be based on a theology of relationships, in which marriage is seen as one sort of relationship among many. This might indeed be “all the data”; if we had a coherent and compelling account of human relationships, we might well be able to see what is distinctive and holy about marriage, and then be able to ask ourselves how best to construct and understand the category of marriage within that framework.

But Uffman knows, ahead of time, and his readers know, and everyone knows, and expects, and demands, that whatever the story is, “marriage” is good, “marriage” is special, “marriage” is better, and - left unsaid, “not being married” is bad. It’s not simply that Uffman’s “all the data” excludes such traditional Christian categories as the voluntarily single and celibate, or the widowed, or those too young for marriage. He does, of course, exclude them; their relationships are relatively unimportant, and not part of “the data” for Uffman, because their relationships are not “marriage-like”, and so can simply be ignored.

Lurking in the background is the unstated assumption that of course however we define marriage, we will also make some cardinal moral pronouncements about sexual activity, about what kinds of partnerships are acceptable and not, and so forth. The omission of any discussion of other kinds of relationships (except for one brief moment, about which later) comes at a price. It is not that such relationships are wrong (presumably elderly widows are allowed to go out to plays with their friends, right?); it is that the only important thing is whether they can have sex. And, if sex is only for marriage, well then, since we’re really talking about who is allowed to have sex, consideration of other kinds of relationships, in which sex isn’t even on the table, is simply irrelevant and unimportant.

So why indeed would a paper like this discuss marriage in isolation from other forms of human relationships? Why is that essentially always the case with such essays? Because the point of the paper is not to figure out “what the church can or should bless” (the church blesses a bajillion things, as Uffman notes, without fretting about official theologizing; priests can and do bless houses, cars, rosaries, babies, individuals, meetings, food, and, to their shame, military uniforms and weapons). No, if that were the point, we would simply move on. The point is that this particular blessing is also taken as a license to have sex, and that is important. Well, to Uffman it’s important.

So, let’s talk about sex There is a stunning game of switcheroo which Uffman has been taken in by. The prestidigitator who accomplished the act was the late pope John Paul II, and it went like this. Once, the Church was confronted with describing what marriage was good for, in a theological context in which marriage was decidedly a second-class way of life, entirely inferior to the lifelong celibate living in religious community or otherwise committed to unmarried ecclesiastical service. And the answer was clear: babies. Marriage produced babies, and without babies, there can be no more priests and religious.

Then time moves on, and in the 20th century the Roman Catholic Church needed to explain that it wasn’t actually trying to push the vast multitudes of Christians into a second-class and inferior status, and began describing the married state as equally valuable as the celibate, and needed to articulate as well that marrying people was not just the Church’s way of making new celibate clergy. Marriage needed to be good for the participants too. And so it was articulated that alongside procreation, there was another equally powerful point to marriage: it served to unify the partners. Marriage was thus both procreative and unitive.

Sex (within marriage) was ok, because it made more Christians. So marriage was ok, because it created the place within which sex was ok.

Oh, and yeah, it brings people together too. Now it’s not that nobody knew this. It’s just that the celibate authors didn’t know it, or didn’t let on that they knew it. Or, most likely, simply didn’t care.

6/16/2015 6:27 PM

Uffman critique

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https://docs.google.com/document/d/1nszcRO7a87GG2Tg6S2_WfzR-S...

Skip forward. Married people have noticed that their economic and social fortunes would be improved if they had more control over reproduction, and advances in medical technology have made birth control safe and reliable. But the Church had always insisted that procreation was part of the point of a marriage (and, let’s be clear, had frequently looked down its nose at those who were infertile through no fault of their own, casting plenty of shame, usually on the women). Well, the ban-hammer descends, and after much hemming and hawing, Pope Paul VI says that every individual sexual act must be “open” to procreation, and so any action which is specifically intended to prevent conception is prohibited, as being contrary to the point of sex.

Never mind the absurd natural-purpose sort of reasoning here, and the unaddressed question of why a moral prohibition should be bootstrapped out of a what-it-was-originally-designed-for argument (is it immoral to use a screwdriver to open a can of paint? is it immoral for a disabled painter to grip a paintbrush with feet instead of hands? is it immoral to beat swords into pruning-hooks?). The argument was that sex must be procreative, every time, or at least, not prevented from being such.

It was never about marriage. This is crucial. For example, it was argued, on the basis of this argument, that while it was certainly immoral to have sex with a prostitute, it was even worse to use a condom while doing so, even to prevent disease. That is, we are not concerned with whether the relationship ought to be procreative (for the conventional morality says it should not) but with whether the sex itself ought to be (open to being) procreative.

Now move forward some more. We have two distinct bits of theology here. First, that marriage is both procreative and unitive, and second, that sexuality is inherently and must always be procreative. Now John Paul II enters the game. Decades after Paul VI got it wrong, John Paul II tries to find a way to encourage Catholic couples to toe the rules against contraception, and articulates a new idea. He says that sex itself is both procreative and unitive. Not the marriage, but the sex. And then, in a tour-de-force, the late pope explains that contraception not only subverts the procreative aspect of sex, but also its unitive aspect.

Finally, Uffman follows Robert Song now in saying that if we Anglicans have decided contraception is not prohibited, it must be because sexuality is unitive, and not only procreative. (And now, to follow the argument forward in brief: because the unitive good in sex is fully sufficient, gay people can do it, and so the absence of a procreative aspect to same-sex sexuality is not, in itself, an impediment to marriage.) And from there, Uffman begins talking about what he thinks is important to marriage.

So, what about sex?

So is sex unitive? Uffman thinks so. But it’s as though the word has floated to the surface at the end of a fairly long story, almost all of which Uffman would discard. Why this one piece floating on top of the soup, when all the rest of the soup pot is tossed out the back door? The superiority of the celibate state, the anxiety about contraception, the desire for a good demographic to keep the institution afloat, the shaming of women who couldn’t have children, the finger-wagging at couples trying to prevent infection in known cases of disease: all of this Uffman (rightly!) has no time for.

But John Paul II got it wrong. In his desire to explain that sex was both procreative and unitive, he conflated facts about sex with facts about how sex functions in healthy marriages with facts about how healthy marriages function. Remember, when marriages were called “unitive”, the focus wasn’t on sex at all originally. And John Paul II produces a disastrous result if we unpack it further.

A good marriage (says the tradition) is both procreative and unitive. But it’s not automatic, says the tradition. A bad marriage might fail to be procreative or unitive. (And yes, the tradition did run around shaming marriages which were not procreative, regardless of the reason, with the shame ultimately landing on the women.) So for marriage, procreation and union are signs of goodness, says the tradition, but not things that come along willy-nilly.

But the fact that heterosexual sex is procreative (in general) is not some kind of best-case. It’s not a description of good sex, but a description of sex. Even the most abusive and morally objectionable sexuality can produce children, up to and including rape. The procreative aspect of heterosexual sex is a biological fact, not a moral criterion. It is only through the natural law argument - which Anglicans generally reject - that biological facts get bootstrapped into moral requirements not to get in their way. But that sex can be unitive is only a moral criterion; it is not a biological fact, and the natural law argument cannot go the other way. When a couple uses birth control (thinks John Paul II) they subvert the procreative end (as they desired) but also (as they did not desire) the unitive end. But it is not as though the unitive moral purpose was automatic.

The question then of whether and how sex is “unitive” is extremely important. I would leave off the word “unitive” at this point; it was borrowed into the discussion because of a conviction that marriage was unitive. The word is question-begging if it is associated with an assumption that only unitive sexuality is good. But regardless of the word to choose here, it is not automatic that sexuality “brings two people together”; it is not a biological necessity; it is not a basic fact. It is something that happens sometimes, and sometimes it does not happen.

So, sex A serious theology of sex needs to involve a serious theology of the body as well. And the Church has essentially no coherent theology of the body left. A substantial number of Christians somehow believe in disembodied spirits as the end-point of resurrection, with a large number thinking that humans go on to become angels in heaven. Paul’s metaphor of athletic training has become our concept of asceticism, which has then been taken by many to be anti-body, which it never could have been (do athletes train their body to make them worse, or because they value spirit over body?).

We are unable to talk sensibly about health. The Church either repeats the nutritionists’ fad of the week, or ignores it entirely. While the YMCA originated with a conviction that athletic exercise was crucial to Christian development (and keeping young men “out of trouble”!),

6/16/2015 6:27 PM

Uffman critique

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https://docs.google.com/document/d/1nszcRO7a87GG2Tg6S2_WfzR-S...

we’ve lost that almost entirely. We were so bad at dealing with addiction that seriously committed Christians had to found AA as a not-explicitly-Christian enterprise in order for it to work at all, and to this day, AA members often report finding much greater work towards health in AA than they ever would in church.

I once heard the late bishop Tom Shaw, SSJE, say that he was glad we could talk about sex in church finally (this was in the mid to late 90s), but what he actually meant by that was that we could talk about using condoms to prevent disease. “Talking about sex” meant “talking about sex as a category of a disease-laden and risky thing”, unfortunately.

Indeed, a Martian could read Uffman’s entire paper and never find out that, for humans, sex is generally an extremely pleasurable activity. A theology of sex which cannot bring itself to notice this is not a theology of sex at all. Even as John Paul II argues that condoms make sex “less unitive” he can only bring himself to say that they do so because they subvert the “embodying and fostering” of the couple’s lives which children would represent. He doesn’t mention that they also make the sex less pleasurable. And this is relevant, of course, because the giving and receiving of sexual pleasure is one of the ways sex is unitive. If you can’t put those words down on paper, you’re not even trying.

We cannot have a theology of sex without a theology of the body, and we cannot have a theology of sex without a willingness to speak frankly about how different things feel at a physical level, and about how sexuality works in different kinds of relationships (or doesn’t).

Frankly, Uffman’s paper is so empty on that point it is hardly a criticism to say he doesn’t discuss it. The criticism is that he doesn’t even notice it’s missing. But it’s not only missing from him; the Church as a whole is entirely absent any serious attempt to talk about sex or relationships with any kind of reality. It is this fact which makes Uffman’s apparent belief that he’s taken into account “all the data” all the more disappointing. He hasn’t even tried.

If you want to know when sex can be unitive and when not, and how it functions in a variety of different kinds of relationships, you can learn a lot by watching Seinfeld, but almost nothing from those who seem to like to talk about sex and union.

So, Aristotle!

Uffman trots out Aristotle’s “four causes”, but like those who trot out Kant without really understanding, it’s clear from the use he makes that he doesn’t really see what is going on with “four causes”, so I’ll need to give some explanation.

A “cause” for Aristotle in this context answers the question “why is this the way it is?” The paradigmatic example is a statue of a man. The reason Aristotle must treat this is that it seems like there should be a single unitary explanation “why is this the way it is?” and yet, there are different answers we can give. Aristotle believes those different answers can be arranged under four headings. Within a single heading, if we’ve truly understood a case correctly, the different answers will all connect properly. But the different headings are simply different; there is nothing right or wrong about the differences there. In modern language, we would say that “why is this the way it is?” is really ambiguous, with the four different headings being the four different ways the question can be taken. (This is all a familiar move for Aristotle; it is very similar to what he does in inventing the notion of “category” to explain why a word like “good” seems to shift its meaning around; in this he believes he is answering a puzzle left by Plato.)

So for the statue, the first answer is, “because it is made out of bronze.” It is the way it is, because it is made of bronze. If it were made of, say, gold, it would be a different thing. Another answer we could give is, “because it is made out of metal.” Note that both of these are answers under the same heading (“material cause”), and they are different answers, but this is ok, because they connect properly: bronze is a kind of metal. (And Aristotle has a well-developed understanding of genus and species here, in which different materials are hierarchically organized by the “this is a kind of that” property.)

The second sort of answer is, “because it resembles Pericles”. That is, it is shaped the way Pericles is shaped. This comes to be known as the “formal cause”. If it resembled Demosthenes instead, it would be a different statue. Again, there are other possible right answers, “because it is of a human being” or “because it is of a living thing”; these are all properly connected and there is no trouble in them being all different, but correct, answers.

Now here we should pause. For the formal and material causes exhaust what the thing is. That is, the material and formal causes, alone, are sufficient to answer the question, “what is this?” Aristotle’s notion of definition by genus and specific description is borrowed from Plato, but he sees that this systematically allows two definitions of things (“it is of bronze metal”; “it is of the man Pericles”), and the four-cause theory helps here, but that’s as far as it goes. The remaining causes answer the question “why is this the way that it is?” but they do not enter in to the question of what it is.

So we move to the “efficient cause”; the word meaning the cause that makes it out of something else, ex facio, in Latin. The matter that makes up the statue was not always bronze (thinks Aristotle, who has a theory of substantial change), and the arrangement of the matter was not always in the shape of Pericles. What accounts for these transformations? Efficient causation. Here we posit the sculptor as the efficient cause. It is the way it is because the sculptor moved his arm in such-and-such a fashion, which pushed around the malleable metal, etc. But there are multiple efficient cause stories (just as for the other formal and material): “because the hammer moved in this way”, etc.

Again, these all need to be properly connected. Note that they are not connected by being kinds of each other. Bronze is a kind of metal, but moving-hammer is not a kind of moving-body-of-sculptor. Rather, the connection for efficient causes is a chain of efficient causation. The motion of the hammer was caused by the motion of the body, etc.

And finally, there is one remaining way to answer, “why is this the way it is”, and that is, “because the city paid the sculptor to do it that way”.

This is the “final cause”, that is, the purpose or goal of the sculptor’s action. And, again, there are multiple answers here, but they all connect.

For example, “because the sculptor wanted to produce a statue of Pericles”. But, he wanted that, because it was a means to the end of getting paid. So there is again a sort of chain of final causes, but one looking forward towards more and more remote ends.

Provided they are properly connected, the different answers under a single heading are all correct, the difference is at what level of

6/16/2015 6:27 PM

Uffman critique

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https://docs.google.com/document/d/1nszcRO7a87GG2Tg6S2_WfzR-S...

description we are talking. There is nothing more real about the more distant final cause, “so that he could eat”, “so that he could preserve his life”, “so that he could reach human fulfillment”. And indeed, the more remote the final cause we cite, the less helpful an answer it is in practice, just as it is more helpful to talk about the motion of the hammer than the motion of the sculptor's arm, and still less helpful to talk about early cosmology. Likewise, it is more useful to say “it is made of bronze” than “it is made of metal”, and it is more useful to say “it is of Pericles” than “it is of a man”. This is purely about the utility of different answers however, never about their correctness.

How about “good”? How does that enter in to it? Well, it mostly doesn’t. The four causes are not “four kinds of good”. We could go astray by explaining how this relates carefully to an important difference between Plato (for whom any real concept is of a good thing) and Aristotle (who disagrees sharply). Suffice it to say that for Aristotle, it is sensible to ask what are the four causes of the Holocaust, just as it is sensible to ask what are the four causes of a cute new puppy. The telos of a thing is not “the good at which it aims” (for Aristotle); the telos of a thing is “that at which it aims,” whether good or bad. As a secondary theory, that is, a distinct theory from the four-cause theory, Aristotle is prepared to defend that the ultimate telos is always the good, but not any of the other causes, and not the intermediate telos, and, recall, the intermediate telos is an equally correct answer to the question “why is this the way it is”, and in practice, is usually a more helpful answer.

Ok, whew. So what about marriage, and Uffman’s attempt to deploy four-cause talk to understand it? He tells us that the material cause is “a set of two sexed creatures from a different set of parents.” This is very hard to understand. He says “creatures”, I think, because he doesn’t want to build in the details of human biology to the definition, and that’s a fine choice. But then why is sexual dimorphism, the number two, and parentage relevant?

We could imagine a species in which offspring are created by pairs of adults, but in which there is no sexual dimorphism at all. They could be in all other respects similar to humans. Would it be absurd to refer to their pairings as marriages?

We could imagine a species in which there are three sexes, all of which must come together to create offspring, and in which the social customs involve the creation of stable long-lived triplets. Would it be absurd to refer to these triplings as marriages?

And as for parentage, consider the situation in Brave New World, in which no one knows of their parentage, and all regard discussion of siblings as quite rude and socially awkward. If two people in that society bucked the trend, and formed a stable partnership in all the ways we would call marriage, we would call them married. If we then found out that it turned out they shared a parent, would we suddenly say, “oh, we were mistaken, that’s not a marriage at all”?

The most we can say about the material cause of a marriage is that it is persons in relationship, and frankly, we can’t say very much about the relationship at all without straying into formal cause territory. Perhaps we can’t even say that much.

So what is the formal cause of marriage? What is its shape? Formal causes are tricky: if the statue is a bad statue of Pericles, then it might not resemble Pericles very well. Enough art history has taught us, however, that resemblance is a tricky matter, and we’ve also learned (or should have) that the intention of the artist is quite irrelevant here. How much resemblance does it need to lose, before we start saying that it’s not a statue of Pericles at all?

This is important to address if we’re deciding whether the artist should be paid. But it is, interestingly, not important in understanding the statue. In other words, the trickiness of formal causes is all in the language used to describe them (and the importance we attach to the language), not the thing itself. Whatever the statue’s shape, it has the shape it has, and that’s its formal cause, whether intentional or not, whether resembling Pericles or not.

So the formal cause of this particular marriage is the interrelationship of its parts, one to another. Just as different marriages are made up of different people, so different marriages have different relationships of the parts (the people). Each is what it is. We only need to fret about whether it is a marriage if we have other loading on that term. (For example, the paymasters in Athens may care if it’s a statue of Pericles, but whatever they judge on that score, it doesn’t stop being what it is just because they decide it’s not Pericles.)

Because the material cause of marriage helps us not at all (once we realize that we cannot sneak in gender or binary coupling that way), all the interesting work is in the formal cause. It is clear that the formal cause of marriage must be in the genus human relationship but we need to know which it is.

So how will Uffman give us the definition (the boundaries) of the formal cause of marriage? He gives us a loose definition by genus and species; the genus is household (itself a species of human relationship). The specific distinctions are that it is characterized by offspring, faithfulness, and permanence.

Now we’re in trouble. Are these descriptions of a good marriage, or of all marriages, good or bad? A bad statue of Pericles is different from a statue of Demosthenes: the former is still of Pericles, and, recall, it doesn’t matter what the artist intends. (If the artist works off a model of Pericles, but is mistaken and thinks it’s Demosthenes, the result is a statue of Pericles, even though the artist intended a statue of Demosthenes.)

But recall, that the trouble here is not in the statue, or its formal cause, but in the use of the words “of Pericles” to describe it. It is a statue, and it has a formal cause: it has the shape it has. So the definition “of Pericles” says “resembles Pericles” (whether well or badly). And the definition marriage (in the formal cause sense) says...well, what? We need to know as part of the use here, what distinguishes an essential part of the thing from what is merely a good example as opposed to a bad example.

Let’s look now at Uffman’s definition, with this in mind. In what way is a marriage a household? It is true that living together is frequently a part of marriage. While financial union and physical proximity are common, it is hard to establish that they are necessary. (Were not Lord and Lady Marchmain still both married, even though physically and financially separated for many years? Isn’t that fact crucial to the plot of

6/16/2015 6:27 PM

Uffman critique

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https://docs.google.com/document/d/1nszcRO7a87GG2Tg6S2_WfzR-S...

Brideshead Revisited?) At best, householding is part of what it means for a marriage to be good or bad, but not something essential.

How about offspring? Well, once again, we must trot out the reliable observation that offspring have never been taken to be necessary for a marriage (or Henry VIII wouldn’t have needed a divorce). When I say “never”, I mean, never, not at all. Rather, marriages have been taken to require sexual intercourse, and in an age before birth control, sexual intercourse between heterosexuals tends to produce offspring. But that was never taken to be essential to the marriage, even if as in the case of Henry VIII it was the main reason for the marriage in the first place.

Faithfulness? Lord Marchmain comes to mind again; he is of course not faithful to his marriage. And while Lady Marchmain has not engaged in sex outside the marriage, it is clear that in a deeper human sense she also has not been faithful to her husband. Is this constitutive of marriage? Certainly not. It may be that an intention to be faithful at the outset is constitutive, but the endurance of that faithfulness is clearly only one of the things that makes for a good marriage, not its existence at all. And likewise, of course, permanence. A marriage that ends in divorce was not permanent, but was certainly a marriage. We might insist, however, that an intention to be permanent is necessary for the creation of the marriage.

So Uffman’s definition has given us some things which are good, but not part of the good of marriage (like offspring) and other things which are part of the good of marriage, but not necessary to its ongoing existence (like faithfulness or permanence), and one thing which is a miss on the genus of marriage (householding).

What might be better? Well, let’s remember to set aside what makes for a good marriage, so that we can talk about what is or is not a marriage separately from its evaluation as good or bad.

I would encourage the following considerations as being relevant. The genus is human relationship. Marriage is a kind of human relationship. What distinguishes it from other human relationships?

First, some form of social recognition as marriage. This may take the form of legal recognition, or special religious status. It might take the form of being treated as a unit socially. In some circumstances the recognition might be limited to subgroups of society, while denied by society at large (for example, the marriages of slaves in the US, or marriages of same-sex couples before legal or religious recognition was available).

Second, marriage is treated as a primary relationship by its participants. It has an extremely broad and overarching significance for the partners’ lives, similar to the importance of parentage or deep long-term friendships.

Third, it has sharp boundaries. Its creation is generally marked explicitly, whether by a religious ceremony, a legal document, a decision to cohabit, or some other form. There is a careful and acknowledged boundary between spouse and non-spouse. The shapes of that boundary differ from case to case: it might involve sexual exclusivity or it might not.

This does not attempt to be an exhaustive list of considerations, and I am not entirely settled with the wording of each. But I believe it is a good start at understanding the form of marriage, such that things which have that form, we would say are marriages, whether or not we would wish to grant them social recognition, whether or not we would want them for ourselves, whether or not we think they are good or bad choices.

So now, what about the efficient cause? Given the above material and formal causes, it is clear what brings about a marriage. Uffman says it is vows. Well, here again, it is what it is for the particular case. Remember, however, that the efficient cause does not change what the thing is. The statue is a bronze statue of Pericles even if it sprang miraculously from a volcano and not the hand of a sculptor. So the efficient cause is whatever combined the people into the relationship they have which is the kind of relationship called “married”: whatever has produced social recognition as such, taken to be a primary relationship, with sharp boundaries, and whatever other considerations might be necessary. In our society that generally happens by the making of vows, though only generally, because the taking of vows does not always produce a marriage: witness the various grounds under which courts would grant annulments even if vows were exchanged.

But it is not as though a failure to take vows means no marriage exists. (If the statue springs from a volcano, it’s still a bronze statue of Pericles.) If a different mechanism happens to produce the necessary social recognition, sharp boundaries, and acknowledge primacy, then it’s still a marriage. The reason we get so confused about this point is that the purpose of the vows is in fact to provide just those sharp boundaries and to be the locus at which social recognition attaches, and to express the primacy of the relationship verbally. (The purpose of swinging the hammer was to produce a statue of Pericles.) But this does not make it essential to marriage, but only to this particular marriage. If one has the necessary form and matter without it, the fact that the efficient cause was very different than the usual matters not a whit.

The Catholic theological tradition, for which vows are essential, locates them as part of the formal cause of marriage, because they’ve understood their Aristotle better than Uffman has. I agree with Uffman, however, that they should be seen as part of the efficient cause, but I understand, as he seemingly does not, that this makes them only the way marriages usually happen to come about, and not some sort of essential thing.

And finally, the telos. Here it is extremely important to remember that “why the sculptor made the statue” may be a very base reason indeed, but that does not affect what it is. If the sculptor made the statue in order to bring embarrassment to the memory of Pericles, or to obtain money to spend on his cocaine habit, or whatever else, it has nothing to do with what the statue is.

Notice what happens here. The formal and material causes of a kind of thing tell us what counts as one of those things. The efficient cause tells us at best how it usually comes about. The final cause tells us almost nothing. There isn’t any help to asking “the final cause of bronze sculptures of Pericles”. While there is a common efficient cause usually, there isn’t even a usual common final cause. This one was

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Uffman critique

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https://docs.google.com/document/d/1nszcRO7a87GG2Tg6S2_WfzR-S...

produced for a commission, that one was produced to bring glory to Pericles, this other one was produced as a student example to learn the art better, another was produced as a trick (it will be sold under a label “Demosthenes” to embarrass an uncultured purchaser), and so forth. For each particular statue there is a final cause, but for the species as a whole there is not. And moreover, having a horrible final cause doesn’t affect at all whether it’s a good statue or not. The evaluation of the statue depends only on what it is, not why it was made.

So asking about the final cause of a particular marriage is asking why the participants created it. And the reasons are many, and they don’t tell us anything interesting about what marriage is. At best, we can talk about good reasons for creating it, or about the reasons why society bolsters the institution. It is lovely when a marriage, as Uffman puts it, is created for “fellowship with God and with each other.” But it stretches the bounds of plausibility to believe that this is the final cause of all, or even most, marriages. And regardless, it has nothing to do with evaluating whether the relationship is a marriage, or even a good marriage.

Now what?

Here we have a starting place for a theology of marriage. But rooted as it is in human relationship, we can only start to make sense of it by talking about the breadth of human relationships. Uffman’s confidence that he has considered “all the data” here is at its most laughable, and it comes to the fore in his treatment of Ephesians 5:31-32.

Uffman confidently assures us that the form of household here “necessarily excludes other forms of oikos such as polyamorous, polygamous, and incestuous partnerships.” Remember that for Uffman, the formal cause of marriage is a household characterized by offspring, faithfulness, and permanence. Here he expands on that view. While he does not say that polyamory, polygamy, and incest are not marriages, he excludes them from consideration as the “reconciled household”, because of their failure to manifest exclusivity.

(It is not clear why the Church should more readily sanction serial polygamy but not concurrent polygamy; nor is it clear why incest is necessarily not exclusive. But I digrees.)

It would be shocking indeed to say that polygamous relationships are not marriages, since, well, that’s what the word means, and since the Bible itself shows no trace of suggesting that polygamous marriages are not marriages. Uffman notes this, but then speaks of the “interpretive tradition”, namedrops Augustine [which work, exactly? the man was rather prolific], and gives us the assurance that of course we mean only monogamy.

What’s going on here? It has become customary in any piece of writing arguing that a traditional sexual rule of the church should be relaxed, to stamp one’s foot and insist that of course there are still boundaries, and then rattle off a list of what-isn’t-ok as if to assure the reader than of course there are still some rules. It is as though the only way to have a theology of sex is to have some rules of things-that-arenot-allowed, and if you don’t have a list, you’re not doing it right.

(This is a rhetorical flourish only demanded of discussions about sex, by the way. When the Church started saying that slavery was immoral, it didn’t feel the need to describe other property rights which still should continue. When fasting rules get loosened, nobody feels the need to list other kinds of ascetical practice that should remain. When the Church admits that evolution is actually perfectly consistent with Christianity, it doesn’t rattle off a list of other scientific theories it still doubts.)

Now, the love of Christ for his Church is not exclusive. So if we were really reading Ephesians 5:31-32, well, we wouldn’t be hammering home how this somehow proves exclusivity. We are called to love Christ and others and indeed, to love them as we love Christ, and in Christ. There is no hint whatsoever of exclusivity in the relationship between Christ and the Church.

Except, and this is key, except that the people of God should not go after other gods. It is that which is the one and only place where exclusivity comes to the fore. In the prophets, God describes himself as married to Israel, but not to the exclusion of loving other nations. It is as though Israel is wife, and other nations are concubines; or elsewhere, Israel is the wife of God’s youth. The emphasis is that Israel has strayed by going after other gods (husbands), and this is the offense. The language is firmly rooted in a patriarchal society that viewed polygamy as unproblematic (especially for a grand and wealthy suzerain), but viewed even the hint of a woman having multiple sex partners with shock and horror.

Well, we may not want to live in that society any more. Uffman certainly doesn’t, nor do I. But this is the exclusivity mentioned in Scripture. It also shows us that when the relationship between God and humans is analogized to particular forms of human relationship, this does not grant that form of relationship a transcendent status. We can, indeed must, continue to value what it tells us about God, even as the way we think of that human relationship may have radically changed. So we should continue to insist that our love should be for God, and for no other gods whatsoever (and here I would list the modern gods of money, nation, and security as primary dangers). But this does not mean somehow that we should also strive to arrange our domestic relationships to look like those of an ancient Hebrew wealthy landowner. Or a first century Greco-Roman household.

What’s the harm?

What’s the harm in Uffman’s rhetorical flourish? He has identified the following different relationships as all having the same moral character (or at least, he has given us no tools whatsoever for distinguishing them): ● three people who have formed a stable polyamorous relationship, building a household and raising children, which has persisted for decades as a source of fulfilment for themselves and hospitality to others; ● the Oneida community; ● a stable couple, recognized as married by each other and their community, who maintain an open relationship with mutually agreed parameters, and who have found it has made their relationship more stable and enduring as a result; ● a man with many wives, kept without autonomy and obliged to be available to him at all times, without economic security;

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Uffman critique

7 of 7

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1nszcRO7a87GG2Tg6S2_WfzR-S...

● a parent raping a child.

In my view, we should recognize the first and third here as good marriages, the second as possibly good [depending on how one interprets the records] but not a marriage, the fourth as a bad marriage, and the fifth as a bad non-marriage. Got it? And how? Because I have done the work to distinguish a good marriage from a non-marriage; because I have (true to Aristotle!) focused on the form of the marriage in a way which does not question-beg the moral evaluation into the definition.

How do we go forward from here?

First, the whole notion that we need to do our theology first and only then change our praxis is absurdly wrong. It does not match the Apostolic community in Acts nor the historic practice of the church. It does not match the way any of the following came about: reverence for Scripture, the baptism of infants, the inclusion of gentiles, the acceptance of marriage, the practice of celibacy, the nature of ordination, the roles of bishops, the allowance of divorce, the use of democratic process in church affairs, or the use of candles on the altar. It does not match the practice of local communities who do such questionable things as display national flags in church, violate the canons on communion, or tell people that everyone who dies “is with Jesus in heaven now.”

The reason for insistence by some on “doing the theology first” is a last-ditch attempt to delay, by any means available, a change which they simply don’t like. I’m glad Uffman has taken the challenge seriously, and attempted to do the theology, but really, it wasn’t necessary. The theology’s been done for decades; the fact that some people are unsatisfied only means their demand is not to lay a theological justification, but that nobody should move until the last nay-sayer has been convinced.

Our best theology, always, is done by looking back at what God has done, not by predicting what God will do. This is the premise of the catechumenate, it is the point of Exodus 33:17-23, and it is the historic practice of the Church.

Second, we do need a theology of marriage. But as I’ve argued, we cannot ever produce a sensible theology of marriage if we do so only to try and hastily draw lines about what counts as marriage and what does not or which kinds of sex we are going to say is ok and which not.

A theology of marriage must be rooted in an encompassing theology of human relationship which acknowledges and confronts all the considerable complexity of human relationship. A theology of sexuality must be rooted in an encompassing theology of the body which acknowledges and confronts all the considerable complexity of human bodies and sexual practices.

Third, we must talk about ourselves. The principal defect of Uffman’s paper is that he only knows what he knows, but he writes as though he knows all the things he doesn’t know. The only thing he says of polyamory is that he’s agin’ it, and that it’s wrong in the same way incest is wrong, and one suspects this is really all he knows.

Uffman would do much better to talk about how sexuality has had a unitive value in his marriage than to talk about it in vague and abstract terms. I understand that this is deeply upsetting to people who desperately want to not talk about sex, and can only do so with deep embarrassment, even shame. I understand that this requires vulnerability and courage. If Uffman is not prepared to talk about his own experiences of sexuality openly and frankly, then that’s fine. But then he should not talk about them in generic and abstract terms either.

One of the things that has hurt the conversation about homosexuality for so long has been the insistence by straight people that they already know all they need to know about homosexuality. Whether this comes from conservatives or liberals, reactionaries or progressives, it is a constant refrain. Heterosexuals need to start talking about heterosexuality and how that is lived in their own experience, and need to shut up and listen from gay people about homosexuality and how it is lived in our experience. I would learn far more if Uffman had talked about his own experience of heterosexuality, than trying so badly to talk about everyone’s at once.

Uffman says, “for Barth, real sex is always an act of reconciliation. The unreconciled sex act - sex in which two humans are not subjects to one another in response to grace - dehumanizes.”

When I read things like this, I always want to hear the story. Or silence. Please tell us dear Dr Karl of your own experience of unreconciled sex acts, before you tell us what they do. For bonus points, give us some other stories, so it's not all about your own psychology. Or please stop talking.

We cannot build a theology of sexuality unless we are willing to speak vulnerably about our own experiences, and hear those of others with space to hear and value them rather than immediately move to shock and complain that other people’s sexuality gives me bad feelz. While Uffman’s paper does much to help a particular narrow conversation going on now in the Episcopal Church, I’m afraid it really does nothing about moving us toward a real discussion.

Thomas Bushnell, BSG

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6/16/2015 6:27 PM