Hays on the meaning of marriage

Posted on | November 10, 2009 | 2 Comments

In The Moral Vision of the New Testament, Richard Hays argues that an easy acceptance and normalization of divorce tells a rival story to the divine story of God and His people. The rejection of divorce, and the various rules surrounding that rejection, is the result of a greater narrative. God hates divorce because marriage is a microcosm of spiritual fidelity. So, contrary to certain traditional accounts, when Paul deals with the theology of marriage in Ephesians, the emphasis is not on indissolubility, but instead moves toward the perfect care and nourishment which typify Christ’s love for the Church.

Marriage therefore takes on an eschatological nature. It is a “figurative sign of the longed-for eschatological union of Christ and the church.” And it is in this context, in this story, that it is very difficult to read marriage as something “ephemeral.” In other words, if marriage is unavoidably symbolic and eschatological, then what we say about divorce reflects back on the greater narrative.

The next question, then, is whether we can even apply such a model for the brokenness that we witness or perhaps experience every day. As Hays attempts to show in his exegetical work, the interpretation of Jesus’ commands regarding divorce acquired various glosses over time and in different communities. Paul himself interestingly comes right out to say that his “Pauline exception” to divorce did not originate with Christ. Particular sets of circumstances required the church to reformulate and adapt with a message appropriate for a particular place and people. Hays grants this much (”it is undeniable that we see here a process of adaptation, in which Jesus’ unconditional prohibition of divorce is applied and qualified in the interest of practicability.”) However, crucially, Hays still wants to affirm that the later adaptations follow by implication. There is, he says, a certain “trajectory” of the story, from Genesis through Hosea to Jesus and the Church. Pastoral improvisation is not only allowable, but necessary, to respond to the specific brokenness that we experience in the Church.

But how? Hays argues that the appeal to experience is very often used to legitimate what is often the easy accommodation to whatever cultural trends are predominant. Should we therefore “improvise” our ecclesial response, as Bishop Spong would want, to bless the dissolution of a marriage now typified by “an increasing inability to communicate,” or one in which the “potential for [quality of] life” is diminished? Hays would argue no, but not perhaps for the reasons we would expect.

Hays proposes that an ethic can be read through various hermeneutic lenses (rule-based, principle-based, affection-based, and symbol-based). In response to Bishop Spong, one might expect Hays to fall back on the explicit rules given by Jesus or by Paul. But instead, he appeals almost beyond them to the narrative framework of the entire Christian tradition (in canon and ecclesial teaching). Essentially, he argues that if we were to accept Spong’s take on divorce, we would have to change fundamentally the story we tell not only about marriage, but about redemption, about the nature of divine forgiveness, and about God’s election of sinners. What we do now testifies to what we believe God has done. So, yes, revisions are necessary, but must not damage the eschatological direction of the overarching story.

Comments

2 Responses to “Hays on the meaning of marriage”

  1. David W. Congdon
    November 11th, 2009 @ 12:47 am

    I don’t know if it’s just my browser, but the last four paragraphs are an exact repetition of the previous paragraphs. I assume that’s a mistake.

  2. Davey Henreckson
    November 11th, 2009 @ 7:46 am

    Thanks, David. Not sure how that happened.

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Theopolitical is the weblog of Davey Henreckson, a graduate student of theology at the University of Notre Dame. Topics of conversation are political and historical theology, with semi-frequent forays into literature, economics, localism, and the divine American sport -- baseball.

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