We all know the outlines of the story: Obama invited Pastor Rick Warren to the inaugural podium, and earned the ire of his liberal base. Then Obama invited the first openly gay Episcopal Bishop, V. Gene Robinson of New Hampshire, to kick things off at the Lincoln Memorial on that same day, horrifying the very religious conservatives to whom he’d made his initial gesture.
The President did exactly what he has said he’d do: listen to everyone, and give everyone a hearing. And thus, like many middle-of-the-roaders, he antagonized both extremes. Happy to have a hearing of their own, they had no intention of listening to the other guy. (Which goal was made easier, in the case of Robinson’s invocation, as the bishop’s voice was barely heard beyond the stage of the inaugural concert.)
But what would it be like to try to hear both parties in the current psycho-sexual brouhaha? Is there anything that this strange juxtaposition of Warren and Robinson can teach us about the current state of the religion-and-culture wars? Perhaps.
First and foremost, one is struck by the nearly apocalyptic rhetoric on all sides. The liberal Obama’s gesture to conservatism is feared as announcing the death of the political left. The parallel gesture to the gay and lesbian community is thought to be the end of the world among some conservative hardliners.
It is that strange note of apocalypse that struck me first, and gives me cause to ponder now. Can a single preacher’s prayer, no matter the venue, really usher in the apocalypse? More to the point: Is there a logic to this linkage of the rhetoric of apocalypse and the question of gay sexuality? Perhaps. And the issue is, as Warren’s recent support of the California Proposition makes clear, the implicit conception of marriage.
I have quarreled with Rick Warren’s biblical exegesis before. But to pose questions of the correct biblical view of marriage ironically raises the specter of the apocalypse in a curious way. The Bible does demonstrate an interest in marriage, though it does so in unexpected and often unusual ways.
It would not be fair to say that the biblical view of marriage begins in the Garden of Eden, “where God created Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve.” In fact, God did not create Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden; God created Adam and the Woman. Adam was a man (ish) made from the soil (adamah), and she, created from his rib, was a she-man (ishah). Adam gave Eve her name later—Hava, the Life-Giver—only after the two had been expelled from the Paradise-Garden. It wouldn’t be fair to say that the two were married in Eden, since it is hard to imagine marrying a she-man with no name, and also because there is no textual evidence to suggest that the two were sexually related in any way.
That all came later—after the expulsion, after the burden of mortality, after Hava became a “life-giver,” by bearing children.
So too, the New Testament mentions marriage with some regularity, though often obliquely and often in challenging ways. Joseph and Mary were unmarried when Mary was pregnant (Luke 2:5). Jesus is called the son of God, who is imagined as a Father with no bride. Jesus scandalizes many, especially in Luke’s gospel, by traveling openly with unmarried women. He is instructed by widows (Luke 21:1-4), mothers who may or may not be married (Mark 7:24-30), and young women (Mark 14:3-9). More to the point, Jesus’s opponents try to trip him up with complicated legal questions involving encounter, he is almost shockingly cavalier in forgiving an adulterous liaison (John 8:3-11, though he offers much harder judgments in the Synoptic gospels, especially at Mark 10:2-12). Paul has his own distinctive and complicated view of gender relations and of sexual desire, and of marriage (most notably at I Corinthians 7:1-16).
But what kind of marriage was Paul talking about here? Roman marriage, in the main. If we are talking about what kind of wedding these people celebrated, then in most cases it was a traditional Greek marriage. The distinctive difference a Christian marriage is supposed to make had not yet been articulated.
That came a bit later, oddly enough, in Christian “apocalyptic” discourse. This is where the most curious and striking Christian references to marriage appear (Revelation 19:6-10, 21:2-10, 22:17). It grows out of the Hebrew prophetic tradition, where Israel is imagined as God’s wayward wife, separated from the divine love until an eschatological reconciliation. Christ is thus the bridegroom, come to marry the heavenly city, apocalyptic stand-in for the old wayward Israelite Kingdom.
So too, the Christian is wedded to Christ, eschatologically. Only such a marriage can be perfect. Christian marriage exists outside of time.
So the link between debates over the proper quality of a marriage and the despairing rhetoric of apocalypse has a curious biblical warrant, though we might reflect better on how the Greek word ‘apocalypse’ has lost its original meaning of “revelation” and taken on a new meaning of “violent destruction,” or “end of the world.” Christian marriage, as opposed to the sorts of marriage in which other people (presumably pagans) engage, is apocalyptic in this sense, oriented to the end times.
And neither Rick Warren nor Gene Robinson said one word about that.
Which raises the question: What are we really arguing about, and why?
