This is Life!: Revolutions Around the Cruciform Axis

Marriage: Primarily About Procreation? Allan Carlson Says, "The Early Church Thought So"

In the December issue of "The Family in America," and the article "Marriage and Procreation: On Children as the First Purpose of Marriage," family historian, Allan Carlson, is making the case that the dissolution and attacks on marriage did not begin with LGBT activism on gay marriage, but rather that the assault on marriage began much earlier in the 20^th century with the easing of divorce laws, legalization of contraception, and the revisionist Constitutional interpretation of a "right to privacy," and that gay activists have only now decided that the deformed thing we currently call marriage (easy to get out of, only about sexual pleasure, and bounded only by one's own "right" to absolute privacy) is something that appeals to them.

But there was another historical era in which marriage suffered from extreme societal deformation: the first centuries B.C. and A. D., and from that context, Christians built a renewal of marriage that was to last some nineteen hundred years. Carlson notes:

Nearly two thousand years ago, what would become Western Christian Civilization began to take form in a time of great sexual disorder. The moral and family disciplines of the old Roman Republic were gone, replaced by the intoxications of empire. Slave concubinage flourished in these years. Divorce by mutual consent was easy, and common. Adultery was chic, and widespread. Homosexuality was a frequent practice, particularly in man-boy sexual relations. There was a callous disregard for infant life, with infanticide a regular practice. Caesar Augustus, worried about the plummeting Roman birthrate, even implemented the so-called "Augustan Laws" in 18 B.C., measures that punished adultery, penalized childlessness, and showered benefits on families with three or more children. These laws may have slowed, but did not reverse, the moral and social deterioration.

Between 50 and 300 AD, and out of this same chaos, the Fathers of the Christian Church crafted a new sexual order. Procreative marriage served as its foundation. Importantly, they also built this new order in reaction to the Gnostic heresies which threatened the young church; indeed, which threatened all human life.

The Gnostic idea rose independent of Christianity, but I am concerned here with so-called Christian Gnosticism. The Gnostics drew together myths from Iran, Jewish magic and mysticism, Greek philosophy, and Chaldean mystical speculation. More troubling, they also appealed to the freedom from the law as proclaimed by Christ and Paul. In this sense, they were antinomians; that is, they believed that the Gospel freed Christians from obedience to any law, be it scriptural, civil, or moral. The Gnostics claimed to have a special "gnosis," a unique wisdom, a "secret knowledge" denied to ordinary Christians. They appealed to unseen spirits. They denied nature. They developed a mélange of moral and doctrinal ideas. But virtually all Gnostics did share two views: they rejected marriage as a child-related institution; and they scorned procreation. . . .

Carlson then walks through several Jewish, biblical and early patristic sources, and then concludes:

All of these sources led the early Church Fathers to one conclusion: the purpose of marriage is procreation. While also celebrating lifelong chastity, they refused to abandon the need for children. As Justin explained in the mid-2nd Century: “We Christians either marry only to produce children, or, if we refuse to marry, are completely continent.” Two centuries later, John Chrysotom taught that “there are two reasons why marriage was instituted, that we may live chastely and that we may become parents.” In the year 400, Augustine, the Bishop of Hippo, wrote the book, The Good of Marriage. He argued that God desired man’s perpetuation through marriage. Offspring, he insisted, were the obvious and first “good” of marriage (the other two being fidelity and symbolic stability or sacrament). As Augustine explained:

What food is to the health of man, intercourse is to the health of the human race, and each is not without its carnal delight which cannot be lust if, modified and restrained by temperance, it is brought to a natural use [i.e., procreation].

Augustine also insisted that the act of procreation included “the receiving of [children] lovingly, the nourishing of them humanely, the educating of them religiously.”

This is a far cry even from conservative, "traditional" accounts given of marriage in much of present-day U. S. Christianity and marriage counselling in general. No, even modern Christianity accepts, for the most part, the rationale of sexual pleasure as binding source of intimacy in a marriage, and therefore as the primary function of marriage, and thus also accepts contraception and, implicitly, all the anthropology that goes with it, and though most conservative and evangelical Christians would verbally reject easy divorce, statistically speaking, they do not live any differently than non-Christians.

Carlson opines that it is probably too late to do anything legislatively to dramatically turn back the clock on the destruction of marriage--though he does think there are important incremental things that can be done. But just as Christians changed the culture's understanding of marriage apart from legislation in the first few centuries of the Church, so may they do so today.

They just have to take on the Christian understanding of marriage--rejecting the secularized version they now accept--and live what God intends for man and woman.

Posted by Clifton at February 7, 2005 06:00 AM | TrackBack