I don't wish to be thought unperceptive, but apparently the world I had always known has ended without my being aware of it.
The occasion for this epiphany was a radio ad for car insurance. This commercial took the form of a little drama, a dialog between girlfriend and boyfriend. The joke turns on the girlfriend's irritation with the boyfriend's disregard of her needs — generally, his refusal to propose marriage, and specifically with his ignorance of how she's spent all the money she had saved on car insurance.
The jolt for me was that the details of this 60-second scenario make it clear that the two are living together. There's even a snide comment about how his mother is treated when she comes to visit. It's a sort of “pre-mother-in-law” joke.
What brought me up short is that this ad was not trying to sell clothes or cars or beer. It was pushing that sine qua non of middle-class respectability: insurance. And the producers felt no fear of offending that class with the assumption it had dramatized: living together before marriage.
How quickly and how completely the old bourgeois morality has collapsed.
What has all this to do with the church? In one sense, nothing, I suppose. When questions of sexual morality are raised, it is routinely and correctly pointed out that Scripture spends much more space on economic injustice than what used to be called the sins of the flesh. I would urge us to be careful, however, that we don't abandon the Ozzie and Harriet values too quickly. (By the way, does anyone really remember who these two were?) After all, to quote another maxim from the bygone days, the personal is always political.
And while the church can no longer assume that either the marketplace or the middle class underwrites her sexual ethics, we ought to be very sure that we are not endorsing theirs.
I am very much afraid that we have already done so, and to a considerable extent. Exactly to the degree that we have embraced the language of choice, of privacy, of inclusion and so forth, we forget that for the Christian there is always a prior question: Do our actions build up the body of Christ or do they damage it? How we spend our money, how we express our sexuality, how we raise our children — these are all, or ought to be, questions that are the concern of the whole church.
The biblical celebration of diversity is very much at odds with a secular understanding of all choices being equally good. Our dominant culture respects diversity because everyone supposedly has the right to make his or her own choices.
In Scripture, however, diversity enriches the church because diversity provides the variety of gifts securely proceeding from a foundation of common assumptions. Ephesians, for example, names this commonality as “one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all…” (4:5-6). Only after describing this common good does Paul then talk about the diverse gifts that God pours out on his people for the building up of the larger body.
It is well to remember that not all things are beneficial.
In fact, human marriage, we need also to remember, is but a pale enactment of Christ's marriage to the church where, through Word and sacrament, we enter into communion with God. Marriage is a supreme sign of God's love (as in the prophet Hosea) and of Christ's self-giving to the church on behalf of the world. Reference to Hosea reminds us of human faithlessness and evasion, and of a divine love that will not let us go.
The Christian story has long considered marriage a “school for virtue,” where we learn that love is not a feeling or private choice, but an invitation to practice living in dependence upon Christ and his body.
It is strange to imagine that in the year of grace 2008, that the most counter-cultural statement that the church can make is to assert that marriage is really a necessity. But perhaps it is.
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— Beth Newman is professor of theology and ethics at Baptist Theological Seminary at Richmond. [email protected]