Now, the word “marriage,” for thousands of years and cross-culturally has meant man and woman. Sometimes it’s been one man and more than one woman. Occasionally it’s been one woman and more than one man. There is polyandry as well as polygamy in some societies in some parts of history, but it’s always been male plus female. Simply to say that you can have a woman-plus-woman marriage or a man-plus-man marriage is radically to change that because of the givenness of maleness and femaleness. I would say that without any particular Christian presuppositions at all, just cross-culturally, that’s so.
With Christian or Jewish presuppositions, or indeed Muslim, then if you believe in what it says in Genesis 1 about God making heaven and earth””and the binaries in Genesis are so important””that heaven and earth, and sea and dry land, and so on and so on, and you end up with male and female. It’s all about God making complementary pairs which are meant to work together. The last scene in the Bible is the new heaven and the new earth, and the symbol for that is the marriage of Christ and his church. It’s not just one or two verses here and there which say this or that. It’s an entire narrative which works with this complementarity so that a male-plus-female marriage is a signpost or a signal about the goodness of the original creation and God’s intention for the eventual new heavens and new earth.
If you say that marriage now means something which would allow other such configurations, what you’re saying is actually that when we marry a man and a woman we’re not actually doing any of that stuff. This is just a convenient social arrangement and sexual arrangement and there it is . . . get on with it. It isn’t that that is the downgrading of marriage, it’s something that clearly has gone on for some time which is now poking it’s head above the parapet. If that’s what you thought marriage meant, then clearly we haven’t done a very good job in society as a whole and in the church in particular in teaching about just what a wonderful mystery marriage is supposed to be. Simply at that level, I think it’s a nonsense. It’s like a government voting that black should be white. Sorry, you can vote that if you like, you can pass it by a total majority, but it isn’t actually going to change the reality.
My first reaction is: Good for Tom.
My second is: when he says, “It’s all about God making complementary pairs which are meant to work together,†what does he mean by complementary? How does he see, say, a female bishop and a male bishop, for instance, working together in a way different from two male or two female bishops? Does he see complementarity as only an intramural, family thing, or does it have wider social and ecclesiological implications? And if this is at least a legitimate question, why has he been so dismissive of opponents of women bishops?
With all due respect to N.T. Wright, if the best that he can say about traditional marriage is that it involves a “complementarity” that mirrors the complementarity of the pairs “heaven and earth” and “sea and dry land” than I don’t think anybody is really going to care.
What’s interesting is that he says: “This [marriage when the “complementarity” is removed] is just a convenient social arrangement and sexual arrangement and there it is . . . get on with it. It isn’t that that is the downgrading of marriage, it’s something that clearly has gone on for some time which is now poking it’s head above the parapet.”
What he fails to notice is that marriage as “a convenient social and sexual arrangement” is exactly what birth control and divorce have made present day heterosexual marriage. Two people marry and decide to have no children. Later they grow apart, divorce, and marry other partners. Once the Protestant denominations decided that this kind of relationship was still appropriately called “marriage” it was inevitable than any other “sexual arrangement” might legitimately also be called “marriage.”
Good on him. It would have been good if he had been as clear when he was back in his bishopric but perhaps the fact that he couldn’t be was the reason he left.
Like Dr. Noll above, I wish +Wright had expressed himself a bit more carefully in places, but on the whole, this is admirably clear, direct, and forceful. If only we had 25 or 50 bishops more like him, we wouldn’t be in the terrible mess that we’re in, as Anglicans in the Global North.
However, my real complaint about +Wright’s often admirable and outstanding work as a bishop and NT scholar lies in three areas not touched upon in this short article.
1. When he was the most prominent and influential biblical scholar and theologian on the blue ribbon group that produced the celebrated Windsor Report ten years ago (Oct., 2004), there were at least two huge, glaring problems that were not only unaddressed back then, but have been left unaddressed by him ever since. The first and foremost problem is that the Windsor Report, having properly highlighted the crucial problem of HOW we as Anglicans are to determine what is adiaphora and what is not (IIRC, sections 94 and following), then punted the ball and failed to provide any help or guidance whatsoever in tackling that core issue. Alas, there has still been no substantive progress made in that essential area. (Hint: in the end, it always comes down to the authority question: WHO gets to decide, in a way that is binding on all Anglicans, what is adiaphora and what is not??)
2. Dr. Wright, and the Windsor Report, were badly mistaken in their reading of patristic history and on what the famous Council of Nicea really said about so-called “boundary crossing.” Arian bishops were simply not recognized as legitimate bishops, and Nicean, orthodox bishops had no qualms about “invading” their territory. The attempt to be “even handed” and to condemn boundary crossing by orthodox Global South bishops as if it were morally equivalent to the heretical and schismatic acts of faithless traitors among the Global North provinces was a colossal mistake. I don’t think the noble Tom Wright has yet made amends for that catastrophic error.
3. Last, but not least, my biggest gripe with even such a fine, brave, orthodox leader as N.T. Wright is that his actions haven’t gone nearly far enough in proving that he is serious about what he says. Compare say, +Michael Nazir-Ali, who courageously chose back in 2008 NOT to attend the futile Lambeth Conference and went to GAFCON in Jerusalem instead.
Bottom line: Wright is still trying to work within the system, when the established system is hopelessly broken. Still, I appreciate his hard work as a theologian and biblical scholar. We have far too few people like him in Anglicanism.
David Handy+