So here’s still more from my (endless) BYU lecture. This part includes issues that I might well have skipped as above my pay grade, except they were of special interest to my audience. Our friends and expert bloggers THE BROTHERS JUDD said my previous post on marriage vs. existential loneliness was actually an argument for married clergy. It would be if not qualified by the below. And maybe it is one anyway. I leave this issue of whether priests should be able to marry to others. No endless lecture can cover everything. Once again, this is a speculative draft on matters about which I admit to knowing little to nothing.
There is no marriage in heaven. That’s what Jesus said to the legalistic Sadducees who didn’t believe in personal immortality and tried to trip him up on the question on which of a woman’s seven husbands would be her husband in heaven. We would be in heaven, Jesus said, like angels. That doesn’t mean we wouldn’t have bodies–including all of our parts. But our bodies would haven’t the limitations and distortions caused by our sinful biological existence.
Obviously the natural and civil necessities that shape the institution of marriage would disappear. There would be no need for procreation, because no one would ever die. So there would be no need for sexual union. And there would be none of the shared responsibilities that come with raising children. We would no longer need human companionship to counter existential loneliness. Our deepest longing would be satisfied in perfectly knowing and loving the personal God.
We would, it seems, still know our wives (whatever number each of us might have had) and our children for who they are. But we wouldn’t love them with any kind of exclusivity or special intimacy. The limited and shaped character of our abilities to know and love would disappear. Each of us will, while retaining his or her personal identity, be one with the whole communion of saints and the personal God himself.
We can also see limited and temporary good of marriage—even as the primordial sacrament—in the Catholic view of the celibate life. Celibacy isn’t good for its own sake, but chosen out of love of God. Marriage isn’t for everyone. Some choose to orient their lives more exclusively around the love of God—to live more directly in anticipation of their heavenly existence—here and now.
So women religious often think of themselves as brides of Christ, as choosing, in a way, a more perfect union. The celibate remind us all, in a way, that we personal beings are not, most deeply, married beings. And we aren’t most deeply sexual beings.
The vow of celibacy is about being a member of a personal community freed up for loving service to others by being freed from the distractions that come from sexual rivalry and the encumbrances of spouse and children.
Christians don’t, as do the Latter Day Saints, marry for eternity—although they are or should be as confident that they were created, as persons, for life everlasting. We should be as confident that the personal God provides everything we need as relational beings. Eventually—although not as persons in this biological life—we don’t need marriage, even as God himself doesn’t need marriage. But we do remain, as he does, relational persons marked by eros and logos.
I hope it won’t seem blasphemous if I’m reminded here of an episode of CURB YOUR ENTHUSIASM. Larry is about to renew his vows to Cheryl. He’s okay with “til death do us part.” But he balks at pledging his love and devotion for eternity. When it comes to eternity, he wants to keep his options open. I fear that, for the LDS, the Catholics share Larry’s fear of genuinely enduring commitment.
For Catholics more than the LDS, the details of who we are and how we live in heaven remain partly elusive and partly mysterious. For now we live in hope for what is somewhat beyond our experience so far.
November 15th, 2012 | 9:42 am
Btw, Notre Dame beat BYU this year. However, in years past those Mormons have given the Micks fits on the field!
Enjoyed the essay!
November 15th, 2012 | 10:15 am
I would note two points.
1. I don’t think that the Catholic view is:
“We would, it seems, still know our wives (whatever number each of us might have had) and our children for who they are. But we wouldn’t love them with any kind of exclusivity or special intimacy.”
I would suggest that the special intimacy of marriage would persist, but it would be transformed. Just as the Old Covenant is incorporated into the more complete New Covenant rather than supplanted, the sacramental economy of the New Covenant will be incorporated into the eschaton.
2. It should be noted that the Catholic Church has traditionally treated celibacy devoted to God as the highest form of life. (The Council of Trent even pronounced anathema on any who would deny this.) The second highest form of life is celibacy within marriage, and the third highest form of life is marriage oriented towards procreation.
It’s not just that marriage isn’t good for everyone, and so the doctrine needs to posit an eschaton that incorporates the various options for serving God in this life. It’s that the paradigmatic Christian life is the one that involves the most direct and complete gift of the self to God, and this self-giving is what will be the defining characteristic of the eschaton.
November 15th, 2012 | 11:16 am
on point no 1–then what if you did have three or four wives because the first two or three died etc. how would the special intimacy work exactly? just asking, never thought about it before. the sadducees seemed to have a sort-of point.
on point no. 2–does that really square with JPII’s theology of the body?
November 15th, 2012 | 12:26 pm
Peter, I share your misgivings about speaking on things above my pay grade. GeoSmiley seems at times to be speaking in a different mode from the norm on this blog. It’s a welcome addition to the conversation, but it is…different. Anyway, in the belief that it’s a good thing to experience the feelings of inadequacy and wonder with which we are often filled when attempting to speak on and think about the highest things, and to seek the truth about ourselves in light of eternity, here are some thoughts on your last two marriage posts.
1. I’m not sure that marriage merits special status as a sacrament, as being the most primordial or the most deeply visible sign of the presence of God or personal logos in the world. Perhaps your point was that this is the sacrament that most people will acknowledge as good and true without the guidance of the Church, and if so then I’d have to agree. But if your meaning was that matrimony has some special status as being the most profoundly revealing of the mysterious union of man and God, I’d have to disagree. Rather, each of the sacraments brings home to us some truth about ourselves and our relation to God that must in some way remain strange or mysterious, and yet becomes palpable through the elements or exercise of the sacrament. I’m very aware of the limits of my understanding at this point, being a Protestant, but the sacraments of baptism and the Eucharist or “Lord’s Supper” as we called it in the Southern Baptist churches of my youth are equally palpable when experienced, and remind us of truths about the mode of our relationship to the personal logos, and the nature of his love for other human persons.
2. Again, writing as an outsider who loves but nevertheless remains somewhat at a distance from his Catholic friends, I have been impressed by the Catholic teaching–someone out there correct my errors on this–about the nature of the relationship between the priest or pastor and his parish or congregation. Perhaps it’s important to draw out the implications of what you and GeoSmiley say above–the celibacy of the priest is necessary because of the nature of his loving devotion to the Church, the body of Christ, in this world. There was a not-so-good movie several years ago with Whitney Houston, The Preacher’s Wife, that did a decent job of portraying the difficulties of the Protestant, married pastor with a family. Namely, the preacher’s wife constantly ends up feeling jilted because her husband is asked to make it his work to care for the members of the congregation as a husband would for his wife and children. When asked to do both, one or the other has to suffer, no man can serve two masters, etc. So the priest’s relationship to his congregants is like that of the husband to his wife, (or, through the sacrament of baptism, the father to his children?). In making the decision to remain celibate and enter the clergy, his love is allowed to expand, rather than being confined within the family, the home. The celebration of marriage and the family as havens in a heartless world can have the effect of drawing our attention away from the even greater haven provided to the existentially lonely and despairing in this world, the catholic or universal Church, which is, in a sense, the family purged of the taint of selfishness which remains a prideful, sinful flaw at the heart of the family, a limit to its attempt to realize in this world the wholeness or unity which we all to some extent aspire.
November 15th, 2012 | 12:45 pm
points 1 & 2 seem not to be consistent. on the one hand, with point 2 you have a hierarchy that classes married life with all its encumbrances as an inferior form of life vis-a-vis other possible ways of serving God. on the other hand, you want to say that the special intimacy of this inferior form of life–which distracts us from service to God–will not be overcome but will persist in the hereafter. everything i’ve read seems to suggest that peter is right about the status of earthly relationships following the redemption of creation–though i’ve always found this one the most depressing part of the story.
the new testament seems to allow that there will be some temporary distinctions among the saints in the hereafter (no. of crowns & all of that), but there is scant evidence that our ability to serve God well has anything to do with marital status. sure, there are some things that paul says about the desirability of the single life, but there is also the example of peter, who was certainly married.
November 15th, 2012 | 12:47 pm
[...] The Christian (Catholic?) View on Heaven, Marriage, and Celibacy. (Or the …First Things (blog)So here's still more from my (endless) BYU lecture. This part includes issues that I might well have skipped as above my pay grade, except they were of special interest to my audience. Our friends and expert bloggers THE BROTHERS JUDD said my previous … [...]
November 15th, 2012 | 1:41 pm
Here’s a comment that came in through email from America’s greatest theologian Good responses by you to the two points made. One point to bolster your response, the argument for priestly celibacy has traditionally been that the priest forgoes the good of marriage and family for the higher good of his graced vocation to stand within the Church in the person of Christ. Understood within the Catholic theological tradition, the celebrate priesthood did not call into the intrinsic goodness or desirability of marriage, an institution traditionally seen to be both a natural and a graced good. Rather, it is viewed on a hierarchy, one in which it pursues a higher good than that of married life. The priest here gives a good up, marriage and family, for a higher good; such giving up is the price we pay for being created, limited, bodily beings extrinsically conditioned by space and time.
November 15th, 2012 | 2:01 pm
David and Sara, Thanks, a lot to think about. The primordial sacrament phrase is from JPII. It is somewhat controversial.
November 15th, 2012 | 2:30 pm
[...] The Christian View on Heaven, Marriage, and Celibacy – Peter Lawler, PoMoCon [...]
November 15th, 2012 | 2:45 pm
So does your essay eventually review the Mormon view of eternal marriage as the most holy state of eternity, and consider how that view influences our relationships as husband and wife in the here and now?
November 15th, 2012 | 2:52 pm
Raymond, Well, no, because it’s on the Christian view of marriage. And because I don’t really know. Share your thoughts please.
November 15th, 2012 | 2:56 pm
I basically agree with America’s greatest theologian. Let me add a few notes.
(1) The position of the Fathers of the Church Peter alludes to seems to indicate something pretty profound: that the complementarity of the sexes is not primarily their ability to procreate. Rather, the ability to procreate flows from the complementarity of the sexes. In other words, Adam and Eve loved each other with the ecstatic love of eros before the Fall, but prelapsarian eros did not necessarily mean sex and babies. What’s primarily meant by sexual complementarity is the possibility and desirability of the ecstatic communion of love (bone of my bone, flesh of my flesh, yet different!) made possible in a relationship that brings together sameness and difference. Kass has some really profound meditations on this in The Beginning of Wisdom. Kass also points out that sexual complementarity is necessary for the development of rationality. In other words, our sexual nature is necessary to our natures as embodied beings with reason. So in that sense the male-female complementarity that grounds both ecstatic love and our rationality and finds its fullness in marriage really could be thought of as the primary sacrament that reveals God’s personality. After all, Paul says that the relationship between Christ and the Church is imaged in marriage. And I suspect that JP II’s reflections on the Trinity in the context of marriage are best understood along lines laid down by Kass: the rational, ecstatic love of man and woman that brings together sameness and difference can be a kind of metaphor for the intertrinitarian processions, which are also ecstatic and rational (the proper names for the proceeding Persons are Logos and Love, after all). As a sacrament, then, the sacrament of marriage would allow the man and the woman a foretaste of that intimate knowledge and love that’s had by the Trinity. That’s a less direct foretaste than the vowed celibate has, but it’s still extremely profound and helpful.
(2) In light of what I’ve said, sexual procreation was understood by most of the Fathers to be a reality only after the Fall and due to the new factor of death. But the already-existing male-female complementarity already had the potency to procreate built from within, should the necessity arise. So procreation is grounded in sexual complementarity as a deeper union-in-difference of man and woman, rather than the difference between man and woman being strictly for the sake of procreation. Man and woman are supposed to be different before the Fall: that reveals something of the importance of personal relationship that Peter is talking about in his post.
(3) I agree Peter about exclusivity. But the way we tend to think about the Communion of the saints is that we have this great relationship with our husband or our wife, and then we’ll lose that in heaven. That’s not it at all. Rather, the relationship of intimate love I have with my spouse will be extended to all inclusively. In other words, the love between spouses on earth, which can only occur in a relationship of exclusivity, will be possible universally in heaven because all will be directly united to the infinite God in the beatific vision. There are a bunch of reasons for this, but the two most fundamental are that sin will no longer divide us as it does on earth, and our bodies will be glorified after the Resurrection, and thereby the limitations of time and space that separate us on earth will no longer separate us in the new creation.
(4) Just because something’s inferior doesn’t mean it’s not good.
Sorry the for long, wordy, shoot-from-the-hip reply.
November 15th, 2012 | 3:21 pm
Actually it is a minor(or perhaps not so minor) exasperation for an involuntary single. What, I have to remain celibate FOREVER? I know there are more important things, and by the time I get to heaven I won’t care about such concerns any more then a toddler cares about his building blocks when he grows. But it really is not a pleasant thought, none the less.
November 15th, 2012 | 3:43 pm
Tom H, we may to reevaluate this greatest theologian thing. So does is erotic love in heaven–freed once again from death and so the necessity of procreation–still depend in some way on sexual differentiation?
November 15th, 2012 | 3:45 pm
And we could ask Larry David whether celibate forever is better or worse than married FOREVER?
November 15th, 2012 | 3:58 pm
Good question, Peter. I’m not entirely sure. Although I think maybe that erotic love will be perfected in heaven in charity. After all, eros is a movement of the will to obtain a good it lacks. But there is no lack in the beatific vision, since the man or woman will be in possession of the infinite good, God (or, the infinite good, God, will possess the man or woman). So what eros aims at will be perfectly attained, allowing eros to give way to agape. So here’s where GeoSmiley’s point comes back. Just as Christ says he fulfills the law, not abolishes; just so, the beatific vision fulfills eros, not abolishes it.
And, of course, we both know that, if I know anything, it’s mostly because of our mutual friend, anyway.
November 15th, 2012 | 6:51 pm
What about the Church as the Bride of Christ? Aren’t we supposed to assume a level of intimacy in that, an eternal union, that is 1) reflected somehow in the Adam and Eve relationship 2) a reunion of body and spirit 3) making singular a multiplicity in the Church and in the Trinity that is reconciled by and in God in ways the human mind might not ever be able to grasp? If God took Eve out of Adam then marriage means a semi-reunion of the parts of the image of God that Adam originally was.
This is my speculation and not my church’s theology, which may consign all of this to mystery. That might be wiser than speculation.
November 15th, 2012 | 9:40 pm
Tom H, I don’t see that distinction in Aquinas. He squarely puts woman as the necessary helpmate in the work of generation and childrearing. Sex difference is more pronounced in animals with higher operations. Since “homo” is called to “intellegere,” it is fitting that the lower operation of generation is carried out by the occasional union of complementary sexes (unlike plants, where both sexes may be found in one individual).
Aquinas seems more grounded in the biological reality (from which he moves higher into morality and sacramental signification) than the Fathers you mention.
November 15th, 2012 | 10:31 pm
Tom H. & Mrsschiavolin are reproducing the argument presented by Christopher Roberts in one of the books we discussed at the BYU conference. Absolute bottom line? The “Christian tradition” is far from having one voice or position on these complex matters.
Many years ago I gave a commencement speech at a seminary graduation: I used C. S. Lewis’s The Great Divorce to put some flesh and bones on the notion of heaven. My guiding proposition: our salvation and perfection must be our perfection and salvation as we really and truly are. The latter includes our bodies, our habits, our memories, our personal identities. I was a serious tennis player at the time; would I be “perfected” if my tennis playing abilities were rendered moot in heaven? Lewis nicely presented the artist, with his particular talent, pointing out to us less-gifted blessed, the glories of God’s creation by way of his expert eye and his deft hand. Any notion of heavenly perfection that bleaches us of the foregoing would be a salvation that doesn’t really save “me/”us. Any notion of “the beatific vision” that is so overwhelming that we denigrate the aforementioned parts of our being seems incarnationally suspect to me. The Catholic both-and seems to demand as much. I grant that what this conjugation of “totally improved-but-still-recognizable-Paul” is, is quite mysterious: “Eye has not seen etc.”. But I find the “we’re still married but not (in some sense) exclusively-in-love and bodily-affectionate” position too angelic. But what do I know? I hope to find out.
November 16th, 2012 | 12:35 am
Actually the question posed to Jesus regarding the seven brothers and the bride, as stated clearly in Mark 12:18, was intended to elicit Jesus’ ruling on resurrection. Note that they deferentially address him as “teacher” even as they seek to test him.
The seven brothers refer to the seven Jewish patriarchs: Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Joseph, Moses, David and Solomon. Stephen summarizes this in Chapter 7 of Acts of the Apostles, and even to this day Orthodox Jews teach about the seven patriarchs.
Asking to whom will the bride belong refers to the Jewish doctrine of “gilgul hanefesh,” and was either a way for the Sadducees to determine which of those seven souls would be incarnated as the Messiah, or perhaps a cynical ploy to trick Jesus into claiming to be an incarnation of one of the patriarchs (even today some Orthodox Rabbis claim to be reincarnated prophets) in order to turn popular opinion against him.
Jesus’ response was basically a legal, inoffensive way to stake his claim as a “homo novus,” stating that he was not an incarnation of one of the patriarchs but a new soul sent for a new age of deliverance of G-d’s chosen people.
Almost everything in the Greek testament is reflected from the Hebrew testament, and there are several references in the Tanakh to G-d’s chosen people being the “bride” of the one true G-d of Abraham.
The particular tribe or leadership role changed at various times even throughout the “Old Testament,” hence the question from the Sadducees who were, like all the Judeans under pagan Roman rule, living through a particularly excruciating period of persecution, bereft of spiritual authority and leadership.
November 16th, 2012 | 7:25 am
bryan, thanks! paul, the big question is what does salvation (perpetuation) of “me” mean, and you’re right to say that we’re stuck with somewhat incoherent to me. Like you, I think most of the speculation is too “angelic.”
November 16th, 2012 | 3:17 pm
mrsschiavolin: What you say about Aquinas may be true, but we should be careful when we talk about “grounding.” Even the biological realities of human life are at the service of the higher powers of the soul for Aquinas. I suspect there’s less difference here between Aquinas and, say, Gregory of Nyssa (to take maybe the strongest contrast) than is apparent at first glance. Besides, let’s remember that when Aquinas talks about the way in which the human being is made happy in the beatific vision, it is primarily through the intellect through the light of glory, and the rest of the man is made happy by a kind of overflow from the unity of the intellect with the divine essence.
Paul: well said. I don’t mean to speak for the entire Christian tradition, only to try to explain what those Fathers might have been getting at whom Peter alluded to in his talk. There are obviously major voices in the tradition who sound different notes. And the principle that when we’re saved, nothing that makes us fundamentally who we are is left out, is exactly right. I might quibble with you that exclusivity in loving is one of those things (if that is what you mean to say). It does seem to me that the perfection of the mystical body of Christ in heaven, with its bringing together of the many into one, means that whatever perfection there is in exclusive loving will be extended to all by virtue of membership in the one body of Christ. Hopefully that’s sufficiently corporeal to exonerate from the charge of angelism. Like you, I’m pretty baffled as to what that will look like.
I also find Lewis’ image of the artist compelling, as well. After all, the body of Christ is still a body with members, which means it’s differentiated. So my own distinctiveness will not only be preserved, but even accentuated by full incorporation into the mystical body. So whatever I am on earth, I will be moreso in heaven. My personhood will be brought into its complete perfection. As Lewis points out, it’s the saints who are the most distinctive characters we know of. And heaven will be populated only with saints.
November 16th, 2012 | 5:39 pm
If grounding is not the right word, what I mean to say is that generation is the starting point, not working backward from the Trinitarian analogy. The erotic dimension supports our bodily and social union with one another (man cleaves to woman all the more seeing his reflection in her, and stays with her for life, unlike other animals). Of course ultimately for Thomas it signifies Christ & the Church/bride.
What I don’t see is a strong notion that sex difference enhances rationality, more that it frees us up for contemplation.
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