Eugene Rogers is a professor of religion at UNC Greensboro. His contributions to this study are many, but most notable among them is his book Sexuality and the Christian Body: Their Way into the Triune God. In this post I want to interact with his much briefer article “Same-Sex Complimentarity: A theology of marriage,” which was featured in The Christian Century.
Rogers’s article is on the 95-page report offered by 8 Episcopalian theologians to the Episcopalian Church on the issue of same-sex relationships, which was published in the Winter 2011 issue of the Anglican Theological Review. Rogers begins by noting lack of anticipated disagreement that one would suspect have found between conservatives and liberals.
The Nature of Mystery
Much of what he has to say rests on these three verses from Ephesians 5
31‘For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two will become one flesh.’ 32This is a great mystery, and I am applying it to Christ and the church. 33Each of you, however, should love his wife as himself, and a wife should respect her husband.
A quick exegetical note. 31 is taken from the Genesis story. 32 is the commentary on that statement. This (v 31), the two becoming one flesh, is a great mystery.
The locus of the discussion in the report was over mystery of Christ and the church and more specifically what icons can image them and what “male and female” means for Christians.
Stanley Hauerwas recognizes that in Ephesians and Galatians Paul subordinates gender identity to the much deeper reality of what he calls the “Christological principle” e.g. “In Christ there is no ‘male and female’.” In the Ephesians metaphor Christ and the church are the realities that are referred to by the signs male and female. A key piece of the argument then, is “that male and female are referred to typologically, as an icon or symbol, even if the symbol participates in what is represents.” The question of interest is, can these metaphors be extended to include same sex couples?
Here Rogers makes the point that marriage is an appropriate metaphor because of its inherent self-sacrificial nature. In this way it is Christological. It is not sex that substantiates marriage, but rather what Robinson calls neighbor love. “Marriage makes a school for virtue, where God prepares the couple for life with himself by binding them for life to each other. Marriage in this view is for sanctification, a means by which God can bring a couple to himself by turning their limits to their good.”
If two individuals of the same sex can participate in neighbor love they can represent Christ and the church morally. Rogers asks if they can represent it sacramentally.
Gender & symbols
To bolster his argument Rogers offers a variety of examples that demonstrate the limits of taking metaphor to their literal ends. The most obvious is that the church, which is symbolized as feminine, has not been limited to females and has historically been led by men exclusively.
A few more
- Graham Ward has noticed that the maleness of Jesus is a curious thing. Lacking a human father, Jesus received no humanly produced Y chromosome, and yet he is circumcised.
- The church is the bride, yet members are made up of both sexes.
- Orthodox theology says that Christ is both human and divine. In his divine nature Christ occupies neither gender. A medieval axiom argues “God is not in a gender.”
- Cistercian Monks used all kinds of feminine imagery in referring to Jesus.
- Jesus was the mother of monks
- Male priests invited male monks to suck the milk from Jesus breasts
- They urged monks to crawl into the wound in his side into his womb to be born again.
- In the Middle Ages an abbot could be gendered male, as a physical man; female, as a member of the church; male again, as a priest; female again, as a mother of monks; and female at prayer, as a soul before God.
What is Christ?
A question worth asking is does gender confine Christ? Surely not. Jesus was human before he was male. He rescued humanity not men.
Rogers’s point then is that gendered language does not require gendered participation. Here in lies the critical difference among the Episcopalians that debated the issue, and in my opinion the proper heart of the issue of same-sex relationship. The panel of theologians argued that “male and female” exemplify but do not exhaust the “mystery”—it images it.
The Point of Marriage
Rogers includes a quote from Karl Barth that I find incredibly helpful for this conversation. Barth said, “Because God loves Israel, there is such a thing as love and marriage.”
Theology logically proceeds marriage. Not vice versa. Sex, marriage, and all other participatory metaphors point to a deeper reality than their literal selves. When God created Adam and Eve, He had in mind not their own sorrow and ecstasy but rather God’s. Or at least the hope that we might all reflect on the sliver of experience that belongs first to the divine life before it can be made sense of our own. This, I gather, is Rogers’s argument and I think it needs to be considered.