Tuesday, June 8, 2010

Going Deeper - Singleness and Joy - Part 2

From the last 2 blogs you may have a sense of the views I’m raising here. First and foremost, that singleness is a valid state of being for believers, and marriage, in and of itself, while equally valid, is not an ideal Christians should seek or hope to attain for any sense of wholeness or becoming complete. In the post prior to that I talked about having a sense of joy.

For the Israelites marriage and having a family were essential, as a command from the “be fruitful and multiply” verse, as the means of salvation and I’m sure for reasons of economic and societal survival due to the agricultural culture. The Old Testament is filled with stories of barrenness and the shame associated with that – we can read about Sarah and Hannah for example. As well the Israelites held firmly to the belief that salvation was available to those who were descendants of Abraham, literally. While we do see exceptions, Rahab and Ruth, those are more the rarer instances, as when we compare and contrast the encounter between Jesus and the Samaritan woman at the well (John 4:9).

Jesus shattered that ancient conception of the path for salvation. As well, we are told that marriage is not to be an aspect of the future Kingdom (Matthew 22:30). To avoid the foolishness of the Corinthians, Jesus did not mean or imply that marriage as a state of being was no longer to be valid, rather that the exclusivity of marriage and family no longer existed as the controlling paradigm for salvation and Kingdom living.

Is it possible that God created male and female for the purpose of establishing His community, to be composed of single persons and married couples who as a community began the journey toward resolving and reconciling the fundamental incompleteness of humanity? The fundamental drive for this reconciliation was not intended to be our sexual differences, and resolving that difference through the state of being in marriage, rather the drive is the resolution of the relational separation that existed from the time of Eden.

Yet within the community of faith, the paradigm of marriage as the ideal state remains. Rodney Clapp in his Families at the Crossroads observed, “They [our churches] see singles as peripheral to the core of central members who belong to families. They assume that the normal single will sooner or later marry and start a family.” The parachurch organization Focus on the Family on its website suggests, “Genesis tells us that shortly after the creation of the first man, God acknowledged Adam’s incompleteness. God then created Eve as Adam’s partner, his completer, and blessed their union.” Stanley Grenz likewise notes that God saw Adam alone as not good, that Adam was "fundamentally incomplete", and created Eve to deliver Adam from his solitude (Sexual Ethics).

Part 3 will look at the confusion of love with romance, and the substitution of emotional joy for Kingdom joy. For now, hopefully we can affirm singleness as equally valid a pursuit as marriage. Stanley Hauerwas rightly notes, “Both singleness and marriage are necessary symbolic institutions for the constitution of the church’s life as the historic institution that witnesses to God’s Kingdom,” in A Community of Character. Eastern Orthodox theologian Paul Evdokimov relates singleness to a sense of joy, in his Sacraments of Love, “A single man can see opening up before him one of two paths, as he finds himself from the perspective of celibacy in the world. For the time being he accepts the situation cheerfully, with joy, he views it as the task limited to today, as the present and full value of his life.” (I think we can read Evdokimov in a non-gender specific manner and affirm his observation)

Is it possible to break the stranglehold and mis-notion of what normal should look like to begin approaching singleness and marriage in a more Scriptural sense, as articulated by Hauerwas?

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