Youth Ministry Initiative

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1996

From Mary Pipher, Ph.D., The Shelter of Each Other - Rebuilding Our Families (1996) at page 17:

In the last decades of our century, for the first time since the 1500s, children have access to the same information that adults have. The walls that protected children and elevated adulthood are coming down. In our electronic village, everyone can watch MTV, Freddie Kreuger and the nightly news. Everyone can play Nintendo and plug into the Internet. Children are not sheltered from what has been considered for hundreds of years to be adult material.

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From Henry James:

Make society do its duty to the individual and the individual will be sure and do his duties to society.

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1997

From Don S. Browning et al, From Culture Wars to Common Ground - Religion and the American Family Debate (1997) page 127:

In saying this, we quickly invoke a theory of love that makes it possible for us to identify women with the cross of Christ in spite of the way this idea has been abused in the history of the church. It is a view of Christian love that makes sacrifice transitional to the restoration of equal regard, that makes sacrifice primarily a matter of self-giving, sometimes even self-assertion, in the name of restoring mutuality. When this view of love is in the forefront, Christ’s relation to the church can function as a counter to the primal female problematic just as it did to the primal male problematic. It is true that an ideal of sacrificial and self-giving love can be abused. But sacrificial love – by either husbands or wives, fathers or mothers – cannot be eliminated from Christian understandings of love. The cross has an unavoidable role in the Christian life and in Christian families. Our strategy, and that of most of the New Testament, is to locate self-sacrifice as a moment within a love ethic of mutuality. When this is done, the sacrificial or Christic moment can be understood as equally appropriate for both husbands and wives, males and females. Even then, sacrificial or self-giving love in the service of mutuality has its limits, especially for vulnerable women, children and minorities. When a partner no longer has the capacity or freedom to respond to enduring love or when evil is so deep that finite human love cannot hope to transform it, then the vulnerable and defenseless need to acknowledge the limits of their love. When this happens, the Christian story tells us that such persons should ground their worth not in winning the love of another human but in the inexhaustible and unchanging love of God.

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1997

From Don S. Browning et al, From Culture Wars to Common Ground - Religion and the American Family Debate (1997) pages 125 - 126:

In The Estate of Marriage” (1522), he offers a prayer of thanks for his paternal vocation: O God, because I am certain that thou hast created me as a man and hast from my body begotten this child, I also know for a certainty that it meets with thy perfect pleasure. I confess to thee that I am not worthy to rock the little babe or wash its diapers, or to be entrusted with the care of the child and its mother. How is it that I, without any merit, have come to this distinction of being certain that I am serving thy creature and thy most precious will? O how gladly will I do so, though the duties should be even more significant and despised. Neither frost nor heat, neither drudgery nor labor, will distress or dissuade me, for I am certain that it is thus pleasing in thy sight.92 Luther, as did Aquinas, invoked the Ephesians drama but applied it mainly to men. In his “Order of Marriage for Common Pastors” (1529), he gives prominence to the analogy between Christ and the church and the servant relation of husband to the family (Eph.
5:25-29). He then concludes with a prayer that thanks God for creating man and woman, ordaining them for marriage, and typifying “therein the sacramental union of the dear Son, the Lord Jesus Christ, and the church, his bride.93 A final difference between Luther and Aquinas cannot be ignored. Aquinas saw a strong place for the cross and sacrificial love in marriage. But the task of sacrificial love was to restore relations to friendship. Luther, on the other hand, held a strong agapic understanding of love. Luther explicitly rejected the equal-regard interpretation of “Love your neighbor as yourself” (Matt.
19:19) that we promote in this book. Luther writes that “one can take it to mean that both are commanded: we shall love our neighbor and ourselves as well.”94 Luther goes on, “But another way to understand it is that it commands us to love only our neighbor and this according to the example of our love for ourselves. This is the better interpretation.”95 We concede that neighbor love, as a paradigm for family love, must contain sacrifical love. But the ethic of equal regard gives equal weight to regard for self and regard for the other and provides a more solid ground for love in families than does Luther’s view.

Notes:
  1. 92 John Witte, Jr. From Sacrament to Contract: Marriage, Religion, and Law in the Western Tradition (Louisville, Ky.: Westminster John Knox Press, 1997), chap. 3.
  2. 93 Martin Luther, “Order of Marriage for Common Pastors,” in Luther’s Works 53 (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1965), 115.
  3. 94 Martin Luther, Luther: Lectures on Romans, The Library of Christian Classics vol. 15 (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1961), 366. 95 Ibid.
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1997

From Don S. Browning et al, From Culture Wars to Common Ground - Religion and the American Family Debate (1997) page 125:

Modern Christian thinkers should consider the following strategy. They should use the disciplines of biology last, not first. They should begin with the scriptures of the communities of faith that form them, with the Genesis ordinances about male and female leaving their families of origin and becoming one flesh. These scriptures contained intuitive wisdom. Aquinas’s naturalistic explanations should then be used to show that what scriptures assert by faith can be given a reasoned account. Although Aquinas’s specifications of the natural conditions of matrimony are rough, contemporary evolutionary ecology helps show their plausibility. The eyes of faith should then follow Aquinas in placing these explanations within a theology and ethic that find a place for the hand of God.

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1997

From Don S. Browning et al, From Culture Wars to Common Ground - Religion and the American Family Debate (1997) pages 124-125:

Yet Luther’s theology of the family was closer to Aquinas’s than is commonly thought. Luther referred, however, not to biology but to the Genesis creation stories and their restatement in the Gospels. So God created man…male and female he created them” (Gen.
1:27). Males and females were not made to “be alone” (2:18) but to become “one flesh” (2:24) and “be fruitful” (1:28). Furthermore, these divine intentions were not “commands” of the kind God addresses directly to the individual conscience; they were “ordinances” stamped into the very fabric of creation. Luther wrote, “It is a nature and disposition just as innate as the organs involved in it. Therefore just as God does not command anyone to be a man or a woman but creates them the way they have to be, so he does not command them to multiply but creates them so that they have to multiply. And wherever men try to resist this, it remains irresistible nonetheless and goes its way through fornication, adultery, and secret sins, for this is a matter of nature and not of choice.”90

Notes:
  1. 90 Martin Luther, “The Estate of Marriage,” in Luther’s Works 45 (Philadelphia: Muhlenberg Press, 1959), 18.
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1997

From Don S. Browning et al, From Culture Wars to Common Ground - Religion and the American Family Debate (1997) pages 123-124:

Margaret Mead once observed that without powerful cultural reasons for men to invest in their children and remain with the women who give them birth, human males have deep desires to follow another sexual strategy.84 Aquinas formulated a powerful religiocultural symbol that reinforced unsteady male inclinations toward paternal investment and monogramy. Aquinas’s symbolic reinforcement of marriage was classically religious. It illustrates Mircea Eliade’s respected phenomenology of the sacred. It made matrimony a recapitulation of the action of a divine being in its creation of sacred space and time.85 The meaning of the husband’s identification with Christ’s sacrificial union with the church is striking when understood, using Ricoeur’s dialectic between archaeology and teleology, as the reinforcement of some and the transformation of other basic male inclinations. The symbol of Christ’s steadfast and sacrifical love for the church becomes, as Ricoeur calls it, a figure of the spirit” attracting inchoate male inclinations and shaping them into a new organization.86

Notes:
  1. 84 Quoted in Popenoe, Living without Father, 5.
  2. 85 Mircea Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane (New York: Harper & Row, 1961).
  3. 86 Ricoeur, Freud and Philosophy, 462-68.
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1997

From Don S. Browning et al, From Culture Wars to Common Ground - Religion and the American Family Debate (1997) pages 121-123:

Aquinas makes seven points about the permanence of matrimony, some of which we have encountered. The first three are premoral and deal with the value of paternal investment. First, because fathers care for their children as a way of extending their own lives, they should give this care indefinitely – as long as it is needed. And marriage should be indissoluble because it provides the context for this lifelong investment.74 Second, because of the long years of human childhood dependency, children need parental, including paternal, help indefinitely. Third, if couples exchange partners, paternal certainty will become obscured, and fathers will care less for their progeny.75 The next arguments are distinctly moral. In the fourth Aquinas asserts that to dissolve a marriage is an affront to equity and fairness toward the wife. Aquinas assumes that men tend to dispose of older women and take as mates younger, more fertile females. He writes, If a man after taking a wife in her youth, while she is yet fair and fruitful, can put her away when she has aged, he does her an injury, contrary to natural equity.”76 Aquinas repudiated patriarchal divorce, a widespread ancient practice that Jesus had rejected as well. Fifth, in addition to procreation, marriage is for friendship, and this friendship will be all the more stable if it is thought to be indissoluble.77 Sixth (and most out of tune with the modern mind), Aquinas thought women were necessarily financially dependent on men and “naturally subject” to the man’s superior wisdom. Therefore neither women nor men should be allowed to initiate divorce since this would deprive women of the resources and guidance they need.78 The contemporary slide of single mothers into poverty, in spite of their increased economic independence, suggests that his economic analysis had more merit than his assessment of women’s need for male wisdom.79 Aquinas’s seventh argument for the indissolubility of marriage makes a direct appeal to revelation and is the cornerstone of his understanding of marriage as a sacrament. It points to a paradigmatic narrative action that Christian husbands and fathers are charged to imitate in relating to wives and children. Furthermore, it shows that Aquinas saw narratives about divine action as supplementing both natural human inclination and the positive law in regulating marriage. Both human law and divine revelation should be based on, yet remedy the defects of, natural inclination. Not only do divine laws “express the instinct of nature, but they also supply the defect of natural instinct.”80 Divine law adds to human law “a kind of supernatural reason taken from the representation of the indissoluble union of Chist and the Church, which is union of one with one.”81 This indissoluble union refers to Christ’s sacrificial love for the church described in Ephesians 5:21-33, a sacrifice that Christian men are to model in their relations to wife and children. Aquinas calls this a “sacrament (Eph.
5:32),”82 which meant to him both indissolubility and supernatural grace. We focus, however, on another dimension of Aquinas’s understanding of sacramentum. This dimension is more dramatic than the somewhat mechanical infusion of grace to overcome concupiscence and immoral behavior; it invites imitation or participation in the archetypal pattern of divine action. Aquinas is addressing this dimension when he writes, “Although Matrimony is not conformed to Christ’s Passion as regards to pain, it is as regards to charity, whereby He suffered for the church who was to be united to Him as His spouse.”83 This means that the husband is to imitate Christ both in the husband’s unbreakable commitment to the family but also in his capacity for sacrificial love or charity (caritas in the Latin and agape in the Greek). The purpose of this sacrificial love is to endure in the relationship and restore it to the equity of friendship. Friendship with one’s spouse, friendship with the neighbor, and finally friendship with God – these are the purposes of Christ’s passion, according to Aquinas. The sacrifice is not an end in itself, it is a means for restoring friendship with spouse and parental commitment to children. When Aquinas invokes the narrative analogy between Christ’s redemptive passion for the church and the love of fathers for family, he has several verses from Ephesians in mind: Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her…In the same way, husbands should love their wives as they do their own bodies. He who loves his wife loves himself. For no one ever hates his own body, but he nourishes and tenderly cares for it, even as Christ does for the church, because we are members of his body. (Eph.
5:25-30)

Notes:
  1. 74 Thomas Aquinas, Summa Contra Gentiles, 114.
  2. 75 Ibid., 115.
  3. 76 Ibid.
  4. 77 Ibid., 115-16.
  5. 78 Ibid., 115.
  6. 79 For an excellent summary of the debate on the moral psychology of the sexes, especially the Kohlberg-Gilligan debate, see Owen Flanagan, The Variety of Moral Psychologies (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1991). 196-247.
  7. 80 Summa Contra Gentiles, p. 116.
  8. 81 Ibid.
  9. 82 Augustine, “Good of Marriage,” 4. Aquinas’s doctrine of marriage as sacrament is based on a great confusion. He followed the Vulgate in rendering the Greek word mysterion as the Latin word sacramentum rather than the more accurate mysterium, which should be translated as “mystery.” This led him to amend Augustine’s three purposes of marriage: procreation and education of children, mutual exchanges in sex and domestic affairs, and sacramentum. He affirmed the first two but interpreted sacramentum to mean supernatural grace rather than marital permanence, as Augustine taught. See Fathers of the Church, 12-20.
  10. 83 Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, 3, q.42,1.
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1997

From Don S. Browning et al, From Culture Wars to Common Ground - Religion and the American Family Debate (1997) page 121:

At both the naturalistic and ethical levels, Aquinas’s argument assumes that the image of God in males and females is a part of creation. We love our children, according to Aquinas, for two reasons, not just one. We love them first because, as Aristotle also taught, we love the image of ourselves that we find in our children.71 God, he believed, implants this impulse within us. But we also love our children because they, like all other humans, contain the good of God (the image of God) within them.72 This is the second, even more profound reason we love our children. The second, more explicitly theological reason, however, does not eliminate the first, the naturalistic reason. Both reasons have to do with God’s work in creation, and God’s intentions are behind them both. The third level of Aquinas’s argument concerning the order of redemption was the realm of supernatural grace and sacrament. Here the narrative of Christ’s sacrifical death on the cross was used as an analogy to the role of Christian fathers in their families.

Notes:
  1. 71 Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, 2, ii, q.26.
  2. 72 Summa Theologica, 2, ii,q.26, a.3.
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1997

From Don S. Browning et al, From Culture Wars to Common Ground - Religion and the American Family Debate (1997) pages 119-120:

Aquinas reinforces this moral argument with a second based on scripture. He quotes Genesis 2:24 and develops an argument that Protestants would say is based on the orders of creation”: “They shall be two in one flesh.” He writes that with this verse, the ancient Hebrew custom of “having several wives is set aside, and also the opinion of Plato who maintained that wives should be common.”67 The “one flesh” verse, of course is repeated many times in the New Testament.68 Aquinas interprets it to mean that husband and wife are to have a friendship of equality that binds them together in their task of raising and educating their children. We believe that Aquinas is right here. (In addition, however, as we discuss in chapter 10, part of the meaning of the “one flesh” covenant is that husband and wife treat each other “as if” they were blood relations, even though they are not. Kin altruism thus becomes a fictive model for the equal investment of husband and wife in the well-being of the other.) Aquinas’s emphasis on friendship is part of what he called mutual assistance – his third purpose of marriage.69 Mutual assistance for Aquinas cut across two levels of human reality. It included the mundane exchange of favors that evolutionists call reciprocal altruism (I’ll help you if you help me), observed in beasts and humans alike. It also included for Aquinas a moral level where friendship is based on a love for the virtuous self of the other – a selfhood that demands to be treated as an end and never as a means only. For him, marriage is primarily a friendship of mutuality and only secondarily one of utility.70 Genuine mutuality for Aquinas contained, yet subordinated, utility.

Notes:
  1. 67 Thomas Aquinas, Summa Contra Gentiles, chap. 124.
  2. 68 See also Matt. 19:5; Mark 10:7; 1 Cor. 6:16, 7:10, 11; Eph. 5:31.
  3. 69. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, 3, q.41,1. 70 Aristotle was an important source for Aquinas’s thinking on friendship. He distringuished three kinds of friendship based on utility, pleasure, and virtue. Christian friendship for Aquinas adapts friendship based on shared virtue the belief that the good of each human is first of all the good of God in that person. For Aristotle’s discussion, see Nicomachean Ethic in The Basic Works of Aristotle, Book 8, chap. 3, and Book 9.
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