“Said Humpty Dumpty, ‘I Always Pay It Extra.’”

In response to my post, “Marriage, ‘Marriage,’ and Why the Difference Is Important,” a friend’s comment raised some important questions that deserve to be considered in more detail (thus length) than the comments section allows. To avoid any distortions, it would be a good idea to read the original July 20, 2013 post. I also have included the entirety of the comment, as you will see beneath the previous post, while addressing it in sections. Feel free to browse to the topics that interest you most.

The purpose of language is to communicate clearly.

More specifically, language is a means to communicate clearly. This requires what Gunton called de-synonymy, but also an appreciation for the fluidity of language over time that I was describing. In what we call “dead languages” there is the blessing of using words that will forever keep the definition they last had when they were abandoned as a means of public communication. In the differentiation of living and dead languages, though, both synchronic and diachronic issues require us to discern that which the word denotes at the time it is being used (whether in historical or contemporary compositions). In short, per Gunton, we make synonyms more specific until they are no longer synonymous. Likewise, exclusive terms often tend to become more inclusive as well. This occurs regularly, much to the chagrin of trademark holders like Kleenex, Scotch Tape, and Saran Wrap. The same problem arises when Evangelicals attempt to reclaim a trademark like “marriage.”

Marriage communicate something that has the weight of both history and culture - it involves the union of a man and a woman.

As ambassadors for Christ, we need to communicate synchronically within the communities we are called to serve. The diachronic shift in meaning for “marriage,” while more dramatic in recent years, began far earlier when the term for a Christian sacrament was applied to civil contracts. The shift in the nature of this civil contract has included many non-biblical and anti-biblical modifications within the surrounding culture, while still being called by the same term that had previously applied exclusively to the relationship Evangelical Christians generally mean by marriage: “One man and one woman, forming a household, with the intent to produce and raise children.”

It is declared publicly - which is important for society.

Among the many historical shifts that culture has accommodated, of course, is that there is no universal mandate for the “solemnization” (California’s legal term) of a marriage through any public ceremony, and there are even provisions for “confidential” marriages in which neither witnesses nor publicly available details are components. I believe that the Christian sacrament of marriage is, in fact, exceptionally helpful to society. But society, even when the dominant culture more fully reflected Christian values, has made allowance for multiple options outside of the wedding as a Christian worship service (as we require at Glenburn), and for relationships other than those which recognize the subsequent marriage as a divine creation of one (nearly) indissoluble flesh from two individual lives.

Reducing the concept of marriage to a civil versus a religious distinction doesn't do justice to what it communicates.

I think the confusion of using one word when referring to two conflicting concepts fails to do justice to either one. But “marriage” does not communicate solely the biblical relationship, even to many Christians who enter into one (and, frequently, another one or two or many more). In fact, it is our habit of combining two concepts into one, under that single term, that greatly hinders not only communication, but our testimony to the unique nature of the relationship God alone can create.

As you said, society has an interest in marriage. People who procreate have a responsibility to society.

I’m guessing a little at the meaning of these two sentences. What I had intended to communicate is that godly marriages and families have been “seen to benefit the broader society.” Therefore, society has made “social and financial benefits” available to such families and, in subsequent application of “marriage” to additional definitions, other “families” that are not remotely similar.

I agree that wherever those benefits are accepted, there should be a commensurate responsibility to the broader society providing those benefits. But at present, “people who procreate,” whether responsibly or irresponsibly, are substantially subsidized (and, in fact, incentivized to procreate far beyond their visible means of support) at levels that are soon to prove unsustainable, no matter how fully they may undertake their responsibility to society.

Worse, in misapplying the concept of “marriage,” our systems routinely extend benefits to individual parents, despite their actions being detrimental to others and society as a whole, purely on the grounds of biological procreation. In the communities I serve, this regularly occurs even where the partner with whom a child is placed has had no relationship with the other parent since conception, and even where those individuals present documented risks to the child. The cyclical disruption of repeated preferential placements, solely caused by punishing and rewarding the variable status of the prioritized, biological procreators, causes far-reaching, systemic harm to our communities, and far more so to the individual children serving as pawns of these policies.

Society’s interest in even Christian marriage, then, hardly recommends that we engage in the reciprocal relationship they offer by accepting the benefits that initially blurred the two categories represented by our single term, “marriage.”

Blurring the definition based on an non-procreating few hardly benefits society as a whole.

Successful procreation is rarely held as a necessary condition for continuing marriage. Where that has been the case, as with Henry VIII, the distinction has been widely condemned. Again, the blurring of the definition long predates any consideration of applying the term to homosexual couples (which I am assuming is meant by “non-procreating” in this context). That deserves its own separate point below.

At a time when society was becoming fairly supportive of recognizing civil unions (which answers the civil equality question), the intrusion of homosexuality into the centuries-old understanding of marriage is an necessary overstep.

While society may have been “becoming fairly supportive of recognizing civil unions,” the church (more specifically, National Association of Evangelicals’ policy statements and the Manhattan Declaration) publicly held that “marriage,” which both define as entailing contractual obligations, must prevail in reserving special rights and privileges only to partnerships comprising two individuals of opposite sexes. This hardly reflects civil equality, even if “domestic partnership” laws were to offer the same status and benefits as are available to those participating in the sacrament, albeit under different terminology.

But tracing any contemporary understanding of marriage back into prior centuries would require us to ignore the liberalization of divorce laws in this past century, not to mention women’s suffrage and property ownership, the abandonment of arranged marriages, as well as our tradition’s very early establishment of government benefits subsidizing those participating in the sacrament. To all but a handful of Evangelical Christians, North Americans would appear to understand the term “marriage” to relate primarily to the government sanctions, not the Christian sacrament. And that began long before “the intrusion of homosexuality.”

It would not be so big an issue if it did not have other implications. At what point are churches that will not perform or recognize such unions, based on a biblical worldview, become outlaws?

Determining the legitimacy of one’s philosophical or theological position based on the potential for negative outcomes is always a bad idea. In the cruciform, sacrificial servanthood of following Jesus Christ, we aspire to fulfill His calling, applying the belief that we are responsible for obedience; He is responsible for the consequences. If one of the consequences of my obedience is that a particular sin is made less convenient, then, once I get over my childish disappointment of having to subjugate my will to His, I should rejoice, shouldn’t I? How much more, then, would it please God to see North American Christians repent to renew an actual adherence, rather than the mere lip-service we offer, to the concept of a Free Church (i.e., free from state subsidy, and thus free from state sanctions). As it is, though, to answer your question directly: It is entirely appropriate for a parent organization to regulate or even prescribe the nature and actions of its subsidiaries. Where churches presume upon government subsidies (sales and property tax exemptions, as well as deductible contributions, to name the most commonly encountered), the government holds an interest in our beliefs and actions. When the government sanctions us, it should only be commensurate with their subsidies of us. But U.S. history suggests that they will do far better at regulation than they will at support (as embodied in the objections of states and counties to “unfunded mandates”).

And so, this is the crux of the conflict: Where we have accepted social benefits provided on the basis of our presumed benefit to the society around us, we adopt a responsibility to conform to the definitions of that society as to what they consider beneficial. Therefore, where we claim to differ from that society in belief, we should also differ from them in action.

Subsidized preachers and subsidized procreators alike must negotiate their own conflicting allegiances. Biblically, though, it seems clearer. Caesar should only get that which belongs to Caesar. God should always get that which belongs to Him. But no matter how vehemently we claim that our own exclusive definition should supersede the broader use of the term “marriage,” from which we previously benefited, all we really accomplish is confusion in our communications.

Marriage, “Marriage,” and Why the Difference Is Important

Colin Gunton, in The Promise of Trinitarian Theology, notes “that the capacity of language increases by a process of de-synonymy; that is, the process whereby two words which are in the beginning synonymous take on different shades of meaning, and are so able to perform different functions.” (Gunton, 10) 

Sadly, the opposite is also, too often, very true.

My children and congregations have long-wearied of my insistence that “Words mean things.” As a corollary, though, “for the thing you want to say, there is likely a word already.” As Gunton advises, there may, in fact, be several words that mean what you’re trying to describe. Unfortunately, very few others may ever have heard any one of the particular words for what you want to say. (And, although Webster is still selling dictionaries, most of us are happy to smile and nod until we find more comfortably convenient vocabulary in use.)

Frequently, though, a single, more common word may describe a broader, more complex reality, with the unintended result that, rather than one definition that fits multiple words, one word now has multiple definitions. These definitions may or may not overlap. They may even contradict each other entirely. But which is it? 

“Which is it?” That is the central question remaining unaddressed in the current debate over what we have been calling “Gay Marriage.” Which “marriage” are we talking about?

Once upon a time, (c.1300, according to etymologists), we adopted a Latin term into English, not merely signifying the relationship between two individuals, but specifically referring, in both its verb and noun forms (“to marry,” and “marriage,” respectively) to the natural result that offspring were produced by the physical union of the two individuals. 

Retroactively applying that term and its concepts in translation of Greek and Hebrew texts, it applies to the earliest such joining described in the Hebrew scriptures: Adam and Eve (Or, as would be fitting in Genesis 5:2, the two halves of “Adam,” a term identifying humankind as a whole, as well as the male individual of the original couple.) This resulted in a condition that, for most of twenty centuries, has been celebrated as a sacrament of the Christian Church in recognizing the intent of such couples to procreate. Thus, for most of Western cultural history, the word marriage was defined without much controversy.

As our story progresses, though, there were other issues to consider, not least of which were the benefits of such unions, their offspring, and the mutual care of these groups (we call them, generally, “families”) for one another. Over time, these groups were even seen to benefit the broader society, and were encouraged through social and financial benefits that were unavailable to individuals and/or other groups who did not conform to the scriptural pattern adopted. What became confusing (long before any discussion of “Gay Marriage”), however, is that the socio-political encouragements resulted in a state-sanctioned institution that has progressively deviated from the origins and character of the sacrament of marriage. 

Today, then, the word marriage applies not only to the Church-ordained sacrament that reflects biblical descriptions of a particular relationship, it also has been applied to the legal/political status of a variety of other relationships, so long as they are registered with the state authorities in order to receive particular benefits in what could more accurately be called “contractually-obligated domestic partnerships.” 

The confusion and consternation that surrounds the term Gay Marriage has resulted from allowing the word marriage to migrate in meaning to encompass at least two aspects of human relationships: one, a specific, narrow, religiously-constrained sacrament between two individuals who intend (and are presumably capable) to produce offspring; the other, a legal status afforded to some of those couples and others who register with the state in order to receive specific benefits.

In light of the above, perhaps it is still confusing to state, “There can be no such things as ‘Gay Marriage,’ in that the relationship celebrated in the sacrament involves two individuals who intend to produce offspring,” while maintaining that one’s socio-political belief in equal protection (and equal availability of benefits) under the law require their extension to any who are willing to register their “contractually-obligated domestic partnerships” with the state. 

Granted, some will want to continue to offer preferential status to one or another category of these relationships as more or less beneficial to the purposes of the state. My view of our shared history is that these segregations have universally caused significant damage to our society as a whole, in its various segments, and to the individuals it comprises. I see a greater benefit to equal protections and benefits for all. 

As one among many Christians who inadvertently perpetuate the confusion of marriage with “marriage,” as it applies to state-sanctioned benefits (In my defense, the IRS offers only the category of “Married, filing jointly” as the nearest description of my twenty-nine year relationship with Shelly Annette Myers.), let me reiterate my apologies as well as my repentance. Linguistically, the problem is not that we are calling “marriage” that which cannot be a marriage. It is that we have, for so long, used the term “marriage” to describe our enjoyment of preferential benefits as heterosexual couples who have registered their contractually-obligated domestic partnerships with the state. 

We should stop. Or allow others the same privileges.