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Protecting Life in Its Fullness: Human Life, Marriage and Family
A Circular Letter and Declaration of the Catholic Churches of the Anglican Continuum
Outline
- Précis
II. Marriage is Fundamentally Bound up with the Central Mysteries of the Christian Faith.
III. Marriage and the Genesis Narratives
IV. The Meaning and Purpose of Marriage
V. Natural Marriage and the Prevailing Culture
VI. The Christian Response
VII. The Organic Fabric of Morality and Law
VIII. True and False Talk about Tolerance
IX. A Summary Confession and Call to Repentance
- Précis.
The One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic Church of Christ has, from the beginning, believed and confessed the sanctity of all human persons, whom God has made in His Own image (Gen. 1:27), and whom He intends to be conformed to His likeness (Rom. 8:29). ….
Likewise, the Holy Mystery or Sacrament of Marriage, was designed by God and blessed to be a reflection and manifestation of the union between Jesus the Christ and His Bride, the Church (Eph. 5:15-33). From the beginning, the man and the woman have been joined to one another in a union at all levels of their personalities, in heart, mind, soul, and body, so that the union of unselfish, self-sacrificial love (agape) is life-giving.
This unity of man and woman in marriage is as old as humanity. As St. John Chrysostom said: "From the beginning God has been revealed as the fashioner, by his providence, of this union of man and woman, and He has spoken of the two as one: 'male and female He created them'" (Homily XX on Ephesians 5:22-33).
Today, these fundamental realities of human life and existence are under attack in the mostegregious and vigorous way. Confusion over the nature of human persons, rejection of the meaning of marriage, and the healthy essential place of husbands, wives, and children in families, require the Church to speak boldly in their defense. The Supreme Court decision,Obergefell v. Hodges,[1] and the revelations concerning Planned Parenthood’s activities in recent times[2] in not only murdering innocent children, but also selling their body parts, demand a clear statement from the Church.
The clergy of the Church Catholicmust take seriously their ordination vows. At their ordination, priests were asked: “Will you be ready, with all faithful diligence, to banish and drive away from the Church all erroneous and strange doctrines contrary to God's Word; and to use both public and private monitions and exhortations, as well to the sick as to the whole, within your Cures, as need shall require, and occasion shall be given?” Each responded “I will, the Lord being my helper.”[3] Bishops were likewise asked: “Are you ready, with all faithful diligence, to banish and drive away from the Church all erroneous and strange doctrine contrary to God's Word; and both privately and openly to call upon and encourage others to the same?” They each also responded: “I am ready, the Lord being my helper.”[4] The clergy of Christ’s Church are compelled by Christian charity [2 Corinthians 5:14] to do so now, setting out the pure, good, and holy; explaining the teaching of the Church, and both warning and calling all human persons to turn to God, Who loves all and desires that no one should suffer eternal death [1 Timothy 2:4], but desires to share with each one the infinite goodness and beauty of His Own life. They are compelled, too, the explain their commitment to civil disobedience to any and all laws which demand that we act against the Faith of the Church, “the Faith committed once and for all to the saints” (Jude 3).
God’s people as a whole, are also called to confess Him. As God proclaimed to the Church through St. Peter, “you are a chosen generation, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, His own special people, that you may proclaim the praises of Him who called you out of darkness into His marvelous light” (1 Peter 2:9). Therefore, “sanctify the Lord God in your hearts, and always be ready to give a defense to everyone who asks you a reason for the hope that is in you, with meekness and fear;having a good conscience, that when they defame you as evildoers, those who revile your good conduct in Christ may be ashamed” (1 Peter 3:15-16).
II. Marriage is Fundamentally Bound up with the Central Mysteries of the Christian Faith.
The Church’s understanding of all created reality flows out of her understanding of God Himself. All true knowledge of God, all theology, is rooted in the Holy Trinity as the Eternal Family and in Jesus Christ asGod in the flesh, the Author and Giver of life. The Trinity and the Incarnation (with all that flows from it, both Christ’s active and passive obedience, His perfect life, His suffering, death, resurrection and ascension, and the force these have by virtue of the hypostatic union), are the primary dogmas of the Church, which contextualize and give meaning to all of Christ’s other teachings, which He has committed to His Bride, the Church, calling her the “pillar and foundation of the truth” (1 Tim. 3:15).
The Holy Trinity is at the center of the Christian Faith. The One God isthree Persons: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.Created in His Image, humanity is also called to share His Life. Because the image of God in man is a Trinitarian image, man, like God, realizes his true nature through mutual life. Just as the three Divine Persons are involved, in the inner life of God (in His Essence) in mutual Self-giving love, so man, in order to be fully himself must live out this same act of self-donating, self-sacrificial love for the good of others. The Father eternally begets the Son. There is no beginning of this. The Son has always received the Father’s Self-giving, in a way infinitely beyond all created comprehension, such that the Son has always existed. And the Son has always been giving Himself back to the Father- completely and without reservation. So also, the Father has spirated the Holy Spirit, so that the Spirit draws infinite, eternal and pre-eternal existence from the Father, and also gives Himself absolutely and completely back to the Father. The Son and the Spirit likewise have always been in perfect Self-donation. Though we cannot comprehend this in its inner meaning, the communication of the deeper, unknowable realities of God’s inner Essence are communicated, revealed, and shared with us by God’s grace, in a way accessible to created beings. These can be identified as God’s uncreated Energies, God’s Own activities toward us.[5] We are drawn into the opera ad extra, the “works of God outside of Himself.”[6] And this is what our life as human persons both means and is designed to be, “persons” being in communion as part of our nature, and being in communion with God first of all. For “in Him we live and move and have our being” (Acts 17:28). In words which are very powerful, St. Bonaventure even makes this claim: “The creatures of the sense world signify the invisible attributes of God… For everycreature is by its nature a kind of effigy and likeness of eternal Wisdom.”[7]Just as the three Persons of the Trinity 'dwell' in one another in an unceasing movement of Self-donating love, so man, made in the image of the Triune God, is called to 'dwell' in the Trinitarian God, and to do so in a way which involves a constant movement of self-giving, and exchange between husbands and wives which is an icon of the Trinity in its nature as life-creating union.
More specifically, God is not Father in some kind of sense that projects ideas about fatherhood onto God, as if God is “like a father.” Quite the contrary, “Father” is a Personal Name of the first Person of the Trinity, Who is THE Father, from Whom all true ideas about fatherhood are derived. Human fathers are only true fathers to the extent that they image God the Father. St. Paul explicitly states this in Ephesians 3:14-15, “For this reason I bow my knees to the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, from Whom all paternity in heaven and earth is named” (i.e., receives its character).
All attacks on true fatherhood are also attacks on the Fatherhood of God, Who is the model for all true understandings of fatherhood. All attacks on sonship, understood according to the model of Jesus, the now Incarnate Son of God, are, at least indirectly, attacks on the Second Person of the Trinity. All attacks on the bonds of self-giving love, are also, ultimately and really, attacks on the relationship between the Father and Son and Holy Spirit, and on the peoples whom God has called to Himself, to share, in a creaturely way, His kind of life. All attacks on the family are not mere cultural critiques, of shifts in subjective matters of opinion, but are themselves attacks on the ultimate family relationship, that which exists eternally in God, and which is then manifested, by imitation, in human families which follow this same pattern.
To make our participation in God’s Self-giving an effective part of our experience by destroying those things which spoil human life by distorting it from its intended and only healthy purpose, God Himself came to join Himself to us, sharing our human flesh and blood, taking on Himself a human soul and will. He came to take our nature upon Himself, and to personally confront and defeat all human sins and death, by death trampling down death, and becoming for us the firstfruits of our own restoration in body and soul (1 Cor. 15). As we pray on the Feast of the Exaltation of the Cross, “This is that noble tree, planted in the midst of the garden,* Whereon the Author of our salvation by his own death did vanquish death for all men”[8] Or, as we hear in the famous hymn by Fortunatus in the 6th century, who directs our gaze to the sacrifice of the New Adam for His Bride on the life-giving tree of the cross, “on which Life suffered death, and by his Death gave life:”
The royal banners forward go,
the cross shines forth in mystic glow;
where he in flesh, our flesh who made,
our sentence bore, our ransom paid.
Where deep for us the spear was dyed,
life's torrent rushing from his side,
to wash us in that precious flood,
where mingled water flowed, and blood.
Fulfilled is all that David told
in true prophetic song of old,
amidst the nations, God, saith he,
hath reigned and triumphed from the tree.
O tree of beauty, tree of light!
O tree with royal purple dight!
Elect on whose triumphal breast
those holy limbs should find their rest.
Blest tree, whose chosen branches bore
the wealth that did the world restore,
the price of humankind to pay,
and spoil the spoiler of his prey.
Upon its arms, like balance true,
he weighed the price for sinners due,
the price which none but he could pay,
and spoiled the spoiler of his prey.
O cross, our one reliance, hail!
Still may thy power with us avail
to give new virtue to the saint,
and pardon to the penitent.
To thee, eternal Three in One,
let homage meet by all be done:
whom by the cross thou dost restore,
preserve and govern evermore.[9]
The Church has, from the beginning, taught the Incarnation of God the Son. God the Son always existed, as the Second Person of the Trinity. This one Person had a single nature: He was God. Yet at the time of the Incarnation (when He was conceived by the Holy Spirit in the womb of the Blessed Virgin Mary) He took into His one divine Person, a second nature: a real human nature, consisting of a human body, soul, and will. Forever after this, there have been and will be two natures in Christ's one Person. Jesus, true God and true man, reconciles man to God. He lived a sinless life, and suffered and died, taking upon Himself the sins and death of all mankind. The ways in which people have wounded themselves and one another- marring, twisting, spoiling the experience of pure goodness and beauty and Selfless love (what is called sin, iniquity, trespasses, transgression, etc., all of which is a movement away from communion with God, and love of God and neighbor)- as well as death itself and the fear of death, all these have to be dealt with. To deal with these experiences of human beings, God has entered into them. God is Himself impassible, unchangeable, and deathless. So, for God to personally experience and confront our sins and death as a man means God becoming a real human being. Yet a single human being, even if this human being were perfect, could not deal with the experiences of the whole human race throughout all time. So, divine powers have to be shared with the human nature in Christ to make this possible.
Only the God-man Himself makes this possible, because He united God and man in His one Person. The powers of infinity, eternity, limitlessness are shared (in the communication of attributes) with the human nature in Jesus the Christ, so that He can enter into the experience of every single human being who has ever or will ever exist. Jesus takes onto His human body and soul the experiences of every single person's hurts- psychological, emotional, spiritual, and physical. He takes on the things that traumatize us, whether they are because of our own actions, the actions of somebody else, or both, and feels them, suffers them, confronts and destroys them, burning them up in the furnace of His Self-giving love. There is no experience of any human being which is not actually and fully known and shared in Jesus' Own experience. This includes the experience of death. Jesus has already shared the exact and specific experience of each and every single person's death, making it His Own.[10] And on the other side of what the famous 4th century bishop, Ambrose of Milan, called the "Blessed Exchange," Christ's bodily resurrection is His victory over all human sins and death, objectively setting all people free from them. He trampled down death by death.
Jesus' real human nature is understood to be behind the whole purpose of God for human beings, who then subjectively receive the objective benefits of this by being joined to the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit in the proclaimed Words of God and the Holy Sacraments, beginning with Holy Baptism. Through these means or instruments God gives Himself to human persons, and so gives life and all that comes from Him to all who accept Him, and are joined to His Family, the Church, the Mother of the faithful. (St. Cyprian’s well known axiom is: “You cannot have God as your Father unless you have the Church for your Mother.”[11])
The whole dynamic involved God dealing with our sin and death, which, at their very root, are precisely the disruption of our communion with God. God became man, taking our own human nature into Himself (in the Hypostatic Union), joining Himself to us and emptying Himself (Phil. 2:5-11) to deal with our sins and death by facing them head on.
From this objective work of Christ flows the application of this to us in the Media Salutis. In Romans six, for example, St. Paul sets out the starting point for the Christian life this way:
1What shall we say then? Shall we continue in sin, that grace may abound? 2God forbid. How shall we, that are dead to sin, live any longer therein? 3Know ye not, that so many of us as were baptized into Jesus Christ were baptized into his death? 4Therefore we are buried with him by baptism into death: that like as Christ was raised up from the dead by the glory of the Father, even so we also should walk in newness of life. 5For if we have been planted together in the likeness of his death, we shall be also in the likeness of his resurrection: 6Knowing this, that our old man is crucified with him, that the body of sin might be destroyed, that henceforth we should not serve sin. 7For he that is dead is freed from sin.
In Baptism, we are joined to Christ, adopted as His Own, so that we experience the work of Christ for us. This is a full covenantal reality: we are His and He is ours, to echo the covenant formula. Our death and His death and not separate, but joined- the death He experienced was not merely His Own, but our specific deaths, and His victory over our particular sins and deaths is now given to us to live in. Set free from these, we can become what He has called us to be. Our life, shared with Him, becomes eucharistic, and a drawing ever closer to Him, Who has drawn close to us. In the Sacrament of the Altar this is realized in a way more powerful than anything else this side of heaven, as heaven and earth are joined, and God places His death-destroying risen Flesh into us. As Our Lord says in John 6: