Question:

I am a pastor in the Lutheran Church Missouri Synod, and I have spent a lot of time thinking and writing about the nature of marriage, particularly what constitutes a valid marriage according to natural law.  Since the recent ruling by the Supreme Court, I am confronted with the reality of having to understand what has actually happened as well as how best to respond.  One of the questions I would really like to understand is this: What is the nature of "marriage" as the state has defined it?

It seems to me that the state has rejected the actual substance of marriage by expressly denying that the complementary nature of a man and a woman are a necessary or defining part of what constitutes a valid marriage.  The substance of marriage is rejected and replaced with emotional verbiage.  If state "marriage" contracted before a Justice of the Peace constitutes something other than a marriage, this will have a profound effect on the church's relationship to it.  On the other hand, if the state still does have "marriage", how are we to explain clearly the distinction between a valid heterosexual marriage vs an invalid homosexual one, since the state uses the same word and definition for both?

Reply:

I agree that the federal government has repudiated the actual substance of marriage, so that to use the same word for both natural marriage and what the government calls marriage is now profoundly misleading.  How are we to explain this to people?  Perhaps something like this.

Marriage is a procreative partnership founded on the complementary, self-giving union of the procreative partners.   It is a natural institution, which means that its structure is determined by the way human persons must live in order to flourish – especially the fact that the child needs the continuous, dependable, loving care of both mom and dad.

Sacramental marriage is not something different from natural marriage, but natural marriage with a plus.  The “plus” is the supernatural grace of the sacrament.  But let’s leave that aside, because in this country the state has never claimed an interest in the sacrament.

Until last week, what the state called marriage was the recognition that a natural marriage existed.  The primary purpose of such recognition was to protect the resulting children by legally enforcing the duties of the mother and father to both their offspring and each other.

But what the state now means by marriage is a state-enforced convention for conferring social esteem on arbitrarily chosen adult sexual arrangements which need have nothing to do with procreation.  Although the state does not deny that children may be in the picture or that they still need protection, they have now been downgraded to a secondary consideration.  The fundamental consideration in this so-called marriage is the so-called right of the grown-ups in the picture to social approval.  What the change will do to family law is dreadful to contemplate.

I realize that this is a pretty small cup of water, but perhaps to parched tongues even a few drops of explanation will be welcome.

Mondays are reserved for questions from readers, especially students.

Question:

If people have been raised to consider bad behavior morally acceptable, how can they ever come to recognize that it isn’t?

Reply:

The premise of your question is that the only way people know what is right and wrong is that they have been told.  That’s what many psychologists think too.  They view conscience as an empty vessel filled up by parental teaching and other forms of socialization.  Your own experience will show you that conscience is more than that.  If knowledge of right and wrong came only from how you were raised, you could never recognize a moral error.  But haven’t you ever come to realize that something was morally wrong, even though nobody told you so?  Haven’t you ever had a change of heart?  Sure you have. 

Of course parental teaching does shape us, but we have, so to speak, a deep shape, which good teaching merely brings to the surface.  No conceivable parental teaching could wipe out the fundamental recognition that wrong is different than right.  No imaginable childhood socialization could pump the awareness of that difference into you if you couldn’t see it for yourself.  There isn’t any way to raise a child so that he will hold the judgment “I should be grateful to those who have done me the most hurt, and ungrateful to those who have done me the most good.”  Even if you don’t teach him the Golden Rule, at some level it will make sense to him that the rules of behavior should be the same for everyone.  He will know that he shouldn’t steal or murder.

By the way, I am not saying that everyone draws correct conclusions from first principles.  Often we don’t.  And I am not saying that everyone actually follows first principles.  Often we don’t do that either.  What I am saying is that everyone knows first principles.  Even our excuses for bad behavior make use of them; we try to convince ourselves that our lies weren’t really lies, that our betrayals weren’t really betrayals, or that our mistreatment of others fulfilled justice because “they had coming to them.”

Just because we do know first principles -- just because we do have deep conscience -- we have a fighting chance of correcting erroneous surface conscience.  Of course it helps to have virtuous friends who will call us to account, but if we didn’t have the knowledge of first principles, how could their words get through to us?  We wouldn’t grasp what they were talking about, would be?  But we can be reached after all; we can see that we are wrong; we can even have a change of heart.

As you probably know, Brian Williams, who was suspended from his prestigious NBC job earlier this year for lying about what happened when he was reporting in Iraq, has been reappointed as a special reports anchor for affiliate MSNBC.  The corporation refuses to comment on his salary, but according to some reports he will be pulling down close to $10 million a year.

Yes, that will teach him.

Some people think Williams’ rehabilitation shows that we are a forgiving nation.  I believe in forgiveness, but this isn’t about how forgiving we are.  It’s about how little we care about lying in positions of trust.

One may forgive the embezzler, but one does not trust him to work for the bank again.  One may forgive the burglar, but one does not give him the house keys.  One may forgive the rapist, but one does not let him date one’s daughter.

What About Those Ignorant German Tribesmen?

What do I mean by the proper reading of the notorious passage of St. Thomas Aquinas which seems to say that the German tribesmen didn't know that theft was wrong?  Here is what he actually says:  "Thus formerly, latrocinium, although it is expressly contrary to the natural law, was not considered wrong among the Germans."  Although the Dominican Fathers translation renders latrocinium as "theft," actually the term latrocinium does not refer to theft.  St. Thomas carefully distinguishes furtum, theft, which is unjustly taking another's property by stealth, from rapina, robbery, which is unjustly taking another's property by coercion or violence.[6]  It turns out that latrocinium is neither theft in general, nor robbery in general, nor even a particular kind of theft, but a particular kind of robbery.  The term is best translated "banditry" or "piracy."  A latro, in Roman law, was an armed bandit or raider.

If we turn to St. Thomas’s source, the sixth book of Julius Caesar's Commentaries on the Gallic Wars, we find right away that the Germans were very much aware of the wrong of both furtum and latrocinium.  In fact, Julius remarks that the Germans considered such crimes as theft and banditry so detestable that on those occasions when they burned victims to propitiate their gods, they preferred to burn the perpetrators of such crimes:  As he put it, “they consider that the oblation of such as have been taken in furto, or in latrocinio, or any other offence, is more acceptable to the immortal gods.”[7]

But if the Germans did know the wrong of latrocinium, then what can St. Thomas be thinking?  We don’t have to look far for the answer.  When he claims Julian authority for the statement that latrocinium "was not considered wrong among the Germans," what he doubtless has in mind is a somewhat later passage in the Commentaries, where Julius explains that the Germans approved not of banditry as such, but only of a particular kind of banditry, raiding against other tribes.  Here is what Julius says:  “Latrocinia which are committed beyond the boundaries of each state bear no infamy, and they [the Germans] avow that these are committed for the purpose of disciplining their youth and of preventing sloth.  And when any of their chiefs has said in an assembly ‘that he will be their leader, let those who are willing to follow, give in their names;’ they who approve of both the enterprise and the man arise and promise their assistance and are applauded by the people; such of them as have not followed him are accounted in the number of deserters and traitors, and confidence in all matters is afterward refused them.”[8]

The manner in which the judgment of these barbarians was "led astray," then, was not that they were ignorant of the wrong of theft, or the wrong or robbery, or even of the wrong of banditry, but that they refused to draw one of the detailed corollaries of these precepts.  They knew the wrong of plundering their neighbors, but they failed to acknowledge the members of other tribes as neighbors.  Consequently they classified raiding them not as banditry, but as something like justified war.  It is as though they said, “I know people who commit banditry deserve to be burned, but come on, raiding doesn’t count as banditry.”  We do much the same thing.  “I know theft is wrong, but come on, inflating the currency to finance expenditures the government can’t pay for doesn’t count as theft.”

Notes

6.  I-II, Q. 66, Arts. 3-4, 8.

7.  Julius Caesar, The War in Gaul, Book 6, Chapter 16, W.A. MacDevitt, trans., "De Bellico Gallico" and Other Commentaries of Caius Julius Caesar, available on the internet at http://classics.mit.edu/Caesar/gallic.html (public domain).  For furto and latrocinio, MacDevitt has "theft" and "robbery."  Though Julius does not mention other, more routine Germanic penalties for theft, such as compensation, these double the proof that they knew theft was wrong.

8.  Ibid., Book 6, Chapter 23.

Link to Part 5 of 14

Nearly everyone is asking what the decision to call sodomitical unions marriages will mean for adults.  Is polygamy next?   Group marriage?  Persecution of those who disagree?  Certainly, all that and more.

But why are so few asking what the decision will mean for children?  Aren’t children the point?

Ask yourself what it will mean that now the law declares marriage to be about the sexual self-esteem of grown-ups rather than the well-being of children, who need moms and dads.