Breaking the Marriage Idol by Kutter Callaway

Author:Kutter Callaway
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Should all Christians be married? Kutter Callaway considers why marriage, which is a blessing from God, shouldn't be expected or required of all Christians. Through an examination of Scripture, cultural analysis, and personal accounts, he reflects on how our narratives have limited our understanding of marriage and obscured our view of the life-giving and kingdom-serving roles of single people in the church.
ISBN: 9780830874064
Publisher: InterVarsity Press
Published: 2018-12-11T16:00:00+00:00

A “CHASTE” COMMUNITY

If I were to summarize what Jesus and Paul have to say about marriage, singleness, and celibacy or sexuality, it would go something like this: Both marriage and singleness are equally viable vocations through which the Christian can flourish, and each provides a unique set of opportunities for the right ordering of our desires. In addition, both involve seasons of abstinence and thus call upon Christians to direct their sexual passions accordingly. So even though marriage names the context in which healthy sex thrives, every Christian is called to move toward chastity in their sexual lives, whether they are sexually active and married or celibate and single.

By “chastity” I do not simply mean abstinence from sex (otherwise it would not apply to married people), nor do I mean to imply that we develop this virtue by merely abiding by some abstract moral imperative. Chastity has a much wider application than celibacy. Following Caroline Simon’s work on sexual ethics, chastity is a “dynamic principle enabling one to use one’s sexual power intelligently in the pursuit of human flourishing and happiness.”13 It’s about directing (and in some cases restraining) our erotic energies in ways that contribute to our own flourishing and the flourishing of others.

The primary reason for practicing this kind of sexual restraint (chastity) is because, for both Paul and Jesus, our sexuality is more about who we are than what we do. And as human beings, before we are anything else, we are persons in relation. Every aspect of our life in the world is always already communally grounded. Despite what the modern world would have us believe, we are not radically independent, autonomous sexual agents, but are intimately connected to both God and our fellow human beings. There simply is no such thing as a free-floating and untethered expression of one’s sexuality. So if we are to truly flourish as human beings, we must practice a kind of generosity in restraint, a giving of ourselves to the other in ways that shape us into people who can receive love from the Other.

What is more, according to Jesus and Paul, while marriage and singleness are both God-given gifts and should be received as such, only one of them is coming to an end—marriage. This means that marriage is not (and cannot be) the paradigmatic relational model to which all Christians ought to conform, nor is it a requirement for the health and vitality of the Christian community. Instead, it is singleness (understood as a person in relation) that is the default category for Christian life and in many cases is the preferable option.

The same can be said of celibacy. According to Paul and Jesus, sex, like marriage, is finite. Even though humans will remain fully sexual creatures in the age to come, celibate singleness seems to be the destiny of all believers.

If the New Testament texts were in fact presenting a normative relational model that all Christians were called to pursue, an argument could be made that it would actually be singleness and not marriage.

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