Para-Marital Blessing as Biblical, Sacramental, and Political Practice

Christopher Ashley Dissertation Prospectus Draft of 2/3/2014

1

ParaParaParaPara----Marital BlessingMarital BlessingMarital BlessingMarital Blessing

as Biblical, Sacramental, and Political Practiceas Biblical, Sacramental, and Political Practiceas Biblical, Sacramental, and Political Practiceas Biblical, Sacramental, and Political Practice

AbstractAbstractAbstractAbstract

First, a definition: By “para-marital”, I intend reference to

such terms as parachurch or paramilitary. A para-sacramental action

participates in certain characteristic features of the sacrament without

fully identifying with the sacrament. Marriage may be an all-or-nothing

affair—Sondheim's “Marry Me a Little” is meant as irony and pathos—but

I believe my coinage names a meaningful range of relationships with

their own theological significance, distinct from both sacramental

marriage and singleness. I would likewise contrast it with other

possible prefixes: para-marital is not anti-marital (primarily critique

of the institution), nor simply extra-marital (as marriage is in some

sense the model by which the para-marital defines itself).

The intervention of this dissertation is to consider para-marital

blessing as a legitimate pastoral option, especially as a voice of the

church to marginalized relationships. I plan to proceed by reflecting on

this practice using five distinct theological genres, each with its own


2

separate chapter: Biblical, practical, social-ethical, political, and

Trinitarian. This structure is not meant to set out a unified argument,

as in a monograph, but to offer various points of entry to the practice

of para-marital blessing in response to a range of possible questions

about it.

The five proposed essay-chapters are as follows:

1) Blessing's Biblical roots. Scripture prominently deploys blessing in

the life of Abraham, in the Psalms, in Galatians, and in the Lucan

canticles. In all these loci, blessing attends and defines the people of

Israel but graciously extends through them to all nations.

2) Blessing as para-sacramental action. It can be modeled as a superset

of sacrament, an extension of sacramental grace beyond the particular

people constituted by the sacrament in question.

3) Blessing as pastoral and prophetic intervention. A thought-

experiment, parallel to the case of same-sex couples: What if a church

blessed economically marginal relationships, whose parties had

determined their lives were too unstable for marriage? What are the

costs and benefits? Paradoxically, such a blessing would affirm the


3

parties theologically and ecclesially, without directly challenging

their second-class citizenship politically.

4) Blessing, marriage, and citizenship. Sacramental marriage requires a

joint account of ecclesial/heavenly and civil institutions: The metaphor

of “second-class citizenship” with regard to blessings is well-taken.

I would suggest that blessing is oriented primarily toward the general

eschaton and a heavenly politeuma, while marriage is oriented toward

earthly politeuma and the personal eschaton (“till death do us part”).

Thus the pastoral paradox seen above.

5) The agent of blessing. Properly speaking, clergy bless on behalf of

the people, by participation in the creative and providential blessing

of God (cf. Frettlöh). I propose to read this action pneumatologically:

The Holy Spirit befriends matter (especially “gross matter”, what

empire devalues) through blessing and brings it into Christ's presence,

and thus into the Trinitarian life.

Having laid out the dissertation's main question and overall structure,

I will now proceed to a more detailed proposal for each essay, including

a chapter title, a genre, and the question I take the essay to address.


4

I. Biblical RootsI. Biblical RootsI. Biblical RootsI. Biblical Roots

[Genre: Biblical theology]

Why have the churches used blessing, in recent decades, in this

para-sacramental sense? I suggest the inspiration is Biblical, namely

the use of blessing in the life of Abraham, in the Psalms, in Galatians,

and in the Lucan canticles. In all these loci, blessing attends and

defines the people of Israel but graciously extends through them to all

nations.

Psalm 67 is my keynote. The Psalmist invokes the Aaronic,

particular, national blessing with, I will argue, an unusually

cosmopolitan intention. The cultic-monarchial-covenantal sense of

blessing, as God's election of and provision for Zion, is (unusually for

the Psalter) paired with the eschatological theme of the nations'

ultimate awe for God. The striking contrast is with the enthronement

psalms (e.g. 47, 68, 95). 67 shares themes, language, and some tone with

them, but lacks the triumphalist note. God does not battle, subdue, or

punish, but rather draws the nations into fear through sheer goodness to


5

Israel. The nearest parallel is perhaps the shorter Ps 100, but even

that (through the formula “YHWH is El”) appropriates a rival pantheon

and thus aggressively replaces it. What makes the difference?

Theologically, I suggest, it is precisely the unique invocation of the

root brch, for liturgical blessing. I will lay out this argument in

conversation, especially, with the line of German Psalter commentators

running from Gunkel to Krauss and Westermann.

I will also treat Charles Ives as a key psalter commentator, by

way of his fin de siècle choral setting of this psalm. His

interpretation, in fact, is a major influence on this project. Although

musically adventurous, featuring both astringent bitonality and some

aggressive voice leading, it was intended for liturgical use in his New

Jersey congregation. The bridging of gaps (between keys, musically, and

between registers of musical thought, sociologically) is a crucial theme

both in the Psalm and this setting.

In light of this Psalmic model, I will (following Frettlöh

closely) offer a reading of the blessing of Abraham in Gen 12:1-4 as

simultaneously particular and universal. God's intention in blessing the


6

patriarch is to elect a particular people in order to affect the whole

world—not so as to erase the particularity of Israel, but to affirm it,

even to bless it. The people will bless themselves by Abraham, thus

rendering themselves and Abraham both blessed simultaneously. In terms

of commentators, Frettlöh frames this in terms of an argument between

von Rad and Blum; I may have Kierkegaard somewhat more in mind as well,

who only comes into Frettlöh's story insofar as he influences

Bonhoeffer.

Paul's reframing of Abraham's story in Galatians inevitably sits

behind this reading, and with it the history of Christian

supercessionism. In terms of NT studies, I find the cosmic commentary of

Martyn and the anti-imperial of Kahl complementary, as showing more

truly universal routes to an Abrahamic ancestry (their status as UTS

faculty is a happy coincidence). The important point, for the present

purpose, is that Christian appropriation of Abrahamic lineage need not

negate the legitimacy of the Jewish lineage, insofar as Paul's critique

is not of Jewish law but of a cosmic principle (Martyn) or Roman

domination (Kahl).


7

Theologically, the work of Frettlöh on the church's being co-

blessed with and through Abraham persuasively summarizes and deploys

contemporary German commentary on this nexus. Her decisive emphasis is

that one can only share the blessing God offers to Abraham and his

descendants if one does, in fact, share in blessing and affirming

Abraham and his descendants. Anti-supercessionism becomes the criterion

for sharing in this blessing.

Most of all, however, I find Origen's reading of Genesis

generative, as he charts (for a Palestinian Jewish audience) the

increasing universalism of God's call and covenant with the patriarch,

which both elects a particular people and means for its blessing to fill

the earth. I have written about this previously (in fact, in my UTS

application essay!) but upon reflection, I find the argument all the

more compelling for its relation to Origen's sacramental and trinitarian

logic. But more on this well below.

The Lucan canticles complete the circle by bringing this early

Christian logic back into poetry, and ultimately into the church's

liturgical life. Christ (in the Benedictus) and Mary (in the Magnificat)


8

become the bearers of blessing, and thus of reconciliation between

separated peoples and revolutionary justice. Of the critical

commentators I find Bovon most persuasive here, but my case around these

passages is at least as much liturgical as it is historical-critical.

II. Blessing II. Blessing II. Blessing II. Blessing and Marriage, Distinguished and Relatedand Marriage, Distinguished and Relatedand Marriage, Distinguished and Relatedand Marriage, Distinguished and Related

[Genre: Practical theology, including both liturgics and polity]

The vexed question of the “blessing of same-sex unions” provides

the subject for this essay. In particular, growing from the practice of

the communities that have nourished me, I want to focus on the function

and implications of the word “blessing” in this context. What do we

mean by a blessing here? What does such blessing accomplish? What

broader theological and practical implications, in particular, do the

use of blessing rites in this context suggest?

Over the past seven years, I have watched three different

communities (which happen to be Episcopalian) vigorously deploy the

language of blessing in their internal and external lives. Anne Fowler,

recently-retired rector of St John's, Jamaica Plain, was often called


9

upon to close otherwise-secular rallies for marriage equality in prayer;

she invariably used a version of the Aaronic blessing in Genesis.

Stephanie Spellers, founding organizer of The Crossing, Boston,

understood blessing as the heart of her priestly ministry there, using

such language in her outreach to a largely post-Christian missional

context. St Michael's, Manhattan, like the other two churches, regularly

offered “blessings” for same-sex couples which mirrored marriage

services. The practices of these communities vis à vis blessing,

together with the relevant deliberations and documents of the Episcopal

Church, are the starting point for this proposed dissertation.

Dogmatics, after all, needs a church. Other denomination-level

discussions of the same matters, however, are certainly relevant; I

expect to treat the homologous Lutheran and Presbyterian discussions, at

least, as well as giving some attention to Reformed and probably Roman

Catholic sacramental theologies. I will not consider this argument

successful if it fails to take such data into account.

Within liturgical practice, I find three useful analogies between

the para-marital blessing and other, less-controversial uses of blessing


10

language. The first is the blessing of the created order made particular

in, e.g., the consecration of liturgical hardware, or the blessing of

herbs on rogation days and candles on the Feast of the Presentation.

Advocates of blessing same-sex unions often make this argument a

fortiori: If we can bless boats and house pets, then why not the love of

human beings? The second is the blessing or commissioning of persons for

particular ministries, with the ministry in question here being that a

couple undertakes together. Something like this, I would posit, is what

the Church of England's very recent guidelines on the subject (in the

“Pilling Report”) have in mind: They make it a point not to model the

service on a marriage, which inevitably makes it look more like

commissioning (say) a Lay Eucharistic Visitor. The third, and to my mind

the most a propos, is the analogy to the blessing offered to non-

communicants specifically in place of the Eucharist. A blessing, in this

case, would be a para-sacramental act, modeled functionally on the

sacrament, casting the recipient under its penumbra if not fully under

its shade.

With the image of “penumbra,” I deliberately invoke the imagery


11

of Justice Douglas' Supreme Court opinion in Griswold v. Connecticut,

which found a right to marital privacy not in the text of any particular

clause of the US Constitution but in its “penumbras and emanations”.

That finding has subsequently underpinned those of Roe v. Wade, Lawrence

v. Texas, and most recently U.S. v. Windsor. My point is less to endorse

the logic of that line of cases—the queer critique of Lawrence in Puar

2006 is notably compelling—than it is to rhetorically (re)assert the

relevance of high US constitutional theory to theology done in a US

context.

As I have often said in conversation, I do not know what a

“blessing of a same-sex union” may be, but I am confident of what it

is not—namely, a sacramental marriage. That formulation, in turn,

requires at least a partial account of sacramental marriage. Christian

theologies of marriage have proven notoriously difficult to systematize,

from the earliest New Testament records to the present. The aporia at

the heart of Matthew 22:18-28/Luke 20:22-32, for instance, is a moment

of apophatic apocalyptic, whereas the (arguably pseudo-Pauline) witness

of Ephesians 5 is either primarily ecclesiological or a troublingly


12

uncritical reinscription of patriarchal norms. I will not attempt here

to define a new, comprehensive synthesis on marriage, but I do take the

following three points as axiomatic: A sacramental marriage (1) must

describe itself as a marriage; (2) its participants should be recognized

as the celebrants; and (3) it must, at least at the outset, intend one

party's death as its temporal horizon.

It might be objected that these axioms are missing several

traditional descriptors. I have not, for instance, said anything in

particular about sex, e.g. by enjoining lifelong fidelity to a single

partner. Although I will often speak of “couples”, I do not treat the

number of parties as essential. Nor does my account engage with language

about marriage's purpose of “mutual help and comfort”, in either a

traditional or a more feminist mode. My reasons for this silence are

twofold.

1) I do not wish to endorse the rather self-justifying tendency of the

more conservative theologies of gay marriage to strongly emphasize

partner exclusivity as the basis of a Christian marriage ethic. Older

queer theologies often reflected the broad range of practices,


13

monogamous and otherwise, within queer communities—a point helpfully and

courageously remembered throughout Cheng 2011. Likewise, too great an

emphasis on a mutuality ethic assumes that marriage, to be justifiable,

must be free of internal power dynamics, which seems to me simply false.

To put the same point more positively, I want to be open, at least, to

queer theology drawing insight from poly and kink communities. I do not

propose to enter that conversation here, but I would regret foreclosing

it.

2) The factors I do choose to enumerate—couple as celebrant; a self-

description as marriage; a lifetime commitment—all seem to me most

theologically relevant. They relate to the questions of agency and

eschatology, both of which are crucial to understanding marriage as a

sacrament. They name marriage's celebrant and horizon, and in turn its

relation to Jesus Christ, ecumenically regarded as the one true

Sacrament of Whom the others (however enumerated) are particular

expressions.

Liturgies for the blessing of same-sex unions, as deployed in my

home parishes, have often met condition (2), of emphasizing the couple


14

as celebrants, but by definition have demurred on (1), calling the union

a marriage (unless previously named as such by the state). It is on

these grounds that I find the analogy to the para-Eucharistic blessing

most instructive. Blessings of a house or a newly-commissioned lector

are easily understood as extensions of the divine blessing of creation,

on the one hand, and as exercises of the baptismal charism on the other.

The blessing of a same-sex union draws from neither. It declares itself

a liturgical, celebratory action that exists in parallel to a sacrament

without fully partaking in the sacramental grace.

Such liturgies have tended to grow out of situations where gay and

lesbian couples are marginal in the broader society but welcome in

particular parishes. Episcopal clergy are bound by canon to offer

marriage rites only when the couple would be legally married in the same

jurisdiction, yoking sacramental to state understandings of marriage. In

the absence of marriage equality, then, some such para-sacramental

action is in fact the best a supportive priest could canonically offer.

Their use as such was originally prophetic, and remains thus in much of

the church: I think of the Diocese of Texas, which has authorized two


15

parishes to employ the trial rite for the blessing of relationships, but

could not (without canonical revision, or else disobedience) allow the

use of a Prayer Book marriage rite.

This origin, I would posit, has been crucial to LGBT advocates'

enthusiasm for official rites of blessing—for instance, as commissioned

at the Episcopal Church's General Convention in 2009 and approved for

provisional use in 2012. The goal has not been formally committing the

church to marriage equality in the sacramental and canonical arenas, but

honoring and empowering the work of welcoming congregations and

dioceses. An illustrative legislative anecdote: At both conventions, the

Diocese of Massachusetts had sponsored revisions to the marriage canons

that would have rendered them gender-neutral, the most elegant solution

if canonical marriage equality were the goal. Those proposed resolutions

were rerouted from the Canons Committee to that on the Prayer Book,

Liturgy, and Music, and ultimately merged with resolutions on blessing

same-sex unions—in keeping, in fact, with the legislative strategy of

the LGBT advocates in Integrity. (The details of the legislative process

are important here, as church legislation is one of the major venues for


16

informal dogmatics at the denominational scale. I believe a similar

story would emerge from other mainline churches' processes on the same

subject.)

III. Blessing a ParaIII. Blessing a ParaIII. Blessing a ParaIII. Blessing a Para----Marriage: A Thought ExperimentMarriage: A Thought ExperimentMarriage: A Thought ExperimentMarriage: A Thought Experiment

[Genre: Social ethics]

Why focus on para-marriage when marriage, itself, is both so

important in Christian practice and so much under threat as a civil

institution? Perhaps there is some need for para-marital blessing for

same-sex couples in jurisdictions that will not marry them civilly. What

will be the use of such blessings when marriage equality is a universal

norm?

America has a long and problematic history of legally excluding

socially disempowered groups from marriage, including not only same-sex

couples but Black people under slavery. Marriage's traditional role as

guarantee of legitimate capital transfer is reflected today in the

middle-class conflation of marriage with professional stability and


17

homeownership. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that the lifelong

commitment entailed by sacramental marriage not be undertaken without

precisely that undergirding of material stability. Marriage therefore

not only feels, but actually is, out of reach for many marginal

communities. Queer and feminist critiques of marriage, up to and

including today's sophisticated critiques of “homonationalism” as

applied to marriage equality (Puar 2006), have long made this case.

Blessing of relationships would therefore be pastorally appropriate and

even prophetic, not only when marriage is legally unavailable, but when

it is prudentially unwise.

Consider, for instance, the following stock scenario, gathered

from pastoral and sociological literature. A non-cohabiting couple in

their early twenties has an unexpected but welcome child. The woman is

relatively stably employed and provides the majority of the child's

financial and parenting support. The father believes that if he married

his girlfriend, she would expect him to be the primary breadwinner,

which neither his education nor his employment history would allow.

Short of marriage, however, he is proudly and frequently present to his


18

child, understanding his role as a father primarily in terms of care and

“quality time”. The mother, for her part, is proud that she can

support both herself and her child without depending on a decent but

perhaps somewhat undependable man.

This couple has discerned that marriage is not for them, at this

time, on the kinds of economic and prudential grounds to which mainline

pastors are generally trained to defer. Nevertheless, if either member

of the couple was part of a church, or approached one—say, for the child

to be baptized—it might well be worth considering, in a pastoral

setting, whether some form of public recognition of their relationship,

short of marriage, would be appropriate and helpful. Blessing rites

could provide such an option, giving the couple a meaningful chance to

discern and liturgically enact the character they want their

relationship to have. It could, indeed, offer a pastoral word to this

couple, and a prophetic word to the broader community—that their

relationship, in its complexities and imperfections, is still valuable

and important in God's eyes.

In such a scenario, a blessing would not be an option in churches


19

that assume any non-marital relationship is too imperfect to bless, and

perhaps even in those that see marriage as the ideal standard for human

relationships. In the former case, a blessing would be unthinkable; in

the latter, pastorally disastrous through its obvious condescension. The

analogy to the eucharistic blessing is once again instructive here.

A real-world example prompted this thought experiment. In 2009,

the Church of England formalized a previously informal practice of

simultaneously baptizing children and marrying their parents. Liturgies

were propagated (a simple recombination of existing rites), alongside a

celebratory press release. That remarkable official document

acknowledged the massive attitudinal and demographic shift that brought

one in five couples to marriage with preexisting children, while still

expressing a hope that this sacramental moment will be a “new

beginning”. Far from a shift in normative sexual ethics, I read this as

this is a subtle call to repentance, named (no doubt sincerely) as

“welcome”. The Foucaultian ironies here speak for themselves. Gay and

lesbian critics were quick to point out that it reflects profound

heterosexual privilege. I would add that, on the whole, it could be


20

analyzed as an especially visible attempt to reinscribe existing

theologies and liturgies for Christian marriage on a changing

institution of the larger society.

My own thought experiment is meant to make explicit how marriage

language tends to conflate theological and socioeconomic realities.

Often, the force of that conflation is to naturalize and “baptize”

existing social norms. Churches that desire to offer hospitality and

solidarity to marginalized people nevertheless balk at detaching

sacramental marriage from the socioeconomic expectations that attend

marriage as a state and social institution. If sacramental marriage

were, in fact, clearly distinct in practice from socioeconomic marriage,

there would be much more room for prophetic critique of the latter on

the basis of the former. In the absence of that clear distinction,

blessing liturgies developed for same-sex couples may be a fruitful site

for other kinds of marginalized people to have their relationships

affirmed. I am not aware of such rites being used in this way, but I

hope this proposal points to the prophetic creativity potentially

implicit in their language.


21

IV. Blessing, Marriage, and CitizenshipIV. Blessing, Marriage, and CitizenshipIV. Blessing, Marriage, and CitizenshipIV. Blessing, Marriage, and Citizenship

[Genre: Political theology]

Doesn't a para-marital blessing, or indeed a para-eucharistic

blessing, create a situation of “separate but equal” or “second-class

citizenship”? When I posit the analogy between para-Eucharistic and

para-marital blessings in church conversations, my interlocutors tend to

respond with these metaphors. If we offer some people marriages and

others blessings, then the blessing is self-evidently a lesser honor. My

usual response is that there are good reasons not to receive communion.

One might be Jewish, say, or not in good conscience. Likewise, there

might be good reasons not to marry—a point that resonates with my fellow

urban Episcopalians, especially those familiar with feminist and queer

critiques of the institution from the 1970s. I do not, however, wish to

dismiss altogether the intuitive connection between marriage and

citizenship, as my questioners have named it. It is too deeply grounded

in my communities, and too instructive. It is admittedly unfashionable

in liturgically-oriented political theologies, which have been markedly


22

anti-Erastian since the Tractarians and anti-Constantinian since the

postliberals. Granted that our politeuma is properly in heaven, our

marriages, per Jesus' explicit teaching, are not. In reflection on

sacramental marriage, metaphors and logics drawn from earthly

governance—in the present case, from liberal democracy—are quite

properly yoked to those of the Bible.

This is not, however, to say a more robustly eschatological

politics is useless here. Any sacrament has an eschatological horizon.

For marriage, however, it is a personal eschaton (death) and a national

eschaton (justice). This is a situation for a method like Hooker's,

seeking convergences between exegesis and regiment in the underlying

logic of law through contemplative reason. This is not merely special

pleading for an Anglican founder, but a methodological point. A

eucharistic politics is more ecclesial, focusing on our heavenly

politeuma; a marital politics is more national—a stance with at least as

many problematics as promises, especially in light of contemporary queer

theory. Marriage equality may be necessary for queer liberation without

being sufficient.


23

In fact, para-marital blessing liturgies, propounded (officially,

in the Episcopal Church; unofficially in others) as a pastoral response

to the needs of gay and lesbian parishioners, do not institute marriage

equality for sacramental purposes. I suspect this inconsistency with

marriage-equality norms is both unconscious and temporary. Within the

Episcopal Church, it is plausible that the forthcoming report of a

special commission on the Episcopal Church's theology of marriage will

give General Convention occasion to revise the canons and Prayer Book

such that straight and gay couples become equal before the altar. In

other churches, homologous processes are likely to reach a similar end

sooner or later. The UUA's policy on “holy unions” makes an

interesting analogy in a non-sacramental setting.

Various articulations of the relation between state and

sacramental marriage are possible, all of which have recently had

constituencies within the church among supporters of marriage equality.

When the state is unsupportive, some advocates have urged it to “get

out of the marriage business” and institute “civil unions for all”,

leaving marriage to the churches. When the state is supportive and the


24

church seems less so, the option of “blessing for everybody” becomes

more attractive—the latter position having some support, especially

among those who find the new blessing rite to be better-adapted to

contemporary marriage than the 1979 texts.

A telling anecdote: In late 2011, after New York State established

marriage equality, then-Bishop of New York Mark Sisk forbade his clergy

to sign marriage paperwork for same-sex couples, lest it give offense to

the wider church. He likewise ordered gay clergy to civilly marry their

domestic partners and seek church blessing on their unions—for the same

reason. The drive to respectability, however defined, has its own power

in marital matters, especially within the church. I expect that

forthcoming debates over the relation of sacramental to civil marriage

on the one hand and to blessing on the other will be governed by that

drive first of all.

The languages of blessing and citizenship may seem disjunct,

derived as they are from Biblical narrative and liturgical practice on

the one hand, and from the politics of modern liberal democracy on the

other. To respond to the church's objection, a theology of blessing must


25

be able to think them together: Blessing must not erase the obligations

and protections of full citizenship in both the polis and the basileia.

Thinking both forms of politeuma together, in turn, requires an answer

to weighty objections, especially from postliberals, to Anglican

Erastianism. The church's intuition is correct that marriage, as a this-

worldly sacrament, is bound up with citizenship in the polis and thus

with the liberal rights regime. The liturgical postliberals are likewise

correct that Biblical apocalyptic, as liturgically enacted in the

eucharist, relativizes the polis to the basileia. The blessing of

unions, in fact, raises precisely this disjunction. It invokes the

eschatological horizon of Biblical blessing without explicit reference

to the polis. It is suggestive on this point that each blessing of a

same-sex union I know of in the communities named above has either

immediately followed a parish eucharist or concluded with a eucharistic

celebration in its own right. With respect to the polis, a blessing will

often reflect second-class citizenship; with respect to the basileia,

its function is to deny it. Such blessings therefore function pastorally

in the basileia and prophetically in the polis, whereas marriage is


26

properly a pastoral rite in both settings. This would apply both to

same-sex couples and to economically marginal couples, as in the case

above.

V. The Agent of BlessingV. The Agent of BlessingV. The Agent of BlessingV. The Agent of Blessing

[Genre: Theology proper, especially pneumatology]

Who blesses, I am often asked—God, the priest, the church?

Westermann 1978 suggests that blessing is a constant, immanent activity

of God in creation, with the church's role being a naming and

affirmation of the same. The model is that of proclamation rather than

speech-act. Frettlöh 2005, enlarging on Westermann, models churchly

blessing as a participation in and repetition of God's blessing of

creation in the first Genesis account, understood providentially.

I essentially concur with these (very Protestant, very Lutheran,

very Christocentric) accounts, but I would propose an additional

pneumatological emphasis. Ecumenical eucharistic theology tends to be

Christological at its core, with an important but logically secondary

role for the Holy Spirit; the formulas of both eucharistic and marriage


27

services bear this out. Para-sacramental blessings, I would suggest, may

be fruitfully modeled as a pneumatological extension of the sacrament's

Christological event—perhaps (I will not be held to this just yet) as a

procession. I ground this claim in Nicene and especially Cappadocian

pneumatology, which proceeds along a Christological logic of

divinization but with a distinct application to the particular life of

communities.

To the extent that modern pneumatologies have tended to emphasize

the Holy Spirit's immanent works, this is already in keeping with

Westermann. My divergent emphasis would be upon the Church's gift of

pronouncing that blessing and rightful confidence in the Spirit's

affirmative response, by analogy to the eucharistic epiclesis. The point

is not to control the Holy Spirit, but to join in the Spirit's life.

My inspiration here is, again, Origen, for whom the Holy Spirit is

at work in the whole world leading reason into truth, and in turn to the

Church where the Truth is embodied. The movement of blessing from God

through Abraham to the nations is mirrored by the Holy Spirit's work in

the world, bringing it before Christ, who in turn offers all things to


28

the Father. Origen does not make explicit the connection between his

Genesis exegesis and his account of the Trinity, but the common logic is

there. Particularity and universality are not set up as opposites or

paradox, but as an opportunity for procession (in a looser sense).

Coakley's recent reading of the Holy Spirit's role in sparking and

purifying human desire is likewise overtly Origenistic, and especially

provocative in the marital context. (My argument, it will be noted, has

largely sidestepped desire and indeed sex as such, aside from an

excursus on monogamy; I am grateful to leave eros in such capable, other

hands, for the time being.) What I most want to draw from Coakley here

is what she shares with Rogers, namely a sense of the Holy Spirit's role

as friend to matter and thus a fortiori to the nations.

The eschatological core of blessing is hidden: It tends, we hope,

to lead unto sacrament, even as the Spirit prepares the believer for

Christ. To return, then, to the question of agency: The priest blesses,

on behalf of the church, which invokes the Holy Spirit to lead the

blessed to the Son and thence to the Father.

Para-Marital Blessing as Biblical, Sacramental, and Political Practice

Documents

Transcript of Para-Marital Blessing as Biblical, Sacramental, and Political Practice