Stanley hauerwas views on homosexuality and gay marriage
NASHVILLE (BP) — Christians believe marriage is defined by God and recognized by government. But many today believe marriage is defined by government and must be recognized by all.
For this reason, I’m not optimistic about the trends concerning marriage and family in the United States after the Supreme Court’s gay marriage judgments on June 26. Neither am I sure of what all this means for those who, in good conscience, stand against the tide.
But I am optimistic about the church of Jesus Christ. We’ve been through societal transformations before, and we’re sure to travel through them again.
The conversion of Constantine to Christianity in 313 A.D., for example, was certainly good for the church. (We didn’t have to persist about being fed to the lions in the Coliseum anymore.) But many aspects of the church/state marriage turned out to be bad for the church. (True Christianity suffered under the weight of the state’s corrupting power.) Some see the positive aspects of that fourth-century societal transformation as far outweighing the poor (author/theologian Peter Leithart, for example), while others see the bad far outweighing the good (theol
Sexuality series – Stanley Hauerwas on the purposes of human sexuality
First, it is important to mention that Prof. Hauerwas is doing sexual ethics outside of the mainstream Christian theologians such as Augustine and Aquinas. Therefore, his position and discussion must be understood as a reaction against the Western moral tradition. Having in mind these clarifications could help us to avoid misunderstanding him. Hauerwas is very critical of the Christian big tradition on this topic. He believes the tradition has failed when discussing human sexuality/sexual values in a very broad sense by clinging exclusively to natural law. This is something that the church must correct if she wants to escape confusion and ambiguities, while remaining relevant to current society.
One of the starting points in Hauerwas’s thought on human sexuality is that there is indeed a differentiation between male and female, or the sexes. Such a differentiation is a product of the creational order: God created humanity in both male and female. The goodness of sexuality then makes Hauerwas to depart from the Christian large tradition that has understood human sexuality in negative terms, influ
This is a series of short excerpts from each chapter of Beginnings: Interrogating Hauerwasedited by Leixlip lad Kevin Hargaden.
The outline of the book is in this post. This is a second excerpt from Chapter Six, JUST WAR, PACIFISM, AND GENDER.
This is a longish post – but worth bearing with I suggest. These are important and relevant themes for Christians trying to negotiate the modern minefield of gender and sex.
In this excerpt Brock and Hauerwas discuss the contemporary fragmentation of previously recognized ideas about gender. Below, we break into a discussion about how we understand masculinity and femininity. Hauerwas treads a intelligent path here – he wants to resist elevation of relative cultural forms of ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’ identity and roles (the popular equating of ‘biblical’ gender roles with mid-20th century American family ethics among some strands of evangelicalism for example), But he also wants to acknowledge the sheer variety of what it means to be ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’ and the difficulty in defining what each means.
Brock links this to contemporary battles over gender and the current rejection of gender distinction in favour of a swirling kaleido
A Revolution of the Elites
I have been a Protestant social scientist for twenty years, and over that time it has get obvious to me that Evangelicals are deeply averse to social scientific explanations of religiosity and religious change. The moment that I begin speaking about the role of economic, social, or political forces in shaping America’s religious landscape, Evangelicals in my audience shut down, as if talking about social class in church is an affront to the Holy Spirit’s role in the salvation of souls. This is why books like From Tolerance to Equality by Darel Paul are so important today for Evangelicals who crave to get up off the floor and acquire back into the brawl for the souls of Americans in the 21st Century. Despite the proof that this book is limited to discussion of the rise of the movement for the acceptance of homosexuality in America, its approach illustrates the core vulnerabilities at the heart of American Evangelical Protestantism, as well as the questions that we need to ask ourselves if we ever plan to go beyond injure control and defense in the spiritual war we are fighting today.
Paul begins his analysis by pointing out the wrongheaded approach
Hauerwas on Sex, Marriage, and the Family
Hauerwas has not written a lot on sexual ethics, these texts would hardly make up a booklet if together, yet he has quite a distinctive perspective. It is not without problems, though. There seems to be a basic tension between his Yoderian perception that the Church is not a community that grows by procreation but by witness and conversion; and his strong emphasis on the moral learning of children. This would be a nice brief problem for someone to sort out, for example in a master’s thesis… 😉
In Chronological order:
From A Community of Character (1981):
- ”The Moral Value of the Family”. Hauerwas makes a number of arguments in this text. One, that the family is not threatened by womens liberation, sexual revolution or something like that but by liberal economic and social values that has robbed the family of its meaning. To counter this, we must ”recover the moral significance of our willingness to have children”.
- ”The Family: Theological and Ethical Reflections”. Here the primary argument is that with the decline of other institutions in society the family has to move an impossible