“Every force at work in the culture tells people they have a right....” says Richard B. Hays, professor of New Testament at Duke University Divinity School. Although his voice trails off and he concludes the sentence with only a shrug, the rest of his conversation about marriage makes it clear he thinks the culture misses the point when rights are given precedence over responsibilities, freedom over fidelity. “Within the scriptural framework,” says Hays, “marriage is an analogue of God’s faithfulness to his people. It is a binding commitment, not contingent upon the feelings of the partners.” Hays reports that his young students at Duke and the somewhat older and more jaded group he taught at Yale are fascinated to hear a perspective that stands over against the prevailing voices of their experience.
Faithfulness is not the virtue our fast-paced mobile culture manages best. As Alan Wolfe of Boston University pointed out in the Autumn 1997 issue of the Wilson Quarterly (in an article that ultimately was rather optimistic), America was founded on an act of disloyalty and nurtured by immigrants who turned their backs on their birthplaces. Today’s seminarians are more likely than those of earlier generations to be products of broken homes. Many have themselves experienced divorce. Second-career students by definition have given up on at least one job. Can theological schools teach loyalty? To what extent should seminaries model virtues outside the classroom—and to what extent can or should students be required to show evidence of fidelity?
Commitment, Marriage, Celibacy
Theological students are deeply involved in ordering their sexual fidelities. Many students marry during their seminary years; a few divorces result from the stresses of seminary life. Single students, whatever their sexual orientation, order their lifestyles with differing degrees of guidance from their varied traditions Orthodox seminarians have to choose between marriage and celibacy before they are ordained—and only those who choose celibacy can aspire to the office of bishop. Roman Catholic priests in the making are formed toward celibacy.
“Every force at work in the culture tells people they have a right....” says Richard B. Hays, professor of New Testament at Duke University Divinity School. Although his voice trails off and he concludes the sentence with only a shrug, the rest of his conversation about marriage makes it clear he thinks the culture misses the point when rights are given precedence over responsibilities, freedom over fidelity. “Within the scriptural framework,” says Hays, “marriage is an analogue of God’s faithfulness to his people. It is a binding commitment, not contingent upon the feelings of the partners.” Hays reports that his young students at Duke and the somewhat older and more jaded group he taught at Yale are fascinated to hear a perspective that stands over against the prevailing voices of their experience.
Faithfulness is not the virtue our fast-paced mobile culture manages best. As Alan Wolfe of Boston University pointed out in the Autumn 1997 issue of the Wilson Quarterly (in an article that ultimately was rather optimistic), America was founded on an act of disloyalty and nurtured by immigrants who turned their backs on their birthplaces. Today’s seminarians are more likely than those of earlier generations to be products of broken homes. Many have themselves experienced divorce. Second-career students by definition have given up on at least one job. Can theological schools teach loyalty? To what extent should seminaries model virtues outside the classroom—and to what extent can or should students be required to show evidence of fidelity?
Commitment, Marriage, Celibacy
Theological students are deeply involved in ordering their sexual fidelities. Many students marry during their seminary years; a few divorces result from the stresses of seminary life. Single students, whatever their sexual orientation, order their lifestyles with differing degrees of guidance from their varied traditions Orthodox seminarians have to choose between marriage and celibacy before they are ordained—and only those who choose celibacy can aspire to the office of bishop. Roman Catholic priests in the making are formed toward celibacy.
“Marriages take place in communities, and they need community support. But precious little responsibility is taken by schools for their part in encouraging students toward fidelity,” says Hays. If any theological schools have especially strong programs aimed at strengthening student marriages, should they’re not widely known. (See “Romancing the Church,” at the end of this article, for an example of the community support Hays has in mind.) Many schools have spouses’ groups—which administrators who know better frequently refer to as “the women’s group.” At Nazarene Theological Seminary in Kansas City, Missouri, spouses are invited to participate in the “accountability groups” that are a crucial element in the school’s spiritual formation program. But spouses’ involvement in community life is often limited by distance or by the demands of child care and bringing in a wage.
Paul Lee, professor of family therapy and counseling at Assemblies of God Theological Seminary in Springfield, Missouri, says, “Strains on marriage during seminary are as great as they’re ever likely to be.” He recalls his own student days when both he and his wife worked full time while he was a full-time and his wife a part-time student. “We were too busy to realize the strain,” he said, “and it was heaven on earth every weekend.” He lists a variety of small ways in which the school attends to the needs of couples—from offering the occasional class in marriage enrichment that must be attended by both spouses, to the usual sorts of counseling, to the appointment of a staff person for student life. Finally, though, in a denomination that voted last summer to continue its ban on divorced and remarried clergy, Lee says that students accept marriage as a permanent and sexually exclusive relationship, and usually manage to work out whatever they must to keep it intact.
Roman Catholic seminaries are less hesitant to take responsibility for helping their students make commitments, and resources abound for those involved in this work. The Reverend Ray Carey, a priest in the Archdiocese of Portland and a clinical psychologist, has an article in Ripe for the Harvest: A Resource for Formation Advisors (see review in this issue's "reading list") titled “Psychosexuality and the Development of Sexuality Skills.” Carey stresses that celibacy is more a matter of working at commitment than a gift, and that celibacy is never abstract but is always lived in context. He notes that monastics living in stable communities need to develop different skills than do, for example, priests in the Canadian Northwest who need to deal with “silence, snow, and whiteness for long periods of time—and with migrating polar bears.”
On the other hand, Carey identifies specific skills—ranging from developing learned resourcefulness to monitoring fantasy and developing awareness of gratitude—that are useful in any context. Among these he includes “skills for fidelity,” about which he says, “One needs competent, prudent, and wise decision-making skills. One needs self-reflection skills in regard to interpersonal relationships in order to keep one in tune with one’s commitments. As well, one needs to be skillfully aware of what conditions make one vulnerable in regard to fidelity, which render one at risk in the face of opposing agendas.” His conclusion makes his article a gift to the larger Christian community:
In the end, as in the beginning, God is love. All that is love, therefore, is of God. It should come as no surprise, then, that much of what has been presented as skills for celibate loving also apply to those who are in exclusive loving relationships such as marriages. The fact that contexts for loving can be very different does not mean that people do not have loving in common. In fact, it seems to me we serve our church better when we begin with the assumption that celibates have more in common with married brothers and sisters than being different from them. Loving well requires skills, no matter the context.
From Flirtation to Commitment
Theological students are not seeking intimacy only with other people, of course. They are at work as well on a relationship with God. Debra K. Farrington’s former position as manager of the Graduate Theological Union Bookstore in Berkeley, California, gave her ample opportunity to watch seekers flirt with, observe, and make tentative connections to holy things. She tells, for example, of a woman who came looking for a book that would explain the Bible to her so she wouldn’t feel hopelessly confused when she went back to church for the first time in many years. Farrington’s sense of many of her customers, and many of her generation in general, is that they have been doing solo explorations of a variety of religious traditions, and tend to wander back eventually to their own Christian roots. She tells her own story: born in 1955, with Baptist and Methodist forebears, her parents took her to Unitarian and Presbyterian Sunday schools before converting to Reform Judaism. She left organized religion in early adolescence and eventually returned to the church—and now tells her story, “not because it is unique, but because it is not particularly unusual.”
Farrington has written Romancing the Holy, a book that is a guide for such seekers finding their way into Christianity. She is insistent that there is no one starting point for the journey, and she has chapters on spiritual direction, retreats, spirituality online, prayer groups, and spiritual reading as well as her first (and longest) chapter on the church. Farrington’s approach to the church was tentative at first and not to be pushed, but eventually she realized, “I need the community of other seekers if I am to truly grow. Left to my own devices, I move further and further inward until, finally, there are no road markers to tell me where I am.... When I seek God on my own, I see only the faces that make sense to me, that are familiar and comfortable. I can ignore anything which does not seem to fit, or which causes me frustration or pain.”
Farrington’s book may well strike those rooted in the Christian tradition as surprisingly shallow in some places, but her commitment toward deepening her own relationship with the holy and helping her contemporaries along their own paths is evident and she does not hesitate to point out that a good, solid relationship takes sustained work and effort over long periods of time.
The romance carries some into institutions of theological education—sometimes with dizzying speed. A clergywoman of my acquaintance went back to church at Christmas, was baptized at Easter, and enrolled in seminary in the fall. She emerged with considerable facility at theological reasoning but with big gaps in her knowledge of the tradition, and was prone to call for help with questions like: “What is this ‘Kyrie’ (she pronounced it ‘Kyree’) thing they want me to sing every Sunday?” and was surprised to discover that the prayer has been part of the church’s worship for 1500 years, and was not an invention of her flock. To her credit, she is doing what she entered the seminary to prepare to do, and she is a faithful shepherd who continues to study and is filling in the gaps in her knowledge of things churchly. The question remains, though—at what point in one’s relationship with the Holy is one ready for graduate theological study?
The phenomenon of students enrolling in theological education for the sake of personal fulfillment instead of preparation for professional ministry is not new: In 1985, Ari Goldman, a New York Times reporter, spent a year at Harvard Divinity School. During his first days of orientation, as he recounts in The Search for God at Harvard, he “learned the dangers of asking what people planned to do with their degree.” Students “spoke in generalities about the joys of studying comparative religion and then quickly changed the subject when I asked them what practical value this would be after they graduated.” When he checked back in with these students five years later, only one of his friends was serving a church as an ordained minister: others were secretaries, business people, pursuing other degrees. Goldman does not deride his fellows’ impracticality, however. Instead, he writes, “My classmates at the div school were different from those at the other professional schools at Harvard. While there were many bright and thoughtful students at the law school or the business school, there were few for whom the law or business was at the core of their lives. These were disciplines they did and did well, but the disciplines didn’t define them. The more I got to know my fellow div school students, the more I found that, for them, religion was at the center. My encounter with my classmates drew me to examine my own life and try to find just where religion fit.”
Committing to Call
That today’s theological students have interesting and not particularly linear life stories does not mean that they are incapable of commitment. Every year people turn their back on promising careers and financial security to enter theological studies. They move their families or commute to them on weekends. They go into debt, sometimes significant debt. They juggle the pieces of their lives in ways that are breathtaking to watch. And then there’s Wessie Spearman, who will graduate from the Lutheran School of Theology at Philadelphia this May 17—after twelve years of part-time study.
When asked if she knew at the outset how long it would take to complete her course work, Spearman replied, “Lord, no!” But as the seventy-year-old pastor of an African Methodist Episcopal church in Camden, New Jersey, and full-time children’s librarian explained, “When I could (take classes), I would. When I couldn’t, I didn’t.” But her denomination requires pastors to hold theological degrees, so she gradually worked her way through LSTP’s Urban Theological Institute, which features night and weekend classes. Among her many plans for her free time once she graduates is a building program for her seventy-member family-oriented church. When she heard herself described as a model of fidelity, she chuckled. “It sounds so good when you talk about it,” she said. She paused. “But when you’re doing it, it just sounds like hard work.”
Romancing the Church
Raymond Hedin left his Roman Catholic seminary in 1966, but the ways in which he was formed there have had a major influence on his life. After attending a class reunion, he realized that his former classmates—both within the priesthood and those who had left—were similarly influenced. After three years of conversations with his classmates, he wrote:
Our minor seminary years [high school and the first year of college] constituted, in a sense, a period of early dating and courtship with our future mate, a period to which we brought our youth and eagerness and a consequent willingness to bend to the seminary’s wishes in order to please her. At the same time, the seminary showed its best face to us, luring us into a stronger commitment through a genuine initial display of support and warmth, along with a certain degree of flexibility. Of course, even in that period the seminary had some of the irritating legalistic quirks which would harden later, at the major seminary. The classmates who were less happy at the minor seminary were those who noticed these traits and were bothered by them earlier than the rest of us.
Most of us, however, were still enamored at that time. Only after five years of courtship, after we committed ourselves more fully, did the seminary’s less appealing tendencies reveal themselves to be major character flaws. We had gotten ourselves involved with someone rigid and controlling, and by this point we had been in the relationship too long to pass over these qualities lightly. Hence for many of us, the romance ended. We broke off the relationship at its worst. Others stayed with her—they needed her more, they saw analogous rigidity in themselves and so couldn’t put all the blame on her—and saw the relationship do what even long-term, stifling marriages can occasionally do: open up and become exploratory and exciting again. And having felt the relationship revive, my classmates were willing to make the final, seemingly lifetime commitment. They became priests, they married the church.
—from Married to the Church, by Raymond Hedin. Copyright 1995 Indiana University Press, Bloomington and Indianapolis, Indiana. Reprinted with permission.
From a wedding sermon based on 1 John 4:7-21
The text tells us two important truths about love that can shape our understanding of marriage.
Love is made known through the death of Jesus for us.
Love enacted in community makes God known to the world.
Let us think about these truths in turn.
Love is made known through the death of Jesus for us. That is the keynote of John’s message: love proceeds from God. God is the initiator. There is the pattern that defines love for us. What does love look like? The Scriptures answer by pointing to Jesus’ death on the cross. Jesus surrendered power and divine prerogative and gave himself for us. That is what love is: self-giving for the beloved. When we know the overflowing love of God, we let it flow through us to others. That points us to the second important truth.
Love enacted in community makes God known to the world. The love of God continues to be visible, not only through the telling of the story of how God sent his Son for us but also through the ongoing life of the community of faith that lives by that story. Through our acts of love, the invisible God is made visible-palpable among us.
What does all this have to do with marriage? Just this: the love that binds man and woman in Christian marriage is the love of the cross.
That means, Tim and Sue, that your marriage is a covenant which will endure, “for better or worse ... in sickness and in health.” Not long ago, I sat and prayed with a friend whose wife was unconscious in the intensive care unit. Amidst my friend’s suffering and uncertainty about the future, I saw in his love and tireless care for her a parable of the love of God, a love that surmounts fear and suffering.
But do not suppose that all suffering comes from outside through tragic mishaps. Your marriage is a covenant that must stand firm even if your spouse becomes a threat to your tranquility and personal fulfillment, even if the time should come when you feel that the one who shares your bed has become—for the moment, at least—your enemy. Jesus has taught us to love our enemies. Perhaps such a time will never come for you. But such times have come for Judy and me, and I suspect that they have come also to your parents and married friends. Certainly, in marriage there is joy. Certainly, there is companionship and comfort. But marriage in Christ can never be a tentative coupling that lasts only as long as the good times roll. The joy of marriage in Christ endures all pain because the love that binds you in Christ is rooted deeply in the love of God.
Thus, in making the covenant of marriage, you make a covenant to love one another unconditionally, freely, sacrificially. In making the covenant of marriage, you promise to become servants of one another in love, you form a union that reflects the love of God and stands as a sign of God’s love in the world. Marriage is a sacrament in the true sense: it is both sign and vehicle of grace.
So, Tim and Sue, as you come to join your lives, this is our prayer for you:
May your marriage bear witness against all shallow, self-seeking visions of love.May the community of faith stand about you to support you in love and to receive from your love.
May your marriage bear witness to the truth of the love of God and make God’s love present to others in the world.
—abridged from The Moral Vision of the New Testament: A Contemporary Introduction to New Testament Ethics, by Richard B. Hays. (HarperSanFrancisco, 1996). Reprinted with permission.