LCMS Convention Workbook St. Louis, Missouri — 2004, Page 400

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400 THEOLOGICAL DOCUMENTS—COMMISSION ON THEOLOGY AND CHURCH RELATIONS

who are born of the flesh do not easily learn the loving rhythms of
life in the Spirit.

Luther praised family life over monastic life because, instead
of merely satisfying human desires, it puts people into a truly spir-
itual struggle. Marriage is understood biblically as a relationship
in which wife and husband, parents and children, are challenged to
live by faith in God rather than by confidence in their own abili-
ties to protect themselves from their vulnerabilities to each other.'°

This means that for Christians marriage and family press be-
yond themselves to a reality that transcends this life. Marriage has
roots in our biological and flesh-oriented existence, but it images a
richer spiritual reality—the community of persons born of the
Spirit. Marriage is a school for practicing how the children of God
relate to God, themselves and one another. Marriage is thus a cre-
ated image and analogy of relationships in the church, the Body of
Christ.

Our principle then is that marriage is to be held in highest re-
gard as the context in which children born of the flesh are best
brought into the world. Marriage is the context where wife, hus-
band and children may perhaps find, as one of the church’s prayers
says, “a foretaste of our eternal home.”

It is in this light that we consider how Christians enter sexual
relationships and how they understand themselves as parents. From
this perspective we will also be able to provide wisdom to the
world at large, though we will not expect that persons who choose
to continue living life only in the flesh will necessarily be per-
suaded by a vision that calls them to repentance and new life in the
Spirit.

Marriage, Family and Procreation

Given this understanding of God’s plans for marriage and par-
enting, we can directly understand why Christians ought not choose
to pursue sexual intimacy outside of marriage. Every proposal for
experiencing sexual intimacy outside of marriage is a proposal to
continue living as individuals doomed to flesh-oriented, frustrated
biological existence.

Sexual relationship outside of marriage speaks a loud “No” to
God’s intent that men and women enjoy this gift in a context of
self-giving. In one way or another an extramarital union says that
the man and/or the woman will give and receive only in a frag-
mented and limited way—always leaving open the option that
when a more fulfilling possibility comes along, it may be seized.
Most often the notion is, as the saying goes, “you only go around
once in life.”

Perhaps the most troubling feature of same-sex relationships is
that these relationships wholly circumvent God’s intention that
there be challenging otherness and difference in the sexual rela-
tionship as well as the sexual self-fulfillment that so many seek. In
the Hebrew, Genesis 2:18 more than hints that the partner God in-
tends for the man is not only a partner but also a counter-partner. A
counter-partner is one who, by the very fact of being counter, in-
vites the spouse out of preoccupation with selfish self-fulfillment.
Christians need also to see that God intends them to locate repro-
duction and the procreation of children within a marriage. To un-
derstand this requires patient consideration of two important in-
sights.

1. Openness to Procreation: Hindering the Potential for Sexual Self-
Exploitation in Marriage

Sexual intimacy, even in marriage, threatens constantly to turn
marriage into a socially accepted setting for two people to use each
other for selfish self-fulfillment. Sinful human beings use and hurt
each other inside a marriage as well as outside of it.

God’s original creation and the promise of his continuing guid-
ance urge married couples to open their love of each other to a third
party, that is, to the children that so often can be the fruit of sexual

2004 Convention Workbook

intimacy. In this way husband and wife are helped to look beyond
themselves to someone else, someone to whom they together can
give themselves in a love resembling God’s love for us.

This insight says much to us about the need for wisdom in using
contraception in marriage. It is one thing to think carefully about
when to have children and how many to have, and whether to use
contraception. But when husband and wife decide that their sexual
intimacy will never be allowed to bring forth children, they should
examine with care whether they are selfishly seeking to circumvent
the natural plan for marital intimacy to turn outward in love for
children. The Commission’s 1981] report on Human Sexuality: A
Theological Perspective observes,

In view of the Biblical command and the blessing to “‘be fruitful and

multiply,” it is to be expected that marriage will not ordinarily be vol-

untarily childless. But, in the absence of Scriptural prohibition, there
need be no objection to contraception within a marital union which is,
as a whole, fruitful."!

A first insight, then, is that openness to procreation can help
husband and wife transcend the preoccupation with self that is
characteristic of our fallen condition, and aid them in resisting
temptations to selfish sexual exploitation of each other.

2. Procreation: Hindering the Exploitation of Children in Marriage

A second insight is that procreation, even in marriage, threat-
ens constantly to provide opportunities for husband and/or wife to
add one more selfish project to their list of accomplishments. Hav-
ing and raising a child can become not an opportunity for love but
one more occasion for engineering our own self-fulfillment.

To counter this threat God has designed the procreation of a
child to be a complex uniting of two similar but significantly dif-
ferent individuals whose union bears a new flesh that is rooted in
but different from the flesh of the parents. The child is “mine,” but
also stubbornly not mine. God teaches us to love our children the
way he loves us all. We are not to love our children because they
may be or become a fulfillment of one of our dreams. As we will
see, one of the great dangers of cloning is that the cloned person
may be brought about because some other person, the “parent,”
wants to produce another person exactly like himself or herself.

This learning to love beyond oneself happens best when hus-
band and wife together live and love and raise their children. For
this reason Christians look with sadness and dismay upon all the
new arrangements that remove procreation from the context of the
life-long union of husband and wife. Sadly, contemporary attitudes
toward marriage tempt people to continue living the doomed life
of limited, fleshly self-fulfillment rather than the free life of the
children of God.

A second insight, then, is that child-bearing that unites sexual
love with husband’s and wife’s ongoing care for a new person can
help husband and wife transcend selfish exploitation of children as
projects.

No one can claim that the simple fact of marriage with children
will automatically save men and women from their selfishness. We
are so sunk in our sin that even in the best of circumstances we
manage to bring much evil out of good. We therefore need to return
continually to God’s Word and the holy sacraments so that the cir-
cumstances provided in marriage accomplish God’s purpose of car-
rying us beyond ourselves.

Furthermore, we must carefully note that God continually raises
up children of God also in circumstances that seem removed from
God’s intention. Divorced persons struggling with single parent-
hood are touched by God’s grace and drawn to the life of the Spirit.
They accept their children as gifts from God and love them to
God’s glory. God also blesses and calls unwed mothers who con-
ceive and bear children to life in the Spirit. Children conceived and
born in circumstances outside of marriage are still fully the object
of the love of a Savior who has come to save us all. Healthy famil-