G-6.0106b says absolutely nothing about difficult and ambiguous cases (like “living together”) and nothing about how to assess them. Despite the common assumptions of critics and proponents alike, it says only what it says, and does not say what it does not say.
The framers of G-6.0106b apparently had two main intentions in mind. First, they wanted to accentuate the positive. They wanted to set forth, with all due brevity, the basic norms of Christian sexual morality. On this score they succeeded admirably. At the same time, as everyone knows, they wanted to rule some things out, but only by indirection. On this score, mercifully, they did not succeed. If they had indeed stated explicitly what they wanted to rule out, there was an excellent chance that G-6.0106b would never have been ratified. Therefore, because of this calculated reticence — this crucial textual difference between what is explicit and what is veiled — it cannot be assumed automatically that the intentions of those who voted for ratification were exactly the same as those who drafted the statement. What is certain is that G-6.0106b will bear an obvious and more generous interpretation than what its drafters had supposed.
As to the “plain sense,” Professor Migliore is hardly convincing. If appealing to sheer generalities about love and biblical narrative (by which one could prove almost anything, as Hans Frei would have been the first to observe) were enough to settle the matter, then it is hard to see why the church, with some of the best minds of a generation, has been debating this matter so catastrophically for more than 25 years. Difficult texts cannot be silenced by resort to abstract appeals.
Posted Feb. 7, 2002
George Hunsinger is the McCord Professor of Systematic Theology at Princeton Seminary..
