Relationship Wreck

Peter Leithart makes these insightful (as usual) comments on the tweeks in what we mean by relationships:

"British sociologist Anthony Giddens has commented on the rise of what he calls “pure relationships.” A “pure relationship” is one in which “the relationship exists solely for whatever rewards that relationship as such can deliver.” A pure relationship has no external anchors or supports, but depends entirely on the commitment of the two who enter the relationship. 

Today, for example, we distinguish friendships from working relationships and family relations, thinking of a friend “specifically as someone with whom one has a relationship unprompted by anything other than the rewards that the relationship provides." 

In recent decades, marriage has increasingly come to be seen as a pure relationship, one that is “initiated for, and kept going for as long as it delivers emotional satisfaction." This is not, of course, how marriage was understood in earlier centuries: “Marriage was a contract, often initiate by parents or relatives rather than by the marital partners themselves,"  and in the Church, marriage was seen as having a “sacramental” character, even when it was not technically understood as a sacrament. 

The dangers go even deeper, however, since American Christians often regard their relationship with God on the model of “pure relationship.” When an Evangelical speaks of a “personal relationship with Jesus,” he’s not talking about a liturgically and catechetically formed relationship, surrounded by the supports of fellow believers, rituals, signs, and texts.  He’s talking about self-standing, free-floating, pure relationship, one made all the more unstable by the fact that one of the parties is not visible."

Citation: Leithart, Peter J. From the “Quodlibet” department in “Touchstone” magazine. June 2009. Page 5.