Engaging the Doctrine of Marriage. Matthew Levering
Following both creation accounts in Genesis, God enunciates the two purposes. First, he commands the couple to ‘Be fruitful and multiply’ (Gen 1:28). Second, God says that ‘Therefore a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and they shall become one flesh’ (Gen 2:24). . . . In his discussion with the Pharisees concerning divorce, Jesus linked these two creation mandates, procreation and unity” (Tarwater, Marriage as Covenant, 104–5).
35. See Eberstadt, How the West Really Lost God.
36. Cahill, Sex, Gender, and Christian Ethics, 193. See more fully Cahill, Sex, Gender, and Christian Ethics, 193–94, quoting Kasper, Theology of Christian Marriage, 30. See also the cognate view of marriage offered by Porter, “Contraceptive Use and the Authority of the Church.” For the development in marital practice (in Europe) in the medieval period, see Goody, The Development of the Family and Marriage in Europe; Herlihy, Medieval Households. See also the remarks of d’Avray regarding medieval marriage sermons: “The marriage mysticism of [thirteenth-century] model sermons was of a different kind from the Bernardine [monastic] sort: more matter-of-fact, less high-flown, less about brides and bridegrooms and more about wives and husbands” (Medieval Marriage Sermons, 2). For further discussion, see d’Avray, Medieval Marriage; d’Avray, Papacy, Monarchy and Marriage; Brooke, Medieval Idea of Marriage; Parmisano, The Craft of Love.
37. Jenson, The Triune Story, 331. As Jenson puts it earlier, “[T]he analogy between the Lord’s relation to Israel and conjugal love appears early and often in Israel’s Scripture. But now, if the sexual relation of spouses can provide an analogy for the Lord’s relation to Israel, the analogy must have some impact also the other way around. And in that direction it will open as a moral opportunity: the sexual relation of spouses can be modeled on the relation of the Lord and Israel” (Triune Story, 280). This means that self-surrendering love and the healing power of the Cross will come into play, as will the fact that God’s fallen people fell, in Adam and Eve, as a primordial marital communion of persons. Indeed, this relationality belongs to the order of creation. Jenson states, “Our creation as two different kinds of bodies, paired to each other by the paired shape and function of blatant bodily phenomena, is the way God keeps our reality as communal beings from being a mere mandate or ideal, and makes it be a fact about the actual things we are” (The Triune Story, 281). Or, put more bluntly, “it is as bodies inescapably ordered to each other by vagina and penis that our adaptation to correspondence with the himself communal [i.e. triune] God is made part of what we simply and without choice are. . . . There are of course other bonds of mutuality, most of them also in one way or another bodily. But marriage is the only one that creates an actual new bodily unit—the old myth of the creature with two backs who was forcibly divided to make woman and man rested on simple observation. The two bodies envelop and enter each other in a fashion provided for not only by shape but by their function beyond pleasure, the function of this orifice and this member of maintaining God’s human creation” (The Triune Story, 282).
38. Middleton, The Liberating Image, 51.
39. Middleton, The Liberating Image, 295.
40. Lossky, In the Image and Likeness of God, 128.
41. Wright, Surprised by Hope, 208.
42. Wright, Surprised by Hope, 279.
43. Wright, Surprised by Hope, 161.
44. Walton, The Lost World of Genesis One, 87.
45. Walton, The Lost World of Genesis One, 88.
46. He cites Weinfeld’s “Sabbath, Temple and the Enthronement of the Lord.”
47. Walton, The Lost World of Genesis One, 98.
48. Walton, The Lost World of Genesis One, 123–24.
49. Ephrem the Syrian, Hymns on Paradise, Hymn III.16, p. 96.
50. Ephrem the Syrian, Hymns on Paradise, Hymn III.16, p. 96.
51. Ephrem the Syrian, Hymns on Paradise, Hymn XV.7–8, p. 184.
52. Ephrem the Syrian, Hymns on Paradise, Hymn XV.8, p. 185.
53. Ephrem the Syrian, Hymns on Paradise, Hymn XIII.13, p. 173.
54. See the historical-critical study by Perrin, Jesus the Priest. Perrin envisions Jesus’ movement as a “counter-temple movement” concerned to bring about a “renewed sacred space,” and Perrin argues that Jesus “and his followers self-consciously functioned as proleptic priests within that quest” (Jesus the Priest, 8; see also the summaries offered on 280–83). See also Barber, “The New Temple.”
55. Staniloae, The Experience of God, 150.
56. Bennett, Water Is Thicker Than Blood, 23.
57. Hsu, Singles at the Crossroads, 46–47.
58. Bennett argues that “[w]e, as members of the Household of God, should not imagine ourselves as separate either from being married or from being single, and we must live as both, in our lives as members of Christ’s body” (Water Is Thicker Than Blood, 128). I agree that Paul teaches that, given the need to focus on the coming of Christ in glory—given that “the form of this world is passing away”—“those who have wives” should “live as though they had none” (1 Cor 7:29, 31). But Paul does not mean this in a literal sense, since he has just stated, for example, that “[t]he husband should give to his wife her conjugal rights, and likewise the wife to her husband” (1 Cor 7:3). I do not see how married people could imagine themselves as not “separate . . . from being single,” or how a married person could actually live both as “single” and as “married.” After all, married people are in fact married, not single.
59. John Paul II, Redemptoris Mater, §45.
60. Bennett, Water Is Thicker Than Blood, 128–29 (emphasis added). See also Otten, “Augustine on Marriage, Monasticism, and the Community of the Church.”
61. Evdokimov, The Sacrament of Love, 73. Evdokimov delivers a rather stringent critique of Augustine and Western theologies of marriage, although he does not appear conversant with medieval (or later) adaptations of Augustine’s approach, as for example Thomas Aquinas’s. Evdokimov states,