Engaging the Doctrine of Marriage. Matthew Levering
the Doctrine series as a whole. Even if he hadn’t, I would still be in his debt for numerous good Thai lunches over the years. Rodney Clapp shepherded the manuscript through the production process, saving me from some embarrassing errors.
My parents, Ralph and Patty Levering, had a wonderful marriage that lasted over fifty-two years. Sadly, during the writing of this book my beloved mom died at age seventy-three. God be praised for the many graces that she received in her last weeks and months, and for the time she had to surrender herself to God and to say goodbye to more than one hundred friends and family members. I owe deep thanks to my parents for their example and for the love and care they have given to me. I am blessed with an amazing wife, Joy Moretz Levering. Everyone who knows us knows that her love, intelligence, hard work, and gracious attitude are the reason why our family functions. The following words of Sirach apply so well to her: “He will lean on her and will not fall, and he will rely on her and will not be put to shame” (Sir 15:4). I dedicate this book to my most wonderful Joy, praying to Jesus Christ for everlasting blessings upon her and our beloved children.
1. Scheeben, Handbook of Catholic Dogmatics, xi.
2. Scheeben, Handbook of Catholic Dogmatics, xii.
3. Scheeben, Handbook of Catholic Dogmatics, xii.
4. Scheeben, Handbook of Catholic Dogmatics, xiii.
5. Scheeben, Handbook of Catholic Dogmatics, xiii.
6. Scheeben, Handbook of Catholic Dogmatics, xii.
7. Scheeben, Handbook of Catholic Dogmatics, xv.
8. Scheeben, Handbook of Catholic Dogmatics, 6.
9. Scheeben, Handbook of Catholic Dogmatics, 4–5.
10. Scheeben, Handbook of Catholic Dogmatics, 5.
11. Admittedly, many themes touched upon in the volumes of my series receive fuller treatment elsewhere in my writings. Therefore, I do not wish to draw a sharp separation between this series and my other published writings.
12. See Levering, Engaging the Doctrine of Revelation; Levering, Engaging the Doctrine of the Holy Spirit; Levering, Engaging the Doctrine of Creation.
13. See Hibbs, “Creation, Gratitude and Virtue,” 101–14. See also Bott’s point that “[t]he psalmists regard praiseworthiness as a central divine attribute; it belongs to Yahweh’s very essence to evoke and receive praise” (Bott, “Praise and Metonymy in the Psalms,” 144).
Introduction
The Eschatological Marriage
The fundamental purpose of creation—that for which all things were created—is the marriage of God and humankind and, through humankind as microcosm, the marriage of God and the entire cosmos. When Christians today think of marriage, we tend to think in contemporary cultural terms of an intimate partnership that has legal status involving mutual benefits. Our theologies of marriage are often thin doctrinally; we reserve thought about marriage mainly to moral issues. In fact, the doctrine of marriage must center upon the purpose for which God created the whole cosmos, namely, the “mystical marriage”1 of God and creation. It will then be seen that marriage is not solely about sacramental and moral issues—though it is about these—but also involves and illuminates the doctrines of the Trinity, original sin, and the Cross, as part of illuminating the full mystery of Trinitarian creation, fall, redemption, and deification.
Support in this regard comes from Jewish scholars. Rabbi Jonathan Sacks remarks, “God is a husband and we are his wife.”2 The Jewish biblical scholar Jon D. Levenson says the same, in view of the interpretation of Israel’s Scriptures. Regarding “the marriage metaphor of the prophets and the poems of erotic longing in the Song of Songs,” he urges that we must learn that God’s relationship to his people “is a love simultaneously covenantal and deeply passionate.”3 From a Christian perspective, this will be spelled out in Trinitarian and christological terms, as the whole of creation is guided toward its eschatological consummation. Louis Bouyer comments, “The Church is the Bride, participating by marriage union in all the privileges of her Bridegroom, as being the people of God come to the perfection of the number of the elect . . . at the same time as it is mankind (that is, the whole world) brought back to the purity of the primitive design of God for His creation.”4 The plan of God for his creation is the marriage of all of God’s people with God in Christ by the Holy Spirit.
Jesus Christ has inaugurated but not yet consummated the marriage of God and creation. This does not mean that human marriage is no longer important. On the contrary, the revelation of the nuptial purpose of creation makes marriages between men and women even more worthy of theological attention. It is necessary to apprehend how Christian marriage and family are—without being superior to consecrated singleness—at the very center of human flourishing. The spiritual writer Heather King, herself unmarried, puts this well: “No matter our age, socioeconomic status, or station, we are called to order our lives to the human family. If we’re single, we are called to lay down our lives for other people’s children.”5 The eschatological marriage of God and creation does not bypass human families. Christian marriages are signs of the self-surrendering love of Christ. In the sacraments, the Church is directed as Bride toward the Bridegroom who will come in glory at the end of the age. Ideally, as the liturgical theologian Uwe Michael Lang observes, “the whole liturgy is celebrated obviam Sponso, facing the Bridegroom. The faithful so anticipate the Lord’s Second Coming and can be likened to the virgins in the Gospel parable: ‘But at midnight there was a cry, “Behold the bridegroom! Come out to meet him”’ (Mt 25:6).”6
Given the centrality of the Bridegroom, however, should I have focused first on Jesus Christ rather than on marriage, in the dogmatic order of the present series? After all, according to Scripture, “before the foundation of the world” God “destined us in love to be his sons through Jesus Christ” (Eph 1:4–5); and, moreover, “all things were created through him [Christ] and for him. He is before all things, and in him all things hold together” (Col 1:16–17). He is “the Alpha and the Omega,” “the first and the last” (Rev 1:8, 17).7 As Bonaventure emphasizes, Christ is the goal of God’s creative plan. Speaking in scholastic language about the divine ideas that ground the act of creation and about the rationes seminales embedded in creation, Bonaventure concludes that “the highest and noblest perfection cannot exist in this world unless that nature in which the seminal principles are present [the created order], and that nature in which the intellectual principles are present [the soul], and that nature in which the ideal principles are present [God] are simultaneously brought together in the unity of one person”—namely, in the incarnate Son, Jesus Christ.8 If so, it seems that the volume on creation might best be followed by a volume on Christ.
After the present volume, the next two volumes of this series will focus on the doctrines of Israel and Christ. The doctrine of marriage sets the scene by identifying the purpose of creation and the purpose of God’s covenantal work in Israel and its Messiah. Erich Przywara remarks that “nuptial love . . . is the fundamental mystery of the Old and New Testaments: from the prophets to the Song of Songs to the gospel of marriage declared by the evangelists from Matthew to John, to the inwardly nuptial theology