Engaging the Doctrine of Marriage. Matthew Levering
“the holy city, New Jerusalem, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband” (Rev 21:2). An angel calls to the Seer and tells him, “Come I will show you the Bride, the wife of the Lamb” (Rev 21:9). The “Bride” is the Church, the New Jerusalem. God and Christ indwell the New Jerusalem so perfectly that the whole city—symbolic of the countless elect people of God—is the perfect temple of God.
I will discuss these points further in the chapters that follow. Let me simply note here that by privileging marriage, I do not intend to detract from believers’ royal and priestly roles. Only if our intimacy with God is so profound as to be “marital” can we eschatologically “reign” and consecrate all reality to God. Otherwise, we could not be true sharers in Christ’s Sonship or in Christ’s royal priesthood. Instead we would have been created simply to stand to the side. It is only if we truly are the “bride” of Christ, intimately united with him and intimately sharing in his communion with the Father in the Spirit, that we can also be priests and kings with him, governing all things in justice and offering them in praise to the Father.
Moreover, the ministry of the ordained priest is inscribed within this eschatological marriage, due to the ordained priest’s ability to act sacramentally in persona Christi. The Orthodox theologian Dumitru Staniloae says, “The liturgical [ordained] priests do not offer only their own personal sacrifices and prayers but those of the entire community and of all the faithful joined to the sacrifice of Christ. In the priest the unification of all is realized, as in the visible image of Christ, who offers Himself invisibly through the priest as a sacrifice.”55 This beautiful description shows how God’s people are enfolded, in their self-offering, within the one priestly self-offering of Christ, the self-offering that brings about the long-desired marital intimacy between God and his (fallen) people. We become the “bride” of “the bridegroom” whose “joy . . . is now full” (John 3:29).
Why Is There No Marriage in Eternal Life, and What about Single People?
Yet, let me pause one more time and ask a further question: why should marriage be so privileged, given that the New Testament and the Church in many ways affirm the superiority of singleness in the Lord? Jana Bennett comments, “A poignant question for theologians should be, What about single people?”56 Likewise, Albert Hsu remarks, “A truly Christian view of both singleness and marriage will honor both equally without disparaging one or the other.”57 By placing this volume on marriage directly after my volume on creation, have I fallen into the trap of implicitly disparaging singleness?
In response, let me reiterate that to participate in the marriage of God and his people, there is no need to enter into a human marriage. The Apostle Paul teaches the value of celibacy: “I wish that all were as I myself am” (1 Cor 7:7). Given that Christians live in the eschatological end-times (the inaugurated kingdom), Paul worries that the daily tasks and responsibilities of married life will focus Christians too firmly on their worldly interests. He counsels, “Are you free from a wife? Do not seek marriage. But if you marry, you do not sin, and if a girl marries she does not sin. Yet those who marry will have worldly troubles, and I would spare you that” (1 Cor 7:27–28). Marriage can indeed focus a couple inward on their own family.58 My point here is simply that through baptism, confirmation, and the Eucharist, single Christians too are caught up into the eschatological marriage of Christ and his Church. They can therefore exercise a spiritual fatherhood or spiritual “motherhood ‘in the order of grace.’”59
Bennett observes, “Christians have most often affirmed the high place of eschatology in view of vowed nonmarried people over against marriage,” whereas Christians “tend to speak of marriage largely in terms of creation only.”60 In this book, I aim to “affirm the high place of eschatology” while speaking of marriage “in terms of creation” but not only creation. The created order—which is created in grace, in accord with God’s plan from “before the foundation of the world” to make us “his sons through Jesus Christ” (Eph 1:4–5)—is created for “marital” union with the triune God. I agree with Paul Evdokimov when he says, “Monastic holiness and married holiness are the two faces of Tabor; the Holy Spirit is the limit of the one and the other. Those who reach the summit by either of these paths ‘enter into the peace of God, into the joy of the Lord.’”61
Is it a problem, however, that Jesus teaches that in eternal life people “neither marry nor are given in marriage, but are like the angels in heaven” (Matt 22:30)? On the contrary, this is what we should expect. Earthly marriage as a sacrament exists to build us up in the self-surrendering love that already fully characterizes the life of the blessed angels—the life of marriage with God. In the consummated kingdom, all will be intimately bound to all, and all God’s people will be present. Precisely because the eschatological marriage will be all-encompassing, sexual intercourse, with its one-to-one exclusivity and procreative power, will not be needed. By God’s power and presence, all the delight and pleasure of intimate interpersonal communion will be wondrously amplified, not negated or reduced. Simply put, eternal life will superabundantly fulfill human marriage, through the unimaginable fullness of the “marriage” of Christ and his Church.
In light of this eschatological consummation, Staniloae speaks of the “gradual pneumatization of the couple’s bond,” through acts of embodied love and service.62 On earth “the mystery of an ongoing and intensifying personal communion” enables the spouses to “experience Christ as the one who appears through the other,” as the spouses grow more transparent to Christ.63 In eternal life this intense intimacy of communion will be shared by the whole Bride with the triune Bridegroom.
Alexander Schmemann remarks that marriage can be a sacrament only if it is “related to the Kingdom which is to come.”64 This means not only that male-female marriage is a sign of the “marriage” of God and creation, but also that if it were not for the marriage of God and creation, male-female marriage would not have the meaning it does. The eschatological reality is the prime analogate. For Schmemann, too, the Virgin Mary’s “Yes” is already the inauguration of the eschatological marriage, as the bridal Church comes to be in history.
I seek to follow Schmemann in firmly grounding the royal and priestly status of the human being in the context of the marital purpose of creation. He explains that “man can be truly man—that is, the king of creation, the priest and minister of God’s creativity and initiative—only when he does not posit himself as the ‘owner’ of creation and submits himself—in obedience and love—to its nature as the bride of God in response and acceptance.”65 The point is that human nature, as created in grace, has an eschatological nuptial vocation, which is signified by human marriage but can also be enacted by single persons: we are created in order to give ourselves in love to God, in an intimacy so profound as to be marital.
Joseph Ratzinger adds the cautionary note that God is no mere “partner” on the same level as human creatures. Thus, we can only give ourselves fully to God when we “accept God’s [transcendent] otherness and the hiddenness of his will” as the key to the flourishing of our own creaturehood.66 In accordance with this line of thought, Hans Urs von Balthasar speaks of the Church’s graced “feminine receptivity,” with Mary as the perfect embodiment of the Church from the first moment of the Incarnation.67 Behind the priestly and royal status of human beings is the nuptial purpose of God’s creation of humans, a purpose revealed most perfectly in Mary’s Yes. As Schmemann puts it, in Mary’s fiat we find “the whole creation, all of humanity, and each one of us recognizing the words that express our ultimate nature and being, our acceptance to be the bride of God, our betrothal to the One who from all eternity loved us.”68
Commenting on Schmemann’s perspective, David L. Schindler suggests that today we often are blind to the nuptial meaning of creation because, given modernity’s mechanistic worldview, we tend to reject any “intrinsically liturgical, nuptial, and Marian sense of cosmic-cultural order.”69 Love’s receptivity no longer seems of value—if it ever really did—in comparison with obtaining and wielding power. No wonder, then, that the sacrament of marriage often is not well understood. In this regard Schmemann highlights the crowning that takes place in the Orthodox marriage liturgy, a crowning that symbolizes the fact that each family is “a sacrament of and a way to