Covenant and Calling

Towards a Theology of Same-Sex Relationships

Robert Song

• Publisher: SCM Press
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9780334051886
• eBook ISBN: 9780334051909

No other issue in recent times has proved as potentially divisive for the churches as that of same-sex relationships. At the same time as many countries have been moving towards legal recognition of civil partnerships or same-sex marriage, Christian responses have tended towards either finding alliances with proponents of conservative social mores, or providing what amounts to theological endorsement of secular liberal values.

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The Beginning and End of Marriage

We could start our thinking about a theology of sexual relationships from any number of places. For example, we might begin by reflecting on the nature of desire – our desire for each other, our desire for God, and, grounding and sustaining these, God’s desire for us. Or we might think about what it means to be embodied, not just angelic beings or pure intellects, but fleshly creatures who relate to one another in our physical presence. Or we might choose to reflect on our cultural context, pondering the meaning of the revolution in attitudes towards sex that has transformed Western society in the past half-century. All of these will have a place in any full theological account of sexuality, and I shall have something to say about all of them in the course of the following chapters.

But a very strong case can be made for beginning at the beginning, with the opening chapters of Genesis. Not only is it the place where the canonical Christian Bible starts, a fact itself of theological significance, it is also and even more importantly the place to which, at the heart of his teaching on the subject, Jesus himself points. If we are to understand how Christian theology thinks of sexuality and marriage, we need therefore to attend first to the Genesis passages and their portrayal of humankind as created in the image of God. Following that, we will be in a position to consider what it means to say that Christ is the fulfilment of creation, and therefore what it means for marriage to be fulfilled in Christ; this correspondingly will direct us towards the dramatic change that the advent of Christ opens up for the Christian understanding of sexuality.

Creation and the ends of marriage

‘From the beginning of creation,’ says Jesus according to the Gospel of Mark, ‘“God made them male and female”. For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh’ (Mark 10.6–8).1 In his words on marriage, Jesus draws into a unity two different strands of narrative in the first two chapters of Genesis, which conventional historical criticism has tended to attribute to separate original sources. The first, which centres on Genesis 1.26–28, sets the creation of human beings in the narrative of the seven days of creation. Following on from the creation of the creatures of the sea, the birds of the air, and the animals on the earth, God creates humankind, declaring that they are made in God’s image, and that they are to have dominion over all the other creatures.

27So God created humankind in his image,

in the image of God he created them;

male and female he created them.

28God blessed them, and God said to them, ‘Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the air and over every living thing that moves upon the earth.’ (Gen. 1.27–28)

Being created in God’s image is related, according to this passage, to being created male and female, which in turn is related closely to God’s blessing and God’s command to be fruitful, to fill the earth and subdue it. The second passage, in Genesis 2, describes the origins of the sexes rather differently. First, an original human being, adam, is formed out of the dust of the ground (adamah), given the breath of life, and placed in the garden of Eden to look after it. After permitting the adam to eat freely of any tree of the garden, except the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, God then declares: ‘It is not good that the adam should be alone; I will make him a helper as his partner’ (Gen. 2.18). In response to this need, God creates all the animals for the adam to name, but none of them are found to be adequate as a partner. Only at this point is the woman created from a rib taken out of the side of the adam while he sleeps; she is one whom he recognizes as bone of his bones and flesh of his flesh, one called Woman, for she is taken out of Man. And so the story leads to the conclusion referred to by Jesus, that therefore a man leaves his partner and clings to his wife, and they become one flesh (Gen. 2.24).

Much could be said about these passages, and I will return to them several times. For now I want to emphasize three themes which the Christian tradition has drawn from them in relation to marriage. First, Christian theology affirms that we are to understand marriage as a created good. To say that it is a created good is to say that it is not merely ‘natural’. It is not just an empirical regularity: it is not something whose truth can be established – or indeed denied – on the basis of scientific observation, whether by anthropological or sociological or historical generalizations about human societies across time, or by zoological comparisons with other apparently lifelong pair-bonding species such as common ravens or prairie voles. The various human and natural sciences may have insights, no doubt of differing levels of profundity, into the ways in which marriage in its endless variations has been socially and culturally constructed, but from a theological perspective they do not exhaust the meaning of marriage; they cannot of themselves determine what marriage as a created ordinance is.

Second, marriage is a created good. That is, it is intended for and oriented to human flourishing. It is a gift of a good God which serves the good of the partners, of their children and wider family, and of society as a whole. It is not a necessary evil which is required in order to ward off even worse evils; if theologians in the Christian tradition have often cast marriage in an apparently negative light, for example seeing it as a remedy against sin, or have been unenthusiastic about it when compared with, say, celibacy, they have never thereby depicted it as an evil. On the contrary, their point has been precisely that its role is one of training in holiness, restraining the lusts that war against the soul. And at their best they have recognized that marriage, as the gift of a good God who is drawing all creation towards himself, can itself be a means by which we are taken up into the love of the Triune God.

Third, marriage in creation has a structure, of which we can isolate two decisive aspects. The first is that it is about the faithful and permanent relationship of the partners. Immediately after the declaration that God will make humankind in God’s own image, and the connection of this with dominion over the other living creatures (1.26), God declares that they are made ‘male and female’, with an intrinsic mutual relationality. Man exists vis-à-vis woman, and woman exists vis-à-vis man. This aspect of relationality is brought out more explicitly in the second creation story. God’s recognition that it is not good that the adam be alone is a declaration that solitary existence is not how human beings flourish: human beings are intrinsically social animals, as would be affirmed by later philosophers, and come to their fulfilment through the mutual support and companionship that is found in faithful, permanent relationship. Here in the second story we should also note that the fulfilment is related to a task: the partner is to be a helper in the task of tilling and keeping the garden, that is, of ensuring its fruitfulness.

The element of a shared task, of the fruitfulness of the relationship of Adam and Eve, is an indication in the Genesis narratives that marriage is not solely for the mutual satisfaction of the husband and wife. And this leads us to the second aspect of the structure of marriage in creation, namely that it has a specific orientation to having children. We can see this from the fact that the declaration that human beings are made male and female in Genesis 1.27 is immediately followed by God’s pronouncement of blessing and God’s command that they be fruitful and multiply in 1.28. Children do not appear here as an optional extra to the otherwise self-contained nature of marriage. They are not extrinsic or contingent, a lifestyle accessory to be added on should the happy couple decide this would make their happiness complete. Rather, as presented in Genesis, the procreation and nurture of children is an inseparable and intrinsic good of marriage, the result of God’s blessing and command to be fruitful. And such procreation and nurture arises out of the relationship of the man and the woman, not in independence from it. Children are not inserted into the partners’ companionship from the outside by the wave of a wand, but are a blessing of God that arises from the heart of the relationship of male and female: a child is the entirely proper and fitting expression in the oneness of his or her flesh of the parents’ own one-flesh bond.

There are other features of marriage that might be drawn out of these narratives. For example, the idea that the man leaves his mother and father may suggest that marriage requires a partner from outside the immediate family. Again, the fact that the passages speak solely of the relationship of the one man and the one woman has often been taken to imply that the marriage relationship and the family unit are the basis of society, the seedbed from which future citizens are nurtured, the cells of which the larger social organism is comprised, the bricks out of which the social edifice is built. And the taking of the woman from the man’s side, as the generic, sexless adam seamlessly becomes the male Adam, has often been taken to legitimate the patriarchal ordering of society and the subordination of women – a conclusion that at any rate the second of the two Genesis narratives does rather little to disrupt.

However, I concentrate on the elements of mutual relationship and procreativity because those are the features that were emphasized in the classical Christian understanding of marriage. Ever since Augustine, the Christian tradition has talked of three ‘goods’ of marriage, three ends that jointly constitute marriage, that together distinguish marriage from all other forms of human relationship, and without any one of which marriage ceases to be marriage. For Augustine, whose reflections on marriage developed through repeated wrestling with these passages in Genesis, the goods of marriage came to be understood as one marital good, summed up in three words: proles (offspring), fides (faithfulness), and sacramentum (the bond of permanence).

The first of these, proles, initially occupied an uncertain place for Augustine; his earlier writings suggest an ambivalence whether there would have been procreation before the fall. Although he never followed some Eastern Christian speculations (such as those of Gregory of Nyssa) that originally human beings shared a primordial androgynous unity, and that the division of human beings into male and female was itself related to a fall from spiritual to material nature, it was initially unclear to him what need there might be for sexually differentiated organs. Only in his later writings, notably the City of God, when he had come to locate sin in the will rather than the body, did he unambiguously affirm the created goodness of biological materiality and sexual differentiation. The purpose of sexual differentiation he came to locate solely in procreation, and the goodness of bodily sexual difference was underlined in his emphasis that it would still be found in the new creation.

The second good of marriage, fides, is conceptualized by Augustine primarily in terms of the restraint of sexual sin. For him this is not just a matter of marriage providing a legitimate outlet for sexual desire, thereby reducing the temptation to infidelity and the consequent disruption to social and civic harmony. Marriage also remedies sexual desire itself: for Augustine, the sexual act involves the temporary loss of the body’s proper subjection to the rational will, and since the subordination of the passions to reason is integral to human virtue, sex is therefore intrinsically morally problematic. Celibacy is always superior to marriage, and sex may only be redeemed by being oriented to the having of children (although Augustine does allow that a partner who submits to having sex in order to satisfy their partner’s desire for it commits a pardonable sin!).

It is with the third good, the bond of permanence, that Augustine introduces a theme that goes decisively beyond the Genesis accounts. It is based on the connection made in Ephesians 5.32 between the marriage relationship and the relationship between Christ and the Church: that husband and wife become one flesh, the writer says, ‘is a great mystery, and I am applying it to Christ and the church’. Not only is marriage a participation in the creation order found from the beginning from before the fall, it also performs a role witnessing to the new life that connects Christ to the Church. Marriage is not just grounded in an understanding of creation, but also in some way signifies God’s relationship to God’s people. This reflects a theme found in the Old Testament (e.g. Jer. 2—3; Hos. 1—3), according to which God’s relationship to Israel had often been portrayed as a marriage, one marked by frequent unfaithfulness on the part of Israel, but by constancy and faithfulness on the part of God. And it justifies the language of covenant in relation to marriage, that is, the public undertaking by the two partners of promises of committed faithfulness one to the other, together with the growth in relationship that emerges out of such commitments.

Augustine’s account of the three goods was enormously influential on subsequent Christian teaching, even though it has been subject to substantial reinterpretation in accordance with later theological preoccupations. Different orderings and enumerations of the goods have been offered, and different accounts of what is meant by a good of marriage elaborated, some emphasizing what marriage is, others why couples might wish to enter upon it. For the sake of clarity, in this book I will regularly refer to faithfulness, permanence and procreation as the goods of marriage. By faithfulness, I mean not just the commitment of the partners to forsake all others and stay faithful to the marital bed, but also to provide mutual support, protection and love. By permanence is meant not an indissoluble, sacramental bond which makes divorce ontologically impossible, as found in Roman Catholic teaching, but the moral bond created by the promise of faithfulness so long as both partners shall live. By procreation I mean an openness to having children as the result of the couple’s sexual relationship, mindful of the fact that not all marriages will in fact be fertile. These three do not sum up everything that there is to be said about marriage, but they do isolate the features that are relevant for my argument, for reasons that will become clear.

Christ and the fulfilment of creation

In the Christian tradition, therefore, we find an understanding of marriage as a created good, with a structure characterized by the ends of procreation and nurture of children, the faithfulness of the partners each to the other to the exclusion of all others, and the commitment to permanence until death. As a good of creation, it is instituted for human flourishing; as a good of creation, it is identified as a universal good, one whose nature can never be finally determined by human scientific understanding.

However, as is clear from the analogy in Ephesians between the relation of husband and wife and that of Christ and the Church, creation cannot be understood separately from its fulfilment in Christ. We need therefore to explore more fully the significance that the coming of Jesus Christ holds for the theology of marriage. Here the decisive thing we have to appreciate is that for Christian theology creation is not an independent realm, an autonomous structure of being with its own logic, to which Christ is then added as an afterthought or a supplement. The doctrine of creation is not a timeless theological truth which can be detached from its context in the story of God’s dealings with all that is not God. As we have seen, this means on the one hand that creation cannot be understood as ‘nature’, a supposedly metaphysically complete and independent realm whose properties could be exhaustively analysed by the sciences. But it also means, on the other, that the doctrine of creation is theologically inseparable from an understanding of Christ. This is the force of the magnificent passage in the opening chapter of Colossians, in which Christ is described as the firstborn of all creation, the one through whom and for whom all things were made, who...

Table of contents

• Covenant and Calling
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Preface
• 1 The Beginning and End of Marriage
• 2 Covenant Partnership
• 3 Sexual Differentiation, Sex and Procreation
• 4 Reading the Bible
• 5 Same-Sex Marriage?
• 6 Conclusion
• Futher Reading