Engaging the Doctrine of Marriage. Matthew Levering

breakdown and to the lack of a father in the home, are more prominently expressed in the culture. Christian faith has spiraled downward in areas where marriage and children are disappearing.35 There is a relationship between recognizing procreation as the primary “end” of marriage (chapter 5), valuing marriage as a sacrament at least in some sense (chapter 6), and perceiving marriage’s powerful contribution to social justice (chapter 7).

Lisa Sowle Cahill contends that “[f]or contemporary Christians, as for most members of modern society, the highest meaning of marriage, and its only really indispensable one, is love.”36 This may be true as a description of modern Christians, but to suppose that only mutual “love” is “indispensable” to—or even necessarily the “highest meaning” of—a Christian marriage is to have forgotten its roots in a self-surrendering fruitfulness that, while profoundly loving, goes well beyond what moderns mean by “love.” Marriages that lack mutual love can still be fruitful in all sorts of important ways. This is not to deny, of course, that abuse may and often will require a permanent separation of the couple.

Moreover, there is a strong relationship between understanding the more “practical” dimensions of marriage (chapters 5–7) and understanding marriage’s theological role in the economy of salvation, including in our imaging of the triune God’s selfless fruitfulness (chapter 2), our distorting of the human imago (chapter 3), and the action of Christ’s Cross in the healing and perfecting of the spouses (chapter 4). At a still deeper level, there is a relationship between all these dimensions of Christian marriage and the accomplishment of the purpose for which God created: the marriage of God and creation (chapter 1). As Robert Jenson says, “there is one woman and one man in the new one flesh in that there is one Israel and one divine bridegroom, one church and one Christ; both unities are aspects of the same mystery.”37 Put simply: unless we understand the marriage of God and creation, we will not understand Christian marriage in its fullness; and, conversely, unless we understand Christian marriage, we will not understand the marriage of God and creation.

      What about Our Royal Priesthood?

Before proceeding to the chapters, however, let me raise the question of whether the eschatological marriage really is the purpose for which God created human beings. After all, Richard Middleton remarks that when God creates humans in Genesis 1, God himself identifies his purpose: humans are to rule over the earth as God’s stewards. Thus Genesis 1:26 states, “Then God said, ‘Let us make man in our image, after our likeness; and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps upon the earth’ [emphasis added].” Middleton notes that the verb for “let them have dominion” or “let them rule” is repeated in Genesis 1:28.38 For Middleton, as for many scholars, royal rule is the purpose for which God created humans. He explains that “the sort of power or rule that humans are to exercise is generous, loving power. It is power used to nurture, enhance, and empower others, noncoercively, for their benefit, not for the self-aggrandizement of the one exercising power.”39 He also emphasizes that all humans are intended to exercise this royal rule, because all humans are God’s images. The Orthodox theologian Vladimir Lossky likewise observes, “In the context of the sacerdotal narrative of Genesis, the creation of man ‘in the image’ of God confers on human beings a dominion over the animals analogous to that which God enjoys over the whole of his creation.”40

In line with Middleton’s perspective, N. T. Wright argues that through “God’s supreme act of new creation,” all of the ways in which Christians have reigned by wisdom and love in this life will become part of the recreated world.41 In the new creation, humans will finally fulfill the mandate that God gave from the beginning: to reign over the earth as royal stewards and to spread God’s reign. Wright affirms that believers have received “the immense privilege of sharing the intimate life of the triune God himself.”42 But according to him, the key way in which we will share everlastingly in God’s life is by reigning. Wright explains that in the coming eschaton, when we receive our resurrected body, “the purpose of this new body will be to rule wisely over God’s new world. Forget those images about lounging around playing harps. There will be work to do and we shall relish doing it. . . . [T]he biblical view of God’s future is of the renewal of the entire cosmos, [and] there will be plenty to be done, entirely new projects to undertake.”43

      Furthermore, in the Gospel of Matthew, shortly after teaching about marriage, Jesus himself promises his disciples that “in the new world, when the Son of man shall sit on his glorious throne, you who have followed me will also sit on twelve thrones, judging the twelve tribes of Israel” (Matt 19:28). This seems clear enough: the eschaton will be primarily about reigning, and not primarily about marital intimacy with God. Additional evidence may seem to come from Jesus’ teaching—again about the consummated kingdom of God—that “in the resurrection they neither marry nor are given in marriage, but are like angels in heaven” (Matt 22:30). Marriage, in short, may not really be a fundamental Christian reality at all.

Some scholars have proposed a second option. In their view, God created the human race in order to establish a race of priests who would lead the entire cosmos in its worship of God. Thus, John Walton suggests that “we should think of Genesis 1 in relation to a cosmic temple.”44 In Genesis 1, God creates the cosmos as a temple, and he dwells in its midst on the seventh day. Walton compares Genesis 1’s depiction of the seven days of creation with ancient Near Eastern texts about “temple inauguration,” including the biblical text of 1 Kings 8.45 He thinks that Genesis 1 may have functioned liturgically for celebrating God’s creation of his cosmic temple and God’s enthronement therein.46 In the cosmic temple, humans (created in God’s image) serve as God’s “vice regents” or, more specifically, as “priests.”47 Humans recognize God’s role as Creator “by our observance of the sabbath” and by means of liturgies by which we celebrate God’s place “in the temple that is his church (1 Cor 3:16; 6:19).”48

The view that God’s purpose in creation was to create priests is found in Ephrem the Syrian’s fourth-century Hymns on Paradise. Speaking of the Edenic paradise, Ephrem suggests that at his creation, Adam was a priest, but not yet fully so. In Hymn III, Ephrem states that “God did not permit Adam to enter that innermost Tabernacle; this was withheld, so that first he might prove pleasing in his service of that outer Tabernacle.”49 The service of the “outer Tabernacle” consisted in obedience to God’s commandment not to eat of the fruit of the “tree of the knowledge of good and evil” (Gen 2:17). Ephrem explains that “Adam’s keeping of the commandment was to be his censer; then he might enter before the Hidden One into that hidden Tabernacle.”50 But instead Adam (and Eve) disobeyed the commandment. In Hymn XV, Ephrem amplifies his view that God created humans to be priests. He holds that Solomon’s temple and its priestly service symbolized and recreated the Edenic condition. In serving God in the Solomonic temple, the priest was supposed to be “robed with knowledge”; and the sanctuary was “a type for Paradise.”51 The Israelite priest was supposed to “put on sanctification,” by contrast to the failed priest Adam, who “was stripped of glory.”52 As Ephrem says in Hymn XIII, Jesus Christ is the “High Priest” who by his “death has returned us to our heritage.”53

Biblically, of course, there need be no opposition between claiming that God created us to be kings and claiming that God created us to be priests. Christ himself is both the messianic Davidic king and the true “high priest” (Heb 2:17).54 First Peter 2:9 identifies Christians as “a royal priesthood.” Revelation 1:6 describes Christians as “a kingdom, priests to his [Christ’s] God and Father.” Indeed, in its portrait of the crucified and risen Christ entering the liturgical assembly of the blessed, the book of Revelation depicts the blessed singing “a new song” that praises Christ for having “ransomed men for God from every tribe and tongue and people and nation” and for having “made them a kingdom and priests to our God” so that “they shall reign on earth” (Rev 5:9–10). Likewise, those who come to life in the “first resurrection,” according to Revelation 20:5–6, “shall be priests of God and of Christ, and they shall reign with him a thousand years.”

      The book of Revelation is especially important, however, for showing that God created for the