Sexuality and Creation Order

The Old Testament speaks poetically of the earth being built upon pillars or foundations, as a way of saying it is stable, with a moral order that will in the end be upheld by its Creator. For example, in Hannah’s prayer (1 Samuel 2:1–10) her assertion that “the foundations of the earth are the Lord’s” (2:8 niv) is the basis for her confidence that right will be vindicated against wrong, that moral order will be upheld in the end. We see the same idea in Psalm 75:3–5, where holding the pillars of the earth steady is equivalent to humbling
the arrogant and wicked. Again, moral order is upheld.

Another way of speaking of this is to say that the world is built according to wisdom. In the imagery of the Old Testament, this wisdom means something like the architecture of the universe. “The Lord by wisdom founded the earth; by understanding he established the heavens” (Proverbs 3:19). When God built the universe, like a building, he did so according to the blueprint called wisdom. Wisdom is the fundamental underlying order according to which the universe is constructed. Sometimes we speak of the architecture of a piece of hardware or software, by which we mean the underlying structure, such that, if we understand it, we shall grasp why it behaves and responds as it does. In the same way, to live wisely in the world we need some understanding of the blueprint or architecture upon which the world is built. Christians claim that part of this order is the proper guarding of sexual expression within the security of marriage.

One argument often heard in debates is that changes in sexual behavior and family life are purely the results of cultural shifts and that there are no absolute standards or benchmarks against which to test culture. In particular, it is suggested that cultural conservatives are no more than that, indulging in nostalgia for a mythical bygone era of family stability. In her influential book The Way We Never Were,⁵ Stephanie Coontz argued that family change is irreversible and we might as well go with the flow rather than hark back to a mythical imagining of 1950s marriage and family life. Against this, Christian people argue that we are under no illusions about some supposed magical ideal era of the past (be it the 1950s or whenever), but whatever the flows of culture, marriage is a creation ordinance, a way of life rooted in the way the world is and the way human beings are. This is the claim.

When Jesus and Paul spoke about marriage, they referred back to Genesis 2:24 as a foundational indication of the Creator’s definition: “For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and they will become one flesh” (Matthew 19:5; Ephesians 5:31). There are presumably many ways in which God could have chosen to create humankind, but this definition implies that he created us as sexual beings whose sexuality is to be expressed only in the exclusive, permanent, social, and sexual union of one man with one woman, publicly pledged and recognized by society in what we call marriage. Another way in which the Bible speaks of this is by calling marriage a covenant to which God is witness (Proverbs 2:17; Malachi 2:14). When a man and woman marry, God is always watching and listening (whether or not it is a church wedding), and he will hold each accountable before him for keeping their wedding promises.

In my biblical and theological study of sexuality, I suggest the following working definition of marriage:

Marriage is the voluntary sexual and public social union of one man and one woman from different families. This union is patterned upon the union of God with his people, his bride, the Christ with his church. Intrinsic to this union is God’s calling to lifelong exclusive sexual faithfulness.⁶

The most problematic word for many twenty-first century people is the second word: “is.” How can we say that marriage “is” in such a definite, institutional, and normative way? Surely we ought rather to consider how marriage is evolving, the cultural and social pressures that have caused marriage to change and be transformed, to continue changing in the years ahead, and to be different in different cultures. Marriage may happen to be something in one culture at one time, but it has no stable identity or definition, it is argued. So in a recent essay, Stephanie Coontz begins,

Any serious discussion of the future of marriage requires a clear understanding of how marriage evolved over the ages, along with the causes of its most recent transformations. Many people who hope to “re-institutionalize” marriage misunderstand the reasons that marriage was once more stable and played a stronger role in regulating social life.⁷

But while it is perfectly valid for social scientists and historians to explore the factors that have shaped the contemporary culture of marriage (including world wars, the emancipation of women, birth control, and social mobility), the Bible sets sexual ethics before us as rooted and grounded in an unalterable moral ordering placed in creation by the Creator. However the cultural tides ebb and flow, we want to say that marriage is certain things. We must not naively expect to deduce what marriage ought to be simply from observing human culture and experience (the so-called “naturalistic fallacy”). Rather, there is an “ought” that is rooted not in what “is” observed or experienced, but on what “is” given to us in Creation.

In his magisterial defense of an ethics rooted in Creation Order, Professor Oliver O’Donovan suggests,

[I]n the ordinance of marriage there was given an end for human relationships, a teleological structure which was a fact of creation and therefore not negotiable. The dimorphic organization of human sexuality, the particular attraction of two adults of the opposite sex and of different parents, the setting up of a home distinct from the parental home and the uniting of their lives in a shared life …: these form a pattern of human fulfilment which serves the wider end of enabling procreation to occur in a context of affection and loyalty. Whatever happens in history, Christians have wished to say, this is what marriage really is. Particular cultures may have distorted it; individuals may fall short of it. It is to their cost in either case; for it reasserts itself as God’s creative intention for human relationships on earth; and it will be with us, in one form or another, as our natural good until (but not after) the kingdom of God shall appear.⁸

This concept is alien to much contemporary thinking. The atheist writer Will Self, looking back on his traditional Anglican upbringing in the UK, wrote about his father’s vain attempts to interest him in Christianity:

Try as he might to enthuse us with the sonorous beauties of the King James Bible, as declaimed by middle-class, middle-aged men in dresses, it was far too late. We had already been claimed by the split infinitives of Star Trek, were already preparing to boldly go into a world where ethics so far from inhering in the very structure of the cosmos, was a matter of personal taste akin to a designer label, sewn into the inside lining of conscience.⁹

But we cannot begin serious engagement with the Christian worldview about sexuality unless we understand the Christian belief that ethics does indeed inhere “in the very structure of the cosmos.” In the hope that it is not too late for my readers, let me expound the concept of Creation Order as it relates to sexuality, and address some objections on the way.