Creation Order Is Moral and Not Just Material

Scientists are familiar with the idea that the cosmos has within its structure an order that exists. That is to say, most scientists are philosophical realists. They believe their task is not to invent physical laws or to impose structure upon a disordered cosmos, but rather to discern (at least approximately) a structure that exists.

The Bible extends that concept of material order to the other dimensions of existence, including the moral, psychological, anthropological, relational, and sexual. It speaks of an order that extends to actions and character (the sphere of morality) as much as to materiality (as we saw in Hannah’s song, with reference to 1 Samuel 2:8 above). So Creation Order is deeper than just an order in the world’s material composition (which is the subject of the study of the material sciences). This order extends also to the moral and spiritual dimensions of existence. It is metaphysical as well as physical. The idea that this world has order only in its material aspect but not in its moral aspect is illogical. What kind of a cosmos would it be, in which the physical sciences were a worthwhile enterprise—because they look for structure that is there to be found—but in which the fields of personal relationships and morality are undifferentiated chaos? This would be a world in which personhood is still “a formless void,” waiting to be given shape by the subjective whims of each person or each succeeding culture. Just as the physical scientist pursues the project of science in the belief that there is order to be discovered (which is why so much of the modern scientific enterprise has roots in Christian soil),¹⁰ so the believer lives on this earth in the conviction that it is finally not a chaotic universe, but one built upon a fundamental underlying and majestic order.

So Creation Order makes an ontological assertion about the nature of reality. But this ontological claim carries with it an epistemological correlate. For if there is a Created Order, it follows that true knowledge can be gained about only one part of it (sexuality) by reference to the whole. That is to say, we cannot hope to make sense of sex unless we have some grasp of the whole Created Order. We cannot study sex as a self-contained subject, but must at the same time ask the bigger questions, the “God questions.”

Creation Order Is Given by God, Not Constructed by Human Beings

If there is such a thing as Creation Order, it follows that this order is given to us by the Creator and not constructed by us. If so, then marriage is an institution given by God, rather than a project fashioned by different cultures. (So we cannot expect simply to observe Creation Order in human relationships as they are in a broken world.) This is very different from many contemporary thinkers. Michel Foucault, in his three-volume History of Sexuality, assumes that sexual identity is a socio-cultural and psychological construct rather than a given.¹¹ James Nelson argues that sexuality is formed by “patterns of meaning which are more socially constructed than biologically determined.” We are not born with some sexual identity given to us; rather we “become sexual” by “a social learning process through which we come to affirm certain sexual meanings in our interaction with significant others.” These “sexual meanings are not absolute but rather are historically and culturally relative.”¹² In Wayne Meeks’ surveys of the early Christian communities, he perceives Christian morality as a collection of arbitrary boundary markers that serve to delimit the fence around the believing communities.¹³ In a revealing postscript to his book The Origins of Christian Morality, he writes that “the process of inventing Christian—and human—morality will continue.”¹⁴

Creation Order means the rejection of the idea that ethics grows out of human choices. Ethics derives from metaphysics and theology. Ethics is the exposition of order placed in Creation by God; it is not order arising from the human will imposing itself upon an originally disordered moral field. We also reject the idea that ethics is swept along by historical processes, cut free from any trans-historical anchor. In this historicist view marriage would be “an item of cultural history”¹⁵ in a process of constant metamorphosis. The statement “marriage is …”, if it is possible at all in this framework, must be heavily circumscribed: “Marriage in our culture and our time is … . But of course it will not always be so and we watch with interest to see how it will develop.”

Now of course we recognize that marriage has been dressed in a wide variety of ceremonies and customs, and this variety extends to the sex and marriage customs evident in the biblical texts. We are not affirming the normativity of a marriage custom just because it appears in a biblical narrative. We are affirming that the publicly-pledged union of one man and one woman, with whatever culturally-varied ceremonies it may be entered, is what marriage is. For the normative structure of Marriage is revealed in Creation, not recorded in transit by snapshots from short exposure film of fast-moving historical moments.

The Alternative to Creation Order

It is easy to criticize the institution of marriage as being oppressive, imprisoning our sexual relations in a structure that gives us no freedom to create our own ways of relating. But it is worth reflecting on the alternative. Brigitte and Peter Berger in their book The War Over the Family, observe that in humanly constructed ethics, “the family ceases to be an institution, an objective given, and becomes a project of individuals, thus always susceptible to redefinition, reconstruction and termination.”¹⁶ By contrast, it is a matter of joy for Christians to embrace Creation Order, for it comes to us as a “given” in two senses: it is non-negotiable, and it is a gift to be received with thanksgiving.

Givenness as a good gift depends on recognizing givenness as transcendent order. As Oliver O’Donovan puts it, Creation Order is “not negotiable within the course of history” and is part of “that which neither the terrors of chance nor the ingenuity of art can overthrow. It defines the scope of our freedom and the limits of our fears.”¹⁷

The alternative is terrible indeed. For it means that morality must of necessity fracture into shards of local, cultural, or individual code. Such moral scattering is, like Babel, a sign of the judgment of God, a descent from cosmos to ethical chaos. On the contrary, the Christian joyfully proclaims, morality does have integrity, and it is to be perceived and understood, not invented.

Truth and Power

Here we must address the objection that to claim that marriage is given to us in Creation is just another modernist power play. All you are doing, says the objector, is claiming the authority of what you call “absolute Truth” in support of your chosen way of organizing society. You want us to conform to your chosen norm of monogamous heterosexual marriage, but we don’t want you to impose this on us just because you are more influential in society.

Some ethics are precisely like that, but when human beings invent ethics, it really is the strongest who win and the weakest who go to the wall. “Might” will be “right” if right is defined by the mighty. Humanly constructed ethics lacks any possibility of prophetic critique from beyond history or from outside one particular group, to challenge the mores of the strong, and to announce salvation for the oppressed. For autonomous ethics any contemporary “norm” is bound to be the strong (the “contemporary”) imposing their mores upon the weak (for the historicist, “the outdated”). Whoever is most influential in society in any given age will impose their chosen ethics on the rest.

Christian (Creation) ethics, however, sits in judgment upon us all. No one group is affirmed by the ethics of the Bible, which goes straight to the heart and calls us all to turn around and behave differently. The person who thinks that the respectably married man or woman can be complacent in the face of biblical ethics has not begun to understand just how radical that ethics is, calling husbands to love their wives with the sacrificial love with which Christ loved the church (Ephesians 5:25). If a husband thinks Christianity gives him a crown in marriage that will enable him to relax and take life easy, he needs to grasp that the crown given him is a crown of thorns.

A proper understanding of human creatureliness and the givenness of creation safeguards against this abuse of authority. Without Creation Order we have the liberty to devise the uses to which we will put our and others’ sexuality. We would no longer be able to allow the argument that there is a Creator’s purpose to which our stewardship must respond and that sets limits to our choice. If we found we could turn our “sexuality” to some purpose that we found “fulfilling,” who could say we should not follow this path? Far from Creation ethics being a mask for oppression, it is the necessary safeguard against human oppression.¹⁸

Entering the Institution of Marriage

If marriage is neither the result of blind historical process nor the outcome of autonomous human construction, it follows that when a couple marry, they enter an institution whose terms are given to them. They neither invent the particular terms of their relationship nor gradually create their relationship as a project over time. Marriage is an institution within which a couple live, not an ideal to which they aspire. The difference between an ideal and an institution is important. A couple may have in their minds some ideal and strive to move towards that in their relationship. This is deceptively similar to marriage but actually radically different because to get married is to enter a status of relationship within which the growth and maturity are to develop. Marriage needs the security of being an institution with boundaries. Within this given order the relational dynamics can safely flourish. The marriage a couple enter has a moral structure within which the Creator calls them to live. To understand this is a necessary precursor to stability and security within marriage; the alternative is the terrifying possibility that each couple must generate the terms and qualities of their particular relationship as they see fit.

So it is misleading to consider marriage simply or primarily in terms of the process of relational growth embarked upon by the couple, important though this is. To do this is to confuse living up to the calling of marriage with the given institution of marriage within which this divine calling is heard. Essentially it removes the security of entering the institution of marriage, within which we are called to live lives of mutual love and faithfulness, and replaces it with a terrifying concept of marriage as the project of each couple and their precarious process of growth in love. It is not a long step from this to being able to caricature a couple as reporting, “Our love is growing well; we are considerably more married this year than last” or “We are having relational problems and are rather less married now than we used to be.” And if our “coefficient of marriedness” falls below some critical benchmark, perhaps divorce proceedings may be expected. This is the logical consequence of confusing the status of being married with the quality of the married relationship. Both status and relationship are important, but if the latter is confused with the former, it removes the stability and the necessary foundation.