Covenantal Marriage: The Implications on Marriage, Sex and Sexual Ethics Marriage. What is it? Most of society would say it is a union of love between two persons that can be dissolved at any time. This modern sentiment of marriage lacks a sound foundation, meaning and purpose. One can enter into a marriage based on feelings and end it just once the butterflies are nowhere to be found in the realities of daily life. In stark contrast, Scriptures present marriage as a covenant. Viewed in the scriptural context of a covenant, marriage is a union of self-sacrificing love to become one with another. One of the Old Testament’s overarching theme is the covenantal marriage between God and Israel. God initiates a union with Israel to be his People and their God out of love, loyalty and fidelity. “A covenant…is an agreement or oath of fidelity between parties made with or before God in which one promises one’s very self to another” (Grabowski, 29). It was not a transaction of a service or good nor an act of natural law, but a fully conscious binding agreement. Israel entered into a new familial bond that “demand[ed] an unconditional and more person form of fidelity” (Grabowski, 29). Understood in this context, marriage is not mere an exchange of mutual feelings or the satisfaction of desires, rather it is the total kenosis for one’s spouse until death. The parties of the covenant become one through the “bond of blood”. Marriage, sex and sexual ethics cannot be viewed in insolation one another but as united in the wholeness of a person rooted in Scripture. They are not social constructs from the natural law but divinely ordained as a means to one’s fulfillment of communion with God. In the book of Genesis, God creates man and woman as “bone of bone and flesh of flesh” sharing in equal humanity (Genesis 2:23). This also established marriage as a covenant of mutuality and unity rather than subordination or pity. Both man and woman have dignity that must be respected in marriage and sexual ethics. God’s creation of “man and woman, their sexuality, their marriage, their fertility are all good” because God created them as gifts and thus humanity is to respect and affirm them as such (Lawler, 9). It is a union of the whole person growing in oneness with other, not a union solely founded on sexual desires. In the Old Testament, a covenant with God calls one to forsake all that distracted one from union with God. Similarly, a marriage demands spouses to embrace exclusivity of one another and forsake emotion, spiritual and physical intimacy with all others. In doing so, “man leaves his father and mother and clings to his wife, and the two of them become one body” (Gn. 2:24).
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This love of total self-gift, not one of a transactional nature, is modeled in the New Testament by Christ. “Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her” (Ephesians 5:25). He is the head of the Church and the Church is his body, in which brings people into his fold. Drawing on this covenant between Christ and the Church, the love of the spouses has to be unitive and life giving. Sex then is not mere a means to satisfy one’s pleasure but it is to bond a couple in deeper union and create new life through children. Thus a covenant, both marital and non-marital, is not a cold, sterile agreement, rather it is a union that creates
This love of total self-gift, not one of a transactional nature, is modeled in the New Testament by Christ. “Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her” (Ephesians 5:25). He is the head of the Church and the Church is his body, in which brings people into his fold. Drawing on this covenant between Christ and the Church, the love of the spouses has to be unitive and life giving. Sex then is not mere a means to satisfy one’s pleasure but it is to bond a couple in deeper union and create new life through children. Thus a covenant, both marital and non-marital, is not a cold, sterile agreement, rather it is a union that creates