By Tyler Been, Seminarian at Nashotah House 

Marriage is a double-edged sword; on the one hand, marriage ought to provide a relationship of mutual support, love, and respect. On the other hand, the marriage relationship serves as a mirror through which to see oneself clearly. Marriage cuts deep. Mutual support, love, and respect don’t always come naturally and require hard work and discipline. Moreover, as far as seeing oneself clearly, there are few things more painful. In other words, the joys and pains of marriage are two sides of the same coin made possible by a solemn vow. This vow unites two people in such a way that they can no longer be themselves without the other. It should not come as a surprise that after divorce, or the death of a spouse, one no longer feels like themselves. How could they? 

At the end of the marriage vow, each person professes, “till death do us part.” Marriage is such that death ends it. As noted above, this same vow unites two people together in such a way that they can no longer be themselves without the other. If both of these things are true, that marriage ends with death and that one in a marriage union cannot be themselves without the other, then, most likely, one person will find themselves living a fractured existence without the other, no longer being completely themselves. How can this be? Of course, no one is ever wholly themselves. Marriage is but a microcosm of a greater reality. None of us is who we are apart from others. And so we all live, to some extent, fractured lives because people who make us who we are eventually die or hurt us and leave us, or we leave them. What makes marriage and the marriage vow unique is that it aims, perhaps more than any other vow or promise, to be unconditional. In marriage, one vows “to have and to hold . . . for better, for worse, for richer, or poorer, in sickness and health, to love and to cherish.” But, of course, death ends this vow, making it a conditional promise. 

By being so entangled with death, the marriage vow ties individuals to the world as it is given. For the married person, the spirit is contained in the letter, not above and beyond it. Marital love does not transcend the suffering of everyday life; it persists through it. And so, the married person cannot escape the world to God’s life through some kind of other-worldly spirituality; the married person experiences God through the other to whom they are bound. In other words, God’s life is found in the world, in all of its fallenness. 

In his book Story and Promise, Lutheran theologian Robert Jenson notes that only a promise that has death behind it can be unconditional. Therefore, only someone with death behind them can make an unconditional promise. Only one who has died and risen to new life can make an unconditional promise. You see where this is going; only Jesus Christ can make an unconditional promise. Jesus Christ continues to live and continues to make his promise. Therefore, “And remember, I am with you always, to the end of the age,” is true now because the one who spoke it then speaks it now. But this reveals something quite startling: even God, to love us as one among us, had to overcome the conditions of death that limit human love. To love us, God in Jesus Christ lived and continues to live a human life.

At this point, it is evident why it is so fitting that Paul uses marriage to explain the relationship between Christ and the church. Just as man and wife are united together in marriage, the church is united to the bridegroom, Jesus Christ. However, perhaps the analogy (is it an analogy?) breaks down at this point. Above, it was said that marriage unites man and wife in such a way that the two united cannot be themselves without the other. Is this true of Christ and the church? Is the union between Jesus Christ and the church such that Jesus would not be himself without the church? Let us push the point of contention back further. Would the eternal Son of God be himself without becoming incarnate as Jesus Christ? Or are these nonsensical hypothetical questions? 

For a particular strand of theological tradition, these questions are not nonsense, hypothetical questions but are axiomatic questions upon which all of theology turns. For example, some theologians take the Thomistic maxim that God bears no real relation to creation to mean that God can, and ought, be conceived of without creatures. According to this line of thinking, it is simply a logical conclusion that the Son of God would be himself even if he was never incarnate as Jesus Christ. The movement of the Son of God towards sinful creatures in the incarnation concerns the Son’s relation to the world. If God bears no real relation to the world, by necessity the incarnation cannot determine who the Son of God is. In other words, the Son of God must antecedently and perfectly be himself apart from the incarnation. It should be no surprise that, within this line of thinking, theologians tend to believe that any of the three divine persons could have been incarnate. To summarize this in another way, the incarnation is a matter of the economy of salvation, and because of God’s relation to the economy of salvation, the incarnation can in no way constitute who God is. But is there another way? 

To begin, the Thomistic axiom must be true in some sense. There is an asymmetrical relationship between God and the world or between Jesus and his church; one is ontologically determinative of the other. But does God being ontologically determinative of creation, or Christ of the church, mean that what one reads within the gospel narratives does not in any kind of way constitute who God is? In other words, can God place himself in a relationship with creation that is determinative of him in such a way that he is still ontologically determinative of the relationship? My contention is that the incarnation is just such an act. In the incarnation, the one who does not know the day or hour of the coming kingdom sovereignly determines the date of his birth and who his mother is, the one who prays answers prayer, and the one through whom all was made is born. And it is this one, Jesus Christ, who says, “I and the Father are one” (John 10:30). And so, God is this one, Jesus Christ, in relation to his Father in the Spirit. Which is to say that one of the Trinity lives both the inner life of God and a life among creatures as a creature. Therefore, the idea that God can be conceived of, or ought to be conceived, apart from creation is a theological nonstarter. 

In marriage, a man and a wife are not themselves without the other. God, while remaining ontologically determinative of all that is not him, has so decided to be God with us, that he cannot be God without us.

Tyler Been is a middler student at Nashotah House Theological Seminary and is an aspirant in the Episcopal Diocese of Dallas.