“We believe that TEC’s task force has failed to do justice to this necessary task, their proposed canonical revisions being a sweeping and unjustified redefinition of the Christian doctrine of marriage at odds with received biblical teaching. Such a redefinition would obscure the nature of marriage as a mysterious icon of the union between “Christ and the Church” (Eph. 5:32), present in creation itself.”

At its General Convention this summer, The Episcopal Church (TEC) will consider a resolution to amend the church’s canons to allow same-sex couples to marry. The denomination’s official Task Force on the Study of Marriage has proposed replacing language in its canons drawn from the famed “Dearly beloved” opening exhortation of the marriage service in The Book of Common Prayer, which asserts that “the union of husband and wife” is intended, when it is God’s will, “for the procreation of children.” By excising the requirement that Christian marriage be a “a lifelong union between a man and a woman,” along with the Augustinian tradition’s second good of marriage, offspring, from the list of “purposes for which it was instituted by God,” marriage would be defined as open to same-sex couples whose sexual unions are not biologically fruitful.

Though the U.S. Supreme Court is at present considering whether the constitution requires that same-sex couples be allowed to marry in civil law, the Court is not obligated to take into consideration the anthropology of Genesis 1-2 as it is received by the New Testament. But any church worthy of the name is indeed obligated to do so. We believe that TEC’s task force has failed to do justice to this necessary task, their proposed canonical revisions being a sweeping and unjustified redefinition of the Christian doctrine of marriage at odds with received biblical teaching. Such a redefinition would obscure the nature of marriage as a mysterious icon of the union between “Christ and the Church” (Eph. 5:32), present in creation itself.

As such, we contend that the proposal of the TEC task force should be rejected. The rationale for its work, laid out in an extensive accompanying report, is marred by serious historical, methodological, and theological flaws. If acted upon, the proposals will present new problems not only for our partners in the Anglican Communion and in other churches, but also for moderate and conservative Episcopalians committed to preserving the traditional teaching of The Book of Common Prayer, either by itself or alongside a rite of blessings for same-sex unions.

Why is this issue such a watershed? Precisely because marriage is a divine reality before it is a human reality, a created social form that bears witness to the covenanted union between Christ and the Church. When we speak of marriage, we speak of the nuptial “mystery” of “Christ and the Church.” And, the tradition has affirmed, the two natural goods of marriage—fides and proles, faithful union and fruitful procreation—are at the same time also sacramentum, an embodied sign of the lasting union between Christ and his Church.

This longstanding tradition runs through St. Augustine of Hippo, whose treatment of sexual ethics is paradigmatic as (to quote Michael Banner) “an envisioning of the world in the light of what is the case in Jesus Christ,” guided by our two-testament Holy Scriptures. Augustine came to his threefold account of the goods of marriage by way of strenuous wrestling with the first three chapters of Genesis, the affirmation by Jesus of marriage’s created goodness in Matthew 19, and the claim of Ephesians 5 that marriage is a figure of Christ and the Church. The Augustinian insight that fides and proles are at the same time sacramentum proves itself, in Ephraim Radner’s words,“remarkably synthetic and coherent of Scriptural and ecclesial realities over the centuries,” enabling us to read Genesis, Matthew, and Ephesians on marriage as a coherent whole within our two-testament Scriptures.

How does the Augustinian tradition do this? Robert Song in his recent book Covenant and Calling points us first to Genesis 1-2, in which the creation of man and woman in God’s image is best understood as “related closely to God’s blessing and God’s command to be fruitful, to fill the earth and subdue it.” To be created male and female is to be empowered to be fruitful and multiply, and so to fill the earth and have dominion over it as God’s image-bearers or vice-regents in the world. Marriage is thus a creation good, given along with human nature and God’s creative calling for us. The Augustinian tradition’s first two goods, fides and proles, arise from theological exegesis of biblical texts that stand as foundational for Christian anthropology. And by laying its foundations in Genesis, the Augustinian marriage tradition represents a considered turn away from gnostic temptations to locate the good of marriage in someplace other than the fruitful one-flesh union of male and female in this finite world of bodies and time.

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