Towards a missiology of marriage and sexuality: A review of Timothy Tennent’s theology of the body

Natural law: Male–female marriage as the foundation of childbearing and childrearing

Tennent begins his treatment with the doctrine of creation and the goodness of its design (5–21). He explores the “creational intentions inherent in our being born male or female” (201). Male–female sexual differentiation is the foundation for procreation (58) and, thus, given human mortality, for the very continuation of humankind. The conception of every child requires the complementary contribution of a biological mother and a biological father (50). Men and women bring complementary strengths to the family unit, with children benefitting from having a father and mother (50). When male–female sexual differentiation is combined with covenant marriage, this provides the optimal condition for each child to enter the world embedded in an intimate and primordial trinitarian “unity of father, mother, and child” (65). Thus male–female marriage (unlike same-sex relations) is ordered toward bearing and raising children (being “fruitful”). And given the complementary male–female procreative binary, heterosexual and homosexual marriages are not “interchangeable equivalencies” (54). Same-sex couples cannot jointly procreate to “create a family unit” but must rely on the procreative input of some male–female binary and thus can only acquire children for themselves who are first legally separated from at least one of their biological parents.

In this much of his discussion, Tennent arguably meets his stated ideal of framing an argument in terms that do not rest exclusively on “special revelation” but which could be made in the public square, appealing to natural revelation or natural law (God’s moral will understood through natural reason). Thus, for example, Japan’s Supreme Court recently defended marriage as a male–female union on similar reasoning to Tennent’s, arguing that in Japan, the legal definition of marriage as a male–female union was intended to protect an essential good—in the words of Judge Fumi Doi, “to protect a relationship between men and women who bear and raise children.” ³

Indeed, Tennent might have mounted a more compelling version of this argument had he been less singularly focused on theology as missiology’s dialogue partner (217). Definitionally, missiology is an interdisciplinary field that ideally interacts, for example, with cultural anthropology and theology. There is no reason why a commitment to theology (and to the authority of Scripture) should preclude engaging anthropological realities, especially since biblical passages on sex and marriage sometimes appeal to creation order and general revelation. Such a biblical logic seemingly suggests that evidence of natural law understandings ought to be ethnographically present, at least in part, even among peoples without the “written law of God” (see, for example, Rom 1–2). And since our subject matter involves human sexual lifeways, including the human institution of marriage, it would make sense to engage theology and anthropology.

And indeed, as anthropologists and missionaries discovered, marriage was present before Christianity was in thousands of societies worldwide. And while some of these societies included same-sex sexuality in the approved or semi-approved extramarital lifeways of their cultures (Rynkiewich, 2022), when it came to the contours of marriage itself, as examined inductively and cross-culturally by anthropologists, so consistent was the pattern that anthropologists rather uniformly until quite recently defined marriage as a cross-sex union oriented towards procreation and social reproduction. Marriage constitutes both a conjugal and a biparental bond—attaching men to the social reproduction project and giving each child a father as well as a mother. Only recently, and in response to recently emergent same-sex ideologies and lifeways of modern societies, have anthropologists begun to change their definitions of marriage to accommodate the new trends (Priest, 2022a: 14–22).

In short, a Christian understanding of marriage as a cross-sex union is not an extremist outlier unique to Christianity, as contemporary rhetoric sometimes assumes. But when considered cross-culturally and through history, marriage understood as a cross-sex union is entirely in the historical mainstream of world cultures—with recent same-sex marriage trends being outliers. Whatever the inherent logic of marriage as a cross-sex union, its near-universal existence, even where Christianity was unknown, suggests that such logic does not rest distinctively on Christian “special revelation” but instead on some form of natural moral reason oriented towards some essential human good. A more sustained focus on marriage as a human institution and a more sustained consideration of the human goods that marriage provides (related to procreation and social reproduction) would have strengthened this part of the argument. And Tennent’s initial argument is congruent with this cross-cultural pattern. It might have been strengthened with a more sustained discussion of such an underlying logic with anthropology as an explicit dialogue partner.

Special revelation as foundational

But while Tennent appeals, in part, to general revelation, most of his exposition appeals to theology grounded in Scripture. While some of the most explicit biblical texts on sex and marriage simply name disapproved behaviors, and Tennent occasionally appeals to those texts (e.g., 141–52), the bulk of his book aims to frame a positive vision of the good. Thus the “thou shalt not” passages are not the texts that attract the most attention from Tennent. Tennent attempts to set forth a positive theological vision, first by focusing on biblical passages that reference the creation order. From the doctrine of creation (5–21), Tennent understands our bodies (male and female) as part of a good creation, as disclosing God’s good design for us, a doctrine relevant for how we should engage neo-gnostic trans ideologies. “Christians should listen to and care about” people who say “they are trapped in a body of the wrong biological sex,” but without abandoning the understanding “that this reflects a disorder, a departure from God’s created design and redemptive plan” (31). “Saying ‘I was born this way!’ is not necessarily a violation of Christian teaching” if one is naming disordered desires resulting from the Fall (31–32). But “we should never confuse our original design with our fallen inclinations and orientations” (32).

In addition to “creation,” Tennent explores the theological concept of “the image of God.” Since God created us “in the image and likeness of God” (Gen 1:26), we should understand that there are homologous parallels and a significant degree of congruence between human and divine realities. And while the Bible does not fully clarify what such an image of God entails, Tennent understands biblical metaphors as calling attention to points of congruence between the human and divine, a metaphoric parallel made possible because we are made in God’s image. Central metaphors repeated throughout Scripture deserve particular consideration. This includes especially marriage, “one of the dominant theological motifs stretching across the entire structure of biblical revelation” (56).

On marriage as a theological icon

The metaphor of marriage applied to Christ and the church presupposes and requires the assumption that marriage binds husband and wife as two distinct categories. Tennent writes,

God created us male and female as icons of the relationship between Christ and his church and, through childbearing, as reflections of the Trinity. . . For Christians, marriage is a covenantal union of two genders brought together in a one-flesh relationship: two different glories coming together to make one new glorious unity. [This] points us to another spiritual reality, that of Christ and his church. In the gospel, we see the revelation of two glories coming together to unite Christ, who is the cosmic Bridegroom, to the bride of Christ in the new creation. Because they point to something else, men and women are not interchangeable, generic biological units. (50)

When male–female marriage fruitfully brings offspring into the world, this family may be understood as analogous to God as a Trinity. The family, Tennent says, is an “intimate unity of father, mother, and child. In this mystery, we discover the spousal meaning of our bodies in their masculinity and femininity, each given to the other, and both given to the child as a reciprocal gift of self-giving” (65). Our marital and parental sociality and fruitfulness reflect the Trinity (60–75), with the triune God constituting “a sweet society,” as the Puritans worded it (62). We “partake in the mystery of God’s inner life as we become co-creators with him and share in an intimate relational bond of family life” (177).

To clarify, while Tennent occasionally refers to “metaphor,” he far more frequently uses the term “icon.” He does not merely argue that human bodies, marriages, and families share similarities with divine realities by virtue of having been made in God’s image, making them helpful metaphors for communicating divine truths. Instead, he emphasizes that the original design and created purpose of our bodies, our marriages, and our families is to be icons of spiritual realities. The real purpose of such human realities is to communicate the truth about divine realities. He indicates that “the sexual act is, of course, exceedingly enjoyable, but its deeper purpose is to point to spiritual realities” (54). Or again, “talk about the created purpose of marriage is only meaningful if you realize that marriage serves a greater purpose, namely, as the divinely appointed icon that points to Christ and his church” (56).

Tennent explains recent trends toward same-sex marriage as understandable “since the culture no longer accepts the guidance of the Judeo-Christian tradition” (58). But “the church has a responsibility to reclaim the original design of marriage and to defend it against alternative understandings.” And what is the original design? It is “nothing less than an icon pointing us to the greater mystery of the relationship between Christ and his church,” a “relationship that cannot be pictured or replaced by same-sex marriage” (58).

But if the “only meaningful” purpose of male–female marriage is to communicate a distinctively Christian truth about “Christ and his church,” then why exactly did pre-Christian societies the world over historically practice marriage as a male–female institution (see Priest 2022a, 2022b; Girgis, Anderson, & George 2012)? This argument hardly seems like one that exemplifies Tennent’s own stated ideal of articulating a “proper moral argument in the public square” (201), proper and compelling, in part, because of an appeal to “general revelation” (201) or natural law—and framed in terms of purposes explicitly tied to human flourishing. Why not instead focus on the meaning and purpose of marriage as a human institution foundational to procreation and social reproduction? After establishing this, one could secondarily explore the implications of the Bible employing marriage metaphors for spiritual truth.

Suppose the true meaning of marriage is uniquely Christian, and the only reason America ever had a model of marriage as a cross-sex union was that “the culture” formerly accepted the “guidance of the Judeo-Christian tradition” (58). Does this not imply that only under Christian hegemony would such a view ever have arisen? This is hardly a public-square argument likely to persuade anyone not already Christian. And it is a concession that a careful engagement with anthropology would demonstrate is unnecessary and untrue.

Let me illustrate an additional aspect of my uneasiness with Tennent’s appeal to metaphor, understood as a controlling theological icon. A couple of decades ago, in a seminary faculty lunchroom, I asked, “Using only the Old Testament, how would you defend monogamy as God’s ideal for marriage?” Faculty proposed various Old Testament-based defenses of monogamy, but without consensus on the validity of any single argument—until a senior faculty member said, “We must think theologically about this. In the Bible, marriage is a central metaphor for God’s relation with the people of God, and this metaphor is always monogamous. Thus, we must understand marriage theologically as monogamous.” Other faculty agreed. But as I pointed out, after Israel split into Judah and Samaria, the OT prophets sometimes portrayed God metaphorically as married not to a single wife, Israel, but to two sisters, two wayward wives (Ezek 23; Jer 3). Some faculty immediately assumed I wished to defend polygyny as a marital pattern. ⁴ But in fact, I wanted only to make the modest observation that metaphors are communicative devices—and that we must not too easily assume that the metaphor is intended to communicate both about the topic in view (spiritual unfaithfulness) and about the ideal contours of the topic the metaphor draws from (marriage). Instead, I would wish to build my theology of marriage on biblical passages where sex and marriage are explicitly the subjects in view. Marriage metaphors employed in contexts where other topics are the focus should, at best, provide supplemental support for ideas about marriage already firmly established on other grounds.

Tennent understands marriage as prescriptively a male–female union. Yet he does not believe same-sex attracted people are wrong to assert, “I was born this way” (31–32). ⁵ In Tennent’s paradigm, the implications for the same-sex attracted merit special consideration—which Tennent provides, as we will see, under the rubric of “celibacy.”

On celibacy as an icon

Tennent sees “the calling of celibacy [as] an extraordinary and high calling” that may be understood as an “icon” and “foreshadowing” (83) of an eschatological future when “people will ‘neither marry nor be given in marriage’” (Matt 22:30; Mark 12:25). Celibacy as an icon is one of the core building blocks for a theology of the body (80–83). Believers who commit to lifelong celibacy “remind all of us . . . of a future when the kingdom will be fully consummated” (88). He contrasts the “glory of marriage” and the “glory” of the celibate life (80). “Celibacy stands as one of the great icons in the world, pointing us to the consummation of the ages when all the redeemed will be married to Christ as his spotless bride” (89).

There is ambiguity in Tennent’s use of the term celibacy, a word which, after all, is not directly a translation of any biblical term—and which in English usage may have one of two meanings. Sometimes Tennent uses the term celibacy simply to mean sexually abstinent. ⁶ In this meaning, Christians who believe sex belongs only in marriage might naturally say that all Christians who are not married ought to be sexually abstinent, celibate. Under this usage, the two morally approved options are (1) sexually active married couples and (2) sexually abstinent unmarried individuals. But much of Tennent’s discussion seems to use the term in a way more aligned with Roman Catholic usage. Tennent speaks of a “calling of lifetime celibacy [as] an extraordinary and high calling for a special group” (83), “where a man or woman chooses (or is chosen by God) not to enter into marriage for the sake of God’s kingdom” (80), a “renunciation of the married state” (82). As Tennent expounds this theme of lifelong celibacy, citing Catholic authorities such as Bishop Robert Barron (81) and Pope John Paul II (82), a different binary is suggested, contrasting (1) those who pledge lifelong marriage vows with (2) those who make lifelong vows repudiating marriage. And, of course, for Catholics, clergy are, with minor exceptions, drawn only from this second category.

Part of the ambiguity for me lies in the fact that Tennent is a Protestant writing for Protestants and that most Protestants historically did not believe it was helpful to encourage young adults to make sacred vows never to marry. Such vows were typically understood as prematurely and problematically binding the conscience. For example, the Westminster Larger Catechism identified “entangling vows of single life” as contributing to the likelihood of sexual failures (see Q 139 of the Catechism). ⁷ Indeed, at least at an informal level, Protestants have typically preferred their clergy to be married. Protestants have often encouraged young people to commit to sexual abstinence unless and until they get married (understood as a moral expectation for all unmarried believers). But in most Protestant settings, one would search in vain for any public venues or rituals where young adults are encouraged to take a formal vow repudiating marriage for life. ⁸

Protestant mission settings have a different culture for the unmarried in ministry than one finds in Catholic mission settings—something missiologists wishing to focus on celibacy ought explicitly to consider. There have often been Protestant missionaries who never married, such as Lottie Moon, Any Carmichael, Henry Martyn, Gladys Aylward, Mary Slessor, or Rachel Saint. As a child of missionaries, I grew up in a missionary community devoted to Bible translation, whose members came from diverse Protestant denominations. This local community included a dozen missionaries (all women) who never married. The single missionary men who came were more likely eventually to marry (given the more favorable marriage market for them). Over the years, world-class never-married linguists with PhDs and a missionary vocation to Bible translation came to our “field” and others to hold translation workshops. In our Bible translation community, the names of these unmarried missionary-linguists (Esther Matteson, Eunice Pike, Sarah Gudschinsky, Ursula Weisemann, Mary Ruth Wise, Mildred Larson, Katy Barnwell) were rehearsed with profound respect. My Aunt Aimee was a childhood hero of mine. With a sense of call to missions and no marital prospects or plans on the horizon, she moved forwards with plans to be a single missionary. A supporter asked, “But what if God wants you to marry?” Her answer, with a grin, “If so, God will give me grace for that too.” She served overseas for 40 years and was never married. Around the world, young Protestant missionaries often moved forward on vocational missionary commitments, even though this sometimes took them out of the marriage market. In Peru, Martha Duff, a single missionary, was pursuing a multi-decade project of translating the New Testament into Amuesha. Bob Tripp, also unmarried, was involved in a similar multi-decade Bible translation project with the Amarakaeri. Martha and Bob became friends but held back from marriage, not because of any vowed vocation to singleness, but because marriage was incompatible with their already accepted missionary commitments. Only after 17 years of friendship, when Martha had completed her Bible translation project with the Amuesha, did they marry and live among the Amarakaeri as Bob finished his translation project.

Single Protestant missionaries have often seen themselves as following in the lineage of the unmarried Apostle Paul, willing to remain single for the gospel’s sake. But in my experience, while nearly all Protestant career missionaries, including single missionaries, were ready to rehearse a story of their own vocational missionary call, ⁹ I have heard no parallel rehearsed stories of vocational calls to vowed lifelong singleness. And when I’ve asked veteran Protestant missionaries from around the world and across nationalities, they report the same. Apart from some exceptions in the Anglo-Catholic wing of Anglicanism (Symonds, 1986: 203–27), Protestant missionaries neither cultivated an ideology of vowed singleness for life nor institutionalized this in public rituals. Thus, older missionaries who did marry did not express ambivalence because of prior vows. No such youthful vows constrained their consciences.

Tennent portrays Christians as facing a tension between “choosing” a life of marriage versus “choosing” “a life of singleness and celibacy” (77), a choice between two alternates presumably faced by young adults. However, not only did Protestants not institutionalize such a chosen vocational vow to lifelong singleness, but many individuals have never had the option to choose marriage. Marriage is a social accomplishment. It requires the participation of others, minimally of a suitable, willing partner! People fail to get married for all sorts of reasons, many of them unrelated to any religious vocation or vowed commitment to a single life.

In many Amazonian or African societies studied by anthropologists (see Goody, 1976: 56–65), it was rare for an adult of 45 or 50 to have never been married, so much so that the identity and role of bachelor or spinster were virtually nonexistent. But this was common elsewhere. In much of Western Europe after the 16th century, for example, the numbers of never-married men and women in their late forties ranged from 15% to 20% (Goody, 1976: 57). Such bachelors and spinsters often did not choose their non-marital state. In a world where marital “matches” required economic considerations and inheritance rules precluded the subdividing of landed estates, firstborn sons (under primogeniture) could easily choose to marry. And single daughters of similarly situated households, whose families provided a generous “matching” dowry, could assuredly marry. But any sibling whose inheritance or dowry was minimal and who lacked other compensating attractions did not find it easy simply to “choose” to marry. Indeed, “under primogeniture in some European areas . . . younger brothers or sisters [were allowed] to stay on the family land [only] as long as they did not marry” (Goody 1976, 58). The presence of a spinster aunt was often a desirable addition to a busy household. The obligation to stay unmarried was a feature of various forms of employment for both men and women, as described and analyzed by anthropologist Jack Goody (1976: 58–59). In short, the existence of what Goody calls “sacred spinsters and bachelors” (58), men and women who deliberately chose permanently to repudiate marriage, was but a subset of the far larger category of those who never married. And for conscientious Protestants historically, core to the ethic of sexual abstinence was not whether one was part of a particular category of people who made a sacred vow permanently to repudiate marriage, but simply whether one was unmarried—whatever the reason.

But while historically, vowed renunciation of the married state was not a cultural practice in most Protestant Christianity, even in its missionary expressions, there is one recent emerging partial exception. A significant community of same-sex attracted Christians, primarily (but not exclusively) within evangelical churches, led by individuals such as Wesley Hill (2015, 2016), associated with Revoice conferences ¹⁰ and identified as “Side B Christians,” affirm that God’s will for sexual activity is exercised only in male–female marriage, understood as required by Scripture. And yet they also insist their same-sex sexual desires are unchangeable. In Wesley Hill’s words, they are “as much a part of my basic makeup as my height or right-handedness” (2015: 17). Thus, male–female marriage is felt not to be a viable option for them. Therefore, same-sex attracted Christians should make vowed commitments to celibacy, understood as both sexual abstinence and as a formal renunciation of marriage for life. They should also affirm their public identity as “gay” or “lesbian,” prefaced implicitly or explicitly by the modifier “celibate.” Furthermore, “celibate gay and lesbian Christians, precisely in and out of their celibacy, are called to express, rather than simply renounce and deny, same-sex love” (Hill, 2015: 76). Such love should not be sexually acted out but will likely include “romantic” and “erotic” feelings (76, 79). Hill suggests gay people have a “genius” for friendship, an “enviable insight into how to foster and enhance same-sex friendships” (80). Thus, they have a special calling to model and represent the true meaning of intimate same-sex friendships to the larger church. He envisions a “Christian practice of vowed friendship,” parallel in many respects to marriage in both intimacy and binding promises, but without sexual activity. Such a relational commitment, like “a piece of ice held fast in the fist,” naturally involves pain and heartache (65–103).

At no point does Tennent clearly illustrate from Protestant Christianity or Protestant mission history examples of people taking formal vows never to marry. But Tennent (83) nonetheless says, “the calling of lifetime celibacy is an extraordinary and high calling for a special group.” And in context, Tennent is discussing those who are same-sex attracted, “spirit-bonded friendships,” and he cites Wesley Hill—who is known for calling for such lifelong commitments. Tennent appears to have in mind, at least in part, “Side B celibate gay Christians,” although he never fully explicates the paradigm they represent. Tennent views such “celibate Christians” as “icons of the gospel in the world” through their intimate friendships (89) combined with their “eschatological celibacy” (88)—oriented towards an eschaton when people “will neither marry nor be given in marriage” (Matt 22:30).

Two issues emerge for me. First is the problem of ambiguity. When Tennent commends Roman Catholic Bishop Robert Barron’s statement that “celibacy” is an “eschatologically fascinating” sign to the church and world (81), is Tennent endorsing the meaning of celibacy that is in the mind of Bishop Barron and in the practice of his church? How exactly should the Protestant missionary culture and history of honored unmarried (and sexually abstinent) missionaries—something one might expect a Protestant missiologist to factor in—fit into the discussion? It would be helpful if Tennent explicitly compared and contrasted the celibacy paradigms of the people he cites and more clearly defined and illustrated what he has in mind. Does he intend to encourage vowed lifelong repudiations of marriage? For whom? For those with same-sex attractions? Based on what biblical criteria or assumed logic? Does the call for such vows presuppose the assumption that a homosexual orientation is fixed at birth, making one intrinsically unsuited for male–female marriage? What if the very construct of a “sexual orientation” is flawed (Rynkiewich, 2022)? To whom do the supposed extraordinary “icon” status and “glory” of celibacy (80) apply? How does his understanding diverge from, or coincide with, historic Protestant or Roman Catholic understandings? How does his approach address the full variety of Christians who are unmarried and who may never marry—often for reasons not of their choosing—but all of whom face the Christian expectation that they abstain from sexual activity? What does Tennent think of Wesley Hill’s idea (2014, 2019) that celibate gay Christians can redeem gay culture, forging cultural patterns that are both distinctively gay and celibate? Since Hill explicitly appeals to Don Richardson’s Peace Child to frame his contextualized approach to gay culture (2019), it would be helpful for missiologists to interact with such a contextualization approach and perhaps compare and contrast the issues with debates in missiology on religious “insider movements.” What issues, if any, should be raised from the results of earlier endeavors in the 1980s to combine celibacy and support for gay culture in selected American Roman Catholic seminaries (cf. Cozzens, 2000; Sipe, 2004; Sullins, 2018)? How does Tennent’s approach align with Wesley Hill’s idea that same-sex attracted individuals are uniquely gifted at same-sex friendships and should focus this gifting on “vowed” same-sex friendships modeled on marriage but without the sex? If so, should churches acknowledge this gifting by allowing such individuals to mentor and disciple church youth in how to have such friendships? Why or why not? Without proposed answers to the above sorts of questions, it is challenging to engage Tennent’s views with greater specificity. To be clear, I am pleased to see a senior missiologist address celibacy issues. But I would like to see further clarifications and elaboration of positions taken.

Second, I remain puzzled by the “icon” argument. In defense of celibacy as an “eschatological icon,” Tennent repeatedly (76, 78, 80, 88, 188) cites two biblical passages (Matt 22:30 and Mark 12:25). Both passages refer to a single incident where the Sadducees, who did not believe in the resurrection, posed a story about seven brothers who one by one all married the same woman sequentially and then died (marrying in accord with the Levirate). They ask, “Whose wife will she be in the resurrection?” Jesus affirms the reality of the resurrection in his answer but clarifies that “when the dead rise, they will neither marry nor be given in marriage; they will be like the angels in heaven.” One plausible interpretation of this passage is that, in a world characterized by aging and death, marriage and sex serve essential ends related to procreation, social reproduction, and the continuation and flourishing of humankind. But in a resurrection post-death world, marriage and sex (and perhaps the male–female binary) cease to be salient realities. What I find less easy to discern is how one draws the inference from this passage that Jesus intended this information as a charter for Christians to formally repudiate marriage in this life as an “eschatological icon” pointing to the glory of the next.