[1] I believe these have long been dealt with adequately by Evangelical scholars. See  www.robgagnon.net/articlesonline.htm  for the acknowledged expert in this sphere, or from an Australian perspective, Sexegesis, Michael Bird, Gordon Preece (eds) Anglican Press Australia 2012.; http://brian-edgar.com/wp-content/uploads/downloads/2010/05/Sexuality-of-God.pdf

[2] Like many others however I have a close relative who is gay and who, like other people I have met, definitely professes to be Christian.

[3] Though I once had an article published called, A Theology of Homosexuality, Evangelical Quarterly 67:1  (1995), 71-87

[4] The religious and moral condition of the Gentiles is a major topic in both passages, but the way Paul describes pagan spirituality in Acts 17 is vastly different from his words to the Church in Romans 1.

[5] God is not like a feature of the created world that can be “studied” or to which a religious technology might be applied to produce an assured result.

[6] I agree with the remarks of Sarah Coakley, “I have argued elsewhere that prayer (and especially prayer of a non-discursive sort, whether contemplative or charismatic) is the only context in which the irreducible threeness of God becomes humanly apparent”, http://www.abc.net.au/religion/articles/2012/03/08/3448940.htm

[7] In other words it is an Incarnational and Trinitarian theology.

[8] http://tonycampolo.org/for-the-record-tony-campolo-releases-a-new-statement/#.ViX9pSuIldg Cf. David P. Gushee, Changing Our Mind, 2014.

[9] In this I follow the 180 degree turn advocated by Karl Barth in his “Christological concentration” e.g. “theological anthropology….must first look away from man in general and concentrate on the one man Jesus, and only then look back from Him to man in general.” Church Dogmatics III/2 p.53.

[10] The single human source of authority to which the Church must submit is the crucified and glorified humanity of the Son of God who sacrificed himself for his Bride and who now completely indwells the life of God (Col 3:1-4).

[11] I affirm the direction of the approach of the Evangelical scholar Peter Leithart in expounding the Song of Solomon, http://www.firstthings.com/web-exclusives/2012/01/the-poetry-of-sex; “The Song helps us relearn what nearly every civilization before ours already knew: Sex is allegory, and as allegory it is metaphysics and theology and cosmology. For Christians, sexual difference and union is a type of Christ and the church: How could an erotic poem (and in the Bible!) be anything but allegory?”

[12] The approach below is aware of the danger of projecting human experience onto the Trinity, which to a degree is necessarily unavoidable. Having said that, for a Christian the “order of knowing”, how we know something, is always subject to “the order of being”, how things are; which is ultimately who God is. Hence, “the fundamentally relational nature of human persons is seen most clearly in the male-female differentiation of humanity. By constituting human persons as sexually distinct, God created in humanity an essential relationality that mirrors the relationality inherent in the Trinity itself.” M. Cortez, Theological Anthropology, 2010, p.24.

[13] http://cross-connect.net.au/the-bride-of-revelation-study-1-jesus-and-the-apocalypse/1/ “ I was at the breakfast table with Donna, eating with my bride as Jesus will dine with the Church when he comes to marry us (Rev 19:6-10). All of a sudden I was aware that Patmos was an island of joy for the apostle John even though he was there as a prisoner for his faith, and I started to sense what he saw in a vision when he was there almost two thousand years ago. John saw that his presence on Patmos made it a bridal chamber, that the area of the 7 churches to whom he wrote was also a bridal chamber and the whole cosmos is one vast bridal chamber where the people of God are being prepared for their marriage to Jesus. God the Father’s plan is for the whole of creation to be filled with endless and indestructible marital bliss.”

[14] By “bipolar” I mean that one pole cannot exist apart from the other e.g. north implies south. This is a stronger but compatible term with “dimorphic”, existing in two forms. Gary Deddo, rightly points out that true partnership depends on the differences indicated by bipolarity and that it is gender differentiation that makes marriage possible; http://www.trinitystudycenter.com/topical/why-we-are-gendered-beings-g-deddo.pdf. p.11 The person who has most famously applied this to homosexuality is Karl Barth; CD III/1, p.186.

[15] ““For who has understood the mind of the Lord so as to instruct him?” But we have the mind of Christ.” (1 Cor 2:16)

[16] “For out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaks.” (Matt 12:34)

[17] These words of Jesus perfectly provide the grounds for the “Christological concentration”; “We could describe this kind of thought as a kind of hourglass, where the two contiguous (things bordering one another) vessels (God and creature) meet only at the narrow passage through the centre: where they both encounter each other in Jesus Christ…there is no other point of contact between the two chambers…” (von Balthasar)

[18] In all respects Jesus’ consciousness of his relationship as Son to Father is revealed by the Holy Spirit; e.g. “and the Holy Spirit descended on him in bodily form, like a dove; and a voice came from heaven, “You are my beloved Son; with you I am well pleased.”; “In that same hour he rejoiced in the Holy Spirit and said, “…. All things have been handed over to me by my Father, and no one knows who the Son is except the Father, or who the Father is except the Son and anyone to whom the Son chooses to reveal him.”” (Luke 3:22; 10:21-22).

[19] Which means the call to a holy life is greater than the physical realisation of sexuality.

[20] Or even more powerfully, “No one has ever seen God. But the unique One, who is himself God, is near to the Father’s heart. He has revealed God to us.” (John 1:18 NLT).

[21] This section basically accepts the validity of “Rahner’s Rule”; ‘The “economic” Trinity is the “immanent” Trinity, and the “immanent” Trinity is the “economic” Trinity’. Which means, more or less, that who God is eternally (Immanent Trinity) is who God reveals Himself to be in history (economic or Trinity ), and vice versa: what God does in history is who God is in eternity. Cf. “our first and decisive transcription of the statement that God is, must be that God is who He is in the act of His revelation.” Barth CD II/1 p.262.  The union of the incarnate Son with the Father images their oneness in eternity.

[22] Providing the “comprehensive context” which Gary Deddo rightly discerns is generally lacking in these discussions; Gendered, p.7

[23] For a down to earth attempt to expound the doctrine of the Trinity as the key to life see, Sam Allberry,  Connected, 2012.

[24] The mystical writer Adrienne von Speyr contends that sexuality can be understood “not in the isolation of the sexual sphere” where the question is “unanswerable, but in the integration of the whole human, Christian, ecclesial, Christological and Trinitarian.” Cited in M.M. Schumacher, A Trinitarian Anthropology, 2014, p.304.

[25] Differences–in-unity of the Trinity are the archetype of all differences which make love possible.; M.M. Schumacher, A Trinitarian Anthropology, 2014, p.27. If this is so we are dealing with a “meta-anthropology” that opens up the being and essence of humanity and the reason for the cosmos.

[26] Monogamy is a reflection of the irreducible, non interchangeable and singular distinctions of the Persons of the Trinity Cf. Christopher West, Theology of the Body Explained, p.118.

[27] Jesus prayed, “The glory that you have given me I have given to them, that they may be one even as we are one,” (John 17:22), indicating that the glory of the Father-Son relationship  is the source of human unity. Contrary to much popular thought, true unity can never mean the negation or levelling of all differences.

[28] The emphasis on the 3 Persons is a part of a social doctrine of the Trinity. This is highlighted by the traditional Latin expression, persona est relatio, person is relationship (Aquinas). There is nothing outside of or beyond the pure relationships between Father, Son and Spirit. The Son is generated by the Father and the Spirit proceeds from Father-and-Son. The persons of the trinity are “individual,

unique, non-interchangeable subjects of the one, common divine substance, with consciousness and will. Each of the Persons possesses the divine nature in a non-interchangeable way; each presents it in his own way… The three divine Persons exist in their particular, unique natures as Father, Son and Spirit in their relationships to one another, and are determined through these relationships. It is in these relationships that they are persons.”, J. Moltmann, The Trinity and the Kingdom of God, pp.171-172.  Cf. The inner works of the Trinity are completely oppositional in a way that unites the Persons in their distinctions and makes their external works, in creation, a perfect unity, W. Pannenberg, Systematic Theology, 2, pp.3-4.

[29] This is called perichoresis, circumincessio or coinherence. The members of the Trinity only exist in their mutual indwelling. This applies to their thinking, willing, acting etc. as one, and in a manner which is a template for the “one flesh” of marriage. Followed through, this insight also provides illumination into salvation as a “wonderful exchange” between Christ and his Bride e.g. Calvin, Institutes, IV.xvii.2.

[30] “Human sexual relationships (in the broadest sense) are reflective of the intra-trinitarian love of God – a love which reaches out to the other: love within the Trinity, from one person to another; love which reaches from God to humanity; and love of male for female.”, Edgar, Sexuality-of-God, p.3.

[31] This approach understands materiality to bear properties which point beyond itself to the glory of God. Sometimes this is put in terms of a “sacramental principle”; the body as male or female for marriage is sacramental of eternal things.

[32] If male/female images Christ/Church then “It follows that sexual difference is endowed with a fundamentally spiritual value from the very beginning.”, M.M. Schumacher, A Trinitarian Anthropology, 2014, p.21. “The spiritual meaning indicates the transcendent reality to which the act points or bears witness to or glorifies”, Deddo, Gendered, p.23. See also Christopher West, Theology of the Body Explained, Male-Female Communion: Icon of the Trinity, pp.77ff.

[33] This is not to say that creation is a necessary act of God; just the opposite, because the relationships in the Godhead were perfectly fulfilling the act of creation is absolutely free, gracious and loving. This is a distinctly Christian understanding.

[34] That God created the world for his glory is a given for orthodox Christianity, see for example, Walter Schultz, “Jonathan Edwards’s End of Creation: an Exposition and Defense”; JETS 49/2 (June 2006) 247–71. This is the glory of the shared intratrinitarian life.

[35] This involves an analogy, humans are both like and unlike God. If we were totally unlike God he would be completely unintelligible to us, but to think ourselves completely like him is conceptual idolatry. “For between Creator and creature no similitude can be expressed without implying an even greater dissimilitude.” (DS 806). As such there is no sexualising of the Trinity as found in various ancient, e.g. Gnostic, religious systems. Cf. Aquinas, ST, I, q.4.a.3 ad 4. Cf. West, Theology, p.120, “the Trinity has not revealed itself as Husband, Wife and Child”.

[36] “Creation is the external basis of the covenant. Covenant is the internal basis of the creation.” (Barth). “ It is vital to note that covenant is not a merely formal arrangement that God institutes for humanity in marriage or between himself and his people. The meaning of creation is to make possible the history of God’s covenant with man has its beginning, its centre and its culmination in Jesus Christ.” (Barth CD III/1 p.42.).  To put this another way, Christ is the reality of the covenant which will finally be realised between himself and his Bride (Isa 42:6; 49:8; Rev 19:6-9). In this context, sexual union is about the total giving of myself to another person in love; just as Father, Son and Spirit.

[37] “Then God said, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness. And let them have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over the livestock and over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.” So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them. And God blessed them. And God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it, and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth.””

[38] See J. Burnside, God, Justice and Society, 2011; p.152. This observation suggests that any society which undoes this binary will move towards chaos. See also, C. Plantinga, Not the Way It’s Supposed to Be, 1995, p.29, who adds the dynamic of “separating” and binding together”.

[39] See Grudem, Systematic Theology,1994,  p.227 for an approach similar to the one taken here.

[40] This is not an exegetical conclusion as such, but a provision of the analogy of faith. “By “analogy of faith” we mean the coherence of the truths of faith among themselves and within the whole plan of Revelation.” (Catechism of the Catholic Church sect. 114)

[41] The fullness of the image of God in which humanity was created is the Incarnate Word of God (2 Cor 4:4; Col 1:15). Cf. Kathryn Tanner, Christ the Key, p.19

[42] http://biblicalstudies.org.uk/pdf/eq/1995-1_071.pdf which is a PDF of my article.

[43] I am not arguing that the male-female or husband-wife relationship is the only aspect of the image of God; there are many other profound relationships involved in reflecting the divine glory.

[44] The relationship between Father and Son is mirrored in that between husband and wife as they are both reciprocal and asymmetrical relationships between equal persons. Or, in Gary Deddo’s language, “a non-interchangeable asymmetric partnership” which makes possible the relationship between God and creation, God and his covenant people, Christ and the Church etc. Gendered, p.17.

[45] This is not some abstract connection; as a type of Christ Adam derives his power to be husband from Jesus, the true Lover of the final Bride, the Church. Unlike with Adam and Eve, the Church comes from Christ’s fullness and the source of both masculinity and femininity is in the eternal Son’s relationship with the Father;  Hans Urs von Balthasar, Theodrama V. 91;  Schumacher, A Trinitarian Anthropology, pp.256, 261, 284ff.  The marriage of Adam and Eve can after the distortions produced by the Fall only be understood through the coming marriage of Christ and the Church. Otherwise the radical unity of male and female becomes debased to male or female, West, Theology, p.152.

[46] In this radical confrontation of their mutually distinct very humanness as a unity man and woman were called to participate in the very divinity of God. West, Theology, p. 251. Cf. 2 Pet 1:4. For Adam, there was something about the holiness and glory of the woman who was given to him by God that was indescribably beautiful. This was an image of Jesus’ plan for the Church; “that he might sanctify her, having cleansed her by the washing of water with the word, [27] so that he might present the church to himself in splendour, without spot or wrinkle or any such thing, that she might be holy and without blemish.” (Eph 5:26-27).

[47] The “bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh” experience of Adam interpenetrated to the very core of his being, and Eve’s.

[48] David Bentley Hart, The Beauty of the Infinite, pp.249, 252 correctly intuits the analogy between the Trinitarian perichoresis and creation as one of beauty and delight.

[49] If it had been “Adam and Steve” then when Adam looked at the “other” he would only have recognised himself. Cf. Gordon Preece, Sex and the City of God, 2003; p.4-5. Eve is a “truly other” Deddo, Gendered, pp.20-21. Which is why Deddo remarks that “same-sex sexual behaviour de-sexualises the act…reduced to a pleasure act…with another person with no regard for the otherness of their gender.”, Gendered, p.26.

[50] Commenting on the Song of Songs Kamal Weerakoon writes, “Sexual love flows from, and is analogous to…the inner life of the Trinity himself…this union is one of self-giving love and mutual delight. We may cautiously say that the lover’s delight in their beloved mirrors, to some extent, the Triune God’s eternal delight in himself.”, Towards an Evangelical Sexual Anthropology and Ethic, 2015, p.8.

[51] More technically, “differentiation within a common ontology”.

[52] Man is man over against woman, and woman knows herself as woman in relation to her male counterpart. Cf. M.Volf. Exclusion and Embrace, 1996, p.187. This images how Father, Son and Spirit know themselves before each other. The gift of woman to man and vice versa images the reciprocal and incessant giving of the Persons of the Trinity which will finally be revealed at the End ; West, Theology, p.254.

[53] As a sort of “ontological glue” holding a marriage together in intimacy, unity and love.

[54] Whilst I would argue that in the biblical accounts of marriage, especially Gen 2 and Eph 5 the male is disposed to initiate and the woman to receive, if interpenetration is real then these aspects must become mutual cf. West, Theology, p.107f. This does not entail subordination between women and men so that women or wives are to obey men/their husbands just as the Son eternally obeyed the Father. For this to follow there would need to be multiple self-existing wills in the Godhead, but “The Father has given the Son everything, including his will.” Von Balthasar, Theodrama, V, p.88.  cf. Kathryn Tanner, Christ the Key, pp.182-187; A Theology of God the Father and Response to Kevin Giles, Phantaz Sunlyk, http://www.tektonics.org/guest/psekstasis.html.

[55] As the Spirit of the Father and the Son the Holy Spirit is the particular Person in God who as a person (hypostasis) joins a man and a woman together as he bonds Father and Son. Holy love is meant to radiate through the body of husband and wife to each other. Cf. West. Theology, p.105.

[56] The question of the place of a child in marriage is beyond this paper. However I would affirm the position of Robert Jenson, Systematic Theology vol 1, The Triune God, p.156; “Thus God has arranged that the mutuality of married love- the invariable paradigm of I-Thou relatedness –shall be achieved by acts whose term is the child – a paradigm of the intrusive third party – whose free agency or suffered absence is the final bond between the couple.” The will to be fruitful beyond oneself is a particularly fitting image of the divine life. See also, Schumacher, A Trinitarian Anthropology, p.280, 375 etc. Deddo, Gendered, pp.30-3, heterosexual couples continue to image the importance of gender in other ways even if childless. For Trinitarian aspects of procreation, see Mulieris Dignitatem, n.18, “”I have brought a man into being with the help of the Lord” (Gen 4:1).This exclamation of Eve, the “mother of all the living” is repeated every time a new human being comes into the world. It expresses the woman’s joy and awareness that she is sharing in the great mystery of eternal generation. The spouses share in the creative power of God!”

[57] Equivalent, for instance, to “Creator, Redeemer, Sanctifier.”

[58] Where the addressee may in order be “God”, “Lord”, Jesus”, “Father” and so on.

[59] Which proves in practice to be a sustained attack on God as Father.

[60] Biblically, this is the great prostitute (Rev 17).

[61] It needs to be said at this point that the entertainment of the possibility of “gay-marriage” by Christians as an authentic spiritual possibility can only arise in a context where the true significant of marriage as a sign of eternal realities has been obscured in Church and culture. In practice marriages easily become earthly idols; West, Theology, pp. 264-265.

[62] Whoever creates their image and likeness is due worship; hence Satan’s temptation to Jesus in the wilderness (Luke 4:6-7).

[63] “most profoundly, same-sex relations fail to represent the eternal unity and non-interchangeable differentiation between the Father and Son in their internal and eternal relations of holy love.” Deddo, Gendered, pp.20-21; While other relationships can express other dimensions of divine love, such as caring, the male- female relationship uniquely represents the intimate relationship, the coming together, the unity of the two fundamental, equal, human, mutually inhering but distinct, different and non-interchangeable dimensions of human nature.”, Edgar, Sexuality of God, p.20.

[64] The background for this teaching is neither culture nor history but the creation of the cosmos i.e. Gen 1-2.

[65] “Same-sex relations stand for the idolization of one’s own gender.”; Deddo, Gendered, p.28, n.28.

[66] Homosexuality is parasitic on heterosexuality for its identity or self-understanding. The order of understanding cannot be reversed because the same-sex attraction is solely a post-fall phenomenon.

[67] Deddo, Gendered, pp.28, 32.

[68] Facebook tried 58 gender identity options, when its users decried this as exclusory it made the choice unlimited.

[69] With the bizarre consequence, as John Milbank puts it, “if marriage is now understood as a lifelong sexual contract between any two adult human persons with no specification of gender, then the allowance of gay marriage renders all marriages “gay marriages.””, http://www.abc.net.au/religion/articles/2012/03/13/3452229.htm

[70] I see this bizarre situation as a sign in the maturation of depravity which precedes a great divine judgement. As God tells Abraham before the conquest of Canaan and the extermination of its inhabitants, “the iniquity of the Amorites is not yet complete.” (Gen 15:16).

[71] Cf. Marx stated this in a prescient manner; “All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can  ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned…”

[72] They might lobby, start political parties or run seminars to convince themselves they are on the right track.

[73] D.Field, The Homosexual Way, p.6; in 1279 English law punished sodomy with live burial, altered to other means of execution in 1533, to life imprisonment in 1861, off the statute books in 1967; Cf. http://www.badnewsaboutchristianity.com/gff_homosexuality.htm#_ednref4

[74] My understanding is that all identity confusions stem from the loss of the glory of sonship which was originally enjoyed by Adam (Luke 3:38).

[75] “Say to them, As I live, declares the Lord God, I have no pleasure in the death of the wicked, but that the wicked turn from his way and live; turn back, turn back from your evil ways, for why will you die, O house of Israel?” (Ezel 33:11; cf. 18:32). “To man, the anger of God incites pain; to God the anger is pain.” (A. Heschel).

[76]  Much like the corollary of accepting same-sex relationships held up by Gary Deddo, Gendered, p.25, the dissolving of the significance of non-interchangeable difference in every covenantal relationship i.e. between Father and Son, God and creation, the two natures of Christ, the members and the Head.

[77] E.g. David Bentley Hart, The Beauty of the Infinite, p.327.

[78] Hart, op.cit p.360

[79] Resurrection is not however instantaneous for the crucified Jesus, or for us. “we can’t answer Jesus’ question [“Why”]. We can only die with him and await God’s answer in him.” Forde, On Being a Theologian of the Cross, p.3.

[80] The husbandhood of Jesus is totally unique; as the God-man who has inclusively endured death and experienced resurrection he uniquely constitutes the Church, male-and-female together, as a Bride i.e. female.

[81] God’s ultimate purpose has always been to take his created image into the eternal distinctions of the Persons of the Godhead, this is achieved by a transposition of these differentiations into salvation history, climaxing eschatologically in the marriage between Christ/Husband and Church/Wife. There is no revelation of God beyond this. Cf. Hans Urs von Balthasar, Theodrama V, p.257.

[82] Cf. Deddo, Gendered, pp.32-33.

[83] Differences over this issue are more basic than the long standing ones with which the Church has learned to live e.g. the nature of the sacraments, church government, predestination. Which is why Wolfhart Pannenberg is correct to say, “If a church were to let itself be pushed to the point where it ceased to treat homosexual activity as a departure from the biblical norm, and recognized homosexual unions as a personal partnership of love equivalent to marriage, such a church would stand no longer on biblical ground but against the unequivocal witness of Scripture. A church that took this step would cease to be the one, holy, catholic, and apostolic church.” http://www.holytrinitynewrochelle.org/yourti92881.html

[84] Material heresy is unintentional and must be distinguished from “formal heresy”, i.e. a heretic opinion proposed deliberately by a person who is aware of its being against the doctrine of the Church. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Material_heresy

[85]“ For example, if we can reconstitute the imago dei and its implications for humanity and the nature of love and so forth, then why not reconstitute the nature of God? Or in fact, if the nature of love is re-defined, would that have already started to happen?”, Edgar,Sexuality of God, p.34.

[86] In this image the Church is the New/Second Eve corresponding to Christ as the Second Adam (1 Cor 15:45).

[87] It is not accidental that Paul rebukes the Corinthian Christians’ resort to prostitutes with a quotation from Genesis 2:24, “The two will become one flesh.” (1 Cor 6:16). The mutual attraction of masculinity and femininity finds its mature goal in reverence for Christ; West, Theology, p.412.

[88] http://cross-connect.net.au/lambs-war6-great-mysteries/ for an example of my teaching on this subject.

[89] Cf. the principle defining the 144,000 redeemed in heaven; “It is these who have not defiled themselves with women, for they are virgins.” (Rev 14:4). For a helpful practical discussion on celibacy Beyond Stereotypes, EA Working Group on Human Sexuality, 2009, p.80ff.

[90] This is by way of offering the “body as a living sacrifice” so entering more deeply into the mystery of the atoning sacrifice of Christ for the Church (Eph 5:32). Weerakoon, op cit, pp.11-13; http://www.christ2rculture.com/resources/Ministry-Blog/The-Gospel-and-Sex-by-Tim-Keller.pdf

[91] For an interesting theological interpretation this phenomenon drawing on the Church Fathers, see http://themelios.thegospelcoalition.org/article/from-moral-majority-to-evil-disbelievers-coming-clean-about-christian-atheism

[92] This was very evident in the Irish referendum on SSM which amounted to a rejection of the moral authority of the Catholic Church.

[93] Allied perhaps with an insecure aggressive reflex like that shown by a victim (Church) being bullied (State).

[94] If Brian Edgar’s thesis that sexuality has displaced the soul in Western civilisation is correct, Sexuality-of-God, p.9ff., then the implications of this connection could be pioneering.  Cf. “We might rejoice in the ‘happy fault’ of the sexual revolution of the twentieth century which won for us so great a theology of the body.” (Christopher West)

[95] Cf. “on God’s side the innermost law of triune love is revealed here: in virtue of this love every Hypostasis, in its own “decline”, causes the Other to arise”. This is the prototype of what we described earlier as the sexual interaction of men and women.”; von Balthasar, Theodrama, V, pp.477-478.

[96] The Church is called “to bring to light for everyone what is the plan of the mystery hidden for ages in God who created all things, so that through the church the manifold wisdom of God might now be made known to the rulers and authorities in the heavenly places. This was according to the eternal purpose that he has realized in Christ Jesus our Lord”. This mystery is revealed through the one flesh marriage of men and women  symbolising Christ and the Church, ““Therefore a man shall leave his father and mother and hold fast to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh.” This mystery is profound, and I am saying that it refers to Christ and the church.” (Eph 3:9-11; 5:31-32).