The covenant theology of the marriage act. The covenant theology of the marriage act can be stated in 17 words. “Sexual intercourse is intended by God to be at least implicitly a renewal of the marriage covenant.”
Why do we teach this? It’s short enough that almost everyone can remember it. It lends itself to explaining and upholding much of the Judeo-Christian Tradition on love, marriage and sexuality. Upon learning it, many of our contemporaries say, “That makes sense. Why haven’t I heard that before?” It’s simple and eminently understandable.
Where did we get this idea? I think the idea is too good to have come just from my imagination. I am too ordinary and spiritually grubby to think that idea is anything but a gift of the Holy Spirit. During the mid-Sixties, I was a parish lay evangelist in Santa Clara CA conducting an Inquiry Forum in the years before the RCIA program. I was using the vomitorium analogy to explain the evil of contraception, but the liberals were trashing that idea. I wasn’t looking for an argument with them; I was simply trying to uphold the received teaching, so I looked for something else. Somehow, I don’t really know how, I started using the built-in meaning of the marriage act.
One Saturday morning early in 1966 I listened to Michael Novak give a talk at a parish in Palo Alto. It seemed to me that he was undermining the received teaching, and I came home truly angry in the good sense of that term. The anger gave me the energy to write “Holy Communion: Eucharistic and Marital” in the rest of that weekend. It was published in Ave Maria magazine on February 25, 1967, seventeen months to the day before Humanae Vitae.
Immediately after Humanae Vitae, I wrote a book to uphold its teaching. When Covenant, Christ and Contraception was published in the spring of 1970, I was suddenly hit by the memory of the words of Jesus to the teachers of the Law in Luke 11:46. “Woe to you lawyers also! For you load men with burdens hard to bear, and you yourselves do not touch the burdens with one of your fingers.” That laid a guilt trip on me: I had done my best to affirm what many were calling a burden so I had to do what I could to provide practical help to live out the teaching of Humanae Vitae. That led my wife and me to teach natural family planning in the fall of 1971 as part of my parish lay-evangelism efforts.
Next week: The views of others on the marriage covenant
John F. Kippley
Sex and the Marriage Covenant