Marriage, Sabbath, Creation and Jesus’s Embodiment of Justice
By the Revd Robert Thompson, Vicar St Mary’s, Kilburn & St James’, West Hampstead; host of Open Table, London; member of General Synod
Like many, my deep disappointment at yesterday’s statement from the House of Bishops on the ending of the Living in Love and Faith process is charged with much anger too. The bishops have confirmed that no proposals will come to February’s General Synod on standalone services of blessing for same-sex couples, nor on permitting clergy or ordinands to enter same-sex civil marriages without canonical penalty. Once again, this position is presented as embodying the need for prudence, pastoral care, and church unity. But delay is never neutral. It is a decision, and this decision has a human cost.
In the Church of England, we have already acknowledged the hurt caused to LGBTQIA + people by our teaching and practice. We have recognised that faithful same-sex relationships can bear the fruits of love, fidelity, patience, and self-giving. We have commended Prayers of Love and Faith as a sign that something has shifted. And yet, when it comes to equality that is visible, embodied, and trusted, equality that can stand on its own, we hesitate.
Prayers may be offered, but only when embedded discreetly within other services. Love may be recognised, but not sufficiently to shape worship in its own right. Relationships may be affirmed, but not enough to allow those who live them to represent the Church publicly as priests. This is not full inclusion. It is calculated containment.
Marriage and Creation
Defenders of the status quo in our debates have often appealed to “creation” to justify this restraint. Marriage, we are told, is a gift of God given in creation and therefore cannot be changed. Doctrine, it is claimed, does not develop but is merely preserved. To alter the Church’s practice in relation to marriage or ministry would therefore be to abandon biblical faithfulness. But this appeal to creation is far less secure, biblically and theologically, than is often assumed.
In the Genesis narratives, humanity is indeed created for relationship. It is “not good that the human should be alone” (Genesis 2.18), and human beings are created for mutuality and companionship (Genesis 1.26–28). Yet Adam and Eve are never described as being married. There is no ritual, no vow, no covenantal form, and no divine command instituting marriage as a fixed social or sacramental institution within the act of creation itself. Marriage, as a recognisable human institution, emerges later, shaped by kinship systems, law, property, and culture.
The oft-quoted line that “a man shall leave his father and mother and cling to his wife” (Genesis 2.24) is not spoken by God but offered by the narrator, already presupposing settled social arrangements beyond Eden. Genesis gives us anthropology, an account of human relationality, not canon law.
Sabbath and Creation
By contrast, there is something in the creation narrative that is explicitly named, blessed, and sanctified by God: the Sabbath. Genesis tells us that God rests on the seventh day, blesses it, and makes it holy (Genesis 2.2–3). If anything can be said to be unambiguously “given in creation”, it is the Sabbath.
This comparison and distinction matters profoundly. Because when Jesus encounters the Sabbath, not as a vague symbol but as a divinely instituted, creation-grounded command, he does not freeze it in place. Nor does he treat its creational status as a reason to resist reinterpretation. Instead, he makes a striking claim: “The Sabbath was made for humankind, not humankind for the Sabbath” (Mark 2.27).
Jesus does not deny the holiness of the Sabbath. He fulfils it by re-articulating its purpose. A creation-given institution is revealed to exist for life, mercy, and human flourishing. When it is used to wound, exclude, or constrain, it has been misunderstood and is not honoured. This instinct lay at the heart of the teaching of the Hebrew prophets: the preservation of life takes precedence over rigid application of law.
This pattern runs consistently through the Gospels. Jesus heals on the Sabbath (Matthew 12.1–14; Luke 13.10–17; Luke 14.1–6), restoring dignity where religious anxiety would have preferred restraint. He insists that mercy, not sacrifice, reveals the heart of God (Hosea 6.6; Matthew 9.13). Law is not abolished, but fulfilled, and fulfilment in biblical terms does not mean repetition, but faithful interpretation ordered towards life.
Jesus’s and the Apostles’ hermeneutic of Justice
Jesus’s way of reading Scripture is not an innovation imposed from outside Israel’s faith, but stands squarely within the prophetic tradition of Judaism, in which God’s commands are continually re-heard in the light of suffering, historical change, and the demands of justice. His teaching does not replace the law; it discloses its purpose.
The same authority is evident when Jesus contrasts inherited teaching with his own words: “You have heard that it was said… but I say to you” (Matthew 5.21–48). This is not a rejection of Scripture, but a claim about how Scripture is to be read faithfully. Doctrine, in the deepest sense, is already dynamic here, not because truth is unstable, but because truth is encountered afresh as God’s purposes come into clearer view.
The early Church understood this instinctively. Faced with the inclusion of Gentiles, the apostles did not cling rigidly to scriptural commands about circumcision. They observed the Spirit’s work among those once excluded, and concluded, “It has seemed good to the Holy Spirit and to us” (Acts 15.28). Scripture was not abandoned, but re-read in the light of lived faith.
To deny the possibility of doctrinal development, then, is not conservative in any serious theological sense. The Scriptures of Israel themselves witness to a living tradition of interpretation, argument, and moral discernment, shaped by the conviction that God’s will is known most truly where life and dignity are upheld. Jesus stands within this tradition, intensifying its demands rather than abandoning its methods.
If doctrine could not develop, the Incarnation would not deepen Israel’s story, the Resurrection would not widen the horizon of hope, and Pentecost would not mark an expansion of God’s life among God’s people. Christ would be reduced to a guardian of settled meanings, rather than the one in whom God’s purposes are brought into sharper focus and fuller light. In short, Christianity would not have come into being.
Processing our Anger
This brings us back to the present moment. The Church is being asked to believe that a same-sex relationship may be holy enough to be prayed for, but not holy enough to shape worship on its own terms. That a same-sex marriage may be lived faithfully by lay people, but becomes incompatible with holiness the moment a vocation to priesthood is discerned. That baptism incorporates all equally into Christ, yet ministry must still be rationed according to categories of suspicion. This is not theological coherence. It is a hierarchy of dignity.
Appeals to unity and process cannot disguise this reality. Unity that depends on inequality is not Christian unity; it is institutional calm purchased at the expense of a minority’s flourishing. Acknowledging hurt while leaving intact the structures that cause it is not repentance; it is recognition without conversion.
It is here that I locate the anger that charges my sadness. Like many colleagues I am now left in a place where I need to assess how best to respond to episcopal decision-making. Anger because I feel as if I been nothing but a faithful, committed and deeply-engaged Anglican for the entirety of my life and this feels like a resounding slap in the face. Like many I am now asking: at which point does active dissent to this decision-making become both morally and theologically essential and what forms should dissent take?
There is a clear distinction between dissent born of impatience and resistance demanded by conscience. Ecclesial disobedience is not justified simply because progress is slow, a vote has been lost, or a desired outcome deferred. But there does comes a point when continued compliance itself also ceases to be morally neutral. It seems to me that this threshold is now met because of the convergence of four conditions:
First, the harm must be real, ongoing, and acknowledged. In this case, the bishops themselves have named the hurt experienced by queer Christians. This is not speculative damage, nor the complaint of a disgruntled minority.
Second, authority must know the harm and nevertheless maintain the policy that causes it. That border has also now been crossed. Delay is no longer inadvertent or provisional; it is conscious and defended.
Third, the harm must fall disproportionately on a vulnerable group. Here it is borne most acutely by LGBTQIA+ Christians, particularly clergy and ordinands, whose vocations, livelihoods, and integrity are placed under sustained pressure.
Fourth, appeals to unity or process must have become mechanisms of avoidance rather than means of discernment. That is now clearly the case here. Many of us have experienced this process as one that has led nowhere. When Procedure ceases to serve justice and instead becomes a way of deferring it the process itself loses any moral authority.
When these four conditions are present, as they are now, obedience itself becomes ethically charged. Continued compliance is no longer a neutral act of loyalty; it is a decision that participates, however reluctantly, in the maintenance of actual structural harm.
At this point, then, faithfulness may require something more demanding than patience. It may require acting as though the Church we proclaim already exists and accepting the cost of doing so. As Marika Rose, very much echoing Jesus on the Sabbath, writes in Theology for the End of the World: “Christian faithfulness is not about managing the world as it is, but about refusing to give ultimate authority to arrangements that deny life.” When ecclesial structures become arrangements that deny dignity, the call of the Gospel is not quiet endurance but truthful disruption.
Jesus’s call to embody Justice
The issue before the Church today is clear: it is whether we are willing to allow mercy, dignity, and life to be the criteria by which our doctrine and practice are shaped or whether we will continue to defend inherited forms even when they wound the very people in whom the fruits of the Spirit are already evident.
That is not a question about sexuality alone. It is a question about what kind of Church we are becoming and whether we truly believe that Christ is alive enough to lead us somewhere we have not yet fully understood.
Will we follow Jesus on the Sabbath? Will we with Christ embody God’s justice?
See also the follow-on article.
This essay is offered as a response to a critique by Martin Davie of my earlier piece, Marriage, Sabbath, Creation, and Jesus’s Embodiment of Justice. I am grateful for the seriousness with which Martin has engaged with the argument. His response is careful, rooted in Scripture, and motivated by a concern for theological coherence. The disagreement between us, however, is not primarily about whether marriage is good, creational, or worthy of honour. It concerns how creation itself is to be understood in the light of Jesus Christ, and how far appeals to “creation” can bear the theological weight being placed upon them.
Methodological Clarification
Before turning to the specific points of disagreement, it may be helpful to clarify the theological method at work in what follows. My argument does not proceed by setting Scripture against tradition, nor by privileging contemporary experience over biblical witness. Rather, it reads Scripture canonically and christologically, attending to how creation, law, and human institutions are interpreted and fulfilled in the teaching and practice of Jesus himself. Creation is therefore understood teleologically rather than statically: its meaning is disclosed not only at its origin in Genesis, but in its fulfilment in resurrection and new creation. Within this framework, the goods of creation — including marriage, Sabbath, and sacrament — are affirmed as real and holy, while also recognised as provisional in form. Discernment, on this account, is not a departure from faithfulness but an intrinsic feature of a living tradition shaped by Scripture, oriented toward Christ, and attentive to the Spirit’s work in the Church.
Creation, Genesis, and the Shape of Human Life
Martin Davie argues that Genesis 1–2 establishes marriage as a fixed creational institution, such that later Christian discernment must conform to that original pattern. Genesis certainly presents sexual difference, relationality, and companionship as part of God’s good creation (Genesis 1:27; 2:18–24). The question, however, is whether Genesis functions as an institutional charter for marriage in the strong sense being claimed.
Jewish interpretation itself cautions against reading Genesis so rigidly. Rabbinic traditions preserve interpretations in which the first human (ha-adam) is understood as an undifferentiated or androgynous being, later divided into differentiated bodies (Genesis Rabbah 8.1; Babylonian Talmud, Berakhot 61a). Whether or not one accepts these readings, their existence matters: they show that Genesis has not historically been read as offering a single, metaphysical definition of marriage. Rather, marriage emerges within Jewish thought as a covenantal and social ordering of life, shaped by commandment and community rather than ontology alone (Satlow, 2001).
Appeals to “creation” that treat marriage as fixed, exhaustive, and self-interpreting therefore risk pressing Genesis more rigidly than the interpretive tradition from which Jesus himself emerges.
Sabbath, Law, and Jesus’s Hermeneutic
Martin Davie resists the analogy between Sabbath and marriage, arguing that Jesus does not relativise Sabbath law but restores its true meaning. On this point there is significant agreement. Jesus does not abolish Sabbath. But he does refuse to absolutise its form.
“The Sabbath was made for humanity, not humanity for the Sabbath” (Mark 2:27). This is not merely a repetition of existing law but a hermeneutical claim about how divine commands function in relation to human flourishing. Jesus repeatedly authorises acts of healing and restoration on the Sabbath (Mark 3:1–6; Luke 13:10–17), insisting that the purpose of the law is disclosed in mercy and life rather than in rigid preservation of form (Sanders, 1985).
The analogy with marriage does not rest on their equivalence, but on the shared theological logic: both are creational goods whose meaning is disclosed in fulfilment, not frozen at origin. If Sabbath can be both creational and subject to radical reinterpretation in the light of God’s redemptive purposes, then appeals to creation alone cannot foreclose discernment about marriage.
Marriage and the Resurrection
This becomes unmistakable when we attend to Jesus’s explicit teaching about marriage and the life to come. In response to a question about resurrection, Jesus states plainly: “In the resurrection they neither marry nor are given in marriage” (Matthew 22:30; Mark 12:25; Luke 20:35).
This is not a marginal aside. It is a direct claim about the structures of human life before God. Whatever marriage is, it does not belong to the final form of redeemed life. Marriage, on Jesus’s own account, is good but provisional. It orders desire, fidelity, and care under the conditions of finitude and mortality. In the resurrection, those conditions no longer obtain (Wright, 2007).
This does not diminish marriage; it situates it within a teleological account of creation. Creation is not denied but fulfilled. Fulfilment, however, involves transformation rather than mere preservation. Any theological argument that treats marriage as eschatologically final risks standing in tension with Jesus’s own teaching on precisely this point.
Creation Read from the End, Not Only from the Beginning
Martin Davie’s account of creation proceeds largely from Genesis forwards. Christian theology, however, has consistently insisted that creation must be read from resurrection backwards. The Christian hope is not the restoration of Edenic arrangements, but new creation (Romans 8:18–25; Revelation 21–22). As Paul insists, “the present form of this world is passing away” (1 Corinthians 7:31).
Creation’s meaning is therefore disclosed not only at its origin, but at its fulfilment in Christ. Marriage belongs to the ordering of life in this age. Its goodness is real and its disciplines are serious, but its form is not ultimate (O’Donovan, 1986).
Sabbath, Sacrament, and Provisional Holiness
The same eschatological logic applies to Sabbath, Church, and sacrament. Sabbath is creational, yet Jewish tradition has long described it as a foretaste of the world to come rather than its final form (Heschel, 1951). In the resurrection, Sabbath is not abolished but universalised: what was once a regulated interruption of labour becomes the permanent condition of life lived wholly within God’s rest.
Likewise, the sacraments belong to the time of pilgrimage. The Eucharist is a real participation in Christ now (1 Corinthians 10:16), but it mediates a presence that, in the life to come, is no longer mediated. Classical Christian theology has consistently held that the sacraments cease not because they are false, but because they have accomplished their purpose (Augustine, City of God XXII).
Marriage belongs within this same theological pattern: real, holy, and necessary within this age, yet provisional in form. To recognise this is not to weaken marriage, but to take fulfilment seriously.
Discernment and Ecclesial Responsibility
Martin Davie suggests that claims of harm only have force if one already accepts the moral legitimacy of same-sex relationships. I disagree. Exclusion, lack of recognition, and enforced invisibility within the Body of Christ constitute real forms of harm regardless of one’s prior moral conclusions. Christian discernment has always involved holding doctrine and lived experience together, rather than allowing appeals to creation to foreclose the process in advance (Williams, 1989).
Conclusion
The disagreement between us is not about whether marriage is good, creational, or worthy of honour. It is about whether creation is static or teleological; whether Jesus fulfils creation by preserving its forms unchanged, or by bringing them to their true end.
Jesus does not deny creation. He fulfils it — and in doing so, he relativises what is provisional without emptying it of meaning. Marriage, Sabbath, and sacrament all belong within that movement from gift to fulfilment. To treat any one of them as eschatologically final is not fidelity to creation, but a failure to take resurrection seriously enough.
