Politics is Where the Competing Moral Visions of a Society Meet and Struggle

The Spousal Analogy

By Christopher West

"God wants to “impregnate” our humanity with his divine life."

Scripture uses many images to describe God’s love for humanity.  Each has its own valuable place.  But both Old and New Testaments use the image of spousal love far more than any other.  This is also the image favored by the greatest mystics of the Church.

The Bible begins in Genesis with the marriage of the first man and woman, and it ends in Revelation with another “marriage” — the marriage of Christ and the Church.  Spousal theology looks to these nuptial “book ends” as a key for interpreting all that lies between.  Through this lens we learn that God’s eternal plan is to “marry” us[1] — to live with us in an eternal exchange of love and communion.  Not only that but, pushing the analogy, through this union God wants to “impregnate” our humanity with his divine life.  This is a very “earthy” way of speaking, but it isn’t merely a metaphor.  Representing all of us, a woman who walked this planet once opened herself so profoundly to God’s love that she literally conceived divine life in her womb.  In this way, as the Catechism teaches, Mary perfectly fulfills the spousal character of the human vocation in relation to God.[2]

And here’s what we learn from the Pope’s Theology of the Body: God wanted this eternal “marital plan” to be so plain to us — so obvious to us — that he impressed an image of it in our very being by creating us male and female and calling us to become “one flesh.”