the order of marriage applies to the church also
It is said by some that the teachings in Conjugial Love about men and
women – and how they relate – apply only to marriage, and have no bearing
upon such questions as women in the priesthood.
But the way a husband and wife relate in marriage represents something
much more general. The order of conjugial love that governs marriage is a
universal order that enters into everything (or at least everything that is in
order).
Individual marriages are the most particular and intense manifestation of
the Divine marriage of good and truth that pervades all creation – and which
makes the Church.
“Marriage represents the marriage of good and truth, that is, the heavenly
marriage, and consequently the church also, for the church is a church from
the marriage of good and truth; and when the church is in this marriage it
makes one with heaven, which is the heavenly marriage itself.” (Arcana
Coelestia 4835.3)
Marriage and the Church, therefore, are inextricably bound together and
are products of the same Divine order. “In the internal sense by the conjugial is
meant what is of the church; for the church is the marriage of good and truth.”
(Ibid. 4731)
In light of such teachings, it makes perfect sense to apply statements about
how men and women relate to each other in marriage to how they relate to
each other in the life of the Church.
(WEO)
an example
We can see that the teachings about marriage have a more general application
from places in the Writings in which it is said that husbands and wives relate
to each other as they do because men and women generally relate to each other
in that way. (See Arcana Coelestia 8994; Conjugial Love 165, 168, 223, and
elsewhere)
The nature of the particular relationship (marriage) is illustrated and
confirmed by the broader principle governing the general relationship between
men and women, and vice versa. The same teaching about how the sexes differ
and relate to each other is given in regard to husbands and wives, to men and
women generally, and more abstractly to the quality of “the masculine” itself
and “the feminine” itself and how they relate.
Notice in Conjugial Love 168, for example, that the way husbands and wives
relate “follows from the difference between the masculine and the feminine.”
The order of the specific relationship (husband and wife) is determined by the
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