Adultery & the Death of Covenant
S. M. Hutchens on the Seventh Commandment
It has been nearly a generation now since I had my first intimate exposure to an institution constituted in a lie. During my early years of doctoral study I took the pastorate of a small Congregational church. I had never been a Congregationalist, but the church’s presentation of itself and its denomination did not offend. It had a “mainline” flavor, but each congregation was free to decide on its own complexion, so long as it remained congregationally governed, and could have as little or as much to do with the national organization as it pleased. Although the Nicene and Apostles’ Creeds were found in the worship materials in the back of its hymnal, on Sunday mornings the congregation would recite the beautiful Salem Church Covenant of 1629:
We covenant with the Lord, and one with another, and do bind ourselves in the presence of God, to walk together in all his ways, according as he is pleased to reveal himself unto us in his blessed Word of Truth.
It was not long, however, before I ran into trouble. Finding much ambiguity and irresolution in the congregation on the cardinal doctrines of the faith, I decided to begin clearing things up by having it recite, from the hymnal, the Apostles’ Creed, upon which I proposed to preach a series of sermons. The woman whom I eventually found to be the controller of the church brought me up short immediately: We do not recite creeds in this church because we don’t believe in them. Creeds divide; covenants unite, and we are a covenantal church.
Aghast at the manifest nonsense of the possibility of a common pilgrimage without common belief, I queried the leadership on this matter frequently. Producing Williston Walker’s Creeds and Platforms of Congregationalism, which showed that creeds—written expressly to exclude people who could not hold to them—were an integral part of Congregationalism from the beginning, did no good at all. The response was a collective yawn and shrug of the shoulders: Congregationalism has no creeds. Walker must have been a Presbyterian or something. They had been under the spell too long.
Curious as to how this could happen, I began to look at the influences that had formed the thirty-year-old denomination, and quickly found the answer. The most influential intellectuals in the national group were committed liberals who disliked creeds, including Congregational creeds, for the reason all religious liberals dislike firm statements of traditional Christian belief. Over years of preaching at national and regional conferences, writing books and pamphlets, dominating the denominational magazine, and exercising influence by filling major pulpits, they had managed to convince their little denomination of an egregious, ahistorical, and entirely irrational lie that a child could see through in a minute. The old Salem Covenant, which clearly included implicit belief in the fundamentals of Christian faith, no longer corresponded to the reality of the institution. It had been emptied of its content by bad men who were spoken of as saints, and whose critics were treated as devils.
The little church eventually died (I could not revive it, but did stay to bury it), and its denomination, already small, soon gained the dubious distinction of being one of the fastest shrinking in the United States. I think this came about mostly because of the militant agnosticism imposed upon it by its church fathers, who thought to make it liberal by omitting creeds, but instead made it nothing at all. It was allowed to become neither liberal nor conservative, neither orthodox nor heterodox. It stood for nothing but mere Congregationalism, which is not enough to sustain the pilgrim soul, especially if it doesn’t qualify for the Daughters of the American Revolution.
Even religious liberalism has, after its own fashion, distinctly articulable beliefs, provides its adherents with a canon of sins that it has the power to forgive, and holds forth the promise of a better life through what it takes for moral progress. By doing away with the very possibility of a creed, those who formed the church’s constitution aborted at the outset its ability to be anything meaningful at all, and gave it nothing to do but wander in the desert, torn about by the vague, competing forces within it, until collapse and death. The covenant that had drawn the colonial churches together by representing a collective will to believe common doctrine no longer stood for the reality of the institution.
Marriage is also an institution founded on covenant, and it, too, dies when its reality no longer corresponds to the agreement upon which it is based. The marriage covenant is made, as are all covenants, not only of positive beliefs and inclusions, but of denials and exclusions. It is not simply a compact to live together amicably, to “walk together,” as it were, but has an exclusivistic element that guards the intimate center (from which its issue arises) from unlawful alienations. At its base is Adam’s recognition and declaration that the woman made by God for him is flesh of his own flesh. From this declaratory covenant and the positive relation it confirmed, come all the negatives that surround and define it—since it is this, it is not that: A man shall leave his father and mother and cleave to his wife; he shall love her as he loves himself; she shall submit to him; forsaking all others, he and she shall keep themselves only unto the other as long as they both shall live; and the seventh commandment: they shall not commit adultery. Children are the natural issue and blessing of the marriage, whose home is the union of their parents, which union is made not only of what the partners are to each other, but of what they are not to the world that surrounds them.
When our Lord said that to lust after a woman was to commit adultery with her in the heart, he was referring not to the completed act, but the seed from which it arises, which is a breach of the protected center, an outflowing of desire that is to be kept or guarded for the spouse alone. It is not to be bestowed upon others, even in the imagination—for the mind is a part of the self—or spilled upon the ground. Adultery is an unlawful effusion from the integrity of the covenanted self—the self most truly self because it has been given over to the love and service of a single and elect other—into the far country of another that is not one’s own, and in which one must always live as a stranger. It is a violent removal from the new and compound self that was created in the first marriage, and from the attempted new love as well.
S. M. Hutchens is a senior editor and longtime writer for Touchstone.
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