And when the world is created, it is created in such a way that those eternal objects of God's loving wisdom become actualities - interacting with one another, relating to God in the finite realm.
If there is one thing I long for above all else, it's that the years to come may see Christianity in this country able again to capture the imagination of our culture.
Religion has always been a matter of community building; a matter of building precisely those relations of compassion, fellow feeling and - I dare to use the word - inclusion, which would otherwise be absent from our societies.
I concluded that an active sexual relationship between two people of the same sex might therefore reflect the love of God in a way comparable to marriage, if and only if it had the about it the same character of absolute covenanted faithfulness.
Marriage has a unique place because it speaks of an absolute faithfulness, a covenant between radically different persons, male and female; and so it echoes the absolute covenant of God with his chosen, a covenant between radically different partners.