'Scripture is full of individuals and communities who do not know who they are until God reveals it to them. To insist on a theological premise for understanding sexual difference it to insist that we learn from this pattern and wait in trust that who we are in the sexual sphere is a datum that will come from God and nowhere else. Israel was was once not a people, but now called together by God, it is "a people" (1 Peter 2:10, alluding to Hos 1:9). Israel cannot know that it is a chosen people beloved by a faithful God, until it is told and its election is announced to it. At the individual level, biblical patriarchs, prophets and priests often resist their vocation until their true identity is forced upon them: Abraham, Jacob, Peter, and Paul do not know their true names until God renames them and reorients their lives.
For Christians, especially postmodern Christians bereft of any consensus, sexual difference is in a similar category. We will not know what it means until we allow God to tell us what it means. The tradition has claimed that we do not know who we are and what it means to find ourselves until we allow the premises and practices of revelation to unfold. In the tradition, stretching from Augustine to John Paul II, sexual difference is not mute, inert, nonexistent, or indifferent. In this tradition, God brings man to woman and tells the two sexes something that they would otherwise not know: that their creation is good, that their creation as two sexes is for the sake of enabling a church and covenant, and that despite their falleness, their twoness can in itself become a witness to reconciliation and redemption through marriage. Marriage gives this aspect of our creation the power to testify, and the nonmarried offer supporting testimony through their chastity, which creates the social ecology supporting marriage.'
Christopher C Roberts, Creation & Covenant, p.247.
