MYC 2022 Elective

MATRIMONY – Gerald Bray, God is love, ch. 16 (emphasis mine)

Celibacy has an important place in the life of the church, but it cannot be the norm for everyone, or even for any large number of people. Sexual relations are essential for the propagation of the human race, and it is important to regulate the context in which they may legitimately take place. This is necessary for the greater good both of individuals and of societies, where unbridled promiscuity is almost certain to lead to disaster and the disintegration of the community." In essence, matrimonial regulations are a form of love for one’s neighbor because they make it clear what the relationship is, and as such they belong at the very heart of the Christian life. When legalized matrimony began is unknown. The principle of monogamy would appear to have been laid down in the story of Adam and Eve, and the earliest generations recorded in Genesis also seem to have been monogamous. Yet in many ways matrimony as we now understand it is a social construct and not something inherent in the original creation. Whatever else Adam and Eve did, they did not pledge lifelong faithfulness to one another in a ceremony conducted in the presence of witnesses, which reminds us that marriage is primarily an agreement between two individuals that is valid in itself. The legal and ceremonial superstructure that now surrounds marriage developed as the human race grew and diversified, but it was many centuries before it became fixed in what we would recognize as the “biblical” pattern.

Some indication of the variety of forms that matrimony might take can be seen in the lives of the three great patriarchs of ancient Israel. Abraham was monogamous, but also childless, which encouraged his wife Sarah to suggest that he should take a concubine. He eventually had children by several other women, but never married them, with the possible exception of Keturah. Isaac was also monogamous, and as far as we know he remained so. Jacob however was bigamous, though this was not entirely by his own choice, and he had children by concubines as well, who were apparently supplied to him by his wives. What is most interesting about this is that the sons borne by these women were all recognized as ancestors of Israel. They were not categorized or stigmatized according to their official legitimacy or illegitimacy but were all treated alike, as table 16.1 illustrates,

Leah, Jacob’s first wife, was the mother of half of his sons, including the eldest (Reuben) and the two who would be most important in the nation’s later history—Levi, ancestor of the priests, and Judah, ancestor of the kings. Leah was also the mother of the only daughter of Jacob who is mentioned by name. Joseph, the son of Jacob’s second (and preferred) wife, received a double blessing and became the ancestor of the tribes of Ephraim and Manasseh. The tribe of Benjamin, the second son of that marriage, remained loyal to the Judaic kings when Israel was divided after the death of Solomon, and it was therefore part of the remnant that was to form the Jewish people as we now know them. There is no discernible difference, however, between the sons of the two wives and the sons of the two concubines, so we can only conclude that matrimony was not the determining factor in their inheritance, as it would have been later on in Israel’s history.

After Jacob’s time it would seem that, although monogamy was probably the most frequent form of matrimony in Israel, it was only one option among others available to and tolerated among God’s chosen people. Odd as it may seem to us, some of Israel’s greatest leaders were polygamous (Moses, David, and Solomon), but there were also humbler folk who had more than one wife, like Elkanah, the father of Samuel. None of these men was criticized for having more than one spouse, although some modern commentators have suggested that the family difficulties encountered by David were a subtle hint that monogamy would have been preferable even for him. With 700 wives and 300 concubines, Solomon was in a class by himself, but he was still the man who built the temple, and as the son of David, he was the prototype of the greater Son of David who would come as Jesus Christ.2” His wives caused trouble, but he was not rebuked for having so many women around. The problem with Solomon’s wives was not their number but the fact that many of them were foreign women, who persuaded him to set up shrines to their native gods and thus polluted the pure worship of Yahweh.°° This was essentially the same criticism later applied to Ahab, who was monogamous but married to a foreign queen who did everything she could to make Israel accept the worship of her native gods.

Monogamy seems to have become increasingly the norm in post-Solomonic Israel and Judah, but along with this there was a greater emphasis placed on the undesirability of marrying outside the nation. We have no way of knowing how widespread such intermarriage was, but we do know that a custom which had been tolerated in the days of Ruth, who was herself a foreign bride, was forbidden after the exile, when it had become quite common and had to be formally suppressed.

As time went on, Israelite marriage practices became increasingly strict, and, by the time of Jesus, they had settled into a pattern which we still recognize today, and which was broadly similar to the rest of the Greco-Roman world. Monogamy imposed itself for a number of reasons. Theologically speaking, the most important of them was that the Bible commanded a man to leave his father and mother and cling to his wife, so that the two would become “one flesh.” A marriage was the start not just of a new relationship but of a new family unit, which could not have come into being in the same way had polygamy and concubinage been the norm. Union of husband and wife in one flesh was of great practical benefit to the woman especially, because it underscored her basic equality with her husband and made it clear that she would not have to share her position in the household with anyone else.

It is perhaps because neither Jews nor Gentiles had to change their inherited practices to any significant extent when they became Christians that no particular form of matrimony is prescribed in the New Testament. The church did not perform weddings, and the only thing it tried to insist on was that Christians should marry other believers. Apart from that, there is no indication of how Christians entered into marriage, and we must assume that people continued to do whatever they had been doing before, and that they made their domestic arrangements in a basically secular context, though there were clear restrictions on whom Christians could marry.° Even when Christianity was legalized and then became the state religion in the fourth century, the church accepted the existing legal framework and did virtually nothing to impose any matrimonial discipline of its own. It was only after the fall of the Roman empire in the West that the church became deeply involved in matrimonial matters, largely because there was no other means of registering a marriage once the Roman law courts had ceased to function.

The church found that it did not like certain aspects of traditional matrimonial law, and it tried to introduce changes that would make it more compatible with Christian principles. The most important of these was the right of each of the parties to a marriage to give their consent to it. This meant that the woman as well as the man had the right to refuse a marriage partner. Although this principle was frequently observed more in the breach than in practice, it nevertheless set a new standard and gradually changed the way that matrimony was perceived. What the church wanted to insist on was that marriage was a solemn commitment between two equally consenting adults, and not a family arrangement decided by the parents for reasons of their own. This seems obvious to us now, bur in an age when a marriage was as much a business contract as anything else, it was extremely difficult to persuade families not to put their financial interests before the happiness of the couple. Despite many failures and lapses, the church’s insistence on the right of consent transformed the basis of marital relations in Western Europe and paved the way for the freedom of choice that we now take for granted. As Christianity has spread around the world, it is this concept of marriage that has gone with it, often having the same transforming effect on inherited matrimonial traditions as it had in medieval Europe.

The medieval church also transformed matrimony into a sacrament, to be celebrated by a priest in the church. That gave it a holy character which it had not previously had and made it indissoluble, since once the grace of God had been given, it could not be rejected or despised by anyone who claimed to be a faithful Christian.°¢ Ac the same time, however, the Western church also withdrew matrimonial privileges from the clergy, who after 1123 had to be celibate. The Eastern churches did not follow this pattern but continued to permit a married priesthood, subject to the proviso that, if a priest’s wife should die, he could not remarry. Bishops, however, as in the Western church, had to be celibate. This system still operates in the Eastern churches today, as of course does the celibacy rule for both priests and bishops in the Roman Catholic Church.

It was the Protestant Reformation that challenged this pattern in the West. The Protestants realized that Peter and many of the early church leaders had been married, and saw no biblical reason why celibacy should be imposed on the clergy.” They also rejected the idea that matrimony was a sacrament, because it was not a special rite instituted by Christ as a sign of the gospel but was a universal human practice. They did, however, retain church weddings and attempted to impose some rules about who could and could not marry. In the medieval church there had been an arrangement whereby individuals who were within the proscribed degrees of kindred and affinity (originally seven but later restricted to four) could not marry one another. In practice it could be very hard to prove this and the prohibition was often ignored, but it came in handy if the marriage failed to work out, because it could then be annulled relatively easily on the ground that the couple were within the prohibited degrees and had therefore contracted an illegal marriage in the first place. In a medieval village everyone was related to everyone else, and so the “prohibited degrees” operated as a safety valve for terminating unhappy marriages. Perhaps not surprisingly, the Reformers saw this as an abuse and adopted the table of kindred and affinity laid down in Leviticus 18 as the basis for deciding who could and could not wed, and with some modifications in the years since then, that is the pattern which prevails in most Western countries today. The big difference is that nowadays restrictions on who can marry whom tend to be based on genetic considerations, so that close blood relatives cannot marry each other because of the dangers inherent in incest. In earlier times “affinity” played an important role as well, so that a man could not marry his mother-in-law, for example, even though she was not a blood relative, nor could he marry his godmother, who would probably not have been related to him at all. Today such restrictions have been increasingly abandoned, though for other reasons cases of such marriages are by their nature very rare.

The church still marries people, although in some countries a couple must register their wedding with the state beforehand, and most of the ritual surrounding modern weddings is Christian in origin. Whether we like it or not, the church is more deeply involved in matrimonial affairs today than it was in biblical times, and despite major shifts away from traditional Christian values in recent years, it still does what it can to uphold and enforce them. Whether this can be called biblical is an open question, but the fact of the matter is that those churches which cling most tenaciously to the Scriptures are also usually the ones that are most determined to uphold traditional marriage customs, which can be done only by claiming and exercising as much control over the institution of matrimony as possible. The basic New Testament principle that a Christian should not marry an unbeliever is usually retained as far as it can be, but to that is often added a number of other things generally lumped together as “marriage preparation.” Many churches and Christian groups also offer marital guidance and counselling services, neither of which was known in the early church, but both of which can be justified by the stresses of modern life, where newlywed couples are less likely to go on living with or near relatives than was the case in the past.

The big difference that Christianity made to the institution of matrimony, however, and the thing that underlay the other reforms that were eventually put in place, was the belief that marriage should be a love affair. The apostles did not understand this in the way that is so common today, when it is assumed that a couple will fall in love and then get married. On the contrary, it was more usually the other way around. A couple would be betrothed for marriage and then be expected to love each other. One of the reasons for this was that it was not often that young girls mixed socially, and certainly not with prospective husbands, because it was important to protect their reputation and the family’s honor. As a result, it was far from uncommon for a couple to be complete strangers to each other until they were betrothed, and sometimes they did not meet until after they had been married—by proxy! But it was also because the early Christians saw love as a command from God and not as a human response to physical attraction. They knew about falling in love but regarded it as potentially dangerous. Emotions wear off sooner or later and beauty fades, but a marriage is meant to last a lifetime. This is why, when the church developed its own forms of marriage service, it asked both the bride and the groom to promise to give themselves totally to one another “for better and for worse, for richer and for poorer, in sickness and in health, till death do us part.” These words and the promise that lies behind them are not taken directly from the Bible, but the thought underlying them most definitely is, and the standard expressed here remains the ideal and the norm for Christian marriage to this day.

It should be said in passing that the Bible knows nothing of “sex before marriage” because in its terms, sexual intercourse is marriage, whether or not there has been a ceremony to record this fact. This principle continues to be upheld by many churches in two ways. The first is that if sexual inter- course does not take place after a wedding, the marriage can relatively easily be annulled because it has never been consummated according to the promises made in the ceremony. The other is that those who have decided to live together have effectively married each other, whether or not there is formal evidence of this. Witnesses and formal documents are valuable but not absolutely essential, and the reality of cohabitation takes precedence over legal niceties or church services.

The Bible says nothing about a minimum age for marriage, though for many centuries it was fixed in Roman (and subsequently in church) law as twelve for girls and fourteen for boys—approximately the age of puberty. This sounds very low to us, but in an age when people seldom lived beyond forty and it was customary for parents to marry off their children, or at least betroth them, almost as soon as they were born, the prescribed marriage age operated as a kind of restraint that was not felt to be too onerous. In the modern world, the minimum age is almost always higher that this, but may be as low as sixteen, with parental consent, and eighteen without it. It hardly need be said that marriage at such a young age, even if it is legal, is not to be recommended because maturity and life experience count for so much more in a world where married couples are less likely to live near their parents or extended family than was once the case, and where the problems inherent in living together are ones that the couple are expected to work out for themselves. Childbirth can also have lasting negative effects if the woman is too young, and so care should be taken to avoid this as much as possible.

Is matrimony a specifically Christian institution? Or should the church today accept that it became one for historical reasons that no longer apply, and so there should be no objection to letting it go back to being the largely secular affair that it was in New Testament times? Marriage cannot be defended as a sacrament in the way that baptism is, but, for Christians, it has a holy character because it is a symbol and prototype of the relationship between Jesus Christ and the church. It is perfectly true that there will be no marriage in heaven, but this is because we shall all be “married” to Christ. Jesus himself used this imagery in the story he told of the wise and foolish virgins. It was a theme well known to Paul and finds its greatest expression in the grand finale of the book of Revelation, the great wedding feast of the Lamb? Because of this, Christian matrimony is a witness to what is to come. Those who commit themselves to it in the tight spirit have the inestimable privilege of getting a foretaste of the glory of heaven. For that reason it must be honored and protected as a gift from God, and maintained until death brings it to a natural end. At that point the surviving partner is free to marry again, and is encouraged to do so if young enough to make a new life. There is no compulsion in this matter, however, and on the whole Paul thought it was better for the widowed to remain as they are and devote their time to the service of God in the same way as celibates are expected to do.