New concept entering a society challenge and often displace old ones. In marriage as well, new concepts challenge the old. Today, we are embarking on a new philosophy of marriage that was stipulated by God from the beginning, which must be employed and accurately express in this season of reformation.
The time for self-indulgence and unconscious marriage is over. Now, is a new season, a time of global change that God is placing a great demand on us to inculcate into our souls the present reality concerning marriage, as well as portraying the lifestyle of His kingdom on earth. The Bible says, “---- in your patience possess your soul” Luk. 21: 19. The kingdom principle and norms must be incarnated in our souls and outflesh through us as husband and wife. Failure to decode current truth will lead to unfaithfulness, heartbreak and divorce.
The inability to advance robust culture and intellectual justifications of marriage has led to various efforts to enhance marriage on other ground. These efforts are important and should be celebrated but without deeper justification that is accepted by the scripture, they will have limited success in strengthening marriage.
For instance, we have learned much about what constitutes good marital communication, romance and intimacy. But this knowledge does not itself constitute a reason for marriage. It simply increases chances for achieving a good one for those already in the system. More recently, we have gained strong evidence that marriage is good for one’s mental and physical health, sex life, and bank account. This too enhances marriage, but it does not define what it is.
The emerging marriage movement and several books on the topic has new confidence that marriage is both good and achievable, but most of them have not confronted the truth that neither of these insights constitutes a definition of what marriage is.
Marriage is defined as the revelation of the spiritual covenant between Christ and the church manifesting in the physical realm through the union of a man and woman. This union begins with the joyful affirmation that it is Gods idea, not men. It symbolizes the mystical union betwixt Christ and His Church, which is the consummation of all things. It is intended to be that reciprocal communication of self-giving love, which finds its natural expression in sexual union. In these ways God has shaped, endorsed and ennobled marriage.
In John Stott’s word, “Marriage is an exclusive heterosexual covenant between one man and one woman, ordained and sealed by God, preceded by a public leaving of parents, consented in sexual union, issuing in a permanent mutually supportive partnership, and normally crowned by the gift of children”.
With this definition, we shall proceed and look at the diver’s dimension of marriage, how it relates to us and how we can shift towards the ultimate.
The five Dimensions of Marriage
The many justifications for marriage advanced through the ages can be organized along a continuum between its communal, divine and personal dimension. The march of history unceasingly has subordinated the communal and elevated the personal. The idea of marriage as a divine institution has lost favor. Increasingly, marriages are viewed as an essentially private intersubjective agreement only incidentally sanctioned by state or church, if at all.
In what follows, I will argue that marriage historically has consisted of five dimensions, all of which are essential for an adequate understanding of it as both an institution and a living human reality.
Marriage has been understood as consisting of natural, contractual, social, communicative, and divine. The meaning of each of these five dimensions has varied over time. Which dimension was viewed as central and which as more peripheral also has shifted from period to period. It is difficult to ignore any one of these five elements without doing violence to the meaning of marriage.
First, to say that marriage has been perceived as a natural inclination means it has been viewed as giving form to persistent yet sometimes conflicting natural inclinations and needs.
Marriage is not a direct product of our instincts and needs, but it does organize a wide range of our natural human tendencies, elevating some and de-emphasizing others. A spectrum of natural inclinations are ordered by marriage, the desire of sexual union; the desire that Aristotle believed humans share with the animals” to leave behind them a copy of themselves”; and, following Aristotle again, “the need to supply humans with their every day want”. These perspectives on the natural purpose of marriage from Greek philosophy were absorbed into Christian commentary on Genesis I and 11. It tells human to “ be fruitful and multiply’ Gen.2v 18. It also teaches that humans were made for companionship: “ therefore a man leave his father and his mother and cleave into his wife, and they become one flesh.” Gen. 2v 24.
2. Marriage As Contract
Second, because of the great natural goods, {affective sexual, procreative, and economic} involved in marriage, it has been seen for centuries in many cultures as requiring the regulation of contracts. In ancient societies, the contracts were viewed as primarily between the families or clans of the husband and wife, with little if any reinforcements from king or prince. They involved agreement about such thing as dowry and bride price, both generally seen as kinds of endowments for the wife. When tribe and clan are the chief authorities in a society, redress for broken contracts takes the form of unmediated negotiation or revenge.
In medieval Europe, marital contracts were activated by the free consent of husband and wife; they required no witness by family, church or state. These privately established contracts elevated the role of mutual consent between husband and wife and weakened the power of extended family. They also gave rise to the phenomenon of “Clandestine marriage”, which were either fraudulent or disputed.
Marital contracts because fully public only in the Protestant reformation when marriage become defined as fist a social institution requiring registration and legitimization by the state, and only later needing the blessing and confirmation of the church.
The mutual consent of the couple, the confirmation by family and friends, the registration before the state, and the blessing of the church were viewed as an orchestrated whole, all of which were deemed important for the establishment of a valid and lasting marital contract. All of these witnesses and legitimating voices turned the marriage contract virtually into a covenant.
The establishment of marriage as a public contract in the countries influenced by the theological and legal scholars of the Reformation gradually brought ton an end the practices and confusions of clandestine marriage.
3. Marriage as a Social Good
Third, marriage has been seen as a social good. The health of marriage and family, especially in its child rearing capacities, often has been seen as essential for the good of the larger society. Without marriage and strong families, children would grow up violent and the wider social fabric would be damaged. Affection between children and invested natural parents inhibits the violent impulses of both adult and child. These restraining functions would decline with the weakening of families consisting of stable and committed parents.
Marriage, Martin Luther taught, was not a sacrament of salvation but an institution given by God at the foundation of creation for the good of couples, children, society, state, schools, and common social life.
The belief that marriage is a social good and therefore a legitimate concern of the state lies behind the 1998 green paper on family and marriage issued by the Labor Government in England, the interest in marriage education in Australia, and the moves into marriage preparation in Florida, Louisiana, and Arizona. The mass of legal codes governing marriage and family in the 50 states is also a sign of the long - standing belief that marriage deals with profound goods that be monitored and ordered for the public good.
4. Marriage as Communicative Reality
There is a growing belief that marriage is a communicative reality between equals, but this idea has a history. The idea that marriage is for mutual comfort and assistance runs throughout the history of its various discourses.
The canon law view of contract assumed the personhood and autonomy of the consenting husband and wife. In early Christianity the command of love your neighbor as yourself, what I have called a love ethnic of equal regard, is taken directly into the inner dynamics of the husband and wife relationship; the famous marriage passages of Ephesians tells us that husband should love their wives as they do their own bodies.” Eph. 54 v 29.
Aristotle saw marriage as a kind of friendship, although one in which the male had the higher honor. Stoics such as Musonius Ruffus took additional steps toward viewing marriage as a union of equals. Early Christians went further still. Judaism and Christianity all depended on the Genesis accounts of creation that portrayed both male and female as made in the image of God, Gen. 1 v 27. But the most part, it is not until the mid-twentieth century that the social conditions necessary for the realization of this long history of the idea of marital mutuality began to fall in place.
Although marriage has been seen, as organizing natural yet conflicting desires, as requiring contracts, and as serving the public good, it also has been seen as a profoundly divine reality. Because of the dominance in the west of the religious view of marriage, this often blinds both the faithful and their detractors to its natural, contractual, and social dimensions. Nonetheless, it is true that the first two chapters of Genesis have been foundational for views of marriage in the Christianity as well as the culture and law in the societies that they have influenced. These texts establish marriage as an “order of Creation” that expresses the will of God for all humanity. This order is preserved and enhanced through covenant promises between God and humans and between God and husband, wife, their families, and the wider community.
The analogy between Gods faithfulness to Israel and Hosea’s faithfulness to his wife Gomer has provided an archetypal pattern for marital commitment wherever Judaism and Christianity have spread. It has elevated marriage to the status of recapitulating the dynamics of the divine life within the marital relation itself.
As an order of creation, marriage conceived as convenient was not itself viewed as a source of salvation, especially for reformation Protestantism. On the other hand, marriage conceived as a sacrament in medieval Roman Catholicism was viewed as a source of super natural grace and a vehicle for salvation. Both covenant and sacramental views drape marriage with a royal robe of divine seriousness and approval. Furthermore, they do not necessarily exclude each other or push aside the natural, contractual, or social views of marriage.
The Use Of Marriage As A Public Institution
Marriage as a public institution, sanctioned by law, in service to the common good, and blessed by the Church, must protect its private, personal, and intersubjective dimensions. Furthermore, we must never forget its procreative, sexuality, companionship and educational functions. Not all persons will use marriage to balance the values of personal love, having and the educating children, and the increase of the social good. But the cultural, legal, and Scriptural definitions of marriage must retain procreation, companionship, and sexuality as one of its central core values.
Through it is beyond the capacity of law or society to monitor all the ways people might use marriage. But its explicit cultural and divine responsibilities and entitlement must continue to honor all for its historic dimensions, including the task of bonding parents to their children and to each other.
We have come to a time when marriage may be divided between the permanent and the temporary is testimony against us, against our ignorance of the true meaning of marriage, love and responsibility is at its highest level in the reign of children, which provides order for society. Socially and personally, the higher and more loyal the levels of that conduct, the greater is man’s achievement in his striving upward. In the New Testament, marriage is clearly an analogy of Gods relationship with man and specifically with the child. Each broken marriage is broken analogy. The collapse of marriage ideas is to the degree of the collapse, a reactionary move in society, better marriage, like better government.
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