by Kim Fabricius
1. Marriage, Edward Schillebeeckx writes, is “a reality secular by origin”; yet, as he continues, it
“has acquired a deeper 
meaning
in the order of salvation in which we live.” Because creation is in and
for Christ, and because the apocalyptic shockwaves of the resurrection
of Christ radiate both backwards and forwards, marriage must finally be
understood Christologically. Although Jesus relativised marriage (e.g.
Luke 18:29, Matthew 19:12), and although in the consummation there will
be no marriage (Matthew 22:30), in his patience and grace God gives us
marriage between-the-times as an intimate space for two people to be
good and let be, and, for Christians, to bear witness to the new
creation. At the marriage in Cana, Jesus turned water to wine – lots of
wine! – his first and programmatic sign of the dawning new age (John
2:1-11). In the imagery of Ephesians 5:31-33, Christian marriage
reflects the eschatological marriage of Christ and his church (cf.
Revelation 19:7). With Bonhoeffer, the ultimate frames but does not
negate the penultimate. It is therefore appropriate to speak of
marriage as a covenant. To call it a
sacrament, however, begs too many questions.
2. A marriage is not to be confused with a wedding.
“A wedding is only the regulative confirmation and legitimation of a
marriage before and by society. It does not constitute a marriage”
(Karl Barth). A ceremony does not make a marriage, consent
makes a marriage. And even in the ceremony, and even in the Roman
Catholic Church, the ministers of the marriage are the bride and
bridegroom, not the minister. Indeed it was only with the Council of
Trent in 1563 that the Roman Catholic Church insisted on an ecclesial
occasion, and mainly to ensure, through the presence of witnesses, that
the marriage was, in fact, consensual. In short, a church wedding does
not create a marriage, it recognises and blesses a marriage that
already exists. Nor should consent itself be taken as a punctiliar act
but as part of an ongoing project of mutual discovery and affirmation.
It is always sad to hear a couple say that their wedding day was the
happiest day of their lives.
3. If the heart of faith is friendship with God through Christ, active in the love of neighbour, the heart of marriage is maxima amicitia humana,
the most intimate form of neighbour-love. This pre-eminent human
friendship is normally both expressed and confirmed as a sexual
relationship. While eros and agape
are certainly to be distinguished (as Beethoven to Mozart, according to
Barth – though, as Eberhard Jüngel winks, “We won’t ask what Mozart
would say about that”), they must not be opposed (as Anders Nygren
argued); nor is sex to be ruefully indulged (as Augustine held) but
enthusiastically enjoyed (as Solomon sang). By the way, we should
exercise word-care when we speak of “pre-marital sex”: what we usually
mean is pre-ceremonial sex.
4. Yet corruptio optimi pessima: sex as the sphere of supreme tenderness and joy is also the sphere of desire at its most distorted (concupiscentia), indeed an arena of violence, as eros 
morphs into thanatos. In fact the libido dominandi is the regnant Pauline “principality and power” in contemporary western culture. Sex and the City
is the iconic text of an age in which sex is everything – there are
even parodic Virgilian tours of its virtual Manhattan Inferno – as we
amuse ourselves to death-by-serial-fucking. Yet while we must speak of
the body’s abuse, we may, in Christ, speak of “the body’s grace”. “The
moral question,” writes Rowan Williams, “ought to be how much we want
our sexual activity to communicate, how much we want it to display a
breadth of human possibility and a sense of the body’s capacity to heal
and enlarge the life of other subjects.” If there is the civitas diaboli of Carrie and company, there is also the civitas Dei of Jesus and his friends.
5.
Although marriage is complete without procreation (Genesis 2:24) and
remains complete after the kids have left home, marriage is the
God-given unit for the birth and nurture of children (Genesis 1:28).
There is, however, a teleology to raising children, namely that they
may grow up to experience the joy and freedom of faith. “This means,”
as Bonhoeffer says, “that marriage is not only a matter of producing
children, but also of educating them to be obedient to Jesus Christ,”
so that they too might become friends of God. The obedience course
begins by telling your children that Jesus loves them – even when they
are disobedient. As for the learning curve (or slider!), I recommend a
Hauerwasian pedagogy: “Start with baseball and also teach them to read.
Don’t teach kids a bunch of rules. Help them submit their lives to
something that they find to be a wonderful activity that transforms
them.”
6.
What about divorce? And remarriage? Reviewing the New Testament texts,
Richard B. Hays concludes that “the fundamental concern in all of them
is to affirm marriage as a permanently binding commitment in which man
and woman become one…. At the same time, there are complex
differences…. Mark and Luke categorically prohibit divorce, but Matthew
and Paul both entertain the necessity of exceptions to the rule,
situations in which pastoral discernment is required.” To be sure,
mired as they are in the cult of feelings, the myth of sexual
fulfilment, and the language of rights, the modern motives for divorce
are usually hopelessly un-Christian. However the notion of
“indissolubility” smuggles in a metaphysic quite alien to the Bible;
divorce is not an ontological impossibility. Nor can or should
remarriage be rejected tout court. “Indeed, ”with Hays, “if one purpose
of marriage is to serve as a sign of God’s love in the world …, how can
we reject the possibility that a second marriage after a divorce could
serve as a sign of grace and redemption from the sin and brokenness of
the past?”
7. Tina
Turner puts the problem – and the question I always put to dumfounded
couples whom I prepare for marriage: “What’s love got to do with it?”
Stanley Hauerwas: “Christians have far too readily underwritten 
the
romantic assumption that people ‘fall’ in love and then get married. We
would be much better advised to suggest that love does not create
marriage; rather, marriage provides a good training ground to teach us
what love involves.” Thus, most provocatively, to disabuse us of
conventional notions of Mr or Miss Right, Hauerwas’s Law: “You always
marry the wrong person.” (As Henny Youngman jested: I married Miss
Right. I just didn’t know her first name was Always.) Thus does
marriage become Luther’s “school of character”, or, better, a “class of
character” in the school of the church. Of course a relationship begins
with the chemistry of attraction, but unless it does graduate work in
the art of loving, it shouldn’t be surprising if it ends in an
explosion.
8.
Colin Gunton observed that marriage “is at once the most private and
the most public of our institutions,” and we may expect marriage to
contribute to the enrichment of society and the strengthening of
community. The church, after all, exists for the world. Yet in much
Protestant thought that takes marriage to belong to an “order of
nature”, the conclusion has been drawn that marriage is a purely civil
affair, a matter of state for which the church provides the altar. This
Constantinian understanding of marriage is a disaster, the collateral
damage of which includes the apotheosis of “family values” and the
raising of children to be loyal citizens, not faithful Christians.
Divorce itself becomes, not a personal tragedy or a failure of witness,
but a threat to the “fabric of society”, i.e. the status quo. The
church must certainly cease to be Caesar’s chaplain, but not by
abandoning its ceremonies, rather by reclaiming them for Christ. Follow
the trajectory to a status confessionis and the state would not sanction and regulate church weddings but declare them to be illegal.
9.
Am I suggesting that the church restrict weddings only to committed
Christians, or to “nominal” Christians only after thorough catechesis?
That would seem to be the drift of the argument – except for one thing.
John Wesley spoke of the eucharist as a “converting ordinance”, as a
means of grace that may bring the baptised (back) to Christ. In my own
experience as a minister, church weddings, on a not insignificant
number of occasions, have performed a similar function – and not only
for the couple but for members of the congregation. In fact, they have
been, indirectly, evangelistic events through which some people have
been drawn into the body of Christ. They may even be prophetic events.
Of course marriage preparation is essential, and that will include
catechesis as well as counsel, but I have always seen it fundamentally
as an act of hospitality and care. Some may chastise me with Matthew
7:6. I take consolation in Matthew 5:45.
10. Finally, if the heart of marriage is friendship, if marriage is for procreation in a gratuitous rather than an 
instrumental
sense, as overflow rather than essence, then do we not open the way for
the blessing of same-sex relationships? I think we do, though I think
the term “marriage” is unhelpful. (And by the way, whatever the social
and legal conventions, homosexual Christians, like heterosexual
Christians, may have a vocation as parents in the church.) This view
presupposes that natural law arguments against same-sex relationships
are otiose – but then I think that the concept of natural law is otiose
in a theology of marriage too! The point is this: if Luke Timothy
Johnson is right to suggest that “If sexual virtue and vice are defined
covenantally rather than biologically, then it is possible to place
homosexual and heterosexual activity in the same context,” it is also
possible to see same-sex relationships, blessed by the church, as an
analogue of the relationship between God and his people, and a model of
the church’s own proper economy of grace. In short, nihil obstat.
Postscript: two clean jokes and a dirty one
- Why
did Adam and Eve have the perfect marriage? He didn’t have to listen to
her talk about all the other men she could have married, and she didn’t
have to put up with his mother.
- A
minister sent a tele-message to his goddaughter for her wedding day: “I
John 4:18. Love, Uncle Jack”. Unfortunately, the telephonist omitted
the “I”, so that the reference was to John’s Gospel. Check it out!
- Finally,
as an illustration that (pace von Clausewitz) marriage is the
continuation of war by other means, an “order of militarisation”:
Reviewing their marriage vows on the eve of their thirtieth
anniversary, a couple had a furious row when they came to “as long as
we both shall live”. He was so angry that in the morning he went out
and bought her a tombstone bearing the inscription: “Here lies my wife
– cold as ever.” In retaliation she went out and bought him a tombstone
too. The inscription? “Here lies my husband – stiff at last.”
