What Makes Marriage Christian?

Our discussions in the UMC need to focus on the kinds of marriage in which clergy can be a partner, over which clergy can preside, and for which congregations can host as representatives of the United Methodist Church. 

Discussions of how people behave sexually are a fruitless waste of time.

Unfortunately we have too often focused on “homosexual practice,” which is singled out in both the Book of Discipline generally and the Social Principles Creed specifically. This focus on “practice” inevitably means that debates about homosexuality become debates about personal behavior, with the attendant nit picking and hypocrisy that attend all efforts to regulate Christian behavior. If we go down the road of listing practices, sexual or otherwise that United Methodists don’t condone, and ostracizing or excommunicating those who engage in those behaviors we’ll empty the ranks of clergy and laity pretty quickly. And checking up on repentance? We’ll have an inquisitorial bureaucracy to rival the EPA.

And if we don’t list them all and enforce them all then we are guilty of hypocrisy. 

On the other hand of the nature of marriage, and particularly Christian marriage is far more suited to a church whose leadership is made up almost entirely of folks with a degree in divinity and a pastoral calling.

I’ll summarize my views first, and then discuss my reasoning:

1. What makes Christian marriage distinctly Christian has no bearing on matters of sex, gender, sexuality, or sexual practice.
2. Marriage as a fundamental institution of the social order does relate to sex, gender, and sexuality. Yet if Christian marriage is too closely identified with the social order described in scripture then it becomes: 
1. Embedded in an understanding of human relationships at odds with both contemporary ideals of equality and democracy 
2. Entangled in an understanding of the natural order that has been deeply problematized by modern science. 
3. Politicized in ways that distract us from our mission. Put more bluntly: it is not the mission of the church to defend the institution of marriage in any form. 
3. Yet if Christian marriage becomes too detached from models found in scripture, and with those the physical intimacy and bearing of children assumed in all human social orders, then we run the risk of a cutting off human personhood from human embodiment, cutting at the root of both Christian anthropology and Christian soteriology.

So what does it mean to say “Christian marriage” and locate the ceremony blessing it inside the church to be led by a pastor? 

First it isn’t a sacrament, not for Protestants. So the presence of a pastor presiding, or the location in a church, doesn’t impart any special charism on the couple. 

If we turn to official UM documents we find that the UM book of rituals says in the rubric prior to the liturgy of Christian marriage: "Christian marriage is proclaimed as a sacred covenant reflecting the Baptismal Covenant.  Everything about the service is designed to witness that this is a Christian marriage.  Since this “reflection” is key to understanding the Christian nature of marriage we’ll need to find where this language actually appears in the liturgy.

Not, as it happens, in the opening description of the marriage covenant:

"The covenant of marriage was established by God,

  who created us make and female for each other.

With his presence and power

  Jesus graced a wedding at Cana of Galilee,

and in his sacrificial love

  gave us the example for the love of husband and wife."

Here the references are not specifically Christian. They refer rather to the created order, in both its social and physical aspects. That order both precedes and encompasses Christianity. Even the reference to the sacrificial love of Jesus must be to the kind of sacrifice many people have made for others. If we take this to mean the redemptive sacrificial love then we set up the bizarre expectation that husbands and wives might redeem each other through sacrifice, which is heresy. 

Only later in the service do we find:

"O God, you have so consecrated the covenant of Christian marriage

 that in it is represented the covenant between Christ and his Church."

Ignoring the fact that we’ve moved from them language of reflection to the language of representation, this tells us what God is presumed to have done: “consecrated the covenant of Christian marriage.” More importantly it gives us a basis for the assertion that marriage is distinctly Christian: “in it is represented the covenant between Christ and his Church.” Here we also see the link to baptism, since it is baptism that forms the covenant between Christ and his Church. 

This assertion that the covenant between Christ and his Church is represented  in marriage rests primarily on Ephesians 5:21-33, although there are allusions in the parables of the Bridegroom and in Revelation direct references to the marriage of the Lamb. In all these cases, but specifically the letter to the Ephesians, what is represented in the covenant between Christ and his Church is complete fidelity and love. That is what makes a Christian marriage Christian. 

But this representation isn’t total, because while the relation of Christ to the church is eternal, as is the covenant of baptism, Christian marriage is strictly temporal. 

What is not represented or alluded to is any kind of relationship based on sex, gender roles, or sexuality. Ephesians quotes Genesis, but the “two become one flesh” is related to Christians being members of the Body of Christ, not sexual union. The parables referring to the bride and bridegroom, with the interpretation that the risen Christ as the latter, are far removed from such biological references. And references to the marriage of the Lamb in the Revelation of John cast the wedding in the apocalyptic Reign of Christ, a realm in which Jesus himself says the earthly institution and earthy aspects of marriage no longer exist. 

So if Christian marriage as distinctly Christian has no relation to sex, gender, and sexuality why are these such big issues? 

It appears to me it is because Christians have traditionally believed that Christian marriage is in fundamental continuity with marriage within the order of creation. The Old Testament, in Christian interpretation, is still an interpretation of the work of Christ. Christian marriage isn’t generic marriage with a Christian twist. It is marriage as established by God then deepened in its significance by an explicit participation by husband and wife in the Body of Christ.

The question for Christians who believe Christian marriage must be between a man and a woman  is how far that vision from Genesis extends beyond the sexes of the primal married couple. Does it extend to their God-given mission of sexual reproduction? The Church has traditionally believed so, although this isn’t a requirement in the UMC.

And further afield? For better or worse the Bible sometimes describes and sometimes assumes a fundamental social order at variance with contemporary human ideals. For example, marriage in the Bible is frequently polygamous. And in the Biblical social order women are beneath their husbands in a distinctly hierarchical, if theoretically complementary relationship. Paul explicitly confirms this aspect of the family social order in Ephesians. As he explicitly affirms a ruler-based hierarchical political order in Romans. 

In other words if by Christian we mean more broadly “belonging to the natural and social order Christians find in scripture” then there must be a basis for distinguishing those parts of the natural and social order ordained by God that are changeable and those that are somehow fixed and cannot be changed. 

On what basis can we make such a distinction? In the book of Genesis the marriage between a man and a woman is part of the unchanging order of nature in which creatures were made male and female in order to produce young of their own kind. Social relations may change, but not the order of nature. But asserting this unchanging basis for marriage between a man and a woman only raises all the problems of how our contemporary understandings of the natural order conflict with Biblical representations of that order. And again the problem of how we distinguish between those parts of the scriptural description of that order we regard as normative.

So is there scriptural evidence of an unchanging divine principle (rather than unchanging order) that marriage must be the union of a man and a woman? 

That is difficult to assert since Jesus himself says that in the Reign of God there is no marriage, and that “they are like the angels in heaven.” Moreover the original human was neither male nor female, although Adam had within Adam’s self the capacity to be both. So Male/Female complementarianism isn’t of the order of original creation. It is in fact an accommodation to the original human’s failure to find companionship.  No wonder Paul struggled with whether marriage should be perpetuated within the church that represents that Reign.  

It is clear enough in the UM social principles creed that we’ve rejected an unchanging social order. Our basic assertions about human dignity and human rights refer as much to the UN Declaration of Human Rights as to scripture. Moreover the more we know about the natural order (human and non-human) the less we see the categories of male and female (whether in terms of sex, gender, or sexuality) as absolute. In any case Christian life is explicitly a life conscious of the fact that the “old order” is passing away with the in-breaking of God’s Reign in Christ. 

So in fact all that remains in the UM Discipline of an association of marriage with some natural or social order is the distinction between male and female. Everything else appears to be changeable. Why not change this as well? After all, our society in the United States has. 

And yet there also seems a danger in disassociating marriage from the distinction between male and female, and thus sexual reproduction. There is the danger that marriage becomes merely a partnership based only on the abstract spiritual qualities of fidelity and love. The parties to the marriage may possess bodies, but it would seem that it isn’t their bodies that are getting married.  In other words we run the strong risk of detaching the covenant of marriage from any meaningful link to the deeply embodied covenant God created between God’s self and the Church in the birth, life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. 

Moreover, we make Christian marriage something almost entirely unknown in the experience of other human societies and religions. We’ve loosed it from long-standing and universal associations between marriage and sexual reproduction. And we have turned the command “be fruitful and multiply” into a mere metaphor for doing whatever we believe adds value humankind, whether having children, growing a fast food franchise, taking in rescue animals, or building homes in impoverished communities.

So we find our dilemma. It is problematic to identify Christian marriage with Biblical models of the social and natural order. And it is equally problematic to detach Christian marriage from those models. 

For this reason it seems doubtful that we should impose on individual pastors and local congregations rules that dictate what, beyond the demand of love and fidelity, constitutes a Christian marriage. If this seems lax for a “disciplined” organization I note that we do not impose on pastors and congregations a fixed definition of what constitutes Christian worship, or the structure of congregational life, or atonement theory, or doctrine of the authority of scripture, or a methodology for interpretation. In all these matters we allow pastors and congregations to be faithful to their own conscience and the local demands of their mission. 

It is almost bizarre that a church so determinedly latitudinarian as the UMC should become dogmatic in insisting on a single theological definition of Christian marriage. So I would suggest that we shouldn’t.