Rediscovering Marriage

Alan Wisdom
January 5, 2010

The following is an edited transcript of an address delivered by IRD Vice President Alan Wisdom at the IRD board luncheon on October 5, 2009. The address was based on Wisdom’s paper “Is Marriage Worth Defending?”

I’m not going to give a synopsis of the paper. You have an executive summary at the beginning, and I hope you will find that summary and the rest of the paper useful in all sorts of ways beyond what I can present here this afternoon. What I would like to do instead is to put forward some of the key arguments from the paper in a different way.

My point of entry is an odd feature that some of you may notice. The title of the paper is “Is Marriage Worth Defending?” In the current political environment that phrase, “defending marriage,” has become a synonym for opposing same-sex marriage. So you might think, reading my title, that I was going to spend a lot of space discussing same-sex marriage. Then you would read through the first 29 pages and be puzzled to find only glancing references to same-sex marriage. It’s only on page 30 that I begin in any detail to address the arguments for and against same-sex marriage, in a kind of excursus.

So what is going on here? Is it just that I’m dense? Some people, including my wife, might report that I can be dense on occasion. But I actually do have a strategy here, and the strategy is based on my conviction that same-sex marriage is ultimately a subsidiary issue. It’s a very important issue; it’s a necessary issue that we have to engage. But it’s logically dependent upon what we think about marriage in general.

The reason that our churches and our society are in trouble on the same-sex marriage issue is that we’ve already lost so much of the meaning of marriage before we even get to that issue. Certainly, in my view, state or church recognition of same-sex marriage would make the situation worse. But in many ways, heterosexuals have already paved the way toward same-sex marriage through their own misunderstanding and malpractice of marriage. To be quite frank, we heterosexuals have done far more damage than the two to three percent of the population that is homosexual could ever do.

The only way that we can resist same-sex marriage effectively is if we first recover the meaning of marriage. And I think that perhaps this is God’s providential purpose in the debate that we face today. It is to make U.S. Christians realize that we’ve taken marriage too much for granted, and now we need to go back into the Scriptures, look back at history, consider the social science evidence, and understand what marriage is really all about.

What I would like to do this afternoon is to strip away some of the myths and misconceptions that have accumulated around marriage, that have spread through the culture, and that have even infiltrated the church. We need to think in a disciplined way, which is what IRD’s whole Mt. Nebo Paper series is intended to encourage. If you go through this paper on marriage, I hope you will see that every other page or so, I am trying to knock down one of these misconceptions.

The first assumption is that marriage is an invention of Western society—that it’s a legal fiction, like the limited liability corporation, developed for its social utility. On the contrary, both Scripture and history testify that marriage was prior to the state. For millennia marriage was practiced without any particular involvement of the state—it was a social custom. The biblical narrative places marriage at the creation—before the covenant with Israel, before the new covenant in Jesus Christ.

The second myth is that the marriage of man and woman is some kind of religious doctrine that Christians are trying to impose on society. Again, that’s not true. Anthropologists will tell you that marriage is virtually universal among human societies. And there are some common features of marriage; it’s variable, but not infinitely variable. The Bible presents marriage as part of God’s order of creation, God’s general revelation, God’s common grace to all humankind. It is not a specifically Christian institution. Now we Christians may have a richer understanding of marriage, where we see it as another way of incarnating the kind of love that God revealed in Jesus Christ. But almost all other religions have teachings on marriage too. The concept of the lifelong union of man and woman is the same for all people.

The third misconception is that there really is no common doctrine of marriage in Scripture. People have the impression that the biblical material on marriage is just this odd collection of stories about polygamous ancient Hebrews and then misogynistic rants by the apostle Paul. It’s to counter such impressions that I begin the biblical section of the paper with the words of Jesus in Matthew 19 and Mark 10 where he’s responding to a question about divorce. Jesus says, “Have you not read that the one who made them at the beginning made them male and female and said, ‘For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife and the two shall become one flesh’?”

Those are the words of our Lord and Savior. It’s not just an opinion of the apostle Paul. Indeed, Paul’s discussions of marriage in 1 Corinthians and Ephesians are both grounded in this notion of “the two become one flesh,” which he got from Jesus and which Jesus got from Genesis. So we’re dealing with a teaching that appears multiple times in the New Testament as well as the Old Testament. It runs through the entire history of the church. All major branches of the Christian faith share this teaching on the marriage of man and woman.

You will hear some people sneer, “Well, biblical marriage, that’s just polygamy. That’s incest. That’s all these non-consensual relationships where masters would forcibly marry their slaves and women’s consent was hardly ever taken into account.” It seems that these people have forgotten a basic principle of biblical interpretation: Not everything that is narrated in Scripture is approved by Scripture.

We then have people who propound the improbable postulate that being male or female makes no difference in marriage.  Their theme verse is Galatians 3:28: in Christ “there is no longer male or female.” That is a powerful verse, but they take it quite out of context. In that passage Paul was talking about our salvation in Jesus Christ and the fact that we receive it all by God’s grace, and none of us comes to Christ on the basis of our worldly position. Thus being male or female is of no advantage in coming to Christ; it’s all by grace.

But the same Paul, in his other letters, exalts the marriage of man and woman. By no means is he arguing that sex is irrelevant. God, in Genesis before the fall, created us male and female and declared it good. This is part of God’s good design for humankind. It’s something fundamental to our human identity. It seems to me that the people who are pretending that these differences between male and female are trivial are trying to be more spiritual than Jesus or Paul was. Our bodies do matter. The fact that we are men and women does matter, and God has a purpose in bringing the two together.

The next misconception is that marriage has always changed through the years and the church has always gone along with however marriage changed in society. I think that the best response on this point actually comes from the Catholic Catechism: “Marriage is not a purely human institution despite the many variations it has undergone through the centuries in different cultures, social structures, and spiritual attitudes.” The catechism goes on to affirm, “God is the author of marriage.”

Yes, there have been many changes in the institution of marriage, but the church has not always accommodated the culture. In fact, if you look at history, you find that the church has often changed the culture. In ancient society, many marriages were non-consensual. The church challenged that social reality. And that’s why in the traditional wedding liturgy that we have—it goes back to the Middle Ages—one of the first steps is the declaration of intent. The priest or minister asks, “Will you have this woman to be your wedded wife?” The reason for the question is they wanted to be absolutely clear that there was consent and no coercion. Any coercion was grounds for annulment.

Another example: In Roman times, slaves could not legally marry; at most they could have a kind of cohabitation with certain limited rights. The church insisted—and this was a papal ruling in the 13th century—that slaves must be allowed to marry because marriage is a grace of God that is for all people.

The church also dignified marriage by insisting that the relationship of husband and wife had priority over other relationships. In many ancient societies, a man’s male friends were far more important than his wife. My paper quotes a sermon by John Chrysostom asserting to the contrary: “Show how much you value [your wife’s] company by staying home with her rather than going out in the marketplace. Cherish her more than all your friends, more than the children born of her, and love the children for her sake.”

To this day that same advice is one of the most transformative messages of evangelical preachers in Latin America. In a very macho culture, one of the things they tell the husbands is: “You can no longer go out drinking and tomcatting around and spending all of the money. You come home to your wife and your children. You spend your time with them and you spend your money on them.” Even today, that message is changing the culture of marriage in a whole continent.

There is the myth that marriage is all about feelings of love. We find this assumption crop up in debates about same-sex marriage. People will say, “After all, what is marriage about except two people that love each other?” Biblically and historically, however, marriage has been about a lot more than feelings of affection.

Love is important, but there are structures built to channel and express the love. There are the vows of total and lifelong commitment. There is the public accountability to the two families and the community. Marriage joins man and woman not only in their emotions, but also in their bodies, their finances, their social relationships, their plans and ambitions. Marriage is exclusive—the spouses “forsake all others.” Marriage is normative—we expect that most people will get married. Marriage ordinarily involves children. All these crucial elements are downgraded if marriage is reduced to just any “two people who love each other.”

All this talk of marriage as feelings of love can sound oddly prudish. It’s as if we don’t want to admit that we’re talking about people who are having sex together. I don’t see that same squeamishness in Genesis or Jesus. When they spoke about how “the two become one flesh,” they weren’t just speaking about an emotional bond between the man and woman. Both church and state have always recognized the physical, sexual side of the union. Under classic canon and civil law, a marriage was consummated by what was called, delicately, the “marital act.” The marital act involves one man and one woman—only one man and one woman. They become “one flesh” in a way different from all other sexual acts. What we do with our bodies matters.

There is also the misguided notion that each couple invents its own marriage. Marriage, in this view, is just a contract, and the contract can be anything that two parties agree to. We see this notion illustrated in the frequent practice of couples writing their own wedding vows. That practice, however well intentioned, sends the wrong message. In actuality, marriage is not created by the couple. It is an already existing institution that God created, that previous generations shaped through the centuries, and that each couple enters into. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, in a 1943 letter from a Nazi prison to a couple that was getting married, put it best: “It is not your love that sustains the marriage, but from now on, the marriage that sustains your love.”

These misconceptions about marriage—that it is an infinitely flexible contract, that it has no fixed meaning in Scripture or across history, that all that matters is the love between two individuals—give rise to a serious misreading of the current debate about same-sex marriage. People assume, falsely, that changing the definition of marriage to “any two persons” would amount to only a slight expansion or adjustment of the institution. They think we’re doing nothing more than including an additional two or three percent of the population who aren’t able to marry now, supposedly. (Actually, they can marry, but their pool of potential spouses is limited. Everyone’s pool of potential spouses has always been limited. You can’t marry a minor, a close blood relative, someone who is already married, or a member of the same sex. These limitations apply equally to everyone.)

But if you change the definition for that two or three percent of the population, you change it for everyone else. You declare irrevocably that the complementarity of man and woman is a trivial matter and that the bodies of the spouses don’t matter. You declare that marriage does not have any necessary connection to childbearing, because you’re marrying couples that, if they have a child in their household, will have borne that child by a third party from whom the child has been separated.

You are also declaring in effect that marriage is no longer a social norm. The vast majority of heterosexuals want to get married and do get married. To this point, however, only a minority of the homosexual community is in any kind of partnered relationship. And only a minority of those partnered relationships have availed themselves of marriage or civil unions where those are legally available. You don’t hear gay and lesbian leaders lecturing people, “You ought to stop shacking up and get married”—as many a Christian parent has advised a heterosexual child. The homosexual advocates want marriage as an option, not as a norm. But if it’s not a norm for them, then it’s not going to be a norm for anybody else.

In this connection we also have to challenge the popular notion that same-sex relations and cohabitation are essentially the same as marriage. You will hear people say about couples that are living together: “Well, they’re married in everything but name. You know, marriage is only a piece of paper.” On the contrary, there are all kinds of studies that show, in very detailed ways, that cohabiting couples behave differently from married couples. To give one example, married couples overwhelmingly have joint checking accounts. Cohabiting couples very rarely have joint checking accounts; they don’t entrust their finances to each other. And there are many other ways in which cohabiting couples withhold from one another the trust and commitment that married couples commonly share.

Similar differences are observed in same-sex relationships. I know that this truth is hard for gay people to hear, but the objective evidence is that a relationship between two members of the same sex is radically different from the marriage of a man and a woman. Same-sex relationships are, on average, significantly shorter. They are less exclusive, with more sexual interactions with third parties. And they are not normative, as we have already noted.

There is a very plausible but deeply misleading line of reasoning that one frequently hears from proponents of same-sex marriage. They wield it as a trump card that supposedly quashes all arguments in favor of maintaining traditional marriage. The line of reasoning poses this question: “Suppose that I and my same-sex partner were to get married. How would it affect your marriage?” The assumed answer is: “My marriage wouldn’t be affected at all.”

But that assumption smuggles in radical individualism. It insinuates the notion that my marriage is totally separate, private thing between my wife and myself. Well it’s not. My wife and I got married before a couple hundred people, including all of her family, my family, and a good portion of the congregation in which she grew up. We are accountable to all those people for the promises that we made to one another. I would note that the wedding liturgy in many churches reminds all the married people in attendance of the vows that they previously took. The point is that our marriages are not separate; they are interdependent.

If I fall down in my marriage, my failure affects other people because they are influenced by my bad example. Above all, it affects young people who are shaping their understanding of marriage—whether it is a relationship that they want, whether it is a relationship at which they can succeed. If what young people see around them is predominantly troubled or failed marriages, they may conclude that a happy marriage is beyond their reach and they will have to settle for something less than what God intended. This is one reason among many why the classic wedding liturgy warns that marriage is not a commitment “to be entered into unadvisedly or lightly.”

We also have to resist a kind of defeatism that is spreading. Even orthodox Christians can start to believe that people really don’t want marriage anymore. They look at the declining marriage rates, the high divorce rates, the rising proportion of children born out of wedlock, and other negative trends, and they conclude that marriage is headed to obsolescence. There is no question that we face all these problems. But the best studies show that the vast majority of young people, 90 percent or more, say that they would like to be married. This is true even of poor women who end up having a series of cohabitations and children outside of marriage. They say that what they really want is to find a man who would marry them and have children together with them.

So I think that people still see marriage as a good to be desired. The problem is that the patterns of relationships in which many are engaging are not leading them toward the goal that they say they want, which is a good marriage. Programs like Marriage Savers deal directly with this situation. They don’t have to force engaged couples to come for help in building healthy marriages. They don’t have to force couples in conflict to come for help in saving their marriages. This is what most people want to do. They want to take the vows of marriage and they want to keep them.

Politically, too, defeatist assumptions need to be challenged. One hears orthodox Christians lamenting that we’re losing on the marriage issue and that defeat is inevitable. But that’s actually not true. In most of the states where the definition of marriage has been changed, it has been by court decisions. Where the voters have had a chance to decide the question—in 30 states so far—they have always ended up affirming marriage either by statute or by constitutional amendment. Marriage has prevailed even in relatively liberal states such as California, Oregon, and Wisconsin.

One even hears laments that we’re losing in the churches on marriage. Again, I think that’s not true. You have to take a global perspective and look at the entire Christian community. In that perspective the number of churches that have in any important way departed from traditional teaching on marriage is very, very small. The Roman Catholics, the Eastern Orthodox, the evangelicals, the vast majority of the historic Protestants around the world—they all have solid teaching on God’s design in bringing man and woman together in marriage. It’s only a handful of extremely liberal churches in North America and Western Europe that have reduced marriage to just any “two persons.” Even the Episcopal Church, which everyone thinks has gone over the edge, has not yet tampered with the wedding liturgy in the Book of Common Prayer. People have a sense that marriage is something sacred, and they are reluctant to touch it.

The final temptation that we need to resist is the one that in the “Policy Options” I call “Option B.” This is the temptation that affects many conservatives. And that is to say: “We know we need to maintain our understanding of marriage in the church, but society is a lost cause. Let’s just give up on society.Let’s get the state out of the marriage business. Let’s just make marriage a private thing that we do in our churches. Whatever relationship people want to have out in civil society, let them have it and call it what they wish. We’re not going to criticize them; we’re just going to try to make faithful Christian disciples inside the churches.”

This option is attractive because it seems to get you out of all the unpleasantness of the culture wars. You don’t have to take the heat for standing up for marriage in public. You just maintain your doctrine quietly inside the church.

But this solution doesn’t work. The forces that are seeking to redefine marriage are inside the churches already. And they are pressing to change the churches’ teaching. Particularly in mainline churches, but also in evangelical churches, you can’t keep them out. If a trend is running through the culture, it’s going to come into the church. Even in evangelical churches, you have individuals involved in homosexual relationships—and large numbers of cohabiting heterosexual couples. Every minister that I’ve met will tell you that he has to deal with those kinds of situations in his congregation.

You can’t erect a wall between the church and society. If you’re going to challenge unbiblical, dysfunctional patterns of relationships inside the church, you’re going to have to challenge them outside in society.

Moreover, we cannot rest secure in our religious liberty inside the church. If society moves to redefine marriage as just any “two persons,” Christian organizations and individuals will face tremendous pressure to conform to this new view of marriage. Priests and ministers will probably still be free, under the First Amendment, to decide whether to marry a particular couple. But any organization, like the IRD, that would insist on distinguishing the marriage of man and woman from other sexual relationships will be put in the position of being in defiance of state policy. We have already seen the use of coercive state power to force compliance. There was a court case in New York several years ago where an Orthodox Jewish seminary was required to provide married student housing to same-sex couples. We will not be able to avoid more such cases which challenge our ability to maintain Christian doctrine even within the churches.

Ultimately, too, we are not responsible solely for our fellow Christians. God calls us to love our neighbors as ourselves. All of the evidence from the past couple decades indicates that lasting, loving marriages uniting men and woman are better for everyone. They are better for children, better for adults, better for society. If we love our neighbors, what we wish for them is to have healthy marriages.

For that matter, promotion of marriage is a major way we can bring people into the church. There are all sorts of studies demonstrating that getting married and having children correlates with coming to church. So the state of marriage in society is closely connected to the state of the church. The kind of people who are drifting around from one non-marital relationship to the next are people, generally speaking, who are lost in other ways too. And these are precisely the people that the church needs to reach.

So we have all of these myths and misconceptions about marriage that we have to clear away. The frustration is that it seems so hard to dispel them. You can have the best arguments, but they don’t seem to sway people sometimes. You can have natural law arguments from the design of the human body and the chemistry of the human mind. You can cite conclusive social science evidence about the advantages of marriage over every alternative form of sexual relationship. You can point to biblical teaching from Genesis to Revelation. And yet many people—even many Christians—will still tell you that they really don’t see much difference between marriage and cohabitation or same-sex relationships. They will even allege that your pro-marriage position can have no basis except hateful bigotry. It’s as if they hadn’t heard a single one of your carefully constructed, sensitively phrased arguments.

In the end, I think what’s going on is something that’s much deeper than logical argument can touch. We face a spiritual struggle. Some of the key concepts in biblical teaching are becoming difficult, and perhaps have always been difficult, for people to comprehend. Regarding marriage, I would say the two keys are the notion that the two “become one flesh” in marriage and the insight that the love between husband and wife can replicate the total, self-giving, unconditional, steadfast love of Christ for his church.

The apostle Paul refers to these teachings as “a great mystery.” And I think we have to accept that they are a mystery. People don’t naturally get it. It takes a kind of spiritual breakthrough, a revelation to see marriage as God sees it. People are so attached to their individuality that they don’t really believe that two persons could become one flesh. They can’t help seeing marriage as just a mutually beneficial alliance of two still independent individuals.

Likewise, many people can’t imagine the kind of love Christ has for the church. They have never experienced a love that is total and unconditional and irrevocable. They can’t get out of the shell of themselves to believe that something like marriage as the Bible presents it could be possible.

My observation of the same-sex marriage debate is this: You can find many people who aren’t regularly practicing Christians who would affirm the traditional definition of marriage; however, when you look at the people who actually stand up and speak out and take the heat for defending marriage, it’s mostly people of an active religious faith. Perhaps it takes that kind of faith to make you see how precious marriage is and why it’s worth the sacrifice.

So the responsibility falls upon us who profess Christ. If the spiritual breakthrough is to come for our neighbors and our society, it will have to come through us. Only we can show them the Christ-like love, the one-flesh union, in the marriages that we build. Or rather, only God can show them that kind of love, that degree of union, as his grace works in our lives. So I think ultimately the spiritual challenge to the church is whether we can turn back to God our Creator, who made us male and female and made us for one another, and recover the meaning of marriage and give that back to a society that seems to have lost it in so many respects.