I’m offering some in depth explanation of 10 affirmations about marriage that I posted the other day. Today I want to look at the third affirmation: Marriage is a spiritual act.
As we noted yesterday, marriage is common across cultures. It can seem to be a very human institution. But the Bible affirms, as we said, that God created marriage. More than that, the Bible says that God is involved every time a man and woman join their lives.
This is another part of what Jesus said in Matthew 19:
““Haven’t you read,” he replied, “that at the beginning the Creator ‘made them male and female,’ and said, ‘For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh’? So they are no longer two, but one. Therefore what God has joined together, let man not separate.”” (Matthew 19:4–6)
Jesus says that it is God who joins the two people. Malachi 2 says something similar. When two people come together in marriage, God is present. God is at work.
That’s why I react strongly when people say, “We don’t need a piece of paper to prove our love.” It’s not about a piece of paper. Just as baptism isn’t just “the removal of dirt from the body,” so a marriage is much more than a ceremony or license. A man and a woman come into the ceremony as two distinct individuals and come out as one being, joined by God.
As Jesus said, what God has joined together, let man not separate.
Affirmation #3: Marriage is a spiritual act.
Tim,
Marriage seems common across the vast majority of cultures, but there hasn’t been a consensus about the nature of that relationship across cultures. And i think that’s really what’s generating so much fuss in our country about defining marriage. –not just the question of “who are the appropriate parties when forging such a relationship?”–but the nature of the relationship itself.
i think, politically speaking, Americans have conceived the nature of marriage as fundamentally contractual. To say that i’m marrying someone is just to say that i am making a very special kind of agreement with them. If marriage is fundamentally or merely a contract, then it’s not always so obvious why certain parties or combinations of parties cannot make such a contract together. –It does seem similar to periods of history in which being non-white or non-male barred persons from forming legally binding contracts.
And it seems lots of conservative folks want to fuss about regulating who are the appropriate parties to the contract of marriage. i think it’s more important to poke on the idea that marriage is fundamentally contractual (or perhaps whether it’s contractual at all). i think exchanging vows even at Christian wedding services has given the bad impression that marriage is contractual in nature. [Incidentally, there are *no* vows exchanged at Orthodox wedding services.] A more Christian view of marriage, i think, is that it is a mystical union of two persons.
Having said that though, i really don’t see how our state, given it’s particular political construction, could really view marriage as anything other than a certain kind of contract. If that’s true, perhaps what we (Christians) should be asking ourselves is whether we’re frankly too eager to have a piece of paper from the state in order to view a given marriage as “legitimate.” In my view, that seems to grant far too much to the state.
–guy