The Future of Marriage
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Original positing: August 23, 2007
The preacher's daughter was to get married later in the week. The scene was my wife's Presbyterian church, where I am usually to be found on Sundays (my wife in turn accompanies me to Anglican services in my church). I got to talk with the bride-to-be, expressed my best wishes, and gave her an instruction: You make sure that your dad ties the knot good and tight! Some time later I found out that my advice had caused some amusement in the family circle. I'm pleased to report that "dad" seems to have done a good job of it: the marriage is off to a fine start.
A wee joke? And a stale one at that? I don't think so myself, but there are some who insist that the quality of a marriage has nothing to do with the skill of the clergyman officiating at the ceremony; neither does it make any difference what liturgy is used, what vows are repeated, and so forth. It's all a question of the quality of the two people entering the marriage state. If they are made of the right stuff, all will be well. And if not ....
Some will take this line of thought further and tell you that all the "legalistic" stuff about vows and signatures is superfluous. No mere piece of paper can make a real marriage. Even back in my college days, when sexual and marital mores were very different from what we see today, that opinion was in circulation. I remember debating it with friends: I was not of that persuasion then, any more than I am now.
Marriage is a matter of "doing the right thing" by your partner. Why do people do the right thing? Because goodness wells up from deep within them? I suppose we could say that -- at least in the case of some people. But it also has to do with external expectations on the part of those who are watching you. Therefore, in a Christian marriage liturgy we use some elevated language suggesting that our activity in the sanctuary is being carried on "in the sight of God." We add a reference to "this congregation gathered here," and so forth. It's fine for the bride and groom to make wonderful promises to one another in private, but it helps to have those promises repeated in pubic. It's good to feel the eyes of God and of your wedding guests upon you when you're struggling to do what's right.
But there are also people -- probably quite a few of them -- who go into marriage with some trepidation. They would like to see a bit of slack in those marriage bonds. You never know when you might have to do a "marital Houdini," for life does not always unfold in just the way you hoped and expected. Wouldn't it be good to leave an escape hatch, just in case? Isn't there a law that says that a house must have at least two doors -- to make sure you have a way out if there's a fire?
There are also people who scoff at such sentiments. They just can't seem to get the marital bonds tight enough. Indeed, with today's flabby morality infecting even cermonies and wedding vows, they yearn for something sterner. And the State of Louisiana has stepped forward and given them a legal option that promises to fulfill their longing -- "covenant marriage."
It sounds Christian and Biblical, but it is not intended specifically and exclusively for Christians. Covenant marriage can well be defined in terms of what it excludes. In the legislation creating this legal category we read that when it comes to divorce, there is a strict distinction between ordinary marriage and the covenant variety: "Except in the case of a covenant marriage, a divorce shall be granted upon motion of a spouse when either spouse has filed a petition for divorce and upon proof that one hundred eighty days have elapsed from the service of the petition ...." It seems that ordinary marriage is a joke nowadays: either party to a marriage can demand a divorce, as long as there has been a separation of about half a year.
In positive terms, the new form of marriage (or perhaps the old one, for in effect it represents a revival of what used to be accepted as normal) is described in the legislation as follows:
A covenant marriage is a marriage entered into by one male and one female who understand and agree that the marriage between them is a lifelong relationship. Parties to a covenant marriage have received counseling emphasizing the nature and purposes of marriage and the responsibilities thereto. Only when there has been a complete and total breach of the marital covenant commitment may the non-breaching party seek a declaration that the marriage is no longer legally recognized.
The tentative vows recited by many a bride and groom today would hardly serve to launch such a serious relationship. Therefore the legislation spells out roughly what the bride and groom need to declare to one another:
We do solemnly declare that marriage is a covenant between a man and a woman who agree to live together as husband and wife for so long as they both may live. We have chosen each other carefully and disclosed to one another everything which could adversely affect the decision to enter into this marriage. We have received premarital counseling on the nature, purposes, and responsibilities of marriage. We have read the Covenant Marriage Act, and we understand that a Covenant Marriage is for life. If we experience marital difficulties, we commit ourselves to take all reasonable efforts to preserve our marriage, including marital counseling.
With full knowledge of what this commitment means, we do hereby declare that our marriage will be bound by Louisiana law on Covenant Marriages and we promise to love, honor, and care for one another as husband and wife for the rest of our lives. [NOTE covenant]
There you have it -- marriage properly so called! Three cheers for Louisiana! The "honorific" conception of marriage triumphs here.
But I wonder whether there is all that much to cheer about. By setting the standard higher for couples with enough resolve and maturity to embark on "covenant marriage," Louisiana in effect lowers the requirements and expectations for those who are not brave enough to take the high road. "We'll give it a try and see what happens." Is any more commitment than this required of them? Pamela Paul is of the same mind:
Take the new covenant marriage laws. The message they send is that for regular marriages, divorce is perfectly excusable and even to be expected. Exalting one kind of marriage while scorning another does nothing for the institution as a whole .... [NOTE paul]
Something has gotten lost here. Marriage is no longer marriage as such. It's as though we need to inspect the fine print to make sure that the terms and conditions of the legal agreement being called a marriage really do live up to the billing. Apparently some marriages are not true marriages.
In my teaching I sometimes find room for the Biblical saying "Many are called but few are chosen." I suspect I misuse this passage on occasion. [NOTE called] Even so, at the risk of being criticized, I am tempted to apply it to marriage as well by saying, in Louisiana terms: When it comes to marriage, many are called but few are chosen. Marriage is not an easy path to follow as you make your way through life. The apostle James writes: "Let not many of you become teachers, my brethren, for you know that we who teach shall be judged with greater strictness." [James 3:1] Who do you think you are anyway? What makes you think you could succeed at marriage? And so young people who still have the inclination to try are likely to put marriage off to some later stage in life, when they are more settled and mature.
But they had best not wait too long, or another difficulty might manifest itself -- at least, as far as marriage purists are concerned. I use this term for those who believe that we need to be stricter nowadays about the definition of marriage. Not every proposed union ought to meet with our blessing.
The thinking of the purists has roots within the Christian tradition, especially the Roman Catholic wing, where both Augustine and Aquinas are held in high esteem. It was especially Aquinas, who had inherited a strong teleological emphasis from Aristotle, who tied marriage and the conjugal act tightly to the main telos or goal of marriage, namely, the reproductive process. The general idea is that you do not marry just for covenience or for companionship, as some older folks might claim to do. No, if you marry, it needs to be because you mean business. You intend to put your shoulder to the wheel, reproductively speaking.
What this teleological fixation meant in practice over some centuries of Roman Catholic history is that the church should not give its approval to a proposed marriage if there was to be no reproductive activity taing place. This "rule" even went so far that back in the sixteenth century, Pope Sixtus V decreed that a priest contemplating joining a man and woman in matrimony had the duty to make sure that the man was properly equipped (especially in terms of testicles) for the marital duties to come. [NOTE ranke] Of course it was also conceivable that something was lacking on the bride's side, but her reproductive imperfections would not reveal themselves quite so simply to a priest without access to modern medical technology.
Roman Catholic excess, you might say. But recent research has shown that such attitudes were also to be found in John Calvin's Geneva, that bastion of Protestant reform. Calvin was known to be opposed especially to proposed unions involving a considerably older man and a young bride. The young woman was supposed to be about the business of reproduction once she was married, and as for her elderly husband -- well, one suspects he would not be up to the job. Like many a Catholic cleric, Calvin feared that such a union could not be a marriage in the proper sense of the term -- not marriage properly so called. [NOTE witte] Best to forbid such a couple to wed in the first place.
So what about marriage in later life? What are we to say about a man and woman who have been married for many years but now find that the conjugal act is out of reach, so to speak? When I was young, such matters were not mentioned in polite society, but now advice about "erectile dysfunction" blares at us from our television sets. Viagra ads (pure spam) appear unbidden in our email inboxes.
The strict tradition that maintains that marriage properly so-called needs to entail regular sexual union aimed at reproduction does not take issue with married folks who run into a spot of difficulty during their golden years. But what about a man and woman of such an age who seek to marry, perhaps having already produced children through earlier marriages that ended in the death of the spouse? May such a pair marry? What, exacty, would be the point, if marriage is teleologically aimed at reproduction? In my experience, there are Christians who find something ludicrous or silly about such a marriage: they can hardly keep from tittering. And if the subject of sex between such an intended couple comes up, some may even shake their heads and wonder whether it is appropriate to inaugurate a sexual relationship when you know that no children can be born of it. I speak from experience, having married a woman who was in her fifties and beyond her childbearing years.
There is a noble-sounding Roman Catholic answer to this question. If the couple in such a case are "open to life," their union can be looked on with favor. And in my own experience I think I have a sense of what this means. When I married Janet, it was not with an eye to making her the mother of my now-motherless children, for they were all grown up and out of the house. But grandchildren would be another story. When Steven was born to my son Michael and his wife Tamara, I fell happily into the role of grandfather, but right by my side was Janet, who is Steven's grandmother (we are called Pake and Beppe -- the Frisian terms). The day will come when Steven is told that he is not actually a descendant of his beppe, but by that point she will have earned such a place in his heart and his life that it will make little difference, I suspect. Janet is "open to life," and her willingness to be a grandmother to my grandchildren is part of what legitimates our marriage, in my opinion. I hope one day to function similarly as a grandfather to her natural grandchildren.
I have sympathy for the "marriage properly so called" idea, then, but I would not want to use it to discourage people later in life from getting married in the ordinary way. A small adaptation is all that is needed. When Janet and I got married, our Anglican wedding service omitted a prayer: "O merciful Lord, and heavenly Father, by whose gracious blessing mankind is increased: Bestow, we beseech thee, on these thy servants the heritage and gift of children ...." Just in case the priest officiating at the service is on auto-pilot, so to speak, the Prayer Book prefaces this prayer with a suggestion: "This Prayer next following shall be omitted, where the woman is past child-bearing." Neither did we provide our wedding guests with rice to throw at us.
One of the themes in this series of essays is that marriage -- I know it sounds paradoxical -- has an element of monasticism about it. For many people whom one might characterize as "marriage minimalists," it represents excessive devotion to another person with whom one forms a very special community of two, a community which may then grow to three, and then four, and so forth. Its special character may inspire other people who do not aim quite as high in their own lives.
Perhaps an example or two from religious history can illustrate my point here about how people who are themselves outside a certain relationship or community may be helped and encouraged by what happens inside that same relationship or community. To many people in various churches, the Old-Order Amish are a fascinating community. We like to read about them. Many books are written. So who writes all that stuff about the Amish? The Amish themselves do not believe in higher education and therefore do not have scholars and professors in their midst. The authors of the writings about the Amish generally do have Amish-sounding names, but when one checks them out, it turns out that they are Anabaptists of a more liberal persuasion, having left the strict Amish ways behind a generation or two earlier. Perhaps they are Mennonites with a higher education and even a professorship. Such writers are fascinated by the Amish and clearly love them, but despite Amish roots in their own family tree, they have left behind the Amish insistence on remaining separate from the world. It is as though their modified Anabaptist way of life draws nourishment from the strict example set by the purist Anabaptists, the ones we know as the Amish.
I could also make mention here of the great Jewish philosopher Martin Buber, who was fascinated by the Hasidim and wrote about them lovingly. Now, Buber was not very observant, as far as Jews go. [NOTE buber-1] Despite his fascination with the Hasidim, he did not join their ranks. [NOTE buber-2]
So why do Buber and other Jews sharing his more liberal mentality pay so much attention to the Hasidim? Or more broadly, why do more liberal Jews contribute so much financial support to rather strict and orthodox Jewish communities and enterprises? I think we see something of the same pattern here: the stricter groups show us what Jewish life really could be like -- perhaps what it should be like. Thereby they lend some substance to the somewhat more lax version of the Jewish life that we find in many other Jews.
In my own life's experience there is a modest parallel to such tendencies. I regard the Canadian Reformed people as their most self-conscious continuation in North America of the church tradition in the Dutch Reformed world from which I spring. The Christian Reformed churches, in which I grew up, seem to me to have lost their way to some degree; it as as though Christian Reformed people no longer quite know who they are or where they came from. But the Canadian Reformed remain remarkably stable and deeply bound to their origins and traditions. Therefore I pay close attention to them and consult their writings on points of Reformed practice and thinking. Perhaps their determined effort to remain Reformed in some traditional manner is an anchor helping a broader Christian community preserve the possibility of Reformed existence in a rapidly changing North American environment. I know that not many Christian Reformed people think along these lines when they consider the Canadian Reformed (indeed, most hardly think about them at all), but I believe my relation to them to be a bit like Buber's relation to the Hasidim.
The upshot of this essay is perhaps not so encouraging for lovers of marriage. On the one hand, insisting on "marriage properly so called" makes one out to be a reformer. One salutes the State of Louisiana for inventing "covenant marriage." But such marriage idealism can all too easily lead ever greater numbers of people to conclude that marriage is too lofty a goal: they dare not dream of being married in the proper sense of the term. Perhaps the closest they will ever get to genuine marriage is a period of living together, which one drifts into quite casually nowadays, and which is also ended without too much fuss -- provided no children are born. "Let not many of you become teachers," advised James. Let not many of you become husbands, or wives. Many are called but few are chosen.
The upshot is that marriage is becoming, for many people, the road not taken. Wrote Robert Frost in a well-known poem: "Two roads diverged in a yellow wood, / And sorry I could not travel both / And be one traveler, long I stood / And looked down one as far as I could / To where it bent in the undergrowth; / Then took the other ...." [END]
NOTES
NOTE buber-1
Jacob Neusner informs us that Buber "... received his first copy of the Talmud from [Abraham] Heschel on the occasion of his sixtieth birthday; Buber thanked Heschel, saying, 'I've always wanted one.'" See Israel in America: A Too-Comfortable Exile? (Boston: Beacon Press, 1985), p. 161.
NOTE buber-2
Buber declared: "I could not become a Hasid. It would have been an impermissible masquerading had I taken on the Hasidic manner of life -- I who had a wholly other relation to Jewish tradition, since I must distinguish in my innermost being between what is commanded me and what is not commanded me. It was necessary, rather, to take into my own existence as much as I actually could of what had been truly exemplified for me there ....� See Hasidism and Modern Man, , ed. and tr. Maurice Friedman (New York: Horizon Press, 1958), p. 24.
NOTE called
The context in Scripture is a bit chilling. We read in Matthew 22:13-14: "Then the king said to the attendants, 'Bind him hand and foot, and cast him into the outer darkness; there men will weep and gnash their teeth.' For many are called, but few are chosen." Hermann Keyserling maintains: "Marriage is not every man's vocation. The more highly a person is developed, the more he must experience a real calling for it." See The Book of Marriage, by Hermann Keyserling et al. (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1927), p. 42.
NOTE covenant
The quotations are drawn from: patriot.net/~crouch/cov/index.html
NOTE paul
The Starter Marriage and the Future of Matrimony (New York: Villard Books, 2002), pp. 243-244.
NOTE ranke
Uta Ranke-Heinemann comments on the �real semen� test for marriage: see Eunuchs for the Kingdom of Heaven: Women, Sexuality and the Catholic Church, trans. Peter Heinegg (New York: Doubleday, 1990), pp. 250ff.
NOTE witte
See John Witte, Jr. and Robert M. Kingdon, Sex, Marriage, and Family in Calvin's Geneva, Vol. 1: Courtship, Engagement, and Marriage (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2005), p. 273.
© Theodore Plantinga 2007
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