Marriage is central among Christian practices and figures prominently in Christian sacramental theologies. Although the New Testament says relatively little about the institution of marriage, the Gospel according to John gives marriage a prominent place in the ministry of Jesus Christ. John tells of Jesus attending a wedding feast at Cana. The couple’s family failed to provide sufficient wine for the occasion and, at Mary’s behest, Jesus turns large containers of water into wine. In John’s Gospel, this miracle marks the beginning of Jesus’ miraculous ministry.
As Christianity began to develop an identity separate from Judaism, Christian theologians struggling with matters of institutional theology took up the task of defining marriage and its relative importance in the church. This was not an uncontroversial endeavor. Among the Apostolic Fathers, Clement of Rome taught in the first century CE that marriage ought to be affectionate but chaste. Ignatius of Antioch, although commending marriage as an institution of reciprocation between husband and wife, taught that celibate marriage is preferable to a sexually active one. In the second and third centuries, the so-called Latin Fathers began to change this attitude, making marriage take second place to virginity (Coleman 2004, 127). Many Christian theologians of this time were influenced by the Gnostic belief that the material world was corrupt and that the only spiritual goal was to escape from it. A common, tempered position was that of Clement of Alexandria, who allowed that sex in marriage was necessary for procreation but that virginity was to be preferred.
Saint Augustine of Hippo, with his ambivalent attitudes toward sexuality, brought about the compromise that would largely define marriage until the modern era, with some adjustment by Protestant theologians. Marriage, even if it is something of a compromise with humanity’s “fleshly” nature, has a good of its own, apart even from the procreation of children. Nonetheless, chastity is a virtue in marriage. Given this endorsement of marriage, Augustine interpreted the institution of marriage as sacramental, establishing a Christian tradition of marital indissolubility (Coleman 2004,127). This pattern, codified in Justinian law, remained largely unchanged in many cultures until the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
Thinkers of the Reformation and the Catholic Counter-Reformation elevated the standing of marriage. Reform theologians, although not banning it as a vocation, rejected celibacy’s standing as the highest calling of the Christian. To them, marriage was the most natural state for humans, including ministers of the faith. Backing away from earlier sacramental theologies, many Protestants came to allow divorce given appropriate grounds. Catholic theologians elevated marriage but did not reduce the status of virginity. Erasmus, for instance, wrote, “The most holy manner of life, pure and chaste, is marriage” (Coleman 2004, 179). Nevertheless, virginity and celibacy, as callings, maintain their high status as special vocations.
Recently, marriage and its definition have reemerged as a central area of dispute among Christians, particularly when national and local governments are debating whether marriage rights ought to be extended to homosexual couples. The Christian voice is often imagined to be united on the issue of homosexual marriage, but within Christianity itself there is a divide. There are Christians who believe that marriage is clearly defined as a heterosexual institution and those who believe that Christ’s message of inclusive love ought to lead modern Christians to extend marriage to the historically disenfranchised. The debate over the issue of homosexual marriage and homosexuals in the Christian church threatens to divide many Christian denominations.
Defining marriage has never been a simple task and remains one of the central concerns of the Christian churches today, testifying to the earnestness of people’s concern where matters of love and society meet most fundamentally.
