The Christian life

Marriage and family

What marriage is in Christian teaching, what the home is for, and where the four traditions differ on divorce and remarriage.

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Marriage, in Christian teaching, is not a contract the couple design. It is an estate instituted by God at creation - Christ grounds His teaching in Genesis rather than in Moses - and it has a given shape: the lifelong union of one man and one woman, ordered to their mutual good and to the receiving and raising of children.

Christ's own words are the starting point. Asked about divorce, He goes behind the Mosaic permission to the beginning: from the beginning of the creation God made them male and female. For this cause shall a man leave his father and mother, and cleave to his wife; and they twain shall be one flesh... What therefore God hath joined together, let not man put asunder (Mark 10:6-9).

Paul adds the theological depth: marriage images the union of Christ and the Church, and he calls it a great mystery (Ephesians 5:32). Which means a Christian marriage is not merely a private arrangement; it is a sign of something.

The family is the first church and the first school. Parents are the primary teachers of the faith - a duty all four traditions state explicitly, and one that cannot be delegated to a parish programme.

Where the four differ most sharply is divorce and remarriage. Catholics hold marriage absolutely indissoluble and provide for annulment - a finding that no valid marriage existed. The Orthodox permit remarriage after divorce in limited circumstances, with a penitential rite. Lutherans and Anglicans permit remarriage on biblical grounds, with pastoral discipline varying widely.

Singleness and celibacy are honoured too. Christ was unmarried; so was Paul, who regarded singleness as a gift with real advantages. A theology of marriage that implies the unmarried are incomplete has gone wrong.

What marriage is

Four claims, held together.

It is instituted, not invented. Christ's method in Mark 10 is decisive. Asked a legal question about Deuteronomy, He answers from Genesis - from the beginning it was not so. Marriage belongs to creation, not to any particular culture's arrangements, which is why the Church claims to describe it rather than to define it.

It is a covenant, not a contract. A contract exchanges goods and can be dissolved when its terms fail. A covenant gives persons, and its promises are unconditional - for better for worse, for richer for poorer, in sickness and in health. The vows are deliberately made in circumstances the couple cannot foresee.

It is one flesh. Not a metaphor for intimacy. Genesis and Christ both use the phrase for a real union - bodily, personal, and in the ordinary course generative. This is why the traditions treat the sexual relationship as constitutive of marriage rather than incidental to it, and why they regard sexual union outside marriage as claiming in the body what has not been given in the whole person.

It is a sign. Paul reads Genesis 2:24 as pointing to Christ and the Church, and the direction of the analogy matters: marriage is the copy and Christ's love for the Church is the original. Which sets the standard for husbands rather uncomfortably high - love your wives, even as Christ also loved the church, and gave himself for it.

Pause and thinkPause: why does the Church say marriage is ordered to children, when many good marriages have none?

The family

Parents are the first teachers of the faith. Not the parish, not the school. The duty is stated explicitly in all four traditions and in Deuteronomy 6, which tells parents to teach the commandments to their children when thou sittest in thine house, and when thou walkest by the way, and when thou liest down, and when thou risest up - that is, continuously and informally, not in a weekly slot.

Luther's Small Catechism is designed for this. Each section is headed as the head of the family should teach it in a simple way to his household, and it includes morning and evening prayers and table graces. The household, not the congregation, is the unit of formation.

The home is where the virtues are learned or not learned. Patience, honesty, forgiveness and self-command are acquired by children who watch adults practise them under pressure. Nothing else in a Christian life substitutes for this, and no amount of religious instruction compensates for its absence.

Family is not an idol. This needs saying, because sentimental Christianity has often made the family ultimate. Christ's words are startling: he that loveth father or mother more than me is not worthy of me. The Church is a larger family than the household, and baptism creates a deeper kinship than blood. Single people, widows, orphans and those estranged from their families are not peripheral to the Church; the New Testament is unusually attentive to them.

Divorce and remarriage: where the four differ

This is the real fault line, and it is worth stating precisely.

The texts. Mark 10 and Luke 16 record Christ's prohibition without qualification. Matthew 5:32 and 19:9 include an exception - except it be for fornication (porneia)

whose meaning has been debated for two thousand years: adultery, unlawful unions

within forbidden degrees, or pre-marital unchastity. 1 Corinthians 7 adds the Pauline privilege: if an unbelieving spouse departs, the believer is not under bondage.

Catholic

The Catholic Church holds that a valid, consummated, sacramental marriage is absolutely indissoluble - not even the Pope can dissolve it. Divorce in the civil sense may sometimes be tolerated for the protection of a spouse or children, but it does not end the marriage bond, and remarriage while a spouse lives constitutes adultery. The Church's provision is annulment (a declaration of nullity): a finding by a tribunal that, despite appearances, no valid marriage came into existence - because of lack of consent, coercion, a condition placed on the vows, incapacity to undertake the obligations, or a defect of form. This is not a Catholic divorce, and children of such a union remain legitimate. Marriage is one of the seven sacraments; in the Latin rite the spouses are its ministers and the priest is the Church's witness. The Church also teaches that marital acts must remain open to life, and Humanae Vitae (1968) reaffirmed the prohibition of artificial contraception while permitting the use of naturally infertile periods - a position no other tradition covered here now holds, and one on which the Church stood alone after the Anglican Lambeth Conference of 1930 first permitted contraception.

Orthodox

Orthodoxy teaches that marriage is intended to be indissoluble and that it endures beyond death - Orthodox marriage rites contain no until death us do part. But the Church also applies oikonomia, pastoral dispensation in the face of human failure, and permits remarriage after divorce in limited circumstances: adultery, abandonment, and a list of grave causes that varies by jurisdiction. The bishop grants an ecclesiastical divorce. A second or third marriage is celebrated with a different, penitential rite - shorter, without crowning in some usages, and containing prayers for forgiveness - so that the Church permits it without pretending it is the same thing. A fourth marriage is not allowed. The Orthodox marriage service itself has two parts, betrothal and crowning, and the crowns are understood as both the crowns of a king and queen of a new household and the crowns of martyrdom - the self-offering the estate requires. On contraception, Orthodox practice varies: some jurisdictions permit its use by married couples in consultation with a spiritual father, and others maintain a stricter line.

Lutheran

Lutherans do not regard marriage as a sacrament of the New Testament - it lacks a divine command attaching grace to a sign - but hold it in the highest honour as a divine estate belonging to the order of creation and given to all humanity, Christian or not. Luther wrote about marriage with unusual warmth and practicality, married a former nun, and treated household life as a school of faith more demanding than the cloister. The Confessions attack mandatory clerical celibacy at length - Augsburg Article 23 argues it is contrary to Scripture and has produced grave scandal. Lutheran teaching permits divorce and remarriage on the grounds of adultery and malicious desertion, following the Matthean exception and 1 Corinthians 7, with pastoral care exercised by the pastor. Because marriage belongs to creation rather than to the Church's sacramental order, Lutherans have generally been comfortable with the state's role in regulating it, while insisting that the state cannot redefine what God has instituted.

Anglican

Article 25 places matrimony among the five commonly called sacraments, and the Prayer Book's marriage service is one of Cranmer's masterpieces. Its preface names three causes for which matrimony was ordained: the procreation of children; a remedy against sin; and the mutual society, help and comfort that the one ought to have of the other. The vows - to have and to hold from this day forward, for better for worse, for richer for poorer, in sickness and in health, to love and to cherish, till death us do part - are among the best-known English sentences. Historically the Church of England permitted separation but not remarriage; practice shifted through the twentieth century, and most provinces now permit remarriage in church at the incumbent's discretion, usually after pastoral enquiry. The 1930 Lambeth Conference was the first Christian body to permit contraception within marriage, a decision of considerable historical consequence. On contested questions of marriage doctrine the Communion is not of one mind: provinces have taken differing positions, several formally, and the resulting disagreement has strained Anglican unity more than any issue since the Reformation. An honest account has to say that rather than report a consensus that does not exist.

Where modern denominations differ

Who differs: On the nature of marriage, most Baptist, Pentecostal, Reformed and non-denominational churches are close to the four - lifelong, exclusive, between a man and a woman, ordered to family life. The real differences are over divorce and remarriage, where much of American evangelicalism is considerably more permissive in practice than any of the four; over contraception, where almost all Protestant bodies permit it and only the Catholic Church prohibits it outright; over headship, where complementarian and egalitarian readings of Ephesians 5 divide evangelicals sharply among themselves; and over the wedding itself, which in non-sacramental traditions is a blessing of a civil act rather than the act itself.

How to answer on divorce: the first move is to recognise that this is rarely an abstract argument. The person across from you has usually been divorced, or their parents were, and an argument delivered as though it were about principles will be heard as an argument about them. Begin by saying what all four traditions say: divorce is a tragedy, not a sin category to be scored, and the Church's task towards the divorced is care rather than exclusion.

Then make the doctrinal point. Christ's teaching is unusually strong and is recorded in all three synoptics. What is striking about Mark 10 is that He is asked a question about the grounds for divorce and refuses the frame entirely, going back to creation. The Mosaic permission, He says, was given for the hardness of your hearts - that is, as a concession to failure, not a description of the good.

Then be honest about the difficulty. The Matthean exception exists, the traditions read it differently, and anyone who claims the New Testament is unambiguous here is overstating. The Catholic position handles the tension by denying that a valid marriage can end while providing a mechanism to test validity; the Orthodox by admitting failure and permitting a penitential second marriage; the Lutheran and Anglican by taking the exception at face value. Each position has a cost, and it is more persuasive to name them than to pretend one has none.

On contraception: the Catholic position is now held by no other tradition covered here, and it is worth knowing that until 1930 every Christian body taught it. That historical fact is usually the most surprising thing a Protestant learns in this conversation, and it is checkable. The Catholic argument is not that children are the only purpose of marriage but that the unitive and procreative meanings of the marital act should not be deliberately separated. Whether one accepts it, it is an argument rather than an arbitrary rule, and it deserves to be represented accurately.

Work with it

Check yourself

When asked about the grounds for divorce, how does Christ answer in Mark 10?

Check yourself

What is an annulment in Catholic practice?

Check yourself

How does the Orthodox Church handle remarriage after divorce?

Objection drill

Your churches cause enormous suffering by trapping people in marriages. A woman whose husband is violent, or who has been abandoned, is told the bond is indissoluble. Meanwhile Catholics with money and connections get annulments. The rule is cruel and it is applied hypocritically.

Write your answer first. You will remember it far better than one you only read.

A model answer

Both halves of this deserve an answer, and the second half deserves a concession rather than a defence.

On the woman in danger. No tradition covered here requires anyone to remain in a household where they or their children are being harmed. The Catholic Church, which holds the strictest position on the bond, explicitly permits and in grave cases counsels separation, including civil divorce, for the protection of a spouse or children; the Catechism says so. What it maintains is that the bond persists, so that remarriage during the other spouse's lifetime is not possible. That is a real burden and should not be minimised. But it is a different burden from being told to stay in the house, and the two are constantly conflated. Any priest or pastor who has told a woman to return to a violent husband has misrepresented his own tradition, and that should be said plainly.

On abandonment, the traditions diverge and it is worth knowing the range rather than assuming the strictest position is universal. Paul's provision in 1 Corinthians 7

that a believer abandoned by an unbelieving spouse is not under bondage - is read by

Lutherans and Anglicans as permitting remarriage, and Orthodoxy treats abandonment as grounds for an ecclesiastical divorce. Only the Catholic position holds the bond absolutely, and even there the Pauline privilege and the Petrine privilege exist precisely to address such cases.

On annulments and money. This is where the honest answer concedes.

There is a real historical record of tribunals behaving badly, and the perception of a double standard did not arise from nothing. There have been well-publicised cases in which prominent people obtained declarations of nullity with a speed ordinary petitioners do not experience. A Catholic defending the doctrine should not pretend otherwise; pretending will simply end the conversation, because the person you are talking to has read the same news stories you have.

What can fairly be said alongside that: the volume of American annulments in the later twentieth century was so high that Rome intervened repeatedly, which is evidence of a system being criticised from inside as well as out. Fees in most dioceses are modest and waivable, and Pope Francis's 2015 reform of the process removed the automatic second-instance review, shortened the procedure, and made it free of charge in most circumstances - changes made precisely in response to complaints about cost and delay. None of that erases the record. It does show a Church aware of the charge.

And the underlying question is worth putting back, because it is the real one. Is marriage the kind of thing that can be ended?

If it is a contract for mutual benefit, then obviously it can, when the benefit fails - and the traditions' position is unintelligible cruelty. If it is a covenant in which two people give themselves to each other, and a sign of Christ's unbreakable commitment to the Church, then it is not the sort of thing that ends when it becomes hard, any more than parenthood is.

The four traditions all take the second view, and then differ on what to do when human beings fail - which is where the real pastoral disagreement lies. The Catholic answer is to hold the bond and test its validity. The Orthodox answer is to admit the failure and permit a second, penitential marriage. The Lutheran and Anglican answer is to take the Matthean exception at face value. Each of those has a cost. The Catholic cost is the person who cannot remarry; the Orthodox and Protestant cost is that indissolubility becomes, in practice, a strong expectation rather than an absolute. Weighing those costs honestly is a better conversation than accusing either side of cruelty or laxity.

Memory work

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