What constitutes marriage.

Midlife Crashes

There seems to be three commonly held beliefs on what constitutes marriage in Gods eyes.
1. Through intercourse
2.When there is some sort of ceremony or
3. When they are legally married.

When people argue on why to wait until marriage to have intercourse they claim that intercourse means marriage. I literally can't find any passage to back up this claim. The people who claim this also claim that pre marital sex means immorality, but if pre marital sex was marriage, why would it be immoral.

For 3. people point to the quote from Romans "Everyone must submit himself to the governing authorities, for there is no authority except that which God has established. The authorities that exist have been established by God. Consequently, he who rebels against the authority is rebelling against what God has instituted, and those who do so will bring judgment on themselves."
But people were married thousands of years before these laws.

So what's your view?

lmaopml

Midlife Crashes wrote: »

There seems to be three commonly held beliefs on what constitutes marriage in Gods eyes.
1. Through intercourse
2.When there is some sort of ceremony or
3. When they are legally married.

When people argue on why to wait until marriage to have intercourse they claim that intercourse means marriage. I literally can't find any passage to back up this claim. The people who claim this also claim that pre marital sex means immorality, but if pre marital sex was marriage, why would it be immoral.

For 3. people point to the quote from Romans "Everyone must submit himself to the governing authorities, for there is no authority except that which God has established. The authorities that exist have been established by God. Consequently, he who rebels against the authority is rebelling against what God has instituted, and those who do so will bring judgment on themselves."
But people were married thousands of years before these laws.

So what's your view?

Yikes, you are very specific there...

I think that Marriage is a 'bond' a covenant of sorts - both in good times and in bad times that a couple pledge they will be there for each other no matter what comes their way - lots of very difficult hurdles etc. It's a promise, and equally so a promise to love their children. It is a serious thing.

It's made in front of the community - but the promise is between the couple, and the community welcome them. Ideally.

Peregrinus

Obviously, there are different traditions about marriage within Christianity, but there is a good deal in common.

All Christians see marriage as important, and usually they see its importance in the fact that the covenant between husband and wife mirrors the covenant between Christ and his church.

Consequently, the essence of marriage in the eyes of most Christians is not any particular ceremony – church or civil – but the mutual promises exchanged by husband and wife. These promises have to be solemn and intended to be binding, and they are expected to be public, so a public and legally binding ceremony is fitting but it’s not absolutely essential. Some traditions – e.g. the Catholic tradition – expect and require their own members to be married in a church ceremony, but there are exceptions to that, and in any event the expectation only applies to Catholics. In Catholic eyes, there’s no doubt that a non-Catholic or non-religious ceremony between two non-Catholics creates a perfectly valid marriage, as long as there is an exchange of promises of mutual, exclusive and enduring marital love.

Physical consummation of the marriage ratifies, seals and confirms the promises made, but if a commitment of that kind has never been made then consummation is not, on its own, enough to make a marriage.

PDN

This is a huge question. In fact it is the elephant in the room for Christians.

What Christians refer to as 'marriage' and what the State refers to as 'marriage' was once similar, if not quite identical. But those days are long gone.

The various churches need to decide if they have the courage to cut the ties to the State, to stop acting as proxies for the State in regards to marriage, and to admit that we are talking about two very different concepts of marriage.

One is a life-long covenant between one man and one woman in the presence of one God.

The other is a temporary contract between an unspecified number of people, irrespective of gender, which can be dissolved at will, and where God is irrelevant.

I am increasingly of the opinion that the churches should let the State do what it wants with their concept of marriage - and we should get on and promote Christian marriage as something quite distinct and separate.

Peregrinus

PDN wrote: »

The various churches need to decide if they have the courage to cut the ties to the State, to stop acting as proxies for the State in regards to marriage, and to admit that we are talking about two very different concepts of marriage. . .

I am increasingly of the opinion that the churches should let the State do what it wants with their concept of marriage - and we should get on and promote Christian marriage as something quite distinct and separate.

To be honest, I don’t know that the churches do act as proxies for the state in regards to marriage.

The churches do what they have always done – marry people – and the state recognises this as the social reality that it is. All that the churches do for the state is to send the paperwork back to the registrar, so that the marriage gets registered. If they failed to do that, the couple concerned would still be legally married, but they (and the celebrant) would have committed the offence of failing to register their marriage.

Traditionally, the churches have been happy to comply with the registration obligation because, in the Christian understanding of marriage, a marriage should be legally binding; the covenant involved is solemn, public and binding. Taking steps to avoid the binding nature of the marriage covenant (by concealing it, or by not registering it) is fundamentally antithetical to the whole concept of marriage.

The churches are pissed off, obviously, because the state now extends, or proposes to extend, a parallel recognition (as well as the label of “marriage”) to relationships which are not, in the Christian understanding, marriage. But there’s nothing fundamentally new about this; in colonial days the British state recognised polygamous marriages in British territory where Christianity was not the dominant religion, and I don’t recall that any Christian missions in those countries refused to co-operate with marriage registration requirements in protest.

Whatever you think about civil recognition of same-sex marriage, or polygamous marriage, or whatever, it seems to be to be cutting off your nose to spite your face to respond by trying to avoid civil recognition of Christian marriages. Civil recognition is proper to a Christian marriage, surely? And if the churches undermine the notion of Christian marriage in this way, they can hardly complain that the state is doing so.

philologos

I'll let God's word speak for itself. Most seem to point to a formal commitment.

Genesis 2:18-25 wrote:

Then the LORD God said, “It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him a helper fit for him.” Now out of the ground the LORD God had formed every beast of the field and every bird of the heavens and brought them to the man to see what he would call them. And whatever the man called every living creature, that was its name. The man gave names to all livestock and to the birds of the heavens and to every beast of the field. But for Adam there was not found a helper fit for him. So the LORD God caused a deep sleep to fall upon the man, and while he slept took one of his ribs and closed up its place with flesh. And the rib that the LORD God had taken from the man he made into a woman and brought her to the man. Then the man said,
“This at last is bone of my bones
and flesh of my flesh;
she shall be called Woman,
because she was taken out of Man.”
Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and they shall become one flesh. And the man and his wife were both naked and were not ashamed.

Matthew 19:1-9 ESV wrote:

Now when Jesus had finished these sayings, he went away from Galilee and entered the region of Judea beyond the Jordan. And large crowds followed him, and he healed them there.
And Pharisees came up to him and tested him by asking, “Is it lawful to divorce one's wife for any cause?” He answered, “Have you not read that he who created them from the beginning made them male and female, and said, ‘Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh’? So they are no longer two but one flesh. What therefore God has joined together, let not man separate.” They said to him, “Why then did Moses command one to give a certificate of divorce and to send her away?” He said to them, “Because of your hardness of heart Moses allowed you to divorce your wives, but from the beginning it was not so. And I say to you: whoever divorces his wife, except for sexual immorality, and marries another, commits adultery.”

Ephesians 5:22-33 wrote:

Wives, submit to your own husbands, as to the Lord. For the husband is the head of the wife even as Christ is the head of the church, his body, and is himself its Saviour. Now as the church submits to Christ, so also wives should submit in everything to their husbands.
Husbands, love your wives, as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her, that he might sanctify her, having cleansed her by the washing of water with the word, so that he might present the church to himself in splendour, without spot or wrinkle or any such thing, that she might be holy and without blemish. In the same way husbands should love their wives as their own bodies. He who loves his wife loves himself. For no one ever hated his own flesh, but nourishes and cherishes it, just as Christ does the church, because we are members of his body. “Therefore a man shall leave his father and mother and hold fast to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh.” This mystery is profound, and I am saying that it refers to Christ and the church. However, let each one of you love his wife as himself, and let the wife see that she respects her husband.

Romans 13 does not mean that people are to submit to laws which encourage ungodly behaviour. If you look to the Acts 5:27-32 where they are flogged for proclaiming the Gospel they claim to following.

doctoremma

PDN wrote: »

One is a life-long covenant between one man and one woman in the presence of one God.

The other is a temporary contract between an unspecified number of people, irrespective of gender, which can be dissolved at will, and where God is irrelevant.

That's possibly one of the most offensive comments about civil marriage that I've ever read.

My marriage is not a temporary contract and neither of us entered into it thinking such.

I fear that the means by which religious folk seek higher moral ground regarding the redefinition of marriage will not to simply be content that they are undertaking marriage as they see fit but to denigrate the meaning of marriage for those who enter it in a fashion outside of their personal view.

JimiTime

doctoremma wrote: »

That's possibly one of the most offensive comments about civil marriage that I've ever read.

Its accurate though. So you are offended by the states definition of marriage rather than PDN's. He didn't say this is how people who have civil marriages view THEIR marriages, but rather how the state view them in reality. I was married in a registry office, and that was simply a legal service, and a public declaration of our commitment. However, our REAL marriage is what it is between myself and my wife.

My marriage is not a temporary contract and neither of us entered into it thinking such.

Great. Good to hear PDN's comment does not contradict you though. The state still views marriages as temporary contracts etc. You as an individual take it more serious than the state, and thats a good thing.

philologos

doctoremma wrote: »

That's possibly one of the most offensive comments about civil marriage that I've ever read.

My marriage is not a temporary contract and neither of us entered into it thinking such.

I fear that the means by which religious folk seek higher moral ground regarding the redefinition of marriage will not to simply be content that they are undertaking marriage as they see fit but to denigrate the meaning of marriage for those who enter it in a fashion outside of their personal view.

I think PDN's comment is fair.

Although civil marriages can be seen as permanent in the eyes of those which are married, they needn't be permanent, and they aren't advocated as lifelong covenants. That's the ideal in some cases, but by their very nature marriages are easily dissolvable, and marriages are simply contracts.

This thread is about how the church, the people of God regard a marriage. If you look at Jesus' opinion in Matthew 19, and Paul's in Ephesians 5, you'll see that marriage goes far beyond a temporal contract (even if it can extend for a lifetime). Christian marriage is also different in that Christians believe that marriages are to glorify God, and that Christians are encouraged to work together to magnify God's glory in marriage. Adam needed a helper to help him serve God's purposes. The same is true in Christian marriages today. It is a lifelong partnership bound in love for sure, but it is also a lifelong partnership to the Christian Gospel. It is about far more than the bureaucracy behind it, and it is far more beautiful also. The quality of a Christian marriage isn't determined crudely by the quality of sex, but by sacrifice towards one another. It is about regarding the other half as worthy to be submitted to in every respect.

The Christian gospel takes marriage far further than the state ever does or ever will. It might be because Jesus as Lord of the universe is worth far more than a piece of paper.

Tim Robbins

PDN wrote: »

One is a life-long covenant between one man and one woman in the presence of one God.

The other is a temporary contract between an unspecified number of people, irrespective of gender, which can be dissolved at will, and where God is irrelevant.

According to this reference

Atheists have a better chance of marriage lasting and conservative Christians are more likely to end up in divorce.

Manach

My understanding, leaving aside the whatever acts the State chooses to pass, is that while Marriage is an indissolubile union that annulments can be granted on various grounds. Biblical authority for the latter is from the bible, the explanations for the annulment I read from a Jesuit magazine, so I'll need several time-periods to process

JimiTime

Tim Robbins wrote: »

According to this reference

Atheists have a better chance of marriage lasting and conservative Christians are more likely to end up in divorce.

A lot of professing Christians have indeed a lot to answer for. They are as guilty as the next person for undermining marriage.

JimiTime

PDN wrote: »

This is a huge question. In fact it is the elephant in the room for Christians.

What Christians refer to as 'marriage' and what the State refers to as 'marriage' was once similar, if not quite identical. But those days are long gone.

The various churches need to decide if they have the courage to cut the ties to the State, to stop acting as proxies for the State in regards to marriage, and to admit that we are talking about two very different concepts of marriage.

I think churches need to decide if they are going to have the courage to tell their flock what marriage is, and to openly condemn those of their flock that flaunt this Godly anointed institution.

I am increasingly of the opinion that the churches should let the State do what it wants with their concept of marriage - and we should get on and promote Christian marriage as something quite distinct and separate.

There was a time when I would have subscribed to such a view, but I've relatively recently had a change of heart. I believe we have a duty to be 'salt' and 'light'. This of course starts with our own holy living, picking out the planks in our own eyes. Then we need to make sure that our churches are also salt and light. From there, we should be salt and light to our communities, and in turn our nations. Rather than retreating from them in matters of marriage etc, we should be a)Exemplary (Practice what we preach), b) Not simply sit back and let evil prosper. To paraphrase MLK, the church should be the conscience of the state. We must rediscover our prophetic zeal, and not become some irrelevant social club.

IMO, we are in the midst (or at least in the midst of the beginning) of post 'christian' Europe/US. It certainly hasn't been perfect or uncorrupt, or indeed very Christian in many respects, but our justices etc have been moulded by having God as the rudder. The people steering have not always been great, but we always have had that place of reference. We have entered a time now though, where mankind is once again marveling at itself and saying, 'Yeah, look at how great and good we are', forgetting God once again, and claiming credit for itself. Rather than retreating to our Churches, we should be more active than ever in resisting the ungodly (once again, starting with ourselves) rather than simply letting them get on with it. Even if it ends up being in vain, at least we can tell our children that we did not just sit down and let it happen. So in short, rather than withdrawing from the state, we should be influencing it.

doctoremma

Let me explain where I'm coming from. I apologise in advance if I have misunderstood a fundamental aspect of Irish marriage law, but having re-read a fairly recent thread where a poster queried the possibility of getting married without State involvement, I don't think I have. Happy to be corrected.

Maybe simplistically, the word "marriage" can be used to describe two things:
1. The first part of "marriage" is the legal contract between two people, granted and authorised ONLY by the State (both in Ireland and the UK). The legal requirements to be able to access marriage, the papers you sign, the people who countersign, are all part of a State/civil marriage process. Under these laws, all marriages are the same. We all signed the same (or similar) documents, we all obtained the same legal recognition of commitment to children/support/other joint ventures and we all have the same means of dissolving said partnership.

2. The second part of "marriage", and the one I am raising issue with, is the concept that the couple themselves hold of what "marriage" means, of what their true and committed intent is as they sign those documents. That concept can be very personal to the couple and it can be embodied in all sorts of ceremonies, religious or not.

If you choose, via a religious ceremony, to sanctify your own marriage as you wish, that's fab. If you choose to call it something else in protest at what marriage has actually become, off you go.

However, it does not mean that those unwilling or unable to access religious marriages should have their marriages discussed as mere "temporary contracts" that can be "dissolved at will". As far as anything to do with marriage law is concerned, these statements apply equally to religious marriage as well as civil marriage. If you choose to ascribe extra or different meaning BECAUSE your marriage was a religious one, fair play. But you do not therefore assume that such meaning or value cannot be derived from an alternative source (or from within).

Marriages are made and broken all the time and, on both sides of the fence, religious or none, are couples who make a mockery of what we all (I hope) understand marriage to be.

Which leads nicely back to the OP - what should marriage be?

Seaneh

Tim Robbins wrote: »

According to this reference

Atheists have a better chance of marriage lasting and conservative Christians are more likely to end up in divorce.

That still doesn't make what he said any less valid though, does it?

What he said wasn't an attack on atheists (or anyone else) it was just pointing out the reality that, legally, marriage is not a lifelong binding contract, it's easily dissolved by either party.

homer911

It will be interesting to see how this story pans out in France - its almost a forerunner to our own debates..

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-20382699

Peregrinus

doctoremma wrote: »

Maybe simplistically, the word "marriage" can be used to describe two things:
1. The first part of "marriage" is the legal contract between two people, granted and authorised ONLY by the State (both in Ireland and the UK). The legal requirements to be able to access marriage, the papers you sign, the people who countersign, are all part of a State/civil marriage process. Under these laws, all marriages are the same. We all signed the same (or similar) documents, we all obtained the same legal recognition of commitment to children/support/other joint ventures and we all have the same means of dissolving said partnership.

2. The second part of "marriage", and the one I am raising issue with, is the concept that the couple themselves hold of what "marriage" means, of what their true and committed intent is as they sign those documents. That concept can be very personal to the couple and it can be embodied in all sorts of ceremonies, religious or not.

I think you’re omitting the fundamental feature of marriage, which is neither state-granted nor individually-determined. Marriage is a social institution.

You and I – this is hypothetical, you understand – you and I can have all the lovey-doveyness we want, and we can have all the hot monkey sex we want, and it ain’t nobody’s business but ours. And we can make all the promises and commitments we want to one another, and we can invest our relationship with whatever religious, mystical or other significance we want, and it’s still an entirely private concern.

When we marry, we are making our relationship other people’s business. We are asking for recognition for our relationship, for an acknowledgement of what it means to us and what commitments we have made, and for support in fulfilling those commitments. What we do affects our families, our other potential partners, our wider community, in a variety of ways. And of course it’s not the couple who determines how the community will respond to their relationship; it’s the community. So marriage is essentially a community recognition and support for a conjugal relationship that a couple can seek, or can choose not to seek.

This social reality precedes both church and state.

The state doesn’t so much create the legal institution of marriage as recognise it. To some extent the state regulates marriage by, e.g., imposing a registration requirement (because the community has a clear interest in being able to answer questions about who is married easily and with certainty) but a marriage registration requirement no more creates the reality of marriage than a death registration requirement creates the reality of death.

What marriage means, therefore, is ultimately determined not by the couple themselves or by the state but by the community. The state, if it is wise, will have public policies and laws which reflect the community understanding – if they don’t, they become irrelevant. So if the community accepts and supports polygamous marriage, or same-sex marriage, the state pretty well has to do the same, or the community loses interesting in the question of whether marriage is legally recognised or not.

Right. A community whose values have been shaped over centuries by Christianity will tend to see marriage as exclusive (i.e., not polygamous but monogamous) and as involving a commitment to fidelity (so adultery will be frowned upon) and a commitment permanence (so temporary or fixed-term relationships will not be considered “marriage”) and as possessing various other characteristics. This view of marriage may persist even if the community ceases to be consistently or predominantly Christian. Or it may change (as it is, I suggest, changing in relation to the question of whether same-sex relationships can be marriages).

There’s a limited amount that a couple who doesn/t share the communal view of marriage can do about it. They might like the idea of a group marriage, say, but if they live in a community which does not favour that idea then their relationship will simply not be accepted or regarded by the community as a “marriage” (and almost certainly not by the state either).

In short, the reality of marriage is socially determined. There’s a certain amount, but a limited amount, that either the state or the couple concerned can do to adapt marriage to their own views.

And the question of how a couple marry is also socially determined. In most western societies, in order to marry you have to exchange promises in public, usually with some degree of solemnity, and usually involving witness who is authorised by the community – registrar, priest, whoever. And those promises will reflect the characteristics that the society considers marriage to have – mutual interdependence, fidelity, etc. A couple can do a good deal to adapt the ceremony to their own tastes, but they have to work around these fixed points.

Tim Robbins

Seaneh wrote: »

That still doesn't make what he said any less valid though, does it?

What he said wasn't an attack on atheists (or anyone else) it was just pointing out the reality that, legally, marriage is not a lifelong binding contract, it's easily dissolved by either party.

It is only a this life contract for Christians. AS far as I know when you go to heaven you are single again (correct me if I am wrong).

Also, AFAIK you can get divorced in the reformed Churches and remarried in nearly all of them.

Let's remember Marriage existed before Christianity. Christianity didn't invent it.

tommy2bad

TBH, marriage is whatever society recognizes as a marriage. If thats 1 man 1 woman or 1 man 20 women or a person and a goat, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sudanese_goat_marriage_incident.
The whole point being that the society grants certain privileges to marriage, inheritance being the most important.
We might like to legitimize what we conciser marriage by claiming that our version is what God intended but at the end of the day....neither marry nor are given in marriage. If it's not good enough for God in Heaven?

ravima

a very conservative interpretation would be that through intercourse creates a marriage. Perhaps that it why many Christians are not in favour of what is commonly known as 'pre marital sex', as to have intercourse commits you to that person as your spouse and to have intercourse with any other, is adultery. Therefore if one 'marries' someone else, that relationship is 'adulterous' and sinful.