Theopedia

Christian marriage

“Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and they shall become one flesh.”

— Genesis 2:24 (ESV)

Definition

Christian marriage is the covenant union God ordains between one man and one woman, established at creation (Gen. 2:24) and confirmed by Jesus (Matt. 19:4-6). Husband and wife become one flesh in a relationship meant to be permanent, exclusive, and fruitful, for their mutual help, for children, and for the restraint of sexual immorality. Marriage also carries a figurative purpose: Paul describes the union of husband and wife as a picture of Christ and his church (Eph. 5:31-32).

Confessional Witness

The 1689 Second London Baptist Confession devotes its own chapter to marriage:

“1. Marriage is to be between one man and one woman; neither is it lawful for any man to have more than one wife, nor for any woman to have more than one husband at the same time.

2. Marriage was ordained for the mutual help of husband and wife, for the increase of mankind with a legitimate issue, and the preventing of uncleanness.

3. It is lawful for all sorts of people to marry, who are able with judgment to give their consent; yet it is the duty of Christians to marry in the Lord; and therefore such as profess the true religion, should not marry with infidels, or idolaters; neither should such as are godly, be unequally yoked, by marrying with such as are wicked in their life, or maintain damnable heresy.

4. Marriage ought not to be within the degrees of consanguinity or affinity, forbidden in the Word; nor can such incestuous marriages ever be made lawful, by any law of man or consent of parties, so as those persons may live together as man and wife.”1

The chapter states marriage’s shape (one man, one woman), its purposes (mutual help, children, chastity), and its bounds (consent, a shared faith, and freedom from close kinship), without treating any of these as merely social convention. Marrying “in the Lord” restates Paul’s instruction that a believer’s marriage partner be a fellow believer (1 Cor. 7:39; 2 Cor. 6:14).

Biblical Basis

Genesis sets the pattern the rest of Scripture assumes. God creates “male and female” in his own image and blesses them: “Be fruitful, multiply, fill the earth” (Gen. 1:27-28). Because “it is not good that the man should be alone” (Gen. 2:18), God forms the woman from the man and brings her to him; the man’s response, “bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh,” is met by the narrator’s own comment on marriage: “a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and they shall become one flesh” (Gen. 2:23-24). Jesus treats this text as God’s own institution of marriage, not a merely human custom, and draws from it the conclusion that “what therefore God has joined together, let not man separate” (Matt. 19:4-6).

Reflecting on this text, Ken Magnuson describes marriage as “the comprehensive union of one man and one woman in an exclusive, permanent, fruitful relationship.”2 Each mark traces back to the creation account itself: permanence, since Jesus grounds the impermissibility of divorce in God’s own joining of the couple (Matt. 19:6); exclusivity, since the one-flesh union is violated by adultery (Exod. 20:14) and even by lust (Matt. 5:28); and fruitfulness, since “be fruitful and multiply” is the first purpose named for the man and woman God has made (Gen. 1:28). Oliver O’Donovan, quoted by Magnuson, argues this structure is given rather than invented: marriage carries “a teleological structure which was a fact of creation and therefore not negotiable,” which “particular cultures may have distorted” but did not create.2

Marriage also has what Magnuson calls a figurative purpose. After quoting Genesis 2:24, Paul adds, “This mystery is profound, and I am saying that it refers to Christ and the church” (Eph. 5:32). The preceding verses use the same analogy to instruct husbands and wives: “the husband is the head of the wife even as Christ is the head of the church” (Eph. 5:23), so wives are to submit to their husbands “as the church submits to Christ” (Eph. 5:24), and husbands are to love their wives “as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her” (Eph. 5:25). Christopher Ash, quoted by Magnuson, cautions against reading this as though the whole passage exists to teach Christology: “the mystery revealed in 5:32… does not mean Paul’s whole purpose is to teach us about Christ and the church. The main thrust of the passage is to persuade husbands and wives in marriages to behave rightly towards one another.”3 The comparison runs both ways: a marriage lived as God designed it becomes, however imperfectly, a picture of Christ’s own union with his people.

Historical Development

Marriage’s status as a sacrament became a point of dispute between Rome and the Reformers in the sixteenth century. The Roman Catechism, as Charles Hodge summarizes it, defines marriage as binding an “indissolubilis vinculi,” an indissoluble bond, a position the Council of Trent grounded chiefly in Ephesians 5:32, where the Vulgate renders “mystery” as sacramentum.4 Hodge, an American Presbyterian, sets out the Reformed objection to reading that verse this way: Paul’s own explanation, “I speak concerning Christ and the Church,” shows the “mystery” refers to the Christ-church union, not to marriage itself, and even granting that marriage is a mystery in some broader sense, “that Latin word had not the sense attached to it by Romanists until long after the apostolic age.”4

The practical consequence of Rome’s sacramental doctrine, in Hodge’s account, was that “marriage between Christians, according to Romanists, is indissoluble. Neither adultery nor desertion justifies divorce. Death alone can sever the bond.”4 Hodge argues this rigidity produced its own workarounds: an expanded system of legal separation without divorce, and an enlarged list of grounds on which a marriage could instead be declared null from the start.4 Against this, Hodge records that “the doctrine held by the Reformers, Luther, Calvin, and Zwingle, and almost without exception by all the Protestant churches” was that marriage is not a sacrament, and that adultery and willful desertion are both legitimate grounds for divorce and remarriage, with the innocent party free to remarry.4

Opposing Views

Roman Catholic sacramental marriage

Rome teaches that marriage is a sacrament conferring grace, a position still held today rather than a settled sixteenth-century dispute: a marriage Rome judges invalid from the outset can be annulled, but a valid marriage between baptized Christians cannot be dissolved by divorce, even for adultery.4 Reformed churches deny that marriage is a sacrament and, following the Reformers, admit divorce and remarriage on the narrower grounds Scripture itself names.

Complementarian and egalitarian readings of headship

Evangelicals who agree that Ephesians 5 addresses husbands and wives still disagree over what it establishes. Complementarianism holds that a husband’s headship and a wife’s submission reflect God’s abiding design for marriage; egalitarianism reads the same passage as qualified by Paul’s opening instruction that believers “submit to one another” (Eph. 5:21), or as describing roles bound to their first-century setting rather than carried unchanged into every culture. Each position’s exegetical and theological case is set out in its own article.

Objections and Responses

Teaching that husbands are heads of their wives licenses abuse or domination. Ephesians 5 grounds the husband’s headship not in a right to be served but in an obligation to imitate Christ, who “loved the church and gave himself up for her” (Eph. 5:25). Paul’s instruction is addressed almost entirely to the husband’s side of the relationship: he is to love his wife “as his own body,” nourishing and cherishing her “just as Christ does the church” (Eph. 5:28-29). Alexander Strauch argues that Paul grounds headship in Christ’s own example rather than first-century custom, and that a husband “cannot love his wife as Christ loved the church while cruelly using and abusing her.”5

The Old Testament’s toleration of polygamy undermines marriage as one man and one woman. Magnuson responds that polygamy is never commanded or commended in the Old Testament narrative; it is tolerated in the way Jesus later says divorce was tolerated, “because of your hardness of heart” (Matt. 19:8). It first appears in the line of the violent Lamech (Gen. 4:19) and repeatedly brings strife on the households that practice it, most severely Solomon’s, whose many wives “turned away his heart after other gods” and split his kingdom (1 Kings 11:4, 11-13).2 Commenting on Genesis 2:24, John Murray concludes that “the indissolubility of the bond of marriage and the principle of monogamy are inherent in the verse,” so that polygamy “was a departure from the original institution.”2

Related Doctrines

References

  1. The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1689), chap. 25, “Of Marriage.” ↩

  2. Ken Magnuson, “7. Marriage and Sexuality,” in Invitation to Christian Ethics: Moral Reasoning and Contemporary Issues (Grand Rapids, MI: Kregel Academic, 2020). ↩ ↩2 ↩3 ↩4

  3. Magnuson, “7. Marriage and Sexuality,” in Invitation to Christian Ethics: “the mystery revealed in 5:32… does not mean Paul’s whole purpose is to teach us about Christ and the church. The main thrust of the passage is to persuade husbands and wives in marriages to behave rightly towards one another.” ↩

  4. Charles Hodge, “Chapter XIX. The Law.,” in Systematic Theology, Volume III (New York: Charles Scribner and Company, 1873), 394-398. ↩ ↩2 ↩3 ↩4 ↩5 ↩6

  5. Alexander Strauch, Biblical Eldership: Restoring the Eldership to Its Rightful Place in the Local Church, 4th ed. (Littleton, CO: Lewis and Roth Publishers, 2017), chap. 5, “Male Leadership,” 69-78. ↩