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Christian Marriage: a Concise History

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Christian Marriage: a Concise History Christian Marriage: A Concise History Muriel Porter1 Then the Lord God said, ‘It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him a helper as his partner’. Genesis 2:18 (NRSV) arriage, according to the second creation account, was estab- Mlished as an institution to give human beings the closest form of companionship.2 This second ‘creation blueprint’ has been more honoured in the breach than in the observance. Marriage has veered far from this original ideal throughout human history, and changed significantly many, many times up to the present. This ‘blueprint’ was not followed faithfully in the story of the Israelites, with the Old Testament recording few couples in a monogamous, let alone genuinely companionate, marriage. The 1 Dr Muriel Porter OAM is a Melbourne laywoman, author, journalist, and academic. She gained her doctorate in church history from the University of Melbourne. She is an honorary research fellow of the University of Divinity, and an adjunct lecturer at Trinity College Theological School, a college of the University of Divinity. 2 In the first account of creation (Gen 1: 26–28), humankind is created as both male and female together at the same time. That the humans in this account are commanded to ‘be fruitful and multiply’ can be read as giving procreation the reason for the different genders, but so too can the partnership of men and women commanded together not only to fill the earth but also to subdue it through their dominion over ‘every living thing that moves upon the earth’. 155 Marriage, Same-Sex Marriage and the Anglican Church of Australia patriarchs and most of the kings of Israel had multiple wives and concubines. In the Christian era, until very recent times, marriage has been unrelentingly patriarchal, with wives treated in law as subordinate to their husbands, rather than equal partners. Until the late nineteenth century, married women in both the United Kingdom and Australia, for instance, had no legal status. They could not own property, take action in a court of law, sign contracts, have legal custody of their own children, or even legally hire servants. In law, the husband and wife were one person—and the husband was the one.3 More seriously, this gave husbands the legal right to disci- pline their wives with physical violence, and also to rape them—a situation changed only very recently. In 1891, British law finally abolished the right of a husband to ‘moderately correct’ his wife by physical punishment, a right that had previously been enshrined in canon law.4 Legislation against rape in marriage began to be introduced in Australia only from 1976; it was not illegal in all Australian states and territories until 1994.5 Although civil law did not recognise egalitarian marriage until recently, companionate marriage was increasingly expected in the English-speaking world from the eighteenth century on and so came closer to the second Genesis ideal. It remained, however, far from equal in Anglican teaching (as revealed in Anglican liturgies) until well into the twentieth century. Anglican marriage rites began to dispense with the bride’s vow to obey her husband only in the 1928 Church of England revision of the Book of Common Prayer. An Australian Prayer Book (1978) dispensed with it in the second 3 ‘Out of his shadow: The long struggle of wives under English Law’, The High Sheriff of Oxfordshire’s Annual Law Lecture, 9 October 2012, 9, https://www. supremecourt.uk/docs/speech-121009.pdf, accessed 18 September 2018. 4 ‘Out of his shadow’, 13. 5 http://www.auswhn.org.au/blog/marital-rape/ accessed 19 September 2018. 156 Christian Marriage: A Concise History order of marriage; it is absent from both marriage services in A Prayer Book for Australia (1995).6 The permission given for artifi- cial contraception in marriage by the 1958 Lambeth Conference of bishops7 released marital sexual activity from requiring procre- ative intent, so increasing its role as an expression of love. Anglican acceptance of divorce and remarriage—a huge and controversial change that had threatened Anglican church unity over many decades8—further cemented companionship as the primary reason for marriage. In the twenty-first century, ‘mutual companionship, help and comfort’9 is now clearly the primary reason for marriage in Australia, and is the first ‘cause’ of marriage in A Prayer Book for Australia.10 Until these recent changes, Anglican marriage rites had consis- tently made procreation the primary reason for marriage. The Book of Common Prayer, through its various editions beginning with the first edition of 1549, always listed procreation first, with sexual control (‘remedy’) second, and companionship a poor third reason 6 It has however re-emerged, in a far stricter form than in any previous Anglican liturgy, in the second form of marriage in the Diocese of Sydney’s Common Prayer: Resources for Gospel-shaped Gatherings (Sydney: Anglican Press Australia, 2012). The bride is asked to promise to ‘submit’ herself to her husband (125). 7 A decade before the Vatican banned artificial contraception in Humanae Vitae, the Lambeth bishops declared that family planning was “a right and important factor in Christian family life”: Resolution 115, The Lambeth Conference 1958, (London: SPCK, 1958). 8 See Muriel Porter, ‘Scripture and the breaking of Communion’, in Scott Cowdell and Muriel Porter, eds, Lost in Translation? Anglicans, Controversy and the Bible, (Melbourne: Desbooks, 2004), 143–149. The Australian General Synod canon on remarriage of divorced persons was not passed until 1985. 9 An Australian Prayer Book, (Sydney: The Standing Committee of the General Synod of the Church of England in Australia, 1978), 548. 10 This is not the case in Common Prayer, where it is second to sexual control in the first marriage order (117), and third after sexual control and procreation in the second order (124). 157 Marriage, Same-Sex Marriage and the Anglican Church of Australia for marriage.11 In the main, they were following the pattern of the pre-Reformation church, itself based on St Augustine of Hippo’s highly influential treatise On the Good of Marriage, written in about 401CE. Procreation was the first ‘good’ of marriage for Augustine, sexual fidelity the second, and ‘the sacramental stability of the marital household within the city of God’ the third.12 Augustine’s third ‘good’ became ‘mutuall societie, helpe, and coumfort’ in the 1549 Book of Common Prayer.13 The ‘causes’ remained in the order established in 1549 in Anglican marriage rites until the first Australian prayer book, one of the first modern revisions in the Anglican Communion. In the second form of marriage in An Australian Prayer Book 1978, sexual control rather than procreation became the first purpose of marriage, discreetly termed as ‘the proper expression of natu- ral instincts and affections with which [God] has endowed us’.14 Companionship became the second purpose, while procreation was relegated to third place.15 It took until the second Australian prayer book—A Prayer Book for Australia 1995—for companionship to become the primary reason for marriage. It is in first place in both the first and second orders of matrimony.16 Other Anglican prayer book revisions have followed 11 The Book of Common Prayer: The Texts of 1549, 1559 and 1662, ed. Brian Cummings (Oxford: Oxford University Press,2011), 64. 12 John Witte Jr., From Sacrament to Contract: Marriage, Religion, and Law in the Western Tradition, second edition, (Louisville: Western John Knox Press, Kentucky, 2012), 67. 13 The Book of Common Prayer, Cummings, 64. 14 An Australian Prayer Book 1978, 560. 15 An Australian Prayer Book, 560–561. 16 A Prayer Book for Australia 1995, (Sydney: Broughton Books, 1995), 647; 658. 158 Christian Marriage: A Concise History suit; for example, in the marriage service in Common Worship, the Church of England’s collection of liturgies published in 2000.17 Had Archbishop Cranmer and his fellow bishops listened to an eminent Continental reformer exiled in England in the year the first English prayer book was published, the second creation order of reasons for marriage might have been honoured from the outset in Anglican liturgies. At the time the Regius Professor of Divinity at Cambridge University, Martin Bucer was invited by his bishop, the Bishop of Ely, to offer a commentary on the new prayer book.18 On the marriage service, Bucer, who was one of the first reformers to marry, wrote: … I should prefer that what is placed third among the causes for marriage might be in the first place, because it is first. For a true marriage can take place between people who seek neither for children nor for a remedy against fornication…Yet since “the two are one flesh” and live unto God as one person, it follows that without that union of minds and bodies and possessions… it is no true and real marriage before God. And so it is that in the first institution of marriage, to which the Lord Christ taught us always to look back, God did not say that its purpose was children, or a remedy, but this: “It is not good for man to be alone, let us therefore make a help for him, to be with him”.19 Bucer’s words fell on deaf ears. As we have seen, it took more than 400 years for Bucer’s preference to be implemented. In its mainstream liturgies, the Anglican Church has now at last 17 https://www.churchofengland.org/prayer-and-worship/worship-texts-and- resources/common-worship/marriage#mm095, accessed 14 September 2018. 18 Given conflicting notations on an original manuscript and the first printed version of Bucer’s commentary, the Censura, it is not clear whether it was the Bishop of Ely or Thomas Cranmer, Archbishop of Canterbury, who invited Bucer to write the commentary.
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