Home » Academics » Lecture Hall

Jesus and Marriage, Part 2

In the first article of this two-part series on Jesus and marriage, I explained that in His response to His Jewish questioners, Jesus pointed to Genesis 1 and 2 as the biblical paradigm for understanding marriage properly. I said that, according to the Genesis paradigm Jesus invoked, marriage is a coin with two sides, one divine the other human. It entails both a divine activity (conjoining) and a particular kind of human relationship (what Adam and Eve were for each other). Without either of those two necessary dimensions, the divine and the human, we have no real marriage. I said also that some of elements we commonly identify with marriage in our culture are missing from Jesus' model. I mentioned two: government and church. I begin here with the third.

3. There were no parents. Marriage is not constituted by parental consent. Indeed, Adam and Eve had no parents to consent. They had God only. We, by contrast, have both God and parents, and we ought not to confuse either them or their roles. The text we are considering does not. That is, the role of God in marriage is now what it was then. So is the role of parents: In the biblical paradigm invoked by Jesus, parents are absent except to say that they are to be left behind. The married couple "leave" parents and "cleave" to one another (Genesis 2:24). Parents are mentioned here in no other way. Divine consent, not parental consent, is the model. A marriage is constituted by what God joins together, not parents. While parents, and others, might provide wise and needed advice — as they so often do — their consent is not a necessary part of the Jesus pattern. Nor does the paradigm invoked by Jesus conflate the role of God and of parents, as if God played the role of parent in Genesis, or as if parents play the role of God now. Both God and parents are expressly mentioned in the text, and they are distinguished one from the other.

While parents, and others, might provide wise and needed advice — as they so often do — their consent is not a necessary part of the Jesus pattern.

The text does not say, nor do I, that parental consent is unimportant or that young men and women are wise to ignore it. Quite often, it seems to me, in the quest to understand if God has indeed brought them together, the couple are well-advised to seek the counsel of parents and of others. But, according to the text, it does not appear that such counsel and such consent are required for an authentic marriage. Parental consent does not make a marriage.

4. There were no vows. In the Genesis account to which Jesus refers, there are no oaths, no vows, no swearing and no pledges. The paradigmatic marriage was based upon a divinely established relationship whereby God Himself joined the man and woman in love and mutuality. Love, to be love, needs no vows. Vows do not add to love or produce love. The same with marriage: Marriage, to be marriage, needs no vows. Two persons are not joined together by God simply because they have made a vow, perhaps even rashly and immorally made it. That is not how to determine God's conjoining activity. Making and exchanging vows does not a marriage make — certainly not in the passage that Jesus invokes as His pattern. Indeed, Jesus seems rather strongly disinclined toward vows, oaths and swearing of any kind (Matthew 5:33ff.), much less does He make them a necessary part of marriage. Vows do not make a marriage.

The Bottom Line

Judging from Jesus' paradigm, none of the things noted above make a marriage. You can have any or all of them without having a marriage; you can have a marriage without having any or all of them. They might be — and normally are — quite useful social, political, economic, familial and churchly protections for a marriage; but they are not a marriage and do not make a marriage. If you think any or all of those things constitute a marriage and are necessary for a marriage, then you are saying, perhaps unintentionally, that (A) Adam and Eve were not married, and that (B) Jesus is wrong — two things I am unwilling to say.

Nor should one think that the Genesis paradigm is not relevant for us today because, after all, unlike Adam and Eve, we do have parents, churches and governments. Indeed we do; and so did those to whom Jesus spoke. They had congregations, parents, ceremonies, contracts, governments, vows — and all the relevant and pervasive sins that circle around sex and marriage — just as we do. Yet, Jesus pointed them to the Genesis paradigm, which He considered perfectly appropriate to their situation. According to Jesus, the Genesis pattern was relevant to them. For precisely the same reasons, it is relevant to us.

Things to Consider

Many peripherals and non-essentials (things conspicuously absent from the passage under review) have become, in our culture and in some churches, the very essence and making of a marriage. Jesus, however, calls this parent-less, government-less, vow-less, contract-less, church-less — but God-conjoined — mutuality of love and service the very paradigm for marriage. That fact raises some disturbing possibilities: Perhaps our culture and some of our churches have a view of marriage that cannot survive even the first two chapters of the Bible, and perhaps some of the unions our culture and some of our churches have called marriages really are not.

Let me be specific:

(1) Our culture, and some of our more liberal churches, are quite wrong to identify as a true marriage the union of a man and a man, or of a woman and a woman. That is not the union produced by God, or exemplified by Adam and Eve, in Genesis. Our culture endorses identifying such arrangements as marriages because it considers mere love or consent (or both) the proper basis for marriage: "If they love one another, or if they consent to it, let them marry." But because the divinely conjoined mutuality between Adam and Eve was not simply a matter of their love or consent, mere love and consent therefore are not a sufficient basis for marriage. One might love the wrong thing, for example, or love the right thing in the wrong way. One might also consent to things that are evil. Love and consent are an inadequate basis for authentic marriage. If they were adequate, then marriage might also include multiple wives, multiple husbands, blood relatives and the young, so long as those involved merely love or consent. That is the direction in which our culture seems now to be heading, along with some liberal churches. Not surprisingly, in its secularized frenzy of self-indulgence, our culture has forgotten God's conjoining, God's consent.¹

(2) Even some of the heroic churches that resist the cultural shift swirling around them are not wholly on board with the Genesis paradigm — though their motivation seems to me highly admirable because it strives to hold fast to the sacredness and importance of marriage, and to resist the ad hoc indulgences of contemporary culture. But in their strenuous effort to resist the prevailing decay, some churches act as if the Jesus paradigm were too stark, too simplistic, too weak and too shrunken — as if Jesus' views were somehow not up to the task of properly defining, and as if they knew better than He what ought to be thought and done. So they up the ante. They transform the good and useful things that have grown up around marriage as its protections and turned them into the very definition and basis of marriage itself.

To be clear, I am not criticizing churches and other Christian organizations that have stood so firmly and courageously behind things like the Defense of Marriage Act — not at all. I support them enthusiastically. They are defending the very things that defend marriage, as they should. By writing this article, I intend to stand with them and to support them. I speak not against them, but against those who, in their defense of marriage, turn marriage into something it is not. The important difference between the two approaches is the difference between defending and deforming. The former upholds, the latter undermines.

C O F F E E  S H O P

---

What is marriage, really?

Join the discussion!

These issues that circle around establishing a biblical view of marriage are both complicated and important. As Christians, we always do well to understand things as best we can from Jesus' perspective. By doing so, we will know better what marriage is, how to produce and preserve it, and how to reduce the tragedy of divorce and the intergenerational pains that circle around it. These are things worth considering.