A Thinking Reed

"Man is but a reed, the most feeble thing in nature, but he is a thinking reed" – Blaise Pascal

Diocese of Mass: Just say no to marriage?

Some priests in the Episcopal diocese of Massachusetts are sponsoring a resolution to be considered at the upcoming diocesan convention that would get the church out of the business of marrying people. Instead, couples would have to get married by a justice of the peace and could then come to the church for a blessing if they wanted.

Depending on who you talk to, this is either a blow for equality or an act of devotion to the principle of the separation of church and state. Either way, Unitarian Universalist blogger Philocrites isn’t impressed.

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23 responses to “Diocese of Mass: Just say no to marriage?”

  1. Jennifer

    Isn’t this what they do in Europe and South America or parts of it? I had friends from Argentina who said in their country that’s exactly what you have to do.

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  2. Joshie

    I don’t really think it’s either, it’s just a return to the way marriage was historically done in the Jewish tradition. No elaborate ceremony, an exchange of marriage contracts, and any property such as cattle or land that was to be exchanged, then a trip to the tent to consummate the deal. Later on there was probably a big party for the joining of the two families, but it wasn’t this elaborate Victorian pagent it’s become today.

    Kudos to the Episcopalians, although I doubt the proposal will go anywhere. A civil marriage is very unromantic you know. It’s so much prettier to have a church as your backdrop (note the sardonic tone).

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  3. Chris T.

    I’m pretty conflicted about this. The language seems to suggest civil marriage == marriage, church marriage == “blessing a union”. Why give up the term “marriage” to the state?

    It also seemed to imply that one had to get a civil marriage (gay or straight) before TEC will bless a union. I hope I was misreading that — I don’t see any reason why obtaining a church marriage should hinge on being civilly married.

    Not sure how I feel about getting the church out of civil marriage entirely. I’ve done one civil marriage so far, and it does feel weird acting as a state agent right in the middle of a religious service. (Well, at the end. But still.) However, I think Chris is right that this is one of the weakest kinds of state action a minister can undertake.

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  4. Lee

    Jennifer – (Glad to see your status as retired blogger hasn’t caused you to give up commenting!) I think that’s right that it’s done that way in at least some other countries.

    I’m of (at least) two minds about this. On the one hand, I agree with the linked post from Philocrites that the rationales for this seem somewhat confused and contradictory. On the other hand, I think there might be something to be said for the churches getting out of the wedding business. Especially for Protestants, for whom marriage isn’t supposed to be a sacrament, it’s not entirely clear what the reason is for the church to marry people in the first place. (Of course, here as elsewhere, Episcopalians are sort of Protestant-Catholic hybrids.)

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  5. *Christopher

    My own priest already practices exactly this policy, see meditatio in my sidebar. Granted most seeking union services in our parish are gay, so acting on the part of the state isn’t possible.

    What strikes me is that there is a contradiction in the argument. Ultimately, I would prefer that some coincidence of the Church celebration and legal contractual rights and responsibilities (these do after all help one live out one’s Christian life together). Perhaps, having few said rights, I see the necessity in helping us live as “spiritual brothers”?

    Also, that this is how most places in Europe do in fact do this, so C, being German, is puzzled by all of the hoopla that such a suggestion garners here in the U.S. given our supposed separation of Church and State.

    Philocrites take is incredibly heterosexual. One should show concern about heterosexuals being inconvenienced in the same way homosexuals already are. Frankly, some level of inconvenience when Church action is involved should be par for the course regardless of the configuration of the couple (premarital counseling, liturgical planning, seriousness of the vows). As for inconvenience beyond that, it really doesn’t take more than a few minutes to get a civil marriage. Like Chris T., I don’t think celebration in the Church necessarily should be predicated on a civil marriage beforehand, though clergy might encourage such, given as I said, legal rights help the couple live out their Christian life together.

    So what of the gay couple showing up at your parish doorstep to be married…send them to the state? Why should they come back to the parish following? The argument seems to be this is a way to welcome straight folk to consider church. Too often, the priest never sees them again after the pretty wedding. I recommend Mark Jordan’s book, “Same-Sex Unions” which explores the commercialism of weddings and the possibility/opportunity of recovering marriage/unions offered because of the mess same-sex unions present to the Church.

    The policy insists that gay couples first seek state marriage and then they might receive a blessing. What if like C and I (who I could not marry because he is a non-resident alien and to do so on the state level might jeopardize his chances of one day getting his Federal greencard–hence, why we haven’t signed up for domestic partnership here in CA) showed up to have our union blessed? Sorry? State can’t marry you so neither will we? It was more important for us to celebrate our union in a Eucharistic context, to bless God with our lives before the community assembled and to have our vows witnessed by Christ, the Saints, and the community, than to register our partnership with the state. We will get a civil union in Germany in November, and someday hopefully, domestic partnership status here, but irrespectively, having given ourselves to one another before God and the community, we are bound to one another (whatever the state may say otherwise).

    This does raise larger issues around thinking this through, as I’ve argued before, I’m still not sure if we call same-sex unions “marriage” or “matrimony” or consider other terminology–we used fratrimony/sororimony, as I think our unions in Sign may point to complementary and interrelated but distinct aspects of the Mystery of Christ and the Church. Regardless early Christian married couples often came to call one another “brother” and “sister”, and C and I do the same, calling one another “brother”.

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  6. Brandon

    This proposed resolution strikes me as exactly upside-down; marriage is not, and has never been, an act of the state, which is why it is standard for states to defer to religious communities on marital status (within limits). Marriage is something done by the people and recognized by the state for the purposes of law. (That, I take it, was part of Philocrites’s point: the only sense in which the marrying minister is an ‘agent of the state’ is that he/she establishes a condition for the marriage being recognized by law.) If (as joshie suggests) the result of the resolution were simply an exchange of marriage contracts, the justice of the peace would be redundant — you don’t need a justice to authorize a purely contractual relationship. What in fact it is suggesting is that the community that is centered on the church is not competent to authorize a marriage on its own, which is absurd.

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  7. Lee

    Brandon, I agree that marriage is not an act of state (and I’m not sure Joshie meant to imply that it was), but is something recognized by the community.

    What’s less clear to me is what role the church plays/should play in all this. I have a hard time seeing marriage as a sacrament in the sense that baptism or the eucharist are sacraments. Partly that’s due to my very Lutheran way of understanding the sacraments no doubt. So, how to think of the relation of the church to marriage? Is it something the church authorizes? Witnesses to? Does the church marry people or does it simply recognize and celebrate marriages that already exist?

    *Christopher, just requested Jordan’s book from the library. Thanks for the tip!

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  8. jack perry

    Actually, that is not how it’s done in Europe, at least not in the Europe I’ve been to. That would be Russia and Italy, in the Russian Orthodox and Catholic Churches.

    When I talk about marriage, I’m talking about the sacrament of marriage — presumably, this is also what the Episcopalians mean. From the Catholic and Orthodox perspectives, the proper place for Christians to marry in a church. (for different reasons, apparently.) Christians who do not marry in a church are not asking Christ’s community of faith to recognize their marriage, so they typically are not engaging in a Christian marriage. Deciding not to marry in the Church, but on a beach in Jamaica instead, say, constitutes grounds for an annulment in Catholicism. (Of course, it may cause hardship for the couple to marry in a church, and dispensations are granted for such things. In some cases, these dispensations are granted where they probably shouldn’t.)

    In Italy and Russia, Christians may have to register with the government first for legal reasons, but they still proceed to the church for a real wedding, not a mere “blessing”, which is what the Episcopalians appear to be proposing. Episcopalian theology may be different, which is fine; my point is simply that how the Church of England views it, and thus how the English approach marriage, is not at all how other churches, and thus other countries, do it.

    My Italian acquaintances tell me that, yes, one has to register with the government in Italy, and of course one can contract civil marriages outside without ever visiting a church. But, one can do that here already, and such marriages aren’t recognized in Catholicism whether they take place in Europe or in the States. The Catholic Church sometimes allows one to marry in the Church without any civil ceremony. The point is that they view this as essential to their mission.

    My wife and I didn’t have to register with the Russian government at all to marry in the Orthodox Church, although finding a priest willing to marry an Orthodox woman to a Catholic man wasn’t easy. I did obtain legal recognition of the marriage when I returned to the States, but only for the legal issues associated with marriage. Naming my wife as a benificiary was part of it, but mostly I didn’t want the American government to deport her.

    I repeat that my wife and I do not see our church ceremony as a mere “blessing”, which appears to be what the Episcopalians are talking about. In our eyes, the real marriage was in the Church. Ours is a Christian marriage, whose purpose is to draw each other closer to Christ, and to bring new life into the world and to raise it up to Christ. While a homosexual couple may be able to raise life up to Christ, they cannot bring new life into the world; thus, our vocation really is different, and the Church is right to recognize it separately. Our marriage is not a mere legal convenience for tax purposes; it is our vocation, just as much as the monk’s life is a vocation.

    I pray that we can make the reality conform to our ideals — it isn’t easy. But it would be a lot harder if our Churches were abandoning the notion that they had a role to play in marriage.

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  9. Joshie

    I think we lose the plot when we set up the state, community and church as completely seperate entities. The same individuals who are members of the church participate in the work of the state (through voting, paying taxes, running for office, et al.) and are all members of the community. The state is a reflection of the community it serves. The state evolved precisely because there was a need to enforce contractual agreements in communities without resorting to blood feuds. The state’s recognition of marriage is a reflection of the community’s recognition of it and the needs of those involved to have their rights protected.

    I really see no good reason why the church should be marrying people. There is nothing in scripture that sanctions marriage or gives any sort of specifics about marriage other than the requirements to love each other. There are the marriage related laws in Leviticus and elsewhere, but they don’t set out in any systematic way what marriage should be, they only set up rules for how to settle disputes that may arise and who should marry whom (or what).

    But it is a false dicotomy that is set up if we claim that the church not marrying people means the church will have nothing to do with marriage. People don’t (usually) have sex and give birth in church, does that mean the church has nothing to do with raising children? Of course not. So yes, the church has a lot to say about marriage, but that doesn’t mean the church needs to be marrying people to have anything to say.

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  10. Chris T.

    Jack —

    Actually having an Orthodox wedding is not typical in Russia, not after decades of official Soviet atheism. For most Russians (and российские — that is, citizens of the RF who are not ethnic Russians), marriage involves a trip to ZAGS and a serious party afterward. I don’t know percentages, but the church is not really a part of that culture’s traditions about marriage anymore.

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  11. jack perry

    Joshie: Scripture doesn’t speak on what a lot of things are. That doesn’t mean we can’t say something about them that is informed by faith. If the sum total of our faith is restricted to what the Scriptures explicitly set out, then there are an awful lot of things we won’t be discussing in faith.

    In any case, you are mistaken that passages in Scripture are so limited that they don’t set out in any systematic way what marriage should be, they only set up rules for how to settle disputes that may arise and who should marry whom (or what). Actually, Scripture talks a lot about what marriage should be. It may not be organized as a treatise, but it is certainly there, and is even used to explain the rules that you refer to. I’ll mention two examples from the New Testament that rely on one such discussion.

    (1) In Matthew 19, Christ quotes the book of Genesis to state the purpose of marriage, using it to explain to the Pharisees why divorce is wrong. By this I mean that Christ does not merely lay down a law; he attempts to justify it based on what marriage is — although he does not dwell on the details, perhaps for the same reason that he did not dwell on the details of why abortion is wrong. These things were unquestioned in his society, and he was not out to overturn them.

    (2) St. Paul, while explaining his statement to “be subordinate to one another out of reverence for Christ,” quotes the same passage that Christ did. He then compares the relationship between husband and wife to the relationship between Christ and the Church. Again, we see that both Paul and Christ reason from what a Christian marriage must be to explain their counsels on it.

    Since this passage is twice used as a justification for laws, by none less than Christ and St. Paul, what does the passage say? It says that marriage should be the union of a man and a woman — not a spiritual union, not a romantic union, and not a contractual union. It is a union of our flesh.

    Additionally, I believe that children are born in church, when we baptize them in Christ. In the eyes of Christianity, this spiritual birth of the soul is no less important than the physical birth of the body.

    —-

    Chris: Yes, I know that a Church wedding is not a part of most Russians’ culture. However, that’s not my point at all, and reading what you say makes me despair of ever getting my point across.

    The example was simply to refute the notion put forth by the article and by some comments what the Episcopalian Diocese of Massachusetts is proposing is common European practice. Marriage in Europe is not merely a civil ceremony, followed by a “blessing” in the Church — not, that is, wherever the Catholic and Orthodox Churches are involved. I can’t speak for any other Church.

    Of course, the question that comes to my mind upon reading this is, If Europe did organize their marriages this way, shouldn’t we avoid following that model at all costs? Neither marriage nor Christianity are in what anyone could call a healthy state in Europe. My wife says that most Russian couples these days don’t even bother with a civil marriage. (She is not what anyone would call a fervent partisan of Orthodoxy. After all, she married me.) I know that most Italians postpone marriage until after a decade or so of cohabitation. All the European countries are dying, as their birthrate isn’t sufficient to maintain their population. One child per couple, while fashionable, is not sustainable.

    So, even if this were how Europe does it, I would suggest that the lesson to be taken is to do the opposite! Europe did not always do it this way; it is a consequence of the secular, de-Christianized society. If that’s what you want, then by all means throw your support behind this proposal.

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  12. Joshie

    Thanks for explaining my examples Jack!

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  13. *Christopher

    Again, I recommend another work on marriage and unions by the very thoughtful historian, Alan Bray, titled “The Friend”. Marriage (in the West–the East has a different tradition) until the Reformation often was contracted without involvement of the Church in its clerical sense at all, and was mostly a matter of the families involved, or in the case of a large majority, the peasant and serf class, of persons making pledged. Marriage as a sacrament is rather late in the development of Christian thinking. For much of the history of marriage in Christianity, it was indeed mostly a legal matter involving the state and property…much of our rite(s) in fact carries with it Roman bits and pieces.

    The history of marriage in Christianity is complex, and not easily reducible to a “this is how it’s always been done or thought of everywhere”, often meaning “this is how it is now”. The modern clerical Roman Catholic involvement in marriage to the extent mentioned here is well, modern, as is the CofE insistence that all Christian marriages happen under the auspices of a priest.

    As for mere blessing, I would rather say that the couple blesses God before the community keeping with the thanksgiving motif still present in Orthodox rites (again, see Bray) as an earlier Eucharistic understanding, this is no small matter at all, but a participation in the Eucharistic action, meaning Christ and the Spirit. Being mostly influenced by the Platonic Christian thinking of the Fathers, any particular marriage participates in the relationship of Christ and the Church, but so does a monk…as I noted in the rite we used, Friendship as a Christ-Church category often resonates with same-sex couples, and has precedence in the Gospel of John, and complements the Ephesians understanding.

    I do think of our union as sacramental and a vocation in the same way monastic vocation is such, hence, the importance of blessing God amidst fellow believers and before the Eucharist and the Saints. Here was the actual rite we used, and here are resources that friends and I are developing for queer folk. I am not, however, beholden to the seven sacrament model–and neither I might add in its best theology are the Orthodox. Being a good Anglican, I take Baptism and Eucharist to be the primary sacraments, and the others as sacramental rites, which participate in these primary realities (and from which they derive their meaning)–marriage after all occured before the Incarnation, yet it is in the things of Christ, Baptism and Eucharist, that it receives a Christian meaning and direction, receives its if one will, original intent, before the Fall. Like Newman, using the sacramental principle, I think we could think of monastic vows (which is actually marriage in some sense), of the vows between two men or two women (again, I prefer “recycling” adoption of a sibling as a category here), the Sign of the Cross, Holy Water, etc. (after all, Augustine lists over 50 sacraments).

    I would add that in conversation with Jack, I tend to agree with this statement: “While a homosexual couple may be able to raise life up to Christ, they cannot bring new life into the world; thus, our vocation really is different, and the Church is right to recognize it separately.” Except, our vocation is first and foremost participation in Christ, so rather there is first a sameness, before the particularity of difference is discussed. And except, that new life is far broader than children, who are a gift of God first to the Christian community. After all, we speak of the Ammas and Abbas, yet they never had children of their own. New life, while exemplified in the birth of children outwardly, ultimately must be far more than this in any Christian understanding or else we are in danger of a fertility cult understanding that is proposed by many these days who conflate marriage with the Trinity taking credit themselves (as Eve did, and presumably Adam) for this wonderful gift from God to the community. In other words, the bringing forth of new life is first and foremost God’s action, not ours , and is always gift as even Creation is grace–what I often refer to as tangible graces when speaking of food, shelter, etc.

    On the whole, I would prefer particular rites that honor the distinctiveness of same-sex couples without a need to say that monasticism, marriage, or unions are better or worse, but rather encourage one another to live out our vows to grow up in Christ. The rivalrousness of so much thinking around all of this is unChristian in a Pauline sense of gift.

    However, I will also point out that adoption of children is a possibility, indeed, demonstrates something quite radical about God’s adoption of us in Christ, and as Gentiles presumably, an ingrafting foreign to, in opposition to, contrary to nature. I’m in the middle of composing a rite of adoption for use by same-sex couples for this purpose…adoption as sacramental also makes sense, and is one way same-sex couples can participate in God’s generativity.

    In the end, until we get back to first thinking about God’s actions, rather than our own, I think our theologizing around vocations is going to continue to be problematic and tend to carry with it what looks like anthropocentric rather than Christocentric understandings of relationships, sex, sexuality, etc.

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  14. jack perry

    Marriage (in the West–the East has a different tradition) until the Reformation often was contracted without involvement of the Church in its clerical sense at all, and was mostly a matter of the families involved, or in the case of a large majority, the peasant and serf class, of persons making pledged. Marriage as a sacrament is rather late in the development of Christian thinking. For much of the history of marriage in Christianity, it was indeed mostly a legal matter involving the state and property…much of our rite(s) in fact carries with it Roman bits and pieces.

    Either I misunderstand you, or you are mistaken.

    For example, at this website we find a detailed description of a medieval marriage ceremony, and that its rite is quite similar to what we have today. There are expositions here and here that make clear that medieval marriage was more than a private affair. The latter reference states that there was a betrothal before a priest 40 days before the wedding. This does not appear to me to be a mere matter of persons making pledges without clerical involvement. I suppose I could also point to the Catholic Encyclopedia’s discussion of the rite of matrimony and its discussion of how the rite was performed before the Reformation, but clearly we can’t rely on such a biased source which quotes people like Tertullian on the excellence of a marriage made in the Church, a Nuptial Mass in the Sacramentary of Pope St. Leo, or any number of early Christians who exhort marriage in the Church.

    You say we should get back to a Christocentric view, rather than a man-centric view. I agree, but who is the judge of what is a Christocentric view? So far, I’m the only person here who has actually bothered to quote any words of Christ on the topic marriage. I’m even the only person to have quoted any words from Scripture at all on marriage. If that isn’t the correct approach to a Christocentric view, what is?

    I have no faith that modern Western culture can discern the Christocentric view any better than our forbears did; we are too blinded by wealth and comfort even to see Christ, which is why we expend so much effort to remake him in our image. That said, I don’t have that much faith in medieval or even ancient Western culture as to what the Christocentric view is. I have faith in what Christ, his disciples, and his followers actually said and did on the matter for twenty centuries. I have yet to see anything resembling real evidence that marriage was not considered a sacred act that, when properly done, required the Church’s involvement. Instead, I find an overwhelming amount of evidence to the contrary.

    Perhaps I am only finding those things that I am looking for, but given the mistakes that people here have made about marriage in Europe, I don’t think I’m the only one with filtered vision. (NB: my wife informs me that Chris’s remark on Russians and marriage the Church is even more mistaken than I let on. Perhaps, she admits, that is the practice in places like Moscow and St. Petersburg, but it is by no means universal. I’ve written too much already, so I won’t go into the details.)

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  15. *Christopher

    Jack,

    There is no THE Medieval marriage ceremony or THE rite, but many variations depending on locale and provenance. An uniformity of rite does not occur until Trent for the Roman Catholic tradition and even then the implications take nearly two centuries to work their way throughout the Roman Catholic world (the same goes for the Mass). I never said private affair, but for many peasants, clerical involvement was not necessarily the case (as property was not involved), and many noble families did not want clergy involved as it muddled up their financial arrangements. Many marriages among Christians happened without the involvement of clerical blessing or involvement at all, and the marriages were considered perfectly Christian. Again, what a source says, depending on what type of source and where does not mean that this is how things actually happened at all times and in all places.

    You seem to be reading back an assumption of across-the-board uniformity into diverse contexts from websites that don’t carry a lot of historical nuance in their interpretation of sources or in their consideration of locale or actual practices among Christians of this long period of time we call “Medieval”.

    After all, marriage as a sacrament was not recognized in the West until the 11th century and in the East in the 8th, that doesn’t mean in some locales and for many it wasn’t a sacred act, but it does mean there was a lot of debate about the place of marriage in the Church, if at all. Until the 11th century in the West, when marriage did happen by the priest it occured at the doorsteps of a church, as because married sex was considered impure and even sinful and could not be allowed into the sanctuary. But even then, that marry from locale to locale. Before we can get to polemic about marriage in Christianity, we should understand the evolution of that institution within Christianity and the diverse streams and threads that it has taken over time. The sites you list tend to carry an argument for a direct continuity that the records simply do not support. Sure their are things we recognize in certain past rites, but we can’t conflate them with modern practices in toto.

    I recommend a few books: The Body and Society by Peter Brown, Marriage in the Early Church by David Hunter, Law, Sex, and Christian Society in Medieval Europe, From Sacrament to Contract by John Witte, and The Work of the People by Frank Sens (perhaps the most accesible of these), as the internet is not a good place to get at the historical nuances of marriage (or most any topic) as it has evolved in Christian contexts and been understood in quite different ways by different Christians even in the Medieval period.

    And I would point out I’ve spoken of Christ here as well. I do honestly think that going for a polemical or moralistic understanding won’t help in shaping the meaning of vocations for Christians, nor do I think finger-waving at Europe solves much of anything, after all, my in-laws (if I may call them that), are average German Lutherans, some waited years to marry, others did not, and yet, I don’t see a less serious approach to marriage among them, but rather what looks a lot like a continuation of Germanic trible practices into the present.

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  16. *Christopher

    Jack,

    Again, the historian in me is wary of these sites as they’re too simplistic (they do point to some of the scholarly sources that do the nuance, however). Your second source is the best of the three in terms of actually being an argument, and the first at least quotes from an acknowledged source (Law, Sex, and Society in Medieval Europe by James Brundage), but quotes are not the same thing as reading the entire source and seeing the complexity and development that this source conveys (and the quotes out of context do not).

    I note in each of these sources a Medievalist romantic twinge (they seem to be sites for those who dress up Medieval costumes and/or are planning a wedding in such a style), an assumption of centralized Church authority that is a modern-reading back into the complexity of the feudal Church, a speaking as if the Church in this long period was a monolithic entity (it wasn’t even though in communion with the Pope–in the West), and an assumption of complete continuity between the Medieval Western Church and Roman Catholicism–there is continuity and break and hardening up of often varied viewpoints around Eucharist and marriage, among other things often in response to the Reformers. Your second sources notes this: Roman Catholic and Protestant beliefs differed sharply on questions about the sacramentally of marriage, clerical celibacy, divorce and remarriage, and ultimately about the aims and purposes of human sexuality itself. The Catholic reaction, both in its reform mode and in its Counter-Reformation mode, tended to sharpen rather than blunt the difference between the two camps.”

    I might add, however, that even in these sources you point to, they do point out the legal differences, some of the evolution, cultural variations, disputes, and that clerical involvement was not necessary for a great swath of Christian history and that suggest the hoops we’ve went through in getting to where we’re at about marriage today; it’s complex and combative and controverted (even Cranmer’s opening to the rite is argumentative in nature because he was making a great claim and break with much tradition since before Jerome to equalize marriage with monastic celibacy) with quite a bit of variation and local custom, not to mention, nuptial masses were rare until the 11th century in the West due to the debate about sex in marriage:

    So long as the couple made the vows before a witness, the marriage was valid–no priest had to be present (although this is increasingly not the case after the 13th century).

    Weddings during the Middle Ages were considered family/community affairs. The only thing needed to create a marriage was for both partners to state their consent to take one another as spouses. Witnesses were not always necessary, nor was the presence of the clergy. In Italy, for example, the marriage was divided into three parts. The first portion consisted of the families of the groom and bride drawing up the papers. The bride didn’t have to even be there for that. The second, the betrothal, was legally binding and may or may not have involved consummation. At this celebration, the couple exchanged gifts (a ring, a piece of fruit, etc.), clasped hands and exchanged a kiss. The “vows” could be a simple as, “Will you marry me?” “I will.” The third part of the wedding, which could occur several years after the betrothal, was the removal of the bride to the groom’s home. The role of the clergy at a medieval wedding was simply to bless the couple. It wasn’t official church policy until the council of Trent in the 15th century that a third party [c.f. a priest], as opposed to the couple themselves, was responsible for performing the wedding. In the later medieval period, the wedding ceremony moved from the house of the bride to the church. It began with a procession to the church from the bride’s house. Vows were exchanged outside the church (BTW, the priest gave the bride to the groom…I don’t think she was presented by her father) and then everyone moved inside for Mass. After Mass, the procession went back to the bride’s house for a feast. Musicians accompanied the procession.

    …..

    Prior to the declaration of the Lateran Council, the presence of clergy at weddings was not only unnecessary, it also seems to have been rare. The original role of the priest in a wedding celebration was to give a blessing to the couple. Georges Duby notes that ninth-century religious texts of Northern France make no mention of nuptial benedictions other than as part of joint wedding-coronation ceremonies where a queen simultaneously married the king and was crowned. During the same time period, the Bishop of Bourge forbade the priests in his diocese to even take part in wedding ceremonies mainly due to the bawdy nature of what was a celebration of the couple’s physical union (The Knight 33-34).

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  17. jack perry

    (1) I am not finger waving at Europe. I’m merely pointing out that a dying, de-Christianzed culture is not an example to hold up for a Christian Church. I would say the same thing about whatever the common American legal practice is: these are not the guidelines on which to establish our understanding of Christian marriage. Any system that allows a couple to get married in a wedding chapel, then obtain an annulment the next day (Spears-Alexander), is a warped system. By contrast, my in-laws were not, to my knowledge, married in a church, but they have certainly been an example of what marriage should be, something I can’t say about a lot of other marriages that do transpire in a Church.

    (2) Adopting a Christocentric attitude is not a matter of “speaking of Christ”. It requires one to begin with what Christ actually said on that topic, to meditate on it, and to proceed from there. I do not mean this as an insult, merely as an invitation.

    (3) I am well aware of a variety of form in the history of the Church, and even in the location. I cited myself as a beneficiary of it, as I received a dispensation to marry according to a different form.

    In my opinion, the issue in question isn’t the lowest-common-denominator practice, but the ideal that was always strived for over the centuries. Usages change, practices fall in and out of fashion. But what did Christ mean by marriage, what did he have to say about it, what did his followers say about it, and what is the Church’s role in it? This is the issue, and this is where we should always begin.

    (4) Your words are, “[marriage] was mostly a matter of the families involved, or in the case of a large majority, the peasant and serf class, of persons making pledged.” You certainly seem to be discounting any role for the Church in regulating marriage, which doesn’t square with the fact that the Church did have a role in it. Whether clergy were physically present at wedding is not the point. The Christian Church has always regulated marriage, determining what constitutes a valid marriage.

    Germanic marriage traditions were changed after Christian missions. The Roman Church forbade divorce, and annulments were granted by ecclesiastical courts and clergy, not by civil courts — long before the Reformation. Clearly, the issue was not merely a secular one that didn’t interest the clergy.

    Alright, I’m tired. I can’t express myself properly. I give up.

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  18. *Christopher

    1) I’m just not so sure that your negative assesment of Europe is completely accurate, and it does read as moralizing and suggests a cause-effect notion that because marriage has lessened there, Europe is failing. I think things are more complex than this, and I don’t necessarily think that either the practices here (clergy acting as agents of the state) or in many places in Europe (separate civil marriage and Church marriage) in and of themselves are problematic or lead to the downfall of marriage per se; both can work well or badly.

    2) This comes across as condescending, as if you alone here have been thinking in terms of Christ or Christian thinking on the matter, not an invitation, given I offered that we begin with Christ’s relationship to the Church as model, not to mention Jesus’ words on marriage and family are a mixed lot. Understanding what little he does say should be understood within his Jewish cultural matrix given divorce laws, etc. Jesus’ rejection of divorce elevates the status of women in his culture, for example. In ours, to have a wholesale policy against divorce can leave women in abusive marriages, and to pretend by annulments comes across as dishonest to many, including myself. In other words, coming up with sound policies around marriage requires more nuance than appealing to what Jesus said or even to what tradition as said, but rather must weigh a variety of factors. That doesn’t mean I favor easy dissolution, but neither do a think a wholesale prohibition wise.

    3) Yes, but you seem to draw out an understanding that thinking and rites on these matters have always been the same, pointing to a recapitulated Medieval rite as near exact of modern rites, when in fact marriage could be as simple, as it often was in Wales, as the couple jumping over a broom. So practices haven’t been by a long shot. There has been quite a lot of disagreement on these matters and a great deal of development that often can be traced back to divergences earlier on in differing thinkers. I don’t think we can trace our a singular ideal across the centuries on the matter of marriage. What we can ask is how do we conceive of vocation in terms of living out and participating in Christ, understanding that no matter how we conceive of this in terms of policies, they’ll come up short.

    4) No. I’m recognizing that the families involved are Church as well, that much of this happened on the lay level–I don’t see a modern worldview of Church and secular in this time period, nor that all actions by necessity required clerical involvement, clearly marriage did not in many cases, and their marriages would not have been considered not Christian. Certainly, higher clergy legislated on these matters in councils and edicts, but legislation is notoriously known not to represent how matters actually were, and not necessarily because the practices in question were somehow lesser, but that the Christians in question had different concerns, sometimes no more or less worldly than those of the clergy. After all, the Western Church closed out marriage for clergy over property inheritance concerns. What I’m saying is this isn’t a one-way univocal matter but carried with it contesting voices and negotiations of power, especially among the nobility and between the nobility and the clergy, particularly their bishops. I think it is your “always” with which I most differ as it again suggests a singular, all times and all places approach, that does not square with the evidence, by which I mean you seem to be looking for a straightforward continuity where I see quite a bit of development and changes over time and mostly a lot of everyday Christians living often with minimal involvement in such matters until we hit the 16th century.

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  19. *Christopher

    Jack,

    I guess what I’m saying at heart, is that I don’t disagree with you that marriage like monastic vows or I would say a same-sex union are in their Christian meaning(s) worthy of upholding to high standards and that they are vocations, of how we live out Christ. What I disagree with you is the method, if you will, with which you’re reading sources. It seems to positivistic, finding your ideal or what your think to be continuity with modern practices in the past. Alan Bray soundly criticized John Boswell for exactly this type of method while offering a more subtle and more beautifully and persuasively argued historical account for the vital importance and understanding friendship and same-sex relationships (both sexual and not) in the Medieval period. I prefer that complexity that places a gap between us and our ancestors so that we don’t to easily read ourselves into their lives. What keeps us within the tradition, then, is not simple linear continuity, but a recycling of what our ancestors passed on to us and a constant having to deal with the challenges of their differences in terms of contexts, worldviews, arrangements, etc.

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  20. Philocrites

    One point I make down in the comments to my blog post is that, in the Episcopal Church, it is canonically required that a couple be civilly authorized to marry before the church will marry them. The Episcopal Church, in other words, does not recognize such a thing as “Christian marriage” that is separate from or prior to “civil marriage.”

    Furthermore, a diocese couldn’t introduce and begin celebrating marriages that are not “legal” in civil law without authorization from the national church. And such a change really would involve a theological reinterpretation within the Episcopal Church.

    I’m not saying that other churches couldn’t develop such practices; simply that I find it peculiar for Episcopalians to make an argument rooted in such a distinction.

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  21. Göran Koch-Swahne

    Some History:

    The pre-modern definition of Marriage (still around in all Western legal systems apart from the Swedish 1915 Marriage law) was the Will of the Parties, that is what the Parties manifested in the sharing of “Bed and Bench” regardless of any additional civil law contracts (dowry, morning gift).

    Originally the Parties were the Clans/families involved. With Time and Gospel the couple became the Parties, the Church requiring from early on in the 1st Millennium their Consensus (primarily the Bride’s) in order to bless their union.

    Until somewhere between 1600 and 1918 the Blessing was distinct from the legal proceedings in all Western countries.

    (The East has a different story. The Byzantine Empire based on Neo Platonism as State Philosophy, and resulting in a mixis of State and Church and an essentialistic concept of holy orders, reckoned a church Blessing to be enough to obtain legal benefits from 750, making it mandatory in 893 – evidently for both weddings and adelfopoiesis; brotherships).

    In the West marriage remained Civil (or common) law, originally in the Bride’s home as Betrothal, during which the witnesses memorized the contract (doto & contradoto) while the couple held hands (fidelitas).

    This holding of hands is still the Sign of marriage in many countries, not the heathen ring of the long-forgotten goddess Vard (Guard) as in Sweden ;=)

    In reality the Consensus of the Bride was not really free in Swedish law until 1872 (commoner 25 years of age) and 1882 (lady 25 years of age) respectively, even though the 1572 Church Ordinance said: not through violence or coercion.

    Church involvement in marriage is late. Long-time Bishops would not permit their priests to be even present at the heathen merriments of weddings. Such a presence is first reported from Normandy, the priest sprinkling holy water on the bedstead in the Bridal chamber (perhaps a Northern shamanistic trait).

    Well into the 19th century church weddings were banned on Feast days and during fast – Pentecost, the “traditional” (recently abandoned) wedding day for many, was the first day after Advent, that weddings were allowed, so most weddings were held during late autumn (“rain in the bridal crown means luck”).

    In 829 at a Paris Synod, Emperor Louis the Pious (= the Neo Platonist) forced his 7 Forbidden Degrees on Church and Empire. In 1215 4 of these were adopted by Lateran II as Impediments to marriage.

    The eldest Swedish diocese, Scara, in its 1281 Synod adopted the principle of Public Banns and the well known exhortation (from English and American films) to speak now, or forever keep his peace” abandoned in Sweden, belongs to the announcement of the Banns.

    From Lateran II and Rome’s “Canon” law (1243) gradually and increasingly Church and law have been mixed in the West.

    So from the late 13th century the Bridal Following marched gaily from the Civil law coupling of hands in the House of the bride to the parish church Porch, where the priest popped the Consensual questions to Bride and Groom individually, upon which they spoke their Promises to love each other in Need and Lust (no “until Death do us part” in these lands until 1986).

    This done, all went out again for a round of cheers and congratulations.

    Whereupon all entered the church as the Sermon was nearing its completion (formerly a Sunday started with burials in the church yard, christenings in church, consensus acts in the Porch, all followed by the Sunday Service.

    For Mass, the actual Consecrating of their Marriage, Bride and Groom sat on the Bridal bench in the choir, surrounded by their best friends taking turns at holding the nuptial Canopy (= equality) aloft (no bride’s veil of subordination until well into the 19th century).

    Now, according to the 1296 Upland law Mass made man and wife Spouses; equal before God and the Congregation, regardless of Birth (marrying thralls with Mass was a way of setting them free, upon which they received a thorp in the forest as tenants).

    In 1734 the Law of the Swedish Realm moved this consecrating function of the Mass to the new (1608) Calvinist/State Absolutist “Vigsel” (appropriately a diminutive of “Vigning”, consecration).

    Henceforth the standing of the wife as Spouse and of the children as full heirs was dependant on this new and alien State/Church ceremony – replacing the Consensus and Vows of the Parties in the Porch.

    What happens theoretically and legally in the Vigsel (which was introduced in the 1608 Calvinist Manuale of the Court), is that the Priest/Performer j o i n s the pair in marriage (ego coniugo vos), their Consensus as Parties suddenly being null and void, without this being visible to the eye.

    With the 1734 Law of the Realm (in force from February 1736) the legal position of the children of marriages without Vigsel began to be undermined. This was completed 1 January 1918 with the so called “Children’s laws” of 1917, which made 3 categories of children who had always been considered born in wedlock, into (Neo Platonist) “bastards”.

    All the above refers to people of property. Both a church approved ceremony and contractual legality express the needs of the higher echelons of Society.

    Have-nots, that is the vast majority, just lived together. This was legal Marriage.

    So, by pre-modernity, Marriage was defined as Sharing Bed and Bench, the father being present at the christening of his children (a mother never was present at a christening before such were being done in private homes – she was not supposed to leave the house before “churching” 40 days after child-birth. Churchings were forbidden in the 1572 Church Ordinance but continued by the 1686/1687 State church).

    From the 16th century theorists wanted a “moment”, making manifest to a State, much into social discipline, that the couple was indeed married. In Sweden this became the Vigsel.

    Earlier, the Betrothal, the Giptharmal (the marriage formula in Viking verse spoken by the Father of the Bride at the Dinner), and the Copulation (manifested in the displaying of appropriate stains to the sheets the morning after) had together sealed the Marriage (either party could withdraw before “consummation”).

    With the Decree Tametsi of the last Tridentine meeting Rome accepted the Calvinist/Absolutist mixis of State and Church, mandating the presence of a Roman priest at the new Civil ceremony manifesting the Renaissance “moment”. However, until WWI in Roman Catholic countries the Presider in these civil ceremonies was always a Magistrate, not the Priest.

    Not to say that the Civil law Marriage Contract remained legally binding in all countries with (original) written law.

    Tametsi itself was not formally enforced by Rome before the new version of Canon law published in 1918, contemporaneously with the Fall of the European Kingdoms and the Roman Concordats with the 19th century Dictatorships.

    For a conclusion of sorts, European countries including the USA show various blends of the pre-modern (and pre-historic) Civil law tradition with the Renaissance Platonist State law “moment” up to 1945, whereupon a rapid shift back to the Consensus of the Parties as only legal principle takes place in all countries (not least including Vatican II), except for Sweden which still adheres to its particular 1915 State Absolutist version of the “forma tridentina”.

    Logically, legal systems which let Marriage be based on the Consensus of the Parties and where the priest/magistrate/presider is merely a witness amongst others, ought to have few difficulties with so circumstantial a thing as the genders of the Parties, whereas Sweden where the Performer m a k e s the Marriage ego coniugo vos as the Agent of the State as legal Subject and with the couple reduced to Objects to an act prescribed by the State, would be the one making difficulties…

    And indeed, Sweden was not first either in 1989, or 2002, or now…

    As to the issue at hand, especially from a Church of Sweden or Lutheran point of view (being a pre-Tridentine church Marriage never was either Sacrament or “sacramental” with us) considering the legal side of Marriage really is not the affair of the Church, the long standing acceptance of the Consensus of the Couple as sufficient for obtaining the legal benefits of Marriage seems to me reason enough to continue doing so, provided that the Church speaks up as to what She is blessing, namely the Parties, not the State, the legal niceties or even the genders at hand.

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  22. Joshie

    I’m not sure you know what the word “neo-platonist” means. And I’m not sure what impact Swedish law would have on the practices of an Anglican church.

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  23. Franklin Jennings

    “Lutheran point of view (being a pre-Tridentine church Marriage never was either Sacrament or “sacramental” with us)”

    Yeah, you may be pre-Trent, but you are Post-Florence (“The seventh sacrament is matrimony, which is a figure of the union of Christ, and the Church, according to the words of the Apostle: This is a great sacrament, but I speak in Christ and in the Church.”) and Post-the-writing-of-Ephesians (Ephesians 5:32 “Sacramentum hoc magnum est ego autem dico in Christo et in ecclesia” or “This is a great sacrament: but I speak in Christ and in the church.”)

    Or as Cardinal Newman so blithely put it: “To be deep in History, is to cease to be Protestant.”

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