Is marriage a holy sacrament permanently binding two individuals who were predestined for each other?
or
Is marriage merely a legal procedure to protect children and prevent the excesses of an immoral society?
or
Is marriage meant to be the happy union of a contented couple?
or
Is marriage a legal arrangement to cement a dynasty and en°Zsure legitimate heirs to property?
or
Is marriage a relationship within which to express love and high regard?
or
Is marriage a safeguard to prevent the loosing of lust and licentiousness on the innocent and unconsenting?
Is marriage permanent?
Is marriage temporary?
Marriage is or has been everything mentioned above. It has been a private family arrangement throughout much of history, but for centuries it has also been a religious commitment for many. In modem America it is largely a civil matter.
There is a notion abroad now to the effect that marriage is no longer a genuine marriage when love is not present to cement the union. But that is not so. Marriage always has been a contract between two individuals, or their representatives, agreeing to a more or less permanent bond regardless of the love content. It is just as much marriage when love is not present as when it is. Marriage has often been more of a business transaction than a love match, but in spite of this it has still been a personal relationship. That is the only universal common ground of marriage-it is a relationship. Whether the atmosphere between the partners is pleasant, loving, or cool and distant, marriage is always a binding of two into a relationship.
The Basic Ingredient
We can look at marriage historically and culturally, practically and emotionally, but unless we examine it in the light of its basic element, as a relationship, we are bound to be confused and possibly diverted >from finding direction we can use in our own marriages. If we try to follow a historical pattern for marriage originated with other people in other times, we may find that pattern unsuitable to our own times. We might have to squeeze ourselves out of shape to fit it. Copying the marriages of other cultures or images of marriage invented as practical innovations or romantic idealizations can be most uncomfortable and unprofitable for us. But if we focus on marriage as a relationship, we can then look for aids and information that we can apply to our own marriage relationship and know that we can use them or discard them on more realistic grounds than if we were trying to copy some ideal pattern.
Both the original creation account in Genesis 1 and the awe-struck meeting of Adam and Eve in Genesis 2 reflect God's intention that male and female would find their relationship satisfying and pleasurable. Adam immediately recognized the purpose of God's dual creation. Ah! At last! Bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh!"
The Bible has much in it that is directly applicable to personal relationships. And it has information that is specifically about the relationship within marriage. Christians have focused so closely on marriage as an institution that we seem to have forgotten it is a relationship. We even give each other advice relationally destructive. We seem to have become preoccupied with a structure for marriage and forgotten the living relationship within it, just as Christians have so often become preoccupied with the organizational structure of the church and neglected the personal relationships between individual believers.
Seeking a Direction
Wives used to be captured in battle or purchased. A man might not be able to afford or capture the wife he really wanted so he would settle for what he could get.
Wives (and husbands) are often captured by pregnancy nowadays. Young women marry men who have impregnated them, even though under other circumstances they may not have chosen to marry that particular man. Men are often coerced or feel obligated to marry the woman they have impregnated whether they would have chosen to do so under other circumstances or not.
People do not always marry the person they thought they were marrying. Jacob thought he was marrying Rachel, the woman he loved. But when he lifted her veil, he found instead her sister, Leah. This happens today in a slightly different way. People are not always what they seem before they marry. They put their best foot forward during courtship. The other foot becomes obvious after the wedding ceremony and the honeymoon. "I didn't know he/she was like that!" is a common cry heard by marriage counselors, friends, and parents.
Though we cannot always choose how our marriage will begin and are often not aware of exactly whom we have married, we can choose what our marriage will become and who we will become. I have a book on the shelf near me titled If You Don't Know Where You're Going You'll Probably End Up Somewhere Else. That could be adapted to fit marriage: If You Don't Know What You Want Marriage To Be You'll Probably End Up With Something Else. People frequently have blind spots in their thinking. They become so used to an uncomfortable situation that they assume they can do nothing about it. Many people are unhappy about at least some situations in their marriages, and yet they feel powerless to change anything. They think, that's what marriage does to you. Or, that's just the way it is.
Few couples even talk about what they want their marriage to be. They tend to let whatever happens happen, or they may try to live out someone else's ideas about marriage. They may copy their parents' marriages, consciously or unconsciously. Many Christians will adopt a particular Christian leader's ideas about marriage, assuming that that person somehow knows more about marriage than they do. They never even consider that they can determine what kind of marriage they want and then create it themselves.
But why not? It sounds revolutionary. Or maybe iconoclastic is a better word. We don't think of marriage as something that is a do-it-yourself project. In the past it would not have been easy or even possible to have the freedom to make marriage what its participants wanted. We have that freedom.
Dissatisfaction With Marriage
Marriage has been taking a beating recently. Some say it is a dead institution. Others say it is too restrictive. And many find it at least uncomfortable. It is as though marriage is an old shoe that doesn't fit any more. Some feel that in this case it is better just to go barefoot and do away with marriage altogether.
We can trace much of this dissatisfaction to a desire for the relationship in marriage to meet needs that were considered unimportant in the past. We expect different benefits from marriage. Then, women and men did not usually have their closest personal relationships with their spouses. Marriage provided other benefits: financial position, social position, children, care in sickness and old age, labor. When marriages were arranged by others or were contracted between a man and woman who did not know each other well before marriage, it seemed too much to demand that one°Zs mate be one's best friend. If love and close friendship developed, it was considered great good fortune, but was necessarily expected. One's closest friends tended to be one°Zs peers of the same sex or one's relatives.
We want more from marriage now in a close personal way. We long for a relationship that is intimate and loving. A mate who is a good provider or a capable housekeeper and mother is not enough for us any more. We want a close friendship with our husband or wife.
This modern era is one of depersonalization. To our government we are numbers on social security cards. To our banks and credit card companies we are numbers in a computer. Our children stand in line to register for school and become numbers on other computer cards. We ride our interwoven, elaborate highways isolated from each other in individual cars. We are often alone even in groups. Feeling like nonpersons and numbers, we are hungry for meaningful human contact. Much of the personal identity and emotional well-being an individual realized in the past came from intimate contact with other people in work surroundings and while participating in the type of leisure activities that brought people together to interact with each other. Now even our leisure and recreational lives are isolated. We sit in our own rooms watching a television set. Or we jog alone along the road. Even when we are in a sports arena with thousands of other spectators, we do not touch or know each other.
This starvation for personal meaning and expression causes us to put an emotional overload on our marriages. We expect this relationship to make up the whole deficit. Usually there is not even an extended family to share it. Parents, grandparents, cousins, and other relatives are hundreds or thousands of miles away. We lose track of old friends and those we grew up with. Marriage is expected to fill almost all our interpersonal needs.
We must look at marriage in a new light if we expect it to survive this pressure. And we can look at it in a wiser light if we recognize that regarding marriage as an institutional pattern to fit one's self into rather than a relationship to feed and care for can never satisfy our longed-for need for intimacy.
An American Dissatisfaction
Rather than think that we Americans are wrestling unhappily with marriage solely because we are a degenerate society, let us consider some more honorable and more accurate reasons for our difficulties.
I am of English, Scots-Irish, Irish, German, Welsh, French and Cherokee extraction. And for an American that's not unusual. Most of the ancestors of modern Americans came from other countries only a few generations ago. Our forebears came to this country searching for a better life. They needed adequate food, shelter, and clothing. Above all, they wanted freedom °Z religious freedom, educational opportunity, and democratic freedom to choose their own government. Hard work and sustained effort secured those goals for them and ultimately for us. You and I have, thanks to our ancestors, the freedoms and opportunities they won for us all.
But the impetus that drove those pioneers and seekers onward still lives in us and pushes us to reach further. Having the outward necessities, we now look inward to know ourselves and realize our full individual potentials. Now we are able to move on to a wider freedom, the freedom to meet our personal emotional needs.
Looking inward, we see a need for intimate personal relationship. And yet, the means for meeting that need seem to be narrowing. While much has changed, marriage remains. It seems to represent both the security of the past and the hope for the future. But the marriage form of the past often thwarts our efforts for intimacy. We are trying to carry provisions for the present and future in inadequate containers from the past.
Looking for Solutions
We can attack the problem of the overload on marriage from several directions. We can work to make the marriage relationship itself a better vehicle for meeting our personal needs. But even if we do this, we must be realistic about what marriage can do. It cannot meet every need we have as individuals. We can take some of the load off marriage by reaching out to those around us and forming a sort of impromptu extended family of "adopted" relatives. This could meet our needs for meaningful relationships outside marriage and at the same time reach out to other people who have similar needs. Some pastors are beginning to realize that the traditional church structure and form for services are not allowing their parishioners meaningful contact with each other. They are experimenting with ways believers may minister to each other and relate in small groups-to become family instead of large, relatively impersonal social organization.
Those who would abolish marriage, discarding it as a useless institution, have identified some of the problems we are facing. They see the limitations marriage now has for so many. But they have the wrong solution. If we scrap marriage, we will still have our needs unmet, and will have destroyed the potential for close relationship which marriage can have if improved If we try to find intimacy within a loose relationship substituting for marriage, a relationship that asks for no commitment and no continuity, we will frustrate that need again. For we humans require a personal security and confidence in our relationships that reaches beyond casual sex and "till we don't groove any more."
Let's not put marriage on the junk pile. Let's fix it. Let's make it what it has the potential to become. It seems strange that mature adults would not realize that if they can choose how they want to live together as an unmarried couple, they can also choose how they want to live together in a marriage.
We may have to throw out some preconceived notions about what marriage is and about what we have to be like in it. We can no longer expect to have some standard marriage behavior pattern handed to us in a package deal - not if we want our marriage to fit us. We will have to invent it ourselves. But never fear; we aren't totally on our own. There are guidelines in the Bible to help us build our own marriage.
Biblical Christianity and Equal Marriage
Information in the Bible tends to surface in time of need. We often do not see truth in Scripture until a particular need makes us sensitive to that truth's presence. I can read a psalm about help in time of trouble and appreciate it but not get anything special out of it. Yet when trouble comes and I read it again, it is alive for me in a new way, and I often see things in that passage I had missed before. It is that way in other areas too.
Present needs are forcing us to look at what the Bible says about marriage more carefully than we have before. In the past it was easier to live with the traditional interpretations of Bible passages on marriage because we could get by with less from marriage in a personal way.
Now we are searching more carefully those passages we had always taken for granted. Some are looking because of a personal need for a more satisfying marriage. Others have seen divorce tragedies and want to prevent both those obvious ordeals as well as the silent tragedy of a miserable marriage that is continued for any number of practical reasons but is only a shell surrounding a family of hurting, alienated people. They have looked at the traditional advice to married couples about roles and patterns and have found it to be inconsistent with other biblical principles. These inconsistencies have led them to deeper study and discoveries of what the Bible says about marriage relationships. This, in turn, has led them away from traditional hierarchical marriages and toward relationships of equal persons.
Like other unsought-for truths of the Bible that surface in time of need, these were there all along. The apostle Paul, writing to Christians in first-century Ephesus, gave instructions about how to live in their society in the new Way, the Christ Way. And those instructions can be used by us to discover how we, in this time and place, can live in our marriages according to the Christ Way. We are neither Ephesians nor first-century Greeks so we have to learn where we have similarities to them and where we have differences so that we will not misapply what God taught them and thus end up denying biblical truth in our lives though appearing to live it to the letter. First-century believers needed better relationships too, but for different reasons. Paul told them how to relate to one another as Christians, and his principles are timeless. Though we may not apply the principles exactly as an Ephesian Christian would have, the principles are for us too.
The principle of mutual submission of believers will work in any relationship, in any culture. Its purpose is to transcend culture and habit and make it possible for believers of every origin to relate as equal persons. I want to examine this principle and show how it can help a marriage become a relationship of equal persons who are able to use all they have, become all they can be, and enjoy and share the process.
But first, there may be questions about the roles we have been taught to follow. Are there traceable historical reasons for the marriage forms we have inherited? What forces created the impression among Christians that we must have a hierarchy of authority (chain of command) in marriage for it to be "Christian?" Do we have to keep on doing things as we have always done them in order to be true to our faith? Is the foundation for the chain-of-command marriage biblical or historical?
We will be answering these questions, as we look at the origins of hierarchical rules and patterns for marriage in the next chapter.
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Heirs Together, by Patricia Gundry, Published by Suitcase Books http://www.suitcasebooks.com Copyright Patricia Gundry