Covenant Marriage as Ascriptural Event (Part One)

In this reflection, I hope to demonstrate some of the more practical aspects of language and its formative power.

Shortly before the turn from the 20th Century, a wave of efforts emerged, beginning in Louisiana to be followed by Arkansas and Arizona, which created a new legal category of marriage - the covenant marriage. While to date it appears the movement is stalling, a boost to the potential occurred in 2005 when Governor Mike Huckabee converted his marriage, in front of a stadium audience, to a covenant marriage under the new legislation in his state of Arkansas.

This inquiry examines the idea of covenant marriage and proposes it lacks a clear basis in Scripture despite its being surrounded with Christian language and symbol. Indeed, it is aScriptural and seeks to transform what is now a secular event into a Christian event - an effort doomed to failure due to a faulty underpinning.

Theologically, since the publication of the classic Christ & Culture by H. Richard Neibuhr in 1951 an entire generation of theologians and clergy has sought to transform or translate what is decidedly secular in culture into a Christian event. John Howard Yoder in his critique of this classic, Authentic Transformation: A New Vision of Christ and Culture, at 42, notes that Neibuhr clearly preferred his fifth typology, Christ transforming culture, and that thinkers in social ethics have come out in favor of that typology regardless of their particular theological heritage.

The covenant marriage effort apparently seeks to infuse a Gospel core into the current sad state of disintegrating marriages. Yet such infusion or translation if you will may also be seen as dilution. Stanley Hauerwas observes, in Wilderness Wanderings, at 3, “for me the question is not how can theologians make Christianity intelligible to the modern world but how can theologians make sense of the world.... I therefore have little sympathy with attempts to translate Christian speech into terms that are assumed to be generally available.” Philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre, in his essay "The Fate of Thomas" in The Religious Significance of Atheism at 25, argues more directly “any presentation of theism which is able to secure a hearing from a secular audience has undergone a transformation that has evacuated it entirely of its theistic content.”

The actual specific identification of covenant and marriage occurs only one time in Scripture, in Malachi 2:14, “You ask, “Why?” It is because the LORD is acting as the witness between you and the wife of your youth, because you have broken faith with her, though she is your partner, the wife of your marriage covenant.” (NIV) All other references to marriage as a covenant are, at best, implied, and at worse, forced as in its essence covenant is an agreement. Covenant in terms of Scripture, while having a connotation of holiness nevertheless remains in essence a mutual exchange or agreement. And if we are to be faithful and honest to the story given to us in Scripture, we must acknowledge that humanity has never considered any agreement, let alone a covenant, as continuously binding. In Jeremiah 31:32 we see that humanity has broken its covenant with God, in a passage that has impulses of a marriage covenant, “it will not be like the covenant I made with their forefathers when I took them by the hand to lead them out of Egypt, because they broke my covenant, though I was a husband to them, declares the LORD.” (NIV)

Louis Berkhof in his Systematic Theology, at 262, observes that the term rendered covenant “does not depend on the etymology of the word, nor on the historical development of the concept, but simply on the parties concerned.” In other words, when a covenant is from God, it has the character of a disposition or one sided arrangement imposed by one party to another, but otherwise the covenant, when between equal parties becomes a mutual voluntary agreement.