Covenant Marriage as Ascriptural Event (Part Two)

Marriage today in the United States is a decidedly secular event. In line with the analysis of Berkhof, marriage as covenant, even within a Scriptural context, is a mutual voluntary agreement between two people, and in keeping with social, moral and legal understandings current today, when one party breaks that mutual voluntary agreement, the other party feels free to terminate that agreement. By transforming contract into a sacred covenant, or so the thinking goes, we have now raised the standard and how we view the sanctity of marriage. C.S. Lewis reminds us, in his classic Mere Christianity, the difficulty with understanding and communication when we engage in language-games. Lewis considers the word “gentleman” which began as a term that identified a person as holding a coat of arms and owning land. The term has come to mean a person who has manners, and therefore no longer acts as a description of a person but reflected simply the opinion of the speaker.

That marriage is now secular may be seen as well in the resistance offered up toward entry into covenant marriage in the three states where it has been enacted. Current numbers indicate that approximately two percent of couples in those states have opted for the covenant marriage, as reported in the column by Cheryl Wetzstein in the September 7, 2008 edition of the Washington Times. As well, in examination of the Arizona version of covenant marriage, you will find the traditional grounds for divorce remain available to covenant marriage couples effectively divorcing the legislation from its intent (pun intended). We Americans simply are not willing to shift away from our contractual thinking and right to be free.

Hence, as cautioned by Hauerwas and MacIntyre, there is great danger with efforts to translate Christian terms into language generally assumed to be available, and understood, by the secular world. One difficulty may be, for secular thinkers as well as most Protestants, we resist the view marriage is sacramental as that sounds much too Roman Catholic for our tastes. Yet coming to a fuller understanding of marriage within the context of Scripture, as opposed to clothing the relationship with Christian-sounding language and symbols, through legislation and for that matter recitation of vows more often than not performed as ritual, may be the better method to strengthen marriage and decrease the number of divorces. Learning to speak the language of Scripture may be the remedy for the marriage crisis and take us beyond the idea of contract - and covenant - as the foundation of marriage.

Is it possible we have confused romance with love? Is it possible we are confused as well as to that term “love?” Stanley Hauerwas in his essay “On Marriage and Homosexuality” in Better Hope: Resources for a Church Confronting Capitalism, Democracy and Postmodernity at 49, believes this is precisely the situation when he suggests “love is far too vague a term to do any work in helping us to discover the disciplines necessary to sustain a marriage, particularly in our cultural context (recall the C.S. Lewis observation about the term gentleman). If this is in fact the situation, relying on romance and love to sustain a marriage is just as likely to succeed as fail – then again is that part of the reason why approximately half of all marriages fail?