Marriage

The first thing God calls not good in the Bible is not sin. It is solitude: 'It is not good for the man to be alone. I will make for him a suitable helper' (Genesis 2:18). The word helper, ezer, is not a word of rank; it is used most often in the Old Testament of God himself as Israel's help. The search through the animals shows that no creature will do (2:20). The woman is made from the man and brought to him, and his first recorded words are a cry of recognition: 'This is now bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh' (2:23).

Then the narrator speaks over the story to every reader after it. 'For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and they will become one flesh' (Genesis 2:24). Three movements are named. Leaving is public and social: a new household is formed, with its own loyalty, and the family of origin no longer holds first place. Being united, dabaq, is the language of covenant loyalty, the word used of Ruth clinging to Naomi. Becoming one flesh is the union itself, bodily and more than bodily, making of two persons a new kinship. The order matters in cultures where the extended family remains in control of a couple long after the wedding; Genesis gives the new household its own standing.

Jesus read this verse as the key to the whole subject. When asked about divorce, he went back past Moses to creation, asking whether they had not read that from the beginning the Creator made them male and female (Matthew 19:4). He joined Genesis 1:27 to Genesis 2:24 and concluded, 'So they are no longer two, but one flesh. Therefore what God has joined together, let man not separate' (19:6). Notice the two claims inside that sentence. Marriage is something God does, not only something two people do. And it is meant to be permanent. Jesus says that Moses permitted divorce 'because of your hardness of heart. But it was not this way from the beginning' (19:8). That principle, that the law sometimes regulated what God's design did not intend, will matter when we come to polygamy.

Paul quotes the same verse and then lifts it: 'This mystery is profound, but I am speaking about Christ and the church' (Ephesians 5:32). Human marriage, on Paul's reading, was designed from the start as a picture of something greater, the faithful love of Christ for his people. That is why the prophets could describe Israel's unfaithfulness as adultery, and why God could say through Ezekiel, 'I pledged Myself to you, entered into a covenant with you, and you became Mine' (Ezekiel 16:8).

Two limits keep this teaching in proportion. Marriage is honourable for all: 'Marriage should be honored by all and the marriage bed kept undefiled' (Hebrews 13:4). And marriage is not ultimate. 'In the resurrection, people will neither marry nor be given in marriage' (Matthew 22:30). The picture gives way to the reality it pictured. The next lesson, on singleness, rests on that second limit, and a church that forgets it will make marriage into an idol and single people into failures.

Christians agree that marriage is a lifelong union of a man and a woman, freely entered, publicly witnessed, and open to the gift of children. They disagree about what kind of thing it is, and the disagreement has practical effects on weddings, on church law, on divorce and on the relation of the church to the state. Three accounts are worth knowing, each at its strongest. John Witte Jr., in From Sacrament to Contract (1997), traces how they developed in the Western churches.

The sacramental account. The Catholic Church teaches that marriage between baptised persons is one of the seven sacraments, a sign through which God gives grace, and it bases this partly on Ephesians 5:32, where the Latin Vulgate renders the Greek mysterion, mystery, as sacramentum. Augustine, in On the Good of Marriage (around 401) and later works, named three goods of marriage: offspring, faithfulness, and the sacramental bond, which he held could not be broken while both spouses lived. The Council of Florence (1439) listed matrimony among the seven sacraments and the Council of Trent (1563) defined it as one. The Orthodox churches likewise speak of marriage as a holy mystery, and in the Orthodox service of crowning the couple are crowned as a sign of the kingdom and of martyrdom, the daily laying down of life for the other. Defenders say this account alone does justice to Paul's claim that marriage participates in the union of Christ and the church, and that it explains why Christian marriage is indissoluble: it is not only a promise between two people but a work of God.

The covenantal account. The Reformers denied that marriage is a sacrament in the sense of baptism and the Lord's Supper. Luther, in The Babylonian Captivity of the Church (1520), argued that scripture nowhere attaches a promise of saving grace to marriage, and later described it as a worldly estate belonging to creation, which every human society shares. Calvin, in the Institutes (book 4, chapter 19), agreed that it is not a sacrament, but he and his successors spoke of marriage as a covenant made before God, with God as witness, citing Malachi 2:14, where the LORD 'has been a witness between you and the wife of your youth', and Proverbs 2:17, which describes the woman who 'forgets the covenant of her God'. Defenders say this account keeps marriage holy without making it a means of salvation, honours it as God's gift to all humanity and not only to the church, and grounds its permanence in a promise God himself witnesses.

The contractual account. In many modern legal systems, and in some Christian thinking about public life, marriage is treated as a contract: an agreement between two persons, recognised by the state, with rights and duties that the law can enforce and, under defined conditions, end. Christians who stress this account rarely mean that marriage is only a contract. They mean that in plural societies the state registers marriages for everyone, believer and unbeliever, and that this civil marriage is real and binding, as Paul assumed the marriages of pagans in Corinth were (1 Corinthians 7:12-14). Its defenders point to an old principle of church law itself, that consent makes the marriage, and to the protection that legal registration gives women and children in inheritance and property. They warn that the church should not pretend that a marriage it did not bless is no marriage at all.

The three can be held together more often than their defenders admit. In much of Africa, a marriage may be made in three stages: customary marriage between families, often with bride price; civil registration; and a church wedding, sometimes years later. A pastor needs to know which of these his church treats as the marriage, and why. Some churches treat a customary marriage as fully valid and the church service as a blessing of it. Others regard a couple married by custom alone as not yet married before God. That question has practical consequences for who may receive communion and who may lead, and it should be settled by teaching, not by assumption.

For many students of this course, polygamy is not a historical curiosity. It is the household next door, or the household they grew up in, or the question their church council argued about last month. It deserves the same careful reading as any other ethical question, beginning with what scripture actually says, on both sides.

The first man recorded as having two wives is Lamech, in the line of Cain, a man whose other claim to fame is a boast of vengeance (Genesis 4:19-24). After him, plural marriage appears among the patriarchs and kings: Abraham, Jacob, Esau, Gideon, Elkanah, David and Solomon. The law regulates it without forbidding it. Exodus 21:10 says that if a man 'takes another wife, he must not reduce the food, clothing, or marital rights of his first wife'. Deuteronomy 21:15-17 protects the inheritance of the firstborn son of an unloved wife. Leviticus 18:18 forbids taking a wife's sister 'as a rival wife'. And when Nathan rebukes David, God says through him, 'I gave your master's house to you and your master's wives into your arms' (2 Samuel 12:8). Those who argue that polygamy is not in itself sinful begin here: God is shown giving wives, the law protects plural households, and no Old Testament text condemns a man for having two wives as such.

Those who argue that polygamy falls short of God's design have their own texts. Genesis 2:24 describes one man and one wife, and Jesus' reading of it, the two will become one flesh (Matthew 19:5), presents monogamy as what was there from the beginning. The king of Israel 'must not take many wives for himself, lest his heart go astray' (Deuteronomy 17:17), and Solomon's story is told as the fulfilment of that warning: 'his wives turned his heart away' (1 Kings 11:3). The narratives of plural households, read with care, show contempt, rivalry, envy and grief again and again, much of it borne by the women and their children. And Jesus' principle about divorce, that Moses permitted something 'because of your hardness of heart' while 'it was not this way from the beginning' (Matthew 19:8), is read by many as the key to polygamy too: the law regulated it to limit harm, as it regulated divorce, without approving it.

Interpreters in Jesus' own time were already arguing about this. The Damascus Document, found among the Dead Sea Scrolls, criticises taking two wives in one's lifetime (CD 4.20-5.2) and appeals to Genesis 1:27, male and female he created them, which is the same text Jesus joins to Genesis 2:24. Scholars debate whether its target is polygamy, remarriage after divorce, or both, but on any reading it shows that a monogamous reading of creation was available in Jewish teaching before the New Testament was written. At the same time, polygamy remained legal in Jewish law for centuries afterward and was practised in some communities, which is why the question of what the New Testament assumes remains debated.

In the New Testament the overseer must be 'the husband of but one wife' (1 Timothy 3:2; compare Titus 1:6). As the inquiry showed, this phrase is read in several ways. If it excludes men with more than one wife from office, it implies two things at once: that monogamy is the standard the church's leaders must model, and that there may have been men in the church who did not meet it and were not expelled. Both sides of the modern debate find support in that double implication. What the New Testament never does is describe a believer taking a second wife after coming to faith. That is the point on which the churches have been most united.

The hardest case is not the Christian man who wants a second wife. Almost every church in the world teaches that a baptised Christian may not take another wife, and most discipline those who do. The hard case is the man who already has several wives when he hears the gospel, and the wives who married him in good faith under the law and custom of their people. What does faithfulness to Christ require of that household? The Pastoral Care lesson Caring for Marriages and Families gives the pastor's first steps. Here the responses are set out as ethical positions, each as its best defenders would put it.

First, monogamy before baptism. For much of the modern missionary era, Catholic and Protestant missions alike required a polygamous man to send away all but one wife before he could be baptised. The Lambeth Conference of Anglican bishops in 1888 resolved that men living in polygamy should not be admitted to baptism but kept under instruction until they could accept the law of Christ, while allowing that their wives might in some cases be baptised. The Catholic Church today teaches that polygamy is contrary to the equal dignity of husband and wife and to the unity of marriage, and that a convert must keep only one wife, while insisting that he has a duty in justice to provide for the women and children of his former unions. Defenders argue that Christ's teaching on the one flesh is not an ideal to be approached gradually but the truth about marriage, that the church cannot baptise a man into a pattern of life it believes contrary to God's design, and that allowing exceptions would teach the next generation that polygamy is compatible with the faith.

Second, baptism without putting away. Others have argued that sending away wives is itself a grave wrong. A wife who is put away may lose her home, her children, her standing and her means of life, through no fault of her own; she married in good faith and has kept her promises. John Colenso, Anglican bishop of Natal, argued this in his Remarks on the Proper Treatment of Cases of Polygamy (1855): he judged polygamy itself to be harmful, but held that forcing converts to put away their wives only made matters worse, and the Catholic missionary Eugene Hillman made a sustained case for it in Polygamy Reconsidered (1975). Adrian Hastings's report Christian Marriage in Africa (1973), prepared for Anglican archbishops on the continent, pressed the same concerns. A century after its earlier ruling, the Lambeth Conference of 1988 resolved that a polygamist who responds to the gospel may be baptised and confirmed with his believing wives and children, on three conditions: that he promise not to marry again while any of his existing wives is alive, that the local church consent, and that he not be compelled to put any wife away because of the hardship that would follow; the same resolution upheld monogamy as God's plan. Churches that take this path commonly bar such a man from office, following 1 Timothy 3:2. Defenders argue that this honours both Jesus' teaching and Malachi's charge not to 'break faith with the wife of your youth' (Malachi 2:15), that it follows the New Testament's apparent tolerance of existing households, and that it treats the wives as persons rather than as problems.

Third, acceptance of plural marriage. Some African Instituted Churches, among them churches that trace their origin to the Liberian prophet William Wadé Harris, whose preaching in the Ivory Coast and the Gold Coast in 1913 to 1915 led perhaps a hundred thousand people to baptism, and who himself had more than one wife and refused to condemn the practice, have historically received polygamous families into full membership. Some African theologians have argued that the Old Testament patriarchs were polygamous and blessed, that no text in either testament forbids it to laymen, that it has protected widows and the childless in societies with no other provision for them, and that mission churches imposed a European form of marriage as though it were the gospel. Some have added that Western societies practise a successive polygamy of their own, through divorce and remarriage, while condemning the simultaneous kind. Defenders of this position ask why the church should demand of African converts what the Bible never demanded of Abraham.

These three positions are argued mainly by men about men, and the women who live in these households have a voice of their own. The Ghanaian Methodist theologian Mercy Amba Oduyoye, in Daughters of Anowa (1995), was among those who argued that polygamy has often served male status and the need for heirs at the cost of women, and she was equally critical of mission rules that left put-away wives without support. Many African women theologians have made both criticisms together. A pastor should listen to the wives in such a household, separately and with care, before deciding anything about them. Some will want to remain, some will want to leave, and some will have had no choice in the marriage at all.

Some things are settled across these positions. A Christian who is already baptised does not take another wife. No ruling may leave women and children destitute; that is a sin of its own, whatever the ruling. A wife has her own faith and may be baptised on her own confession, whatever is decided about her husband. Forced marriage and the marriage of children are wrong in every case, and a pastor who learns of either must follow the safeguarding steps in the Pastoral Care lesson Protecting the Vulnerable. Know your own church's rule, know the reasons for the other two, and never let a rule about the husband become a sentence on his wives.

Across much of Africa, a marriage is sealed by gifts from the groom's family to the bride's: lobola in southern Africa, roora among the Shona, mahari in East Africa, and many other names. In South Asia the direction is often reversed, and a dowry passes from the bride's family to the groom's, a custom India outlawed in its Dowry Prohibition Act of 1961 but which persists. Scripture knows the bride's gift. The Hebrew word is mohar, which the BSB renders dowry or bridal price: Shechem tells Jacob's family, 'Demand a high dowry and an expensive gift' (Genesis 34:12), and the law of Exodus 22:16-17 requires a man who seduces an unbetrothed young woman to pay it. Jacob served seven years for Rachel, 'yet it seemed but a few days because of his love for her' (Genesis 29:20).

The case for bride price, at its strongest, runs like this. It honours the bride's family and acknowledges what they have given in raising her. It binds two families, not only two individuals, into lasting obligation, so that both have a stake in the marriage succeeding and both can be called on when it struggles. It marks the seriousness of the commitment and distinguishes marriage from mere cohabitation. Scripture records it without objection. Many Christian couples and their parents value it as a gracious custom, and many churches in Africa encourage it in a modest form, sometimes as a token, so that the custom keeps its meaning without becoming a burden.

The case against, or for its reform, is also serious. Where bride price is high, young men cannot marry for years, couples live together without marrying, and some are driven into debt. Where it is understood as payment, it can teach a husband, and his family, that the wife has been bought, and some abusive men have said exactly that. Where custom demands its return on divorce, a woman may be trapped in a dangerous marriage because her family cannot repay. In 2015 the Supreme Court of Uganda, in a case brought by the women's rights organisation MIFUMI, held that demanding the refund of bride price on divorce was unconstitutional, while declining to outlaw the custom itself. Christian critics argue that a gift which can be refunded on divorce has become a price, and that the gospel cannot allow any person to be priced.

Between those positions, a church can say several things clearly. A wife is never property, and no gift makes her so; she is among the 'fellow heirs of the gracious gift of life' (1 Peter 3:7). No custom may be used to trap a person in a marriage where she or her children are in danger, and the steps of the Pastoral Care lesson Domestic Abuse take precedence over every family obligation. No child may be married, whatever is offered. And a church that wants to keep the custom should help families keep its meaning, honour and kinship, while refusing its distortions, debt and possession. Where your church stands on the amount, the timing and the meaning of the gift is a question for teaching, not for silence.

Divorce and remarriage belong to this subject but are not repeated here. The Pastoral Care lesson Caring for Marriages and Families sets out the three main Christian views at full strength, the permanence view, the adultery and desertion view, and the broader view, with their texts and defenders, and insists that no view of divorce may ever be used to keep a person in danger. Read it alongside this lesson.

Take a new page in your casebook and title it Marriage. Copy Genesis 2:24 from the BSB at the top, and under it write the three movements of the verse in your own words: leaving, being united, becoming one flesh.

Now write a composite case from your own setting. Choose either a polygamous household seeking to join a church, or a family negotiation over bride price, or a couple married by custom but not yet in church. Write the case in a paragraph, with no names and no detail that would identify anyone, and with nothing about the couple's private life. Write it so that it contains the real difficulty: the people who would be hurt by each possible answer.

Under the case, write three headings. Under What scripture says, list the texts from sections 1, 3 and 5 that bear on it, on every side. Under What my church holds, write your church's actual rule and its reasons, and if you do not know them, write the question you will ask your pastor or church leaders. Under The other positions, write one fair sentence for each response your church does not hold, in words its defenders would accept.

Finish with the hardest line. Write what you believe the most faithful course would be in this case, and then write who would bear the cost of that course, especially the women and children, and what the church would need to do to carry that cost with them. If your answer leaves anyone without care, go back and write it again.