Bishop's letters: February 07 +James

MARRIAGE

“Marriage is popular” wrote George Barnard Shaw, “because it combines the maximum of temptation with the maximum of opportunity.” Since then, nothing much has changed about marriage – except its popularity.

Perhaps that’s partly because of the cost of a wedding, which is now (on average) more than £12,000. Perhaps it’s because young (or not so young) couples are put off the idea of marriage by the alarming divorce statistics (not far off 50%). Or perhaps it’s because people simply can’t see the point of a “piece of paper”. “We love each other” one cohabiting woman said to me recently. “Isn’t that enough? We don’t feel any need to stand up in a church to prove it.”

So why get married rather than simply live together? From a Christian point of view, any answer to that question has to begin with Scripture. As the marriage service points out, marriage is ‘a gift of God in creation and a means of his grace’, hallowed by the presence of Jesus at a wedding in Cana and encouraged by the writings of St Paul. The unity of husband and wife in heart, body and mind is a sacramental sign of the unity of Christ with his bride, the Church. Deciding to cohabit rather than get married means ignoring the Bible’s teaching and resisting the will of God.

It also means overturning centuries of Tradition. The Church has consistently taught that the mutual, life-long commitment which should under-gird every marriage is the only proper context for sex, and the best foundation for family life. Of course married couples haven’t all been blissfully happy. Far from it. As Samuel Butler once remarked in the nineteenth century, “It was very good of God to let Carlyle and Mrs Carlyle marry one another and so make only two people miserable instead of four.” Or as another wit put it, only Adam and Eve had a perfect marriage. He didn’t have to hear about all the men she could have married, and she didn’t hear about how well his mother cooked! But however far it may have fallen below the ideal, marriage has always formed the bedrock of society and has been upheld as something to be revered and honoured.

Of course some people won’t be too impressed by Scripture or Tradition. “Times have changed” they say. “We don’t want to live in the past.” That’s why the arguments for marriage from Reason also need to be considered. The recent Social Justice Policy Group’s report claims that cohabitation and single parenthood is “unleashing a social and economic crisis”. (Roughly half of cohabiting parents split up before their child’s fifth birthday compared with 1 in 12 married couples.) It suggests that “without a radical reappraisal of government policy towards marriage and the family, social tensions will grow, fuelling crime.” And it points out what Christians have always maintained – namely that “marriage lies at the heart of stable families and communities”.

All of which means that we don’t need to apologise for promoting marriage and the commitment it should involve. God has given it to us because he knows what is best for us. It is part of his recipe for security and stability in a chaotic and fragmented world.



+James Newcome