One of my favourite organizations is Family Life and Marriage Education, FLAME, “a voluntary network within the Church of England working for the enhancement of family life, marriage and human relationships”. Since thousands of Christian parents have grown-up children who are living with their partners outside marriage, pastoral guidance is needed in an area that many Christians still find controversial. The Trustees of FLAME invited me to deal with this problem at their annual conference in March, 2003, at Leicester Cathedral.

BETROTHAL, MARRIAGE, AND MARRIAGE PREPARATION

I thank the Trustees of FLAME for inviting me to speak about betrothal, marriage and marriage preparation. I am, of course, pleased that the arguments advanced by now in several books (Marriage After Modernity, Living Together and Christian Ethics, and Celebrating Christian Marriage) are being taken seriously. That does not mean they are valid! All theologians can ever do is offer their work to the living church in the hope that it may be fruitful in the work of mission and ministry. If it raises the right questions I shall be happy: if it provides answers, I shall be delerious!

Many theologians are presently engaged in ‘applied’ or ‘practical’ theology. This means that they want what they say to be relevant to particular social and pastoral situations. Their first task then is to acquaint themselves with these situations in order to understand them, and then to propose how the gospel is able to transform them. So I make no apology for spending nearly half the lecture laying out the social situation regarding the place of marriage in British society. If you are impatient for the theology, don’t worry – we will get there!

1. The big divide: ‘pre-nuptial’ and ‘non-nuptial’ cohabitation

A basic distinction must first be made between people who intend marriage and live together first, and people who live together with no intention of marriage. This is the distinction between ‘pre-nuptial’ and ‘non-nuptial’ cohabitation. 70% of marrying couples in the UK lived together before their first marriage in the early 90s (the figure is rising, and is higher still for people intended further marriage). Many more lived together but did not marry (more about them below). While wishing to incorporate pre-nuptial living together into a Christian framework of marriage, it is difficult to see how Christian traditions could ever incorporate non-nuptial cohabitation into a marital framework. Being ‘non-nuptial’ it excludes itself from marriage.

The rise in the average age of first marriages has risen sharply since the 1960s, and is now 30.5 for men, and 28.2 for women. The expectation that couples will refrain from love-making during the extended period from puberty to marriage is not only unrealistic but unkind, especially if, following Luther and Protestant traditions generally, we agree that celibacy is a very rare gift. Part of my desire to commend betrothal to the churches is because it makes a positive contribution to overcoming the glaring lack of any theological grasp of the sexual dilemmas facing young Christians in their twenties. To some extent this age-group has already decided what to do about sex before marriage: their solution is to live together first. Since this solution is fraught with difficulty, it is necessary to examine it in some detail.

2. The ‘guide’ to living together

What then do we know about living together as a prolegomenon to theological work? Sociologists and demographers have been studying it for the last 25 years so there is a wealth of material available.[1]

1. In many countries more people enter marriage from cohabitation than from the single state. In the early 90s cohabitation remained illegal in some states in the USA. By the late 90s about 70% of first-time marrying couples lived together first. Many of these couples maintain separate residences. In the jargon they are ‘living apart together’. They are ‘LATs’. This is known in France as ‘semi-cohabitation’. Neither is the practice of informal cohabitation confined to industrialized or ‘first world’ countries. In parts of South America there are more informal unions than formal marriages.

2. Cohabitors are as likely to return to singleness as to enter marriage. These are the ones we don’t hear so much about, yet in the early 90s about as many cohabitees broke up as went on to marry. Data from the British Household Panel Survey (which has followed a sample of 10,000 adults annually since 1991) predicts that out of every 20 cohabiting couples, 11 will marry, 8 will separate, and 1 will remain intact after 10 years.[2] The number predicted to marry is likely to be an over-estimate.

3. Cohabitation has weakened the connection between marriage and parenthood since the 1970s. A startling discovery was made in the early 90s which has enormous consequences for family formation well into the third millennium. Jane Lewis and Kathleen Kiernan postulated two major changes in Britain with regard to ‘reproductive behaviour’ in the previous 30 years.[3] The first was a widespread separation of sex and marriage which happened in the 1960s. The second was a widespread separation of marriage from parenthood, which happened in the 80s and gathered pace in the 90s. The first of these was greeted by social commentators and radical theologians with optimism: the second ‘has given rise to moral panic about lone motherhood’.[4] The key to both changes is the declining importance of marriage. According to this thesis when an unmarried couple conceived in the 60s, they generally married. In the early 70s, when an unmarried couple conceived they generally either married or had an abortion. Living together as a prelude to marriage ‘began in the 1970s’. In the late 70s and early 80s, an unmarried couple upon conception opted increasingly for an abortion or an illegitimate birth. The 90s has seen a confirmation of this trend. But in the 90s 70% of women marrying for the first time had cohabited before marriage compared with only 6% in the late 60s. Cohabitation is therefore ‘inextricably linked’ both to the decline of marriage and the increase in childbearing outside it.

4. Some people choose cohabitation as an alternative to marriage, not as a preparation or ‘trial’ for it. They avoid it for different reasons, perhaps from a scrupulous boycott of a failing patriarchal institution, or because of dating behaviour described as ‘sex without strings, relationships without rings’.[5]

5. ‘Trial-marriages’ are unlikely to work. There are plenty of difficulties with trial-marriages, best exposed by asking what is being tried. Some cohabitors are trying out whether they can bare living with someone else - they are trying out whether living together is better than living alone. Others are trying out their suitability for marriage - called (in the trade) the ‘weeding hypothesis’. Only ‘those cohabiting couples who find themselves to be well suited and more committed to marriage go on to marry’. The rest weed themselves out or are weeded out by the experience. [6] But all the research shows that the likelihood of divorce increases with the incidence of previous cohabitation. The unconditional love which in Christian marriage reflects Christ’s love for the Church (Eph.5.25) cannot be nourished in a context where it can be terminated if ‘things don’t work out’.

6. Men, in particular, are likely to be less committed to the female partners they live with, and much less committed than women to any children of the partnership. In 1996 extensive research showed that ‘the substitution of cohabitation for marriage is a story of lower commitment of women to men and even more so of men to women and to their relationship as an enduring unit’.[7] While men wanted sex and female companionship, they did not want them within a family-making context, and they also valued the amassing of consumer items which took economic preference over household commitments. Men have ‘greatly increased aspirations for expensive consumer goods such as new cars, stereophonic equipment, vacation homes, and recreational vehicles’ and they prefer these to the responsibilities of settling into a new family. The authors found that ‘although marriage is declining in centrality in both men’s and women’s lives, the centrality of parenthood is declining far more in men’s lives’. There has been ‘a retreat from children’ and most of it has been on the part of men.[8]

7. Cohabitors with children are very likely to split up. Unmarried couples with children are much less likely to proceed to marry than couples without children. Work done on the Canadian Family and Friends Survey in 1990 showed that the ‘presence and number of children within cohabitation have a strong negative influence on separation for both sexes’ and ‘a strong negative effect on the transition to marriage.’[9] Work done in Britain for the Research Centre on Micro-social Change (1997) concluded ‘that direct comparison between first children born in a cohabitation and those born in a marriage shows that the former are much more likely to end up with only one parent. Starting from the birth of the first child, half of the cohabiting parents have separated within ten years, compared with only an eighth of parents who were married before the baby was born.’[10]

8. Children raised by cohabiting couples are likely to be worse off than children raised by married parents. Children of cohabiting parents are worse off economically; they are more vulnerable physically. Cohabiting couples are more violent to each other than married couples. Robert Whelan’s study, based on British data in the 1980s showed that children of cohabiting parents were 20 times more likely to be subject to child abuse. If children lived with their mother and their mother’s boy friend who is not their father, they were 33 times more likely to suffer abuse than if they lived with their parents.[11] ‘The most unsafe of all family environments for children is that in which the mother is living with someone other than the child’s biological father. This is the environment for the majority of children in cohabiting couple households.’[12]

9. The extent of cohabitation may reinforce the belief that all intimate relationships are fragile and transient. New research suggests that attitudes to marriage are negatively influenced by cohabitation. The experience of successive cohabitation impacts on attitudes to marriage, making marriage less likely, or if it happens, less successful.[13] Popenoe and Whitehead conclude that ‘The act of cohabitation generates changes in people’s attitudes to marriage that make the stability of marriage less likely. Society wide, therefore, the growth of cohabitation will tend to further weaken marriage as an institution.’[14] There may then be a serious compound effect of cohabitation on the wider societies where it is practised. If so, this become a strong reason for arguing that the process of legal recognition of cohabitation should be halted.

10. People who live together with their  partner before they marry value fidelity almost as much as married people do. Once the distinction is made between pre-nuptial and non-nuptial cohabitors the differences in relationship quality noted earlier (above: proposition 8) disappear. ‘Cohabitors with marriage plans are involved in unions that are not qualitatively different from those of their married counterparts’.[15] The finding led the researchers to conclude that for this group of cohabitors ‘cohabitation is very much another form of marriage’.[16] Cohabitors intending marriage ‘likely view their current living arrangements as a stepping stone to marriage or as a temporary arrangement until marriage is practicable.’[17] European Union research in 1993 showed that 66.5% of married respondents and 62.9% of cohabiting respondents, endorsed the statement that ‘Getting married means committing yourself to being faithful to your partner’. However, less than half of those who had previously cohabited and were currently cohabiting or single, endorsed the statement.[18] This finding contributed to the conclusion that ‘it is the issue of commitment which appears to be central to understanding the greater instability of marriages preceded by cohabitation.’

This is the halfway point in the lecture. The 5 main points to hang on to are: 1) the rising age of first marriages, 2) the widespread practice of cohabitation, 3) the difference between pre-nuptial and non-nuptial cohabitation, 4) the dangers of non-nuptial cohabitation, and 5) the likeness of pre-nuptial cohabitation to marriage. In the second half of the lecture I shall say what betrothal is, and the contribution it is able to make to an understanding of the entry into marriage in the third millennium.

3. RETRIEVING AN ANCIENT TRADITION

The rite of betrothal is retained in the churches of the East (where it is combined with marriage in a single lengthy rite). It was deprived of legal recognition by the Council of Trent in 1563 and in England and Wales only in 1753 (by the passing of the Hardwicke Marriage Act which had nothing to do with theology and everything to do with property). The problem of retrieval is severe because, having been written out of marital scripts for a couple of centuries or more, even the most astute theologians barely refer to it and thereby unwittingly confirm its demise.

1. Betrothal in the Bible

An early intimation of oddness might be the thoroughly biblical character of betrothal. Given the importance of the Bible in all forms of Protestantism (I speak self-deprecatingly, as one) , a strange phenomenon emerges - Protestant marital practice does not conform to biblical norms (meagre though these are). Marital practice is a severely truncated and impoverished version of medieval rites (lamentably reductionist in the eyes of the Orthodox). There are 5 cases of couples becoming married in the Bible through betrothal. They are Rebecca and Isaac (Gen.24), Rachel and Jacob (Gen.29), Zipporah and Moses (Ex.2), Sarah and Tobias (Tobit 6-7) and Mary and Joseph (Mt.1).

If betrothal is not the beginning of marriage, then Mary and Joseph were not married at the time of the conception and birth of Jesus. Whether they were married depends upon a prior view of when marriage begins. Aquinas and his contemporaries could not have allowed that the Mother of God had undergone the inevitable impurities of sexual intercourse, even with her husband. However the adoption of the consent theory of marriage allowed them to be considered married since sexual intercourse was inessential to the marriage. Indeed, the ‘marriage’ of Mary and Joseph was a major influence on the consent theory. What the consent theory did not do was explain how Jesus was born before the nuptials had taken place. So the question whether the marriage was ‘a true marriage’ remained. Aquinas held a marriage was true if it conformed to its true purpose of producing and training children.[19] The sexless marriage of Mary and Joseph was therefore a true marriage, Aquinas argued, perhaps without knowledge of where his argument was taking him. If he is right about then, then the ideal marriage is a sexless one. It also follows that there are true marriages which do not need and do not receive liturgical ceremony. This view would seem to endorse millions of informal marriages, past, present and future..

2. Recovering the place of betrothal in New Testament theology

Betrothal is the assumed means of entry into marriage in the Bible, and in Greek and Roman custom. It is also assumed in the marital imagery of the New Testament. St Paul compares the Corinthian church to a bride betrothed but not yet presented to Christ her ‘true and only husband’. (2 Cor.11.2-3) It is likely that the lengthy story of Jesus at the well with the Samaritan woman (Jn.4.1-42) is to be understood as a betrothal story because it relies on the literary conventions found in the betrothals of Rebecca, Rachel and Zipporah. John the Baptist explains he is the ‘forerunner’ of Jesus and compares his relationship to Jesus as one of ‘best man’ to bridegroom. But who is the bride? The betrothal conventions include

1.     The hero travels to a foreign land far away.

2.    The hero stops at a well.

3.    A maiden comes to the well.

4.    Hero does something for the maiden, showing superhuman strength or ability.

5.    The maiden hurries home and reports what has occurred.

6.    The stranger is invited into the household of the maiden.

7.    Hero marries maiden-at-the-well. (He will eventually take her back to his native land.)’[20]

Jesus too, travels to a foreign land, Samaria. He too stops at a well, Jacob’s well. A woman comes to the well. Unlike Rebecca and Rachel whose striking physical and virginal attributes are remarked on by male gazers and authors, the Samaritan woman has had 5 husbands and a live-in lover. Jesus, like Abraham’s servant, asks her for a drink. Abraham’s servant gives gifts to Rebecca (Gen.24.22) and her family (24.53). Jesus has ‘living water’ to offer the woman (Jn.4.10). Just as Rebecca ‘ran to her mother’s house’ (Gen.24.28), Rachel ‘ran and told her father (Gen.29.12), and the 7 daughters of Reuel returned to him (Ex.2.18), so the Samaritan woman ‘left her water-jar and went off to the town, where she said to the people, “Come and see a man who has told me everything I ever did. Could this be the Messiah?”’ (Jn.4.29)

There are other parallels which cannot detain us. In this narrative it is Jesus, not the woman, who has water to offer, and even Samaritans are welcome to drink it. Even the final convention, that of marriage, is not exactly neglected, just adjusted. Jesus does not marry the woman but union with him is possible, even for a Samaritan woman with a chaotic love-life. The use of ‘We know’ (oidamen: ‘we... know that this is indeed the Christ, the Saviour of the world’ - AV) at 4.42 can bear the suggestion of a sexual, marital union. The very gift of salvation is to be understood as the self-gift of marriage. It provides a theology of betrothal in which God takes the initiative of self-giving to all humanity in a relationship of infinite love that is finitely lived out in the loving commitments that make marriage. Christ is the bridegroom. There are no worries about virginal status here. The woman who appears in the guise of his betrothed at the well is immoral, and aware that Jews regard her racial origin as inferior (4.9). Unlike the brides of Ezekiel 16 and Ephesians 5 who have to be prepared by the beautician in order to be made ready for the nuptial ceremonies, this woman does not conform to type. Such is the depth of the love of God for humanity that no-one is excluded on grounds of religion, sex or race. Christ in offering them living water offers himself. Like all the other biblical encounters that began at a well and led to betrothal and the union of marriage, the encounter with Christ the bridegroom leads to a union of faith and knowledge which has its counterparts in betrothed love. An adequate understanding of the narrative becomes achievable once forgotten betrothal practice is recovered and built into it.

3. 2 Ceremonies - SPOUSALS and NUPTIALS

Marriage liturgies presume two occasions, each marked by appropriate rites and social events. The first is the spousals which Gratian identified as matrimonium initiatum or the beginning of marriage. This constituted the intention to enter, at a future time, an irrevocable and permanent pledge of union. It was a conditional promise rendered unconditional by nuptials or solemnization of the marriage. The promise was made in the future tense - de futuro. Sexual intercourse, or the marriage liturgy (whichever came first!) rendered the conditional promise unconditional. Vows were made in the present tense - de praesenti. This was matrimonium ratum. Aquinas is clear that betrothal is dissoluble.[21] One ground of dissolution is mutual consent (so if the couple go off each other, no harm is done!). So there are two stages in the entry into pre-modern marriage; and a ‘floating marker’ along the way. The Latin expresses it well. The beginning of marriage is matrimonium initiatum. If a couple then started having sex before the solemnization they were presumed fully married (matrimonium presumptum). When they solemnize their marriage in church, it is then a ratified marriage (matrimonium ratum). However even in early canon law, a ratified marriage without sex was dissoluble. Only a valid marriage consummated by sexual experience (matrimonium consummatum) was held to be indissoluble.

4. 2 sets of vows (future and present tenses)

An ‘archaeological’ reading of the Common Worship Marriage Service of the Church of England reveals a fragment of the old betrothal vows of the first millennium. The bride and bridegroom are each asked two sequential questions. These are: to the bridegroom, ‘N, will you take N to be your wife? Will you love her, comfort her, honour and protect her, and, forsaking all others, be faithful to her as long as you both shall live?’: and, to the bride, ‘N, will you take N to be your husband? Will you love him, comfort him, honour and protect him, and, forsaking all others, be faithful to him as long as you both shall live?’ The answer is ‘I will’, and then in words of the present tense each of them performatively ‘takes’ the other with the words ‘I take you to be my wife’ or husband. It may be doubted whether many clergy and marrying couples are aware that the future tense of the question ‘Will you take...?’ and the future tense of the response ‘I will’ is a tangible relic of the first millennium, when the vows, or weds, or troths were exchanged by the betrothed in anticipation of their nuptial ceremony sometime in the future. The future and present tenses stain retain a ‘trace’ of the verba de futuro and verba de praesenti of another age. The CW Marriage Service and the earlier 1980 Alternative Service Book closely follows the 1662 Book of Common Prayer which also requires responses first in the future, and then in the present tense. It can hardly be doubted, says one historian, ‘that we see here a survival from a time when the promise of espousal was held to be sufficiently ratified, even after a considerable time, by the nuptial ceremony following’.[22]

5. THE LITURGICAL OPPORTUNITIES

A.R. Harcus has described how he uses the first calling of the banns as an occasion for a ‘fuller Betrothal ceremony in which the couple formally announce their intent and their families and the congregation, as representative of society at large, also acknowledge their role and responsibilities (an appropriate liturgy is supplied).[23] Kenneth Stevenson translates several such rites from Eastern sources.[24] Once the betrothal rite is restored, the present marriage service would also be restored, de facto, to its previous position in the couple’s life-history, as a culmination of a process rather than a singular event licensing talk of ‘before’ and ‘after’ a marriage. The ‘solemnization of marriage’ as the Book of Common Prayer calls it, restores the supposition that a marriage already exists, and that it has now reached the point of no return, of unconditional promise which requires the blessing of God and continuing divine grace to sustain it

A huge pastoral advantage of the double rite is that the passage from singleness to marriage is marked in the couple’s story. Once betrothed they are no longer single. They are beginning marriage, but the unconditional commitment which marriage assumes has precisely not yet been required of them by the church, by their families and friends, or by each other. They grow into this as men and women grow into their vocations as monks and nuns, leaving final vows to the consummation of a long process. Arnold Van Gennep, in Les Rites de Passage[25] has established that for a rite to be a genuine rite of passage, three stages need to be involved in it. These are ‘separation, liminality, and incorporation’. The older scheme provided this. At betrothal the couple mark themselves off as no longer single, while preparing themselves for the unconditional obligations of marriage. This middle ground is precisely ‘liminality’, the state of being on the threshold of marriage. People marrying today are offered a rite for only the third stage of the process. Kenneth Stevenson (the present Anglican Bishop of Portsmouth) has drawn attention to the inadequacies of the liturgical provision of the Western churches. He thinks that there is a ‘deep structure’ to marriage which was once provided for liturgically and now no longer is: that proposed liturgical changes (he wrote this in 1987) amount to playing around with surface meanings instead of addressing the theological and psychological hiatus; that marriage liturgies once catered for the deep needs of the human spirit and no longer do.[26] I agree with this. I think the present efforts of the churches to commend marriage are right, but reluctantly conclude this is proceeding without any real grasp either of the deep meanings of the theological or liturgical past or the deep social sognificance of the demographic trends of the present.

6. THEOLOGICAL AND PASTORAL OPPORTUNITIES

I hope that by now the theological and pastoral opportunities provided by the growing practice of living together are suggesting themselves. Non-nuptial cohabitation is unlikely ever to be thought consistent with Christian faith if only because God wills only what is best for us, and there good reasons for thinking that these arrangements are not the best for us, and particularly not the best for women and children. The distinction between pre-nuptial and non-nuptial cohabitation may be precisely the catalyst that assists pastoral carers in helping pre-ceremonial couples honestly to review their relationships. There are empirical reasons for suggesting that if they do not intend marriage they may be harming themselves: there are theological reasons for suggesting that if they intend marriage they may already have begun it.

Whether or not betrothal is reinstated, recognition of it, even of the absence of it, draws attention to the processive character of marriage. It is a matter of growth where separately and together individuals grow towards each other. Marriage is a particular form of the Christian experience of new life in Christ, whereby endowment in the Christian virtues is a shared undertaking.

The Western emphases on consent and consummation provided a slight sense of process, but while they were capable of undergirding a theology of marriage at the start of the second millennium, they can no longer adequately do so at the start of the third. The idea that the essence of marriage lay in consent is largely a by-product of medieval debates about how the ‘marriage’ of the parents of Jesus Christ could be valid, perfect and sexless. If concensus facit matrimonium, then it is possible for a couple to be validly married without ever having touched each other (and that is precisely why the western churches taught it). This should be faced. The Orthodox churches regard the consent doctrine as reductionist and pointedly don’t have a place in the liturgies for it to be expressed. The Germanic churches (however sexist) regarded marriage as having begun as soon as the bride was handed over and began living with the groom. There are alternatives. Consummation provides important senses of completion or fruition, achievement and fulfillment, but it is very doubtful if the first act of sexual intercourse could ever achieve this. (Perhaps consummation as first intercourse is a product of the celibate mind that regarded having sex with a woman at all, as a dark achievement.) Consummation might be more appropriately located at the point in the couple’s life history where the decision to make long-life commitments to each other and to children becomes irrevocable. If the couple, then around this time they will want to go public about what’s happening.

In Marriage After Modernity[27] I offer some friendly criticisms of the Vatican document Preparation for the Sacrament of Marriage,[28] precisely because it refuses to allow that sacramental grace can be experienced before the service of marriage. It is not only sex that we can’t have before the ceremony - we can’t have God’s grace either! The realization that things were once very different would allow the church to look for signs of God’s grace in the growing commitment of couples to each other, and in the painful searchings about whether to make it unconditional. ‘The exclusion of sacramentality from engagement seems to have disastrous pastoral consequences. The early flowering and blossoming of mutual love is potentially one of the most graced times in people’s lives.’[29]

This point deserves some further development. Couples coming to the churches for marriage do not generally believe that the churches understand their social and sexual situation, and they need assurance that, if they are found to be sexually experienced, or already living together, they will not be harshly judged. Any reputable theology of Christian marriage will insist that, in the period of deepening love prior to the unending commitment made at the nuptials, connections are being made between the human covenantal love of the partners for each other, and the divine covenantal love of God for the world and Christ for the church. The recognition that there was once a quite different means of entry into marriage would help to overcome the embarrassment, unease and fear of pre-married couples coming to the churches for marriage.

I am sometimes asked, by those who do not want, or who do not think it possible that betrothal should be introduced, whether it will happen. My answer is: I don’t know. But the point of these deliberations is not to promote some further distant, contentious, liturgical reform. It is to query the arbitrary arrangements for entering marriage that English law has bequeathed and the churches have never subjected to theological examination. Some of the problems surrounding those Christians who wait until the age of 30 before they marry might be met by betrothal. The lack of a liturgical form may currently be adding to their problems. One of the conclusions to which I have come is that the tradition of betrothal in Christian faith allows us to proclaim the good news that those who anticipate their nuptials by living together first, are not, after all, far from the Kingdom of God.

© Adrian Thatcher
10 March 2003