Lesson 1 of 15 · About 13 minutes

What God Joins

What are we entering when we marry?

A union of one man and one woman, made freely, for life, before God and open to children, which the Christian traditions have long held in common, though Catholics call it a sacrament, Orthodox Christians a holy mystery and most Protestants a covenant.

A gold ring opened into its two linked hoops, edged in blue and white enamel with a small red stone, on a grey ground; black letters on the hoops read WAS GOTT ZU SAMEN FUEGET. — Historical witnessGimmel ring (twin ring)Unknown goldsmith · second half of the 16th century · The Metropolitan Museum of Art (1974.356.649), The Lesley and Emma Sheafer Collection, Bequest of Emma A. Sheafer, 1973CC0 (The Met Open Access)

01

The question in front of us

Some Pharisees once came to Jesus to test him with a question about divorce. Matthew records it: “Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife for any reason?” Jesus answered by going back to the first pages of Genesis. God “made them male and female,” he said, and a man “shall be joined to his wife; and the two shall become one flesh.” Then he drew his conclusion: “What therefore God has joined together, don’t let man tear apart.”

The 1928 Book of Common Prayer gives nearly the same sentence to the minister at the moment he joins the couple’s right hands: “Those whom God hath joined together let no man put asunder.” This course takes its name from those words. Before money, parents or the wedding day, it starts where Jesus started: with what God does.

The short answer

Jesus describes marriage as something God does. God “made them male and female,” and when a man and a woman marry, “the two shall become one flesh.” Catholic, Orthodox and Protestant churches have long held the same core. Marriage joins one man and one woman, who give themselves to each other freely, for life, before God, open to the children he may give. They differ on what to call it, a sacrament, a holy mystery or a covenant, and this Lesson sets out each name in the church’s own words. It also shows you how to take the course together: read each Lesson, write your answers apart, then talk.

02

Part 1: Before You Promise

Christian wedding services ask their questions before anyone makes a vow. Will you have this man? Will you have this woman? Do you come freely? This Part asks those questions early, while the answers can still change your plans.

Lesson 1 starts where Jesus started when he was asked about marriage: with Genesis, and with what God does when two people marry. It sets out the five things the churches have long held about marriage, and the three names the churches give it, each in that church’s own words. It also shows you how to take the course together: read, write your answers apart, then talk. Lesson 1 is free to read.

Lesson 2 asks whether you are ready. It looks at the difference between deciding and drifting, the conversations to have before you fix a date, and what the churches teach about living together before the wedding. It names the reasons to stop and get help, and gives crisis numbers for six countries.

Lesson 3 turns to your families. Genesis says a man will leave his father and mother and join with his wife, and the vow asks each of you to forsake all others. The Lesson shows what changes with your parents and what stays, how to answer a parent who objects, and what your church asks if one of you has been married before.

Part 2 turns to how you speak to each other, and what to do when you fight.

03 · Attend to Scripture

What are we entering when we marry?

He answered, “Haven’t you read that he who made them from the beginning made them male and female, and said, ‘For this cause a man shall leave his father and mother, and shall be joined to his wife; and the two shall become one flesh’? So that they are no more two, but one flesh. What therefore God has joined together, don’t let man tear apart.”

Matthew 19:4–6 · World English Bible

04

What God said first

Genesis tells the first marriage in a few verses, and the first thing God says about it is a judgment on loneliness: “It is not good for the man to be alone. I will make him a helper comparable to him.” Then God makes the woman and brings her to him, and the man speaks the first words Genesis gives a human being to say: “This is now bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh.” The writer adds the sentence Jesus would quote: “Therefore a man will leave his father and his mother, and will join with his wife, and they will be one flesh.”

Three things in those verses run through this whole course. Marriage begins with a need God himself named, so companionship belongs to it from the start. The woman shares the man’s nature: she is his own flesh. And the marriage is a new household: two people leave the homes they were born into and are joined. Lesson 3 is about the leaving, and Lessons 8 and 9 about the one flesh.

Augustine of Hippo, writing about the year 401, asked why marriage is good. His answer kept both halves of Genesis together: “this seems not to me to be merely on account of the begetting of children, but also on account of the natural society itself in a difference of sex.”

05

Five things the churches have long held

Catholic, Orthodox and Protestant churches describe marriage in different words, but their historic teaching agrees on five things. Most of them you will say aloud in your vows.

1. One man and one woman

Jesus begins where Genesis begins: God “made them male and female.” The Westminster Confession, the Presbyterian statement of faith finished in 1646, puts it in one line: “Marriage is to be between one man and one woman.” Every rite this course quotes joins a bride and a groom.

2. Freely

Nobody can be married against their will, so every rite asks before anyone promises. The Prayer Book asks the man and then the woman, “Wilt thou have…?” The Orthodox priest asks each whether they come with “a good, free and unconstrained will.” The Catholic priest asks whether they have come of their own free choice, without being forced. Lesson 2 is about what freedom requires.

3. For life

The old vow runs “till death us do part,” and Jesus says that no one may tear apart what God has joined. The churches agree that marriage is meant to last as long as both live. They differ on what the Church does when a marriage breaks down, and Lesson 3 sets out each tradition’s rules on remarriage.

4. Before God

A wedding is a promise two people make to each other in God’s presence, with the Church as witness. The Prayer Book service opens by saying the congregation is gathered “in the sight of God, and in the face of this company.” The Catholic Catechism says it in seven words: “God himself is the author of marriage.”

5. Open to children

God’s first words to the man and woman in Genesis 1 are a blessing: “Be fruitful, multiply.” The Prayer Book asks God to give a new couple “the gift and heritage of children,” and adds, “if it be thy will.” Augustine held that a marriage without children is still a marriage, or else older couples who “had lost sons, or had given birth to none” could not be called married at all. The churches teach differently about family planning, and Lesson 10 sets out each teaching, with care for couples who face infertility or loss.

The Catholic priest also asks, before the consent, whether the couple will love and honour each other for life and welcome children from God; the question about children may be left out for older couples. Lesson 13 reads each tradition’s vows line by line.

06

Sacrament, holy mystery or covenant

Tradition

What it calls marriage

In its own words

Catholic

What it calls marriageA sacrament, one of seven

In its own wordsMarriage between the baptized “has been raised by Christ the Lord to the dignity of a sacrament” (Code of Canon Law, canon 1055; Catechism 1601)

Orthodox

What it calls marriageA sacrament, or holy mystery

In its own wordsBefore crowning the couple, the priest prays to God, “for by thee is the husband united unto the wife. Unite them in one mind: wed them into one flesh” (the service of crowning, tr. Isabel Hapgood, 1906)

Anglican

What it calls marriageA holy estate instituted by God, distinct from the two sacraments of the Gospel

In its own words“an honourable estate, instituted of God, signifying unto us the mystical union that is betwixt Christ and his Church” (1928 Book of Common Prayer)

Lutheran

What it calls marriageGod’s ordinance from creation, distinct from the sacraments of the New Testament

In its own wordsMatrimony “was not first instituted in the New Testament, but in the beginning, immediately on the creation of the human race” (Apology of the Augsburg Confession, 1531)

Presbyterian and Reformed

What it calls marriageA covenant, and “no sacrament”

In its own words“Although marriage be no sacrament, nor peculiar to the church of God, but common to mankind” (Westminster Directory, 1645); “a covenant in which God has an active part” (Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), Book of Order)

Methodist

What it calls marriageA covenant, not a sacrament

In its own words“a sacred, lifelong covenant” (United Methodist Social Principles)

Baptist and free churches

What it calls marriageA covenant

In its own wordsMarriage is “the uniting of one man and one woman in covenant commitment for a lifetime” (Baptist Faith and Message, 2000)

Two of these names come from one verse. When Paul writes of marriage in Ephesians 5, “This mystery is great, but I speak concerning Christ and the assembly,” his Greek word is mystērion. The Latin Bible of the Western church translated it sacramentum. Eastern Christians still call the sacraments the holy mysteries, and the Western church kept the Latin word. At the Reformation, Lutherans, Anglicans and the Reformed concluded that marriage did not belong with baptism and the Lord’s Supper, while still calling it holy and God’s own institution.

Catholic teaching adds that in the Latin, or Western, church the bride and groom give the sacrament to each other by their consent, before a priest or deacon and two witnesses (Catechism 1623; canon 1108). In the Orthodox service the priest blesses the couple and crowns them, as Lesson 13 describes. Lesson 12 sets out each church’s rules when a couple belongs to two.

A round glass disc with gold-leaf figures: a man and a woman in long robes join right hands beside a small column, a wreath hangs between their heads, and the words VIVATIS IN DEO run around the edge. — Historical witnessBowl Base with a Marriage SceneUnknown Roman or Byzantine artist · 4th–5th century · The Metropolitan Museum of Art (15.168), Rogers Fund, 1915CC0 (The Met Open Access)

07 · Historical witness

A marriage the Church cements

About the year 207 a Christian writer in North Africa named Tertullian wrote two short books to his wife. He addressed her as “my best beloved fellow-servant in the Lord.” In the second book he tried to describe a marriage between two Christians, and wondered where “(words) enough” could be found “fully to tell the happiness of that marriage which the Church cements, and the oblation confirms, and the benediction signs and seals.”

Then he tried. Two believers married to each other are “of one hope, one desire, one discipline, one and the same service.” “Both (are) brethren, both fellow servants, no difference of spirit or of flesh; nay, (they are) truly ‘two in one flesh.'”

A century or two later, a glassmaker in the Roman world set a married couple in gold leaf at the base of a glass bowl, now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The couple stand in the traditional Roman marriage pose, and the museum notes that “the crown and the inscription indicate that they may be Christians.” Both the letter and the glass come from long before the churches divided. What they take for granted is the core this Lesson began with: a man and a woman, joined before God, with the Church’s blessing.

08

How to take this course together

This course is meant for two people, and the research on marriage preparation suggests that reading alone changes little. In a 2012 review of programmes couples work through at home, couples who only worked through the material showed almost no change in the quality of their relationship and a small gain in how they communicated; programmes that added some face-to-face contact did much better on both (McAllister 2012). So every Lesson ends the same way.

Read the Lesson, together or apart. Then turn to Talk it through. Each of you writes your own answers first, without looking at the other’s, so that you find out what you think before the other’s answer can change it. Then read your answers aloud and talk. Each conversation takes about half an hour and is printed on its own sheet. With the conversations, the fifteen Lessons come to about eight to ten hours, spread over the months before the wedding.

The five Parts follow the words of the 1928 Prayer Book vow: Before You Promise (what marriage is, whether you are ready, your parents); For Better, for Worse (how you speak, fight and forgive, and who does what at home); To Have and to Hold (sex, the past you bring, children); For Richer, for Poorer; in Sickness and in Health (money and faith at home); and The Wedding (the vows, readings and prayers, and the first year).

This course teaches. It is not counselling, it gives you no score, and it does not replace your church’s own preparation; Lesson 2 explains how the two fit together.

09 · A question couples ask

We belong to different churches. Will this course take sides?

No. Where the churches agree, which is most of what this course teaches, it says so plainly. Where they differ, on what marriage is, on divorce and remarriage, on family planning, on living together before the wedding, and on how to read Ephesians 5, it sets out each church’s teaching in that church’s own words, with the same weight, and sends you to your own pastor or priest for the ruling.

If you come from two churches, read the comparison tables together. They show where your churches already stand on the same ground, and where you will need your pastor’s or priest’s help.

10 · A practice for today

Talk it through

About thirty minutes, together

Whose marriage did you watch most closely growing up, and what is one thing in it you want in ours?
Of the five things in this Lesson (one man and one woman, freely, for life, before God, open to children), which is easiest for you to say yes to, and which do you want to talk about more?
What does your church call marriage: a sacrament, a holy mystery, a covenant? In a sentence, what do you think it means by that word? If you don’t know, say so.
Jesus says God joins a married couple. What do you hope God will do in our marriage that we could not do by ourselves?
When will we sit down for each Lesson’s conversation? Name a day of the week and a time.

Write your answers separately first. Then read them aloud to each other, and talk.

This week: find out what preparation the church you will marry in asks of you, and how far ahead of the wedding it must begin.

A prayer for the two of you.
Lord God, you made us male and female,
and you saw that it was not good for us to be alone.
Thank you for bringing us to each other.
Teach us what we are promising before we promise it,
and when the day comes, join us as only you can.
Amen.

Sources and further reading

Paintings

Unknown goldsmith, Gimmel ring (twin ring), second half of the 16th century. The Metropolitan Museum of Art (1974.356.649), The Lesley and Emma Sheafer Collection, Bequest of Emma A. Sheafer, 1973. CC0 (The Met Open Access).
Unknown Roman or Byzantine artist, Bowl Base with a Marriage Scene, 4th–5th century. The Metropolitan Museum of Art (15.168), Rogers Fund, 1915. CC0 (The Met Open Access).

Scripture quotations are from the World English Bible, which is in the public domain.

Excerpts from the English translation of the Catechism of the Catholic Church for use in the United States of America, copyright 1994, United States Catholic Conference, Inc. – Libreria Editrice Vaticana. English translation of the Catechism of the Catholic Church: Modifications from the Editio Typica, copyright 1997, United States Catholic Conference, Inc. – Libreria Editrice Vaticana. Used with permission.