Matrimony
A Holy Ordinance of God, but Not a Sacrament
atrimony is the last of Rome’s
seven sacraments. The Catechism of the Catholic Church teaches that “the matrimonial
covenant, by which a man and a woman establish between themselves a partnership of the whole of life,
is by its nature ordered toward the good of the spouses and the procreation and education of offspring;
this covenant between baptized persons has been raised by Christ the Lord to the dignity of a
sacrament” (§1601).
On the goodness of marriage there is no quarrel. Rome and the Reformers agree that God instituted it in the garden and that Christ honored it at Cana. The dispute concerns whether marriage is a sacrament that confers grace, and what follows from that claim: the church’s control of marriage, its laws on who may marry and who may not, and its exaltation of celibacy above the married state.
Background
Marriage is older than the church and older than the fall. “God himself is the author of marriage,” the Catechism rightly says, and “the vocation to marriage is written in the very nature of man and woman as they came from the hand of the Creator” (§1603). Christ confirmed the Creator’s design: “What therefore God hath joined together, let not man put asunder” (Matthew 19:6).
The claim that marriage is a sacrament rests chiefly on Ephesians 5:32. Paul, having quoted Genesis 2:24, writes, “This is a great mystery: but I speak concerning Christ and the church.” Jerome’s Latin Vulgate rendered the Greek mysterion (“mystery”) as sacramentum: “sacramentum hoc magnum est.” Trent itself said only that the doctrine is “intimated” in Ephesians and rested its main argument on tradition.1
History
For more than a thousand years the church blessed marriages without numbering marriage among a fixed list of sacraments. Pohle and Preuss trace the sacramental claim back through the Council of Florence (1439), which called matrimony “the seventh of the Sacraments,” to “the beginning of the twelfth century,” when “it was included in the list of Sacraments drawn up at that time.”2 The Scholastics adopted the list, and with it the conclusion that marriage, as a sacrament, belonged under the authority of the church.
The practical effects were far-reaching. Church courts claimed jurisdiction over marriage cases. Canon law multiplied impediments of kinship, including “spiritual kindred” between godparents and their godchildren’s families, and the pope dispensed from them.3 Meanwhile the medieval church held the celibate life to be holier than marriage. Calvin observed the contradiction: “Marriage being thus recommended by the title of a sacrament, can it be anything but vertiginous levity afterwards to call it uncleanness, and pollution, and carnal defilement? How absurd is it to debar priests from a sacrament!”4
Development
The Council of Trent defined the doctrine in its twenty-fourth session (November 11, 1563). It taught that Christ “merited for us by His passion” the grace that perfects natural love and sanctifies the married, and that the Fathers and councils “always taught, that it is to be numbered amongst the sacraments of the new law.”5 Its canons then struck at the Reformation’s teaching and practice:
If any one shall say, that clerks constituted in sacred orders, or regulars, who have solemnly professed chastity, are able to contract marriage, and that being contracted, it is valid, the ecclesiastical law, or vow, notwithstanding; and that the contrary is nothing else than to condemn marriage . . . let him be anathema. . . . If any one shall say, that the marriage state is to be preferred before a state of virginity, or of celibacy, and that it is not better and more blessed to remain in virginity, or in celibacy, than to be joined in matrimony; let him be anathema.6
Trent also anathematized anyone who said that the church errs in teaching that the bond “cannot be dissolved on account of the adultery of one of the married parties,” and anyone who denied that the church could “constitute impediments dissolving marriage.”7 In the same session its decree Tametsi required that marriages be contracted before the parish priest and witnesses, a rule that still stands behind the church’s demand for the “ecclesiastical form” (§1631).
What Rome Teaches
Rome teaches that marriage between baptized persons “signifies and communicates grace” and is therefore “a true sacrament of the New Covenant” (§1617). In the Latin church the spouses themselves are the ministers, who “mutually confer upon each other the sacrament of Matrimony by expressing their consent before the Church” (§1623). The grace of the sacrament “is intended to perfect the couple’s love and to strengthen their indissoluble unity” (§1641).
Because the bond is sacramental, “a marriage concluded and consummated between baptized persons can never be dissolved,” and “the Church does not have the power to contravene this disposition of divine wisdom” (§1640). Catholics who divorce and remarry civilly “cannot receive Eucharistic communion as long as this situation persists,” and may be absolved in penance only if they are “committed to living in complete continence” (§1650). The sacrament of marriage is thus tied to the Eucharist and to penance, and all three to the authority of the church.
The Reformers’ Response
Luther treated matrimony in The Babylonian Captivity of the Church with the same test he applied to every rite: a sacrament requires a divine promise joined to a sign that God himself appointed.
It is not only without any warrant of Scripture that matrimony is considered a sacrament, but it has been turned into a mere mockery by the very same traditions which vaunt it as a sacrament. . . . Now we nowhere read that he who marries a wife will receive any grace from God; neither is there in matrimony any sign of divine institution, nor do we anywhere read that it was appointed of God to be a sign of anything.8
Luther added that marriage “has existed from the beginning of the world, and still continues even among unbelievers,” so that there is no reason “why it should be called a sacrament of the new law, and of the Church alone.”9 Calvin agreed, and put the point memorably:
It is a good and holy ordinance of God. And agriculture, architecture, shoemaking, and shaving, are lawful ordinances of God; but they are not sacraments. For in a sacrament, the thing required is not only that it be a work of God, but that it be an external ceremony appointed by God to confirm a promise.10
As for Ephesians 5:32, Calvin answered that “the thing which misled them was the term sacrament,” for the Latin translator used sacramentum “in no other sense than the Greek term” mysterion “was used by Paul.”11 Paul calls the union of Christ and the church the great mystery; he does not make every wedding a channel of grace.
The Reformers’ deepest protest was against forced celibacy. In To the Christian Nobility (1520) Luther wrote that a pastor “should not be compelled to live without a wedded wife but should be permitted to have one, as St. Paul writes,” and that the Roman See had made celibacy “a universal commandment that forbade priests to marry.”12 The Reformers acted on their convictions. “Reformers who were formerly Roman Catholic priests were now marrying. Even Luther himself married Katharina von Bora, a former Roman Catholic nun who had embraced the Gospel and left the convent.”13 Zwingli had already argued in 1523 “that all which God has allowed or not forbidden is righteous, hence marriage is permitted to all human beings.”14 The parsonage became a home, and marriage was restored to honor as a calling in which God is glorified.
Matrimony and Scripture
Marriage is a creation ordinance for all mankind. “Therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave unto his wife: and they shall be one flesh” (Genesis 2:24). The marriages of Abraham and Isaac were true marriages, though no sacrament of the church was administered. Marriage does not need to be raised to a sacrament to be holy; God made it holy from the beginning.
Marriage is honorable, not inferior. “Marriage is honourable in all, and the bed undefiled” (Hebrews 13:4). Paul valued singleness for undistracted service (1 Corinthians 7:32–35), yet he called it a gift, not a higher state of merit, and he warned that “forbidding to marry” is among the “doctrines of devils” (1 Timothy 4:1–3).
The great mystery is Christ and his church. Paul teaches husbands to love their wives “even as Christ also loved the church, and gave himself for it” (Ephesians 5:25). Marriage pictures the gospel; it does not dispense the grace of the gospel. The grace by which husbands and wives love one another comes from Christ through faith and the Word, not from the act of consent.
Christ, not the church, sets the terms. Rome claims power to create impediments and to dispense from them, yet it forbids what Christ permitted when he made an exception “for fornication” (Matthew 19:9). The Word of God governs marriage, and of laws that bind where God has not bound, Christ said, “in vain they do worship me, teaching for doctrines the commandments of men” (Matthew 15:9).
Marriage needs no priest to make it a sacrament. It needs husbands and wives who live together as “heirs together of the grace of life” (1 Peter 3:7), and churches that honor what God has joined. See also Holy Orders on clerical celibacy.
Scripture quotations are from the King James Version.
