I’ve posted before on traditional Jewish wedding ceremonies (here). I found it interesting at the time that the betrothal (engagement), which grants legal rights , is guaranteed by (among other things) sexual intercourse. The consummation (sexual intercourse) is what legally binds the couple together before the marriage. The Orthodox tradition (which I posted on here and here) obviously seems related to the Jewish, as it has the same two-part structure, although I don’t believe the betrothal is associated with consummation of the marriage.

Prior to the Council of Trent in 1545, the Roman Catholic ceremony was also of a similar form. It, too, had two ceremonies. The betrothal gave the couple the right to live together, and if the couple became with child, the marriage had been consummated, and the wedding followed after. As with the Jewish ceremony, sexual intercourse played its role in engagement, and doing so generated marriage.

Protestants, however, took a different path. Martin Luther, and then the Puritan government, passed laws making marriage secular and not spiritual, and ordered it be performed not by a priest but by a justice of the peace. It was the Protestant reformation that caused the secularisation of marriage, in reaction to the Catholic understanding of marriage as a sacrament.

Today’s Catholic ceremony takes the same shape as all Catholic sacraments: The entrance procession (gathering), the storytelling, the sacrament, and the sending out (commissioning). It is the same story told in the Eucharist every Sunday. The couple give their vows in the context of the Eucharist, because what marriage says about God’s love in us, the Eucharist says in a more universal way. The couple receives Holy Communion, and are sent out to bear witness to God’s love for the world. In this, Orthodox marriage and Catholic marriage say the same things about marriage.

The current Protestant church, however, seems to have lost any sense of what marriage is. Whilst a legally binding, secular act in the traditional Protestant sense of marriage, it is often taken in a church by a priest in the Catholic and Orthodox manner, reflecting the sacramental narrative of Catholic marriage, but without the sacramental meaning.

It seems there is confusion about marriage in Protestantism and in culture on many levels. There is the confusion between marriage as a sacramental act and marriage as a legal one (the arguments about civil unions would not be as fierce if this were cleared up). There is confusion about it’s meaning: For most, it’s just an expression of “their love for each other”, or just a way to have sex without being frowned upon by their peers.

A small tangent on that note: I’d like to draw attention the fact that for the first one and a half thousand years of Christianity, and for the thousands of years of Judaism before that, sexual intercourse was not kept sacred for marriage. It was a symbol of engagement, and a defining characteristic that separated marriage and betrothal was sexual intercourse, but the concept of premarital sex was not an issue, because it was accepted that sex was what generated marriage, not that it was something that came after. I’m not sure when this understanding changed, and I’m not sure if the change was a good one or a bad one, but I think that looking at the tradition of our predecessors in this might give us a chance to prevent marriages that occur for this wrong reason.

These confusions concerning the meaning of marriage and the distinction between legal and spiritual marriage seems to be a result of the traditional Protestant rejection of the marriage as sacrament, clashing with the scriptural suggestions that marriage is a part of God’s natural, spiritual order. My answer to these confusions, is that I think the Orthodox view of sacrament is the best view: Consider your whole life sacrament. I think that adopting the Catholic and Orthodox views on this gives meaning to marriage beyond whim or emotion or sexuality, and hence elevates it above other relationships.