Christian marriage

Jim Coggins

On May 20, the Supreme Court of Canada ruled that family law in Ontario must use definitions of "spouse" that fit homosexual "couples" as well as heterosexual couples. My initial reaction was that this would redefine marriage in all its aspects throughout Canada. In fact, the news story in Maclean’s magazine was headlined "The Family Redefined".

Later news reports suggested that the decision might not be so significant. And, on June 8, the House of Commons voted to maintain the traditional definition of marriage as being between a man and a woman. Nevertheless, I don’t think the House of Commons action will have much impact; it seems to me that its resolution was passed to gain favour with voters more than to seriously challenge the Supreme Court ruling. The Supreme Court can overrule the House of Commons, the Supreme Court has already spoken, the court decision is consistent with a longstanding trend in Canadian law and social consensus, and I think this decision will stand. Marriage is in the process of being redefined in Canada.

Now, one could criticize the Supreme Court decision on a number of levels. For instance, one could observe that at the Supreme Court level, there are no laws for deciding cases; rather, decisions are based on "fundamental principles", and in a pluralist society those principles change according to the personal preferences of those who happen to be the Supreme Court justices at a given time.

One could also note that while the Supreme Court can change human laws, it cannot change the laws of biology.

One could also argue against the decision on practical grounds. If the divorce courts are overcrowded with heterosexual divorces now, they will be even more overcrowded in future since homosexuals tend to rotate partners more frequently than heterosexuals. (It is significant that the case before the Supreme Court concerned rights after a lesbian couple’s break-up, not their rights while together.)

Marriage is a committed sexual union of a man and a woman, involving their families, their future children, society at large and God.

What the Supreme Court seems to have done is to focus the definition of marriage more narrowly, looking at it primarily as a financial contract. The wording used by the Supreme Court was "intimate relationships of economic interdependence". The "intimate" or sexual component is increasingly fuzzy, since 1) no one has defined what exactly constitutes homosexual or lesbian sex (the old requirement that marriage required the consummation of sexual intercourse to be legal obviously no longer holds) and 2) sex is now so common outside of marriage (very few homosexual couples—including some of those demanding marriage benefits—are monogamous). What we are left with is a "relationship of economic interdependence", a purely financial arrangement.

On that basis, it seems that the Supreme Court was correct in giving "spousal" benefits to the plaintiff—the two lesbians had founded a business together, and it was only fair to divide those financial assets between the two partners.

However, one has to ask whether this financial contract which the Supreme Court has defined can really be considered marriage. Technically, the Supreme Court did not redefine marriage. Homosexual couples still cannot legally "marry" in this country; that privilege is still reserved exclusively for heterosexual couples.

However, since the Supreme Court has changed the definition of "spouse", and since it accepts common law relationships as equivalent to marriage, homosexual couples will , in effect, get all of the legal privileges of marriage without legally being "married". Thus, homosexuals will eventually get pension, medical and other benefits and probably the right to adopt children and to have custody rights over their partner’s children (even though they cannot produce their own children without being sexually unfaithful). In effect, the Supreme Court has used a financial definition of relationships but will then likely apply it in social contexts, such as child custody rights.

In one sense, our courts are in a dilemma, a dilemma only partly of their own making. Increasingly, in our society, people are selfish. They avoid making commitments (because they value their personal "freedom"), do not keep the commitments they make (again because they want to keep their personal freedom), but also insist on having the "rights" arising out of the commitments they didn’t make. People live in chaos, get into trouble and then turn to the courts to bring order out of chaos. By recognizing common law relationships (an "implied" commitment) as marriages (a legally registered commitment), the courts have committed themselves to this perhaps impossible task. One can applaud the courts’ desire to protect common law wives (who have often been left with children and without money by departing common law husbands), but at the same time recognize the difficulty of the task. In effect, the courts are trying to protect people from their own folly.

Further, by extending the definition of common law marriage to homosexuals (and thus making the sexual part of the definition more fuzzy), the courts have taken on the difficult task of trying to sort out which "intimate relationships of financial interdependence" it will consider to be an implied financial contract. What is to prevent roommates ore relatives who have not had a sexual relationship from claiming "marriage benefits", even retroactively? The resulting court cases could be a legal quagmire.

In focusing on economic and social issues, the one aspect of marriage which the Supreme Court is ignoring altogether is God’s role in marriage.

Currently, when a couple is married in a church, the pastor (licensed by the denomination and registered with the provincial government) performs the marriage as an officer of the state. We take for granted this cooperation between church and state, but we should not; in one sense, this cooperation is only "an accident of history".

Ever since the Emperor Constantine allied the Roman Empire with the Christian church about AD 325, the Western world has been termed "Christendom". This alliance of church and state has been harmful to the church in many ways; it was in reaction to the corrupted state churches, that our ancestors rightly created the "free " or "believers’ churches". Nevertheless, aspects of Christendom have remained, even in the free churches. One of these has been marriage. Until recently, the state has enforced the Christian understanding of marriage, giving legal force to marriages performed by clergy.

Since the 1960s, the willingness of the state to enforce the Christian definition of marriage has been eroding. This did not begin with homosexuality. It began with making divorce easy in 1969, and even easier with "no-fault" divorce in 1987. It continued when governments began recognizing common law relationships as marriages. (This was ironic because people entered these relationships precisely because they did not want to be committed, but this recognition could be implemented without too many objections because the government had already lowered the standard of commitment.)

Church and state also aided in this process by allowing couples to write their own vows and thus fundamentally change the nature of the commitment they were making. No longer required are phrases like "love, honour and obey", "cleaving only unto her/him" (remaining sexually faithful), "for better or worse, for richer or poorer, in sickness and in health" and "as long as you both shall live" (I was fascinated to see this last phrase change to "as long as you both shall love" in the 1970s—which is pretty meaningless if you define love as an emotion rather than a commitment.).

So what should we do?

I propose, first of all, that we accept that we have lost the battle to have Canadian government and society accept the Christian definition of marriage. In the short run, I see no point in handwringing, anger or begging Canadian governments to reverse this decision. The flow of culture is too strongly in the direction of the Supreme Court ruling. What we can do is to clearly warn society what the results will be and then to allow Canadian society to suffer the consequences of the decision it has made. Many people will suffer as a result, some of them innocent victims, but I don’t see any alternative.

The second thing we should do is to re-establish the definition of Christian marriage as something clearly distinct from the financial contract defined by the Supreme Court of Canada.

This has been done before. In communist Russia, for instance, the church had no authority to legalize marriages. Christians would go to city hall and sign the formal documents for a legal marriage. They would then go to the church and make the vows of a Christian marriage.

Already in the US, some churches have begun to establish a "covenant marriage" contract that goes beyond the legal definition of marriage (see sidebar in the feature section of this issue). Among other things, these covenant marriages require extensive premarital counselling and a commitment to seek counselling rather than divorce should the marriage encounter trouble.

The Christian definition of marriage should include sexual abstinence before marriage, sexual faithfulness within marriage and non-optional, specific vows. Above all. Christian marriage should be undertaken "in the sight of God", recognizing that it is only the grace of Jesus which will enable us to fulfill our marriage commitments.

If Christian couples committed themselves to such a Christian marriage, then I suppose that accepting the financial contract which the government makes available would be not very important, perhaps a matter of financial convenience, like deciding whether or not to claim one’s spouse as a dependent on an income tax return. I am all for seeking legal and societal recognition of our marriages, but if society doesn’t have a recognized practice of marriage, then it is difficult to comply with it.

Perhaps the Christian churches could create a central registry of "Christian marriages", perhaps administered by the Evangelical Fellowship of Canada and maybe the Canadian Council of Churches.

I think we also need to differentiate between "Christian marriage" and a "church wedding".

Many non-Christians want to have a church wedding—a wedding performed in a beautiful sanctuary, with the bride wearing an expensive white gown (the white no longer necessarily signifying sexual and personal purity symbolic of the bride of Christ in Revelation 21:2), bridesmaids wearing expensive gowns, the men attired in rented tuxedos, an expensive catered dinner (no longer serving the practical function of feeding guests who may have travelled a long distance to attend), flowers and other decorations, and expensive rings.

Some of these trappings of church weddings may at one point have been intended to symbolize Christian marriage (the commitment of a couple before God) but now obscure it. I hear of couples who put off marriage because they can’t afford a church wedding, but live together instead; they clearly fail to understand what Christian marriage is all about.

Rather than waste time bemoaning the fact that government no longer understands or enforces Christian marriage, we as the Christian church should focus on teaching clearly and practising faithfully Christian marriage. We may think that the current Supreme Court decision is a disaster, and it is. However, it is also a wonderful opportunity for us to teach and demonstrate the difference that Jesus Christ makes in human lives and relationships. It is time for the Christian church to appear again as a radical counterculture distinct from the world. Can you imagine the impact when the world clearly sees the ideal of Christian marriage as radically distinct from anything it has seen or experienced before? In a world desperately searching for meaning and purpose, Christian marriage offers a wonderful opportunity to preach Jesus. Can we foresee a time when non-Christians, disillusioned with the chaos of sexual liberty, turn to the church for answers regarding marriage and find Jesus? When people come to us to ask for a church wedding, will we be able to gently and clearly explain to them that it is more important to have a Christian marriage—and that the blessing of such a marriage is impossible without accepting Jesus?

Return to the M.B.Herald Vol. 38, No. 14 Home Page