Asking All the Wrong Questions about Marriage–Part 2

Asking the wrong question “Who can be legally married?” leads us to wrong answers.  Instead, we need to remember the original purpose and definition of marriage being one man and one woman becoming “one flesh” to the glory of God.  God both established and defined marriage.

Society now circumscribes–through a series of written laws–something like marriage, just without God.

The redefinition of marriage began.   

In Part 1 we traced the history of marriage from Bible times to the Middle Ages.  Now we will explore six of the watershed events resulting in the legal code that we see today in Europe and America.

1.  Ironically, the great concern over mutual consent was the first of six pivotal events that determined the course of Western marriage as we know it.  

Mutual consent can be considered pivotal because marriage shifted from a family-endorsed social structure with dual purpose (religious and social) to an individual decision apart from a religious framework or social benefit.  This was not a bad thing since many families arranged marriages for completely political or worldly reasons.  But a shift from community to individual paved the way for future changes.

Mutual consent was an issue because, under Germanic law in the 5^th to 9^th centuries A.D., marriage didn’t require the bride’s consent at all.  The families arranged a Brautkauf or bride-purchase agreement in which the groom consented and the bride was assumed to consent by her family.  Originally, a nuptial pretium (a certain amount of property or money) was contracted as the purchase price given to the father or guardian of the bride-to-be.  Eventually, to combat the idea of a wife as purchased property, the nuptial pretium became a sum given to the bride as her security should her husband die prematurely.

At this point, we’re in the central and late Middle Ages and the Catholic Church altered Germanic marital practice to insist upon direct, free, and fully mutual consent by both parties in the marriage.  To ensure that the union was by mutual consent, the Church established the suggestion that unions be blessed.

A religious blessing became part of the union and occasionally the Catholic Church threatened to excommunicate any persons who married without the blessings of the local priest.  Given that the position of women (prior to the Catholic canonists) was extremely low in Frankish tribes, the mutual consent aspect was a good development.

It took significant time for divorce—common in Germanic law—to be abolished by the spread of Catholicism.  In the Frankish tribes, legal matters (including marriage related issues such as adultery, divorce, etc.) were typically resolved by ordeal–an ordeal being by fire, water, combat, etc.  Eventually a system of compensation—the giving of money to satisfy grievances—was encouraged by the Catholic Church to curb violence and paved the way for the development of the system of indulgences.  For those of you who know Reformation history, the system of indulgences eventually became one of Martin Luther’s hot button issues.

Join me on the next page for the next watershed moment, marriage as a sacrament.

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