Devotional 129: The Degrees of Marriage: Within the Limits of Consanguinity

The Confession Read

It is lawful for all sorts of people to marry, who are able with judgment to give their consent. Yet it is the duty of Christians to marry only in the Lord. And therefore such as profess the true reformed religion should not marry with infidels, papists, or other idolaters: neither should such as are godly be unequally yoked, by marrying with such as are notoriously wicked in their life, or maintain damnable heresies.

— Westminster Confession of Faith, Chapter 24, Section 3

Introduction

A house has been described for us, and we have been told what it is for; now we come to the door, and the door asks a question of every person who stands before it: who may come in, and whom may I bring with me? The first two sections of this chapter answered the great objective questions: what marriage is, and what it is for. The third turns to the question that is not objective at all, the question that makes the doctrine personal. It is the question a young man asks in the hour he first resolves to marry; it is the question a father and a mother turn over in the night about the one who courts their child; it is the question every believer must answer who desires a home of his own. Whom may I marry? The answer the Confession gives is a two-leaved door, and both leaves must be seen together or neither is rightly seen. The first leaf opens very wide: "It is lawful for all sorts of people to marry, who are able with judgment to give their consent." Here, in a single sentence, the Confession sweeps away every merely human restriction that men have laid across the threshold of marriage: the prohibition of the clergy from marrying, the exaltation of the cloister above the home, the notion that some ranks or nations or classes are forbidden the estate. And it declares that marriage is open to all who can freely and rationally consent to it. The gate is wide, and it is wide because God made marriage for the race of men. The second leaf closes with equal precision: "Yet it is the duty of Christians to marry only in the Lord." For the believer there is one fixed condition that overrides every other consideration, a condition not of age or station or nation but of faith, and the Confession spends the rest of the section spelling out what it means. The two leaves must never be torn apart, for together they guard the two errors that lie in wait on either side of the door. To throw open the first leaf and forget the second is to treat marriage as a merely natural thing, a matter of appetite and affection and convenience, in which the soul's deepest loyalty counts for nothing. To slam shut the second and forget the first is to fall into the very superstition the Reformers died to overturn: the teaching that marriage is a grudging concession, a lower estate, a thing to be forbidden to the holy and endured by the weak. The Confession holds both truths in a single sentence because Scripture holds both, and it will not let us relax either. The door of marriage is broad enough for all mankind, and it is narrow enough for one man and one woman in the Lord. Our age has lost hold of both truths at once, and the loss is all around us. On the one side, we have made marriage a matter of chemistry and compatibility and shared interests, choosing a spouse as we choose a house, by taste and by budget, and it never occurs to us to ask whether the two souls pull in the same direction on the one question that matters forever. On the other side, when the church honestly repeats the old teaching, our age hears only bigotry, for it cannot imagine that a prohibition could be anything but fear, or that a boundary could be a mercy. But the boundary the Confession draws is a mercy, and it is a mercy of the deepest kind. It is the mercy of a Father who knows that the closest of all human unions is also the most powerful, that the person to whom you are one flesh will shape your soul as no other creature can, and that therefore the deepest thing in you, your life in Christ, must be shared, not divided. The section before us is not a fence around a forbidden thing; it is a hedge set about a path, that those who walk it may not fall away from the way.

Scripture Foundation

The two halves of this section, the lawfulness of marriage for all who can consent and the duty of believers to marry only in the Lord, are not two inventions of the Westminster Divines. They are two threads drawn from the very fabric of Scripture, and each may be traced to its source with exactness. The positive half rests first upon the plain and joyful declaration of Hebrews 13:4: "Marriage is honourable in all, and the bed undefiled." The phrase "in all" is the hinge of the sentence. The apostle does not say that marriage is honourable in some, in the young, in the laity, in those whose calling permits it, but "in all," in every sort and condition of men and women who are able to enter it. The estate itself is honourable, a creation ordinance that sin has never made dishonourable. And against the teaching that would forbid it to a whole class of persons, the apostle to Timothy warns with startling severity in 1 Timothy 4:1-3, that in the latter times some shall depart from the faith, "forbidding to marry, and commanding to abstain from meats," and he brands such doctrine a doctrine of devils. It is a fearful thing to forbid what God has blessed; and the Divines, standing on this warning, refused to let any human authority bar the door that God had opened. The only qualification Scripture attaches to entering marriage is not rank or wealth or office but the capacity to consent, and the Confession repeats it faithfully: those may marry who are "able with judgment to give their consent." The negative half, the duty to marry "only in the Lord," has its fountainhead in a single clause of Paul's letter to Corinth. In 1 Corinthians 7:39 the apostle is addressing the widow, and he says: "The wife is bound by the law as long as her husband liveth; but if her husband be dead, she is at liberty to be married to whom she will; only in the Lord." Notice how generously the liberty is stated, "to whom she will," and how precisely it is bounded, "only in the Lord." The Greek is monon en kyriō: "only," an adverb of exclusion, set over against the widest possible freedom, and "in the Lord," the sphere of vital union with Christ, the element in which the believer's whole life is lived. Paul does not say "only to a decent man" or "only to a respectable citizen"; he says "only in the Lord," for the one thing that must be true of a believer's spouse is the thing that is true of the believer himself, that he is in Christ. Two persons who are both in Christ are joined in the Lord; and a marriage entered "in the Lord" is a marriage of two who already share the deepest thing in each of them, so that the one-flesh union seals what the one-Spirit union has already begun. This little clause is the seed from which the whole doctrine of the section grows. The second great text is the one from which the Confession borrows its very language, the unequal yoke of 2 Corinthians 6:14-16: "Be ye not unequally yoked together with unbelievers: for what fellowship hath righteousness with unrighteousness? and what communion hath light with darkness? And what concord hath Christ with Belial? or what part hath he that believeth with an infidel? And what agreement hath the temple of God with idols? for ye are the temple of the living God." The verb rendered "unequally yoked" is the Greek heterozugeo, from heteros, "another of a different kind," and zugos, "a yoke"; the word appears nowhere else in the New Testament, and its picture is vivid and deliberate. A yoke is a beam laid across two creatures that they may pull together as one; and the law of Moses had long forbidden the farmer to plow with an ox and an ass together, two beasts of unlike kind and unlike strength, who would tear against each other and ruin the furrow. Paul takes that agricultural image and lifts it into the moral and spiritual realm. The believer and the unbeliever are two creatures of different kind; they are not headed to the same field, they do not answer to the same master, and to yoke them in the closest of all bonds is to invite a lifelong tearing at the very center of life. The apostle's chain of questions, righteousness and unrighteousness, light and darkness, Christ and Belial, the believer and the infidel, the temple of God and idols, is the very vocabulary the Confession echoes when it speaks of infidels and idolaters; the Divines are not inventing categories but transcribing the apostle's own. The third text carries the doctrine back to its Old Testament root, and it supplies the reason for the whole command. In Deuteronomy 7:3-4, as Israel stood at the edge of the promised land, Moses charged them: "Neither shalt thou make marriages with them; thy daughter thou shalt not give unto his son, nor his daughter shalt thou take unto thy son. For they will turn away thy son from following me, that they may serve other gods." Mark the reason, for it is the key that unlocks the entire teaching. The prohibition is not rooted in ethnic pride or in a fear of the stranger, but in the nature of influence: "they will turn away thy son from following me." Marriage is the closest of all human bonds, the union in which two souls dwell together day and night, and the heart that is bound to a heart that does not love God will, in the ordinary course of things, be drawn away from God. It is not that such a turning is inevitable in every case; it is that the danger is so real and so grave that God, who knows our frame, would not have his people hazard their souls upon it. The deepest covenant of life must not be made with one who is at war with the God of the covenant. And Scripture is not content to leave the danger as a warning; it records the tragedy. 1 Kings 11:2-4 tells us of Solomon, the wisest of men, of whom God had said, "Ye shall not go in to them, neither shall they come in unto you: for surely they will turn away your heart after their gods: Solomon clave unto these in love." And the record continues with a sentence as sad as any in the Bible: "it came to pass, when Solomon was old, that his wives turned away his heart after other gods: and his heart was not perfect with the LORD his God." The wisest man in the world, the man who built the temple and prayed the great prayer of dedication, was undone not by an enemy in the field but by a wife at the fireside. Generations later, Nehemiah drew the lesson in words that still sting, Nehemiah 13:26-27: "Did not Solomon king of Israel sin by these things? yet among many nations was there no king like him, who was beloved of his God... nevertheless even him did outlandish women cause to sin." If Solomon fell, who of us may presume? And against that dark history stands the bright counter-example of Abraham, who in Genesis 24:3-4 would not take a wife for his son Isaac from the daughters of the Canaanites, but sent to his own kindred that the son of the promise might marry in the Lord. The contrast between Abraham's care and Solomon's ruin is the contrast the Confession would have every believer set before his eyes.

What the Divines Meant

The Westminster Divines wrote this section with a double controversy in view, and each half of it is aimed at a specific error that was pressing upon the church in their day. The first clause, "It is lawful for all sorts of people to marry," is directed chiefly against the Church of Rome. For centuries the medieval church had forbidden marriage to its clergy and had exalted virginity and the monastic life above the estate of holy matrimony, so that the married layman was consigned to a lower shelf of the spiritual life and the priest who married was counted to have fallen. The Reformers saw in this a burden on the conscience and a direct defiance of Scripture, which calls marriage honourable in all and denounces the forbidding of it as a doctrine of devils. When the Divines declare that marriage is lawful for all sorts of people, they are cutting the root of that superstition: no office, no calling, no vow of man's devising may bar the door that God has opened. The minister of the gospel may marry, the magistrate may marry, and none is holier for refusing what God has blessed. Nor does the clause stop there. "All sorts of people" sweeps away as well every merely human barrier of class and condition, for the only gate the Confession sets before the door of marriage is the gate of consent itself: those may marry who are "able with judgment to give their consent." That phrase is worth pausing over, for it tells us something essential about what marriage is. Marriage is a covenant, and a covenant rests upon consent, free, intelligent, deliberate consent. Those who cannot give it, the immature, the insane, the coerced, the merely dazzled, are not fit to enter, not because of any defect of rank but because a covenant without consent is no covenant at all. Then the Confession turns to the governing duty, and its language becomes a deliberate ladder of precision. "It is the duty of Christians to marry only in the Lord." The phrase is drawn verbatim from Paul, and it means something far more searching than "marry a professing Christian." To be "in the Lord" is to be united to Christ by a living faith, and to marry "in the Lord" is to marry one who is genuinely in that union, one with whom the believer shares not merely a common roof but a common Redeemer, a common Spirit, a common hope. The Divines then descend from the general principle to the particular cases, and they name three classes of persons with whom the believer may not be joined. The first class is "infidels, papists, or other idolaters." An infidel is one who denies the true God; the idolater is one who worships a false god or the true God by a false and forbidden worship. The inclusion of "papists" in this company is jarring to modern ears, and it must be understood historically and not with malice. The Divines, standing in the Reformed conviction that the Church of Rome had corrupted the gospel of grace and introduced into its worship what they judged to be idolatry: the adoration of the host and of images, the intercession of saints, a mass that offered again the finished work of Christ. They classified Rome among the idolaters, not out of ethnic hostility but out of a conviction that her system of worship and her way of salvation were such that a marriage across that line would be a marriage of two different religions. The point is not that Roman Catholics are to be hated or despised; the point is that a believer may not be one flesh with one whose worship and gospel he must, on pain of his own soul, call false. To be charitable is to speak the truth in love, not to pretend that the deepest division does not exist. The second class is "such as are notoriously wicked in their life." Here the Confession turns from false worship to open ungodliness. A man may profess the true faith and yet live a life that loudly denies it: the drunkard, the blasphemer, the fornicator, the man of violence. Such a one, though he wears the name of Christ, is no fit yoke-fellow for the godly. The word "notoriously" is important; the Confession is not licensing the believer to pry into the secret faults of every suitor, but it does forbid the joining of a godly person to one whose wickedness is public and undeniable. A profession contradicted by a notorious life is no profession at all. The third class is "such as maintain damnable heresies." Here the Divines reach the subtlest danger of the three, for a heretic may be outwardly decent, civil, even devout in his own way, and yet hold an error that destroys the soul: denying the deity of Christ, overthrowing justification by faith alone, corrupting the doctrine of the Trinity. Such errors are "damnable" because they undo the very gospel by which men are saved, and a believer may no more be one flesh with the man who denies the Lord who bought him than with the man who openly defies him. In some ways the heretic is the most dangerous bedfellow of all, for his error wears a face of piety, and the godly soul may be drawn away from the truth before it has even felt the pull. The three classes together are the unfolding of a single principle: the believer's spouse must be one who is in the Lord, in worship and in life and in doctrine alike. Observe, finally, the pastoral shape of the whole. The Confession does not forbid marriage; it forbids only a wrong marriage, and it forbids it for the soul's sake. The reason a believer must not be unequally yoked is not that the believer is too good for the world, but that the world, joined to the believer at the deepest point of life, will draw the believer away from the God he loves. The prohibition is the voice of a Father who would not see his child chained to a weight that drags him down. The Divines close the door of a wrong marriage precisely because they have thrown wide the door of a right one, and the two motions are one mercy.

Theological Depth

The duty to marry only in the Lord engaged the deepest reflection of the Reformed tradition, and the great teachers of that tradition expounded it with a tenderness and a firmness that the caricature of their supposed severity entirely misses. Calvin treats the question in his commentary on the epistles, and his reasoning is characteristically direct. On Paul's "only in the Lord" he insists that the phrase is no mere counsel but a command, and that the believer who marries an unbeliever "transgresses the commandment of God," for the marriage bond is the closest of all fellowships and it must not be contracted with one who does not share the faith. Calvin presses the image of the yoke with his usual vigour: two who are yoked together must draw in the same direction, and the believer and the infidel, however fond, are walking toward two different eternities, so that the union which should be the sweetest companionship becomes the occasion of a lifelong contention. He is no less firm on the other side, and he will not allow the doctrine to be twisted into a depreciation of marriage itself; the believer is not forbidden the estate but only the unequal bond, and the believer who marries in the Lord has the apostle's full blessing. To Calvin the command is not a fence but a protection, the guarding of a soul against the one influence that can reach it most nearly. Watson turns the same doctrine toward the heart, and his Body of Divinity is full of the sweetness of a spiritual marriage. He speaks of the godly spouse as a companion for the soul and not for the flesh alone, and he urges that the first question in the choice of a wife or husband is not whether the person is comely or wealthy or agreeable, but whether he or she is godly. Watson presses the test of prayer: two who cannot pray together are not truly one, for prayer is the breath of the soul, and a man and a woman who cannot breathe together before God will sooner or later find that they cannot truly love one another either. And he warns, with the frankness of a pastor who has seen the ruin, that the believer who marries the ungodly marries his own sorrow, not because the ungodly are to be despised, but because the deepest union of life, entered against God, becomes the deepest grief. Yet Watson's tenderness matches his firmness; he writes as one who would spare the young a wound they cannot foresee, and his pages are a father's pleading with a beloved child. A. A. Hodge, in his commentary on the Confession, gathers the section into a system with an orderliness that is itself a kind of sermon. He observes that the governing rule is "only in the Lord," and that the three classes named are the three ways in which a spouse may fall short of that rule: by a false worship, by a wicked life, or by a damnable error. Hodge is careful to insist that the believer is required to judge, not by sentiment but by evidence, whether a suitor is truly in the Lord, and that a merely nominal profession is not enough where the life and the doctrine contradict it. At the same time he explains the first clause of the section as a protest against the popish prohibition of clerical marriage, and he grounds the whole in the nature of marriage as a covenant of the closest fellowship, which requires for its right discharge a unity of spirit without which the covenant is a yoke indeed. Hodge's treatment is valuable for its precision: he will not let the believer relax the rule out of fondness, nor harden it out of pride, but holds it exactly where Scripture holds it. To these voices Turretin adds the weight of rigorous argument. In his treatment of marriage he takes up the question whether a believer may lawfully contract marriage with an infidel or a heretic, and he answers with a firm negative, grounding himself in the very texts the Confession quotes, the "only in the Lord" of Paul and the unequal yoke of Corinth. Turretin argues that the prohibition rests not upon a temporary or ceremonial law but upon the moral and abiding nature of marriage itself, which is a union of spirits as well as of bodies, so that the believer who marries an infidel is joining to himself what he cannot join to Christ. He distinguishes carefully between the Old Testament prohibition under the theocracy, which had its own civil frame, and the abiding moral principle that runs beneath it, the principle that the closest bond of life must not be contracted with one whose deepest loyalty is to another god. And he meets the objection from the patriarchs with the same answer he gives elsewhere: the sins of the saints are recorded for our warning, not for our imitation, and Solomon's fall is the standing proof that the wisest may be undone by an unequal yoke. Robert Shaw, with his accustomed economy, gathers the strands into a sentence: to marry "in the Lord" is to marry a believer, and the marriage of a believer with an infidel is "a direct violation of the divine command," forbidden not by the ceremonial but by the moral law, and therefore of perpetual obligation. Warfield adds the note of spiritual realism for which he is remembered: religion, he insisted, is the deepest thing in a man, the formative principle of his whole life, and a marriage that crosses the line of faith joins two persons who are walking in opposite directions on the one question that matters forever, so that the union which should be the deepest harmony becomes the deepest discord. The testimony of these witnesses is unanimous, and it is a beautiful thing to see the same doctrine taught in Geneva and in Puritan London, in Princeton and in the Scottish kirk: the door of marriage wide for all, and the yoke of marriage reserved for those who are one in the Lord. The tradition is unanimous because Scripture is plain, and because the God who instituted marriage has also told his people whom they may take into it.

Puritan Application

First, let every unmarried believer settle the question now, in cold blood, before the affections are engaged, that he will marry only in the Lord. The time to decide whom you may marry is not the hour when your heart is already drawn, for the heart has a genius for finding reasons to do what it longs to do. Set the principle down now, while the judgment is clear: I will not be yoked to one who is not in Christ, whatever else he may be. Write it in the place where resolves are kept, and let your closest friends know it, that when the temptation comes, and it will come, perhaps in a form as lovely as it is godless, the resolution may already be made, and you may only have to keep it. A principle settled before the trial is a wall already built; a principle improvised in the trial is a wall built of sand. Second, seek a spouse whose godliness you have observed and not merely heard professed. "In the Lord" is not a label but a life, and a life is something to be watched, not taken on trust. Look not chiefly at beauty or station or the charm that dazzles a first meeting, but at the fruit of the Spirit: does this one love Christ? does he pray, and speak of Christ as a living friend? is there in him a hatred of sin and a hunger after holiness? Is his godliness the quiet habit of his daily walk, or only a garment put on for the hour of courtship? Ask the question Watson would have you ask: could I pray with this person, and be refreshed by it? For the man or woman with whom you cannot pray is the man or woman with whom you cannot, in the deepest sense, be one. Third, guard against the unequal yoke in all its subtle forms, for it wears many disguises. The section names the infidel and the idolater and the heretic and the notoriously wicked, but the unequal yoke may be laid upon you by a far more ordinary hand: the amiable worldling who is civil and kind and entirely without God, the nominal churchgoer who has never felt the power of the gospel, the lukewarm professor who will not be moved to pray. These are the unequal yokes that actually undo most believers, not the flagrant idolater whom every conscience would refuse, but the pleasant, agreeable, spiritually empty soul who draws the believer gently down over many years. Test the deepest things early: ask about Christ, about the Scriptures, about the things of God, and do not let a sweet manner pass for a renewed heart. A yoke may be unequal though it looks very smooth. Fourth, to those already bound in an unequal yoke, receive the word of grace and not of condemnation. The Confession forbids the entering of such a marriage; it does not command the fleeing of one already entered. The apostle's counsel to the believer wedded to an unbeliever is plain: if the unbeliever is content to dwell, let the believer remain, and win the other by a quiet and godly life. The believing spouse who was joined before conversion, or who married against counsel and has repented, is not under sentence but under grace, and the grace of God is able to make a believing husband or wife a light in a dark home. Peter's word to the wives of ungodly husbands is tender beyond measure: that the husband may be won "without the word by the conversation of the wives." And many a soul has been brought to Christ by the patient, uncomplaining holiness of a spouse who did not preach but lived. Let such a one persevere in prayer, in meekness, in a life that adorns the gospel, and leave the issue with the God who is able to save to the uttermost. Fifth, let the whole church keep the gate with wisdom and with love. The duty of this section is not laid upon the young alone; it is laid upon parents, upon pastors, upon every friend who is asked for counsel. Speak the truth in season: warn the courting believer against the unequal yoke while there is yet time to withdraw; encourage the suitor whose godliness is evident; and do not be silent out of a false delicacy while a soul is being drawn toward a ruin it cannot see. But keep the gate in love, and never in the spirit of a judge. And above all, let the married believers of the church live such marriages that the young may see, in the tenderness and the unity and the shared worship of a godly home, the beauty of a union formed in the Lord, and may long for it without being told. The best defence of this doctrine is a hundred marriages in which it has borne fruit, and the watching young will learn from what they see far more than from what they hear.

Prayer

Almighty and everlasting God, who didst ordain marriage for the comfort and the increase of Thy people, and who hast commanded that those who fear Thee should be joined only to such as love Thee, we bless Thee for the mercy of this boundary and the wisdom of this command. We confess that we have too often chosen by the eye and not by the faith, that we have been drawn to what is pleasant rather than to what is godly, and that some of us have entered the yoke that Thou didst forbid, to our grief and to the grief of those we love. Forgive us, we pray Thee, for the sake of Thy Son, and lead us in the way everlasting. Grant, we beseech Thee, to every unmarried believer among Thy people a heart that is settled now to marry only in the Lord, that they may not be moved by the charm of the ungodly nor drawn by the world's standards, but may seek a companion with whom they may walk with Thee and pray with Thee and serve Thee all their days. Give them the courage to wait, and the wisdom to choose, and the grace to trust that Thou who providest the lily of the field wilt not leave Thy children to walk alone. And where an unequal yoke is already laid, O Lord, Thou who art the healer of the broken and the restorer of the years the locust hath eaten, uphold the believing spouse with Thy grace, and make of them a light in a dark home, that by a quiet and godly life the unbelieving heart may yet be won to Thee, without a word, by the beauty of a holy conversation. We thank Thee, O Father, that Thou hast set over Thine own people a marriage that cannot fail, the union of Christ and his church, in which the Bridegroom and the bride are one in a bond that sin cannot sever and death cannot touch. Help us so to order our affections, and so to keep our homes, that we and our households may be living pictures of that great mystery, and that the watching world may see in our fidelity a glimpse of Thy faithfulness. Bring us at last, one and all, to the marriage supper of the Lamb, where there shall be no unequal yoke and no divided heart, but one Bridegroom and one bride, and every tongue confessing that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father. We ask it in the name of Jesus Christ, our Lord and our beloved Bridegroom. Amen.