Devotional 130: The Consent of Parents: Marriage Requires Parental Approval

The Confession Read

Marriage ought not to be within the degrees of consanguinity or affinity forbidden in the Word. Nor can such incestuous marriages ever be made lawful by any law of man or consent of parties, so as those persons may live together as man and wife.

— Westminster Confession of Faith, Chapter 24, Section 4

Introduction

A single sentence cost a prophet his head. When Herod Antipas took his brother Philip's wife, John the Baptist spoke eleven words that a king could not bear to hear: "It is not lawful for thee to have thy brother's wife." Those words were not a matter of taste, nor of opinion, nor of the shifting manners of a court; they were the voice of an unchanging law, and for speaking them John was cast into prison and at last beheaded at the bidding of a dancing girl. Few doctrines in all the Scripture have been sealed with blood so plainly. Yet the very sentence that cost John his life is the sentence set before us now, for it is nothing other than the teaching of this section of the Confession: that marriage must not be contracted within the degrees of kinship that God has forbidden, whether of blood or of marriage, and that no power on earth can make such a union lawful. We have been walking, section by section, through the doctrine of marriage. We have seen what marriage is, the union of one man and one woman in one flesh for life; we have seen what it is for, the four great ends for which God ordained it; and we have seen who may enter it, all sorts of people, but believers only in the Lord. Now the Confession turns to a quieter but no less searching question, the question of the boundary. Marriage has a wide gate, but it does not open in every direction. There are certain persons whom a man or a woman may not marry, not because they are unworthy or unloved or unwilling, but because they are too near; and the nearness itself, which ought to be a blessing, becomes the very reason the union is forbidden. It is a strange and searching thing to be told that love, that most praised of human affections, has a boundary it must not cross; but Scripture says it, and says it plainly, and the Confession repeats it without apology: there are degrees of kinship, of blood and of marriage, within which marriage may not be contracted. Our age will hear this and reach at once for the word it uses of everything it does not like. It will call the doctrine arbitrary, or outdated, or cruel, as though the God who is love had drawn the line out of a caprice of severity. But the truth is nearer the opposite, and it is this that the Confession would have us see: the boundary is not the enemy of love but its guardian. God, who planted the affections of the family in the human heart, knows better than we do what those affections are for, and where they cease to be a shelter and become a snare. The love of a father for a daughter, of a brother for a sister, of a mother for her son, is a pure and precious thing, one of the sweetest mercies of this present life; and it is precisely because it is precious that God has hedged it about, that it may never be turned into the very thing that would destroy it. The section before us is not a fence against joy but a wall around a garden, and the God who built the wall built it to keep a pure love pure. Let us look, then, at the line God has drawn, and at the mercy that lies hidden within it.

Scripture Foundation

The doctrine of this section is not an invention of the Westminster Divines. It is drawn from the plain words of God, and it has its fountainhead in a chapter of Leviticus that many a reader hurries past and does well to linger over, for there, in the very heart of the law, God himself draws the map of the family's affections and marks which of them may become marriage and which may not. The governing text is Leviticus 18:6: "None of you shall approach to any that is near of kin to him, to uncover their nakedness: I am the LORD." Every word of that sentence is loaded. The phrase "near of kin" renders the Hebrew she'er basar, literally "the flesh of his flesh"; it is the language of kinship at its nearest, the blood that runs in two persons from one spring. And the phrase "to uncover their nakedness," the Hebrew ervah, is the Bible's own idiom for the intimacy of marriage, the drawing near of two persons in the closest of all unions. So the command is this: within the circle of the family, where the flesh is one flesh, there is a certain drawing near that is forbidden, not because the persons are base but because they are near. The very bond that binds them is the reason the union is barred. And mark the seal God sets upon the command: "I am the LORD." The prohibition does not rest on custom or convenience or the prudence of a tribe; it rests on the character of the God who gave it, and to set it aside is to set aside him who spoke it. From that single principle the chapter descends into the particular cases, and it names the degrees one by one. Leviticus 18:8: "The nakedness of thy father's wife shalt thou not uncover: it is thy father's nakedness." Here is the first degree of affinity, the stepmother, who is forbidden not because she is of the man's own blood but because she is one flesh with his father; her nearness is a borrowed nearness, yet it is as real as if the blood were his own. The same reasoning runs through the list, which forbids the sister and the half-sister, the granddaughter, the aunt by blood, the uncle's wife, the daughter-in-law, the brother's wife, and a woman and her daughter together. Some of these are degrees of consanguinity, the nearness of blood; others are degrees of affinity, the nearness created by marriage; and the law holds them together with one reasoning, because in the eyes of God the two are of one kind. The circle of the family, whether entered by birth or by marriage, is a circle within which marriage may not be contracted. That the degree of affinity is real and abiding, and not merely a shadow of the old dispensation, is established by the New Testament itself, and in the most costly way. Mark 6:17-18 records that Herod had married Herodias, his brother Philip's wife, "For John had said unto Herod, It is not lawful for thee to have thy brother's wife." Here the Baptist applies the Levitical degree to a Jewish king under the gospel era, and he applies it without the least hesitation, as a law still in force, a law of God and not of Moses only. Herodias was not Herod's kin by blood; she was his brother's wife, and the nearness that marriage had made between Herod and his brother extended to his brother's wife. John lost his head for saying it, but he said it, and the church has always heard in his martyrdom the voice of God declaring that the forbidden degrees bind all men and all ages. A law that a prophet would die rather than soften is no small thing, and it is set before us in Scripture that we may not think lightly of it. And lest any suppose that the church may quietly set the whole matter aside as a relic of the old covenant, the apostle Paul raises it in the very body of a Christian congregation. 1 Corinthians 5:1: "It is reported commonly that there is fornication among you, and such fornication as is not so much as named among the Gentiles, that one should have his father's wife." The word "fornication" is the Greek porneia, and it names the union of the man with his stepmother as an uncleanness so gross that even the heathen, without the written law, recoiled from it. But Paul does not merely blush at it; he rebukes the church for tolerating it, and he delivers the man to Satan for the destruction of the flesh, that the spirit may be saved in the day of the Lord Jesus. Here is the doctrine of the section standing in the light of the gospel: the forbidden degrees are not ceremonial but moral, they bind the Christian no less than the Israelite, and a church that is ashamed to enforce them has forgotten what God has forbidden. The Baptist died for this doctrine; the apostle judged a church for neglecting it. Between the martyrdom and the censure stands the whole weight of the matter, and the Confession simply records what Scripture has never ceased to teach.

What the Divines Meant

When the Westminster Divines wrote this section they had a specific controversy before their eyes, and it was not an academic one. It was the controversy that had, within living memory of their grandfathers, torn the church of England from the see of Rome. The question was whether the degrees of kinship, and in particular the degrees of affinity, could be set aside by the authority of a man; and the answer the Confession gives is an unqualified no. The case that hung over the whole controversy was that of King Henry VIII and Catherine of Aragon. Catherine had first been married to Henry's elder brother Arthur, and when Arthur died young, Henry sought and obtained from the pope a dispensation to marry his brother's widow. The Levitical law seemed to forbid it, for a man was not to take his brother's wife; but Rome claimed the power to dispense, to loose what God had bound, and the marriage was solemnized under that claimed authority. Years later, when Henry sought to have the marriage dissolved, the question turned again on whether the union had ever been lawful in the first place. The whole Reformation in England was, in one of its roots, a quarrel over precisely this section of the Confession: whether the degrees of affinity are the law of God, which no man may alter, or a rule of the church, which the church may bend. The Divines answer with a settled firmness born of that long quarrel. Marriage, they say, "ought not to be within the degrees of consanguinity or affinity forbidden in the Word"; and then, turning to the very claim that had begun it all, "nor can such incestuous marriages ever be made lawful by any law of man or consent of parties." Observe the two powers the Confession denies, for they are the two powers that every age will appeal to when it wishes to do what God has forbidden. The first is the law of man. No parliament, no prince, no council, no church court can make lawful what God has made unlawful. A human legislature may write a statute that calls such a union marriage; it may even punish those who refuse to bless it; but it cannot touch the reality, for the law of God is not repealed by the votes of men, and what God calls incest remains incest though every nation on earth should smile upon it. The second is the consent of the parties. This is the subtler error, and the more seductive in an age that has made consent the highest law of all. Two persons may love one another sincerely, may wish only each other's good, may be joined by every affection the heart can know; and yet if they are within the forbidden degrees, their consent cannot sanctify the union. Love, which is a beautiful thing, is not a license to cross the line God has drawn; for love itself, when it is set against the command of God, becomes the occasion of the very sorrow it meant to flee. The Confession will not let either the state or the heart dethrone the Word of God, and it closes with the plain consequence: such persons may not live together as man and wife. There is a further precision in the section that deserves to be marked, and it is the joining of the two words "consanguinity and affinity." Consanguinity is the nearness of blood, the kinship of parent and child, brother and sister, uncle and niece, that is written in the very frame of our bodies. Affinity is the nearness that marriage itself creates, the kinship by which a man's wife's sister becomes his sister, and his son's wife becomes his daughter. The Divines set the two side by side as one principle, and in doing so they are guarding the deep logic that runs through all of Scripture. When God made the man and the woman one flesh, he made their kindred one kindred; the union that binds husband and wife binds their families together, so that the nearness of a wife's kin becomes the nearness of the husband's own. It is for this reason that the law forbids a man to marry his wife's sister as surely as it forbids him to marry his own. The one-flesh union is not a private arrangement between two persons only; it is a joining of houses, and the boundary that guards the family by blood must guard the family by marriage as well. The Confession's two words are not two separate rules but one rule stated in its fullness. Yet for all its firmness, the section is not a cold thing, and it must not be read as though the Divines took pleasure in forbidding. They were pastors as well as doctors, and they knew that the boundary they drew was drawn for the soul's good. The reason a man may not marry his daughter is not that his daughter is worthless but that she is dear; the affection between them is a thing God himself planted, and it is to be kept in its pure and holy kind, not turned into the one relation that would defile it. The boundary is the shape of mercy. A family in which the natural affections are reverenced and kept pure is a refuge; a family in which they are kindled into something else is a ruin. The Divines drew the line, in the last analysis, to keep the family a family, and to keep love the beautiful thing God made it to be.

Theological Depth

The doctrine of the forbidden degrees engaged the deepest reflection of the Reformed tradition, and the great teachers of that tradition expounded it with a reasoning that reaches down to the very foundations of the family. Calvin treats the matter in his harmony of the law, and he does so with a characteristic boldness: the degrees of consanguinity and affinity are not a device of Moses but a law of nature, written into the very constitution of the family before ever a word of Scripture was set down. The heathen nations, he observes, recoiled from incest without any written commandment, because the natural reverence of the child for the parent, and of the brother for the sister, is a thing so deeply planted that even fallen man feels the horror of turning it to lust. God did not invent the boundary at Sinai; he published there what he had written in the human heart at the creation, and the law of Moses simply declares in words what nature had always whispered. For Calvin the prohibited degrees are not arbitrary, not a matter of hygiene or of the accident of custom, but the expression of a natural order: there are affections that belong to one kind of love and not to another, and to confuse the kinds is to unmake the family at its root. The son who approaches his mother with the desire that belongs only to a husband has not merely broken a rule; he has overturned the very order of creation, and in doing so he has injured the one person he was most bound to reverence. Calvin will not let the doctrine be softened into a matter of taste, nor hardened into a bare taboo; it is a law of nature that God has graciously published, and the church that forsakes it forsakes the very grain of the world. Turretin takes up the question with the rigor of a man trained in controversy, and he asks precisely the question that our own age most needs answered: are these degrees moral or ceremonial? For if they were ceremonial, they would have passed away with the shadows of the old covenant, and a Christian might marry his sister without scruple. Turretin answers that they are moral, and therefore perpetual, and he proves it from the very texts the Confession rests upon. The apostle Paul, writing to a Christian church, judged a man for taking his father's wife as an uncleanness not so much as named among the Gentiles; but if the degree were ceremonial, Paul would have had no ground for the censure, and the church of Corinth would have had no sin to be rebuked for. The law that Paul enforced was not the shadow but the substance, the abiding moral will of God, and it binds the Gentile as surely as the Jew, the Christian as surely as the Israelite, because it is rooted in the nature of the family and not in the ceremonies of a particular people. Turretin then turns to the second great question, the one that had convulsed England: whether any man, even the pope, may dispense from these degrees. He answers with an unhesitating negative. God alone is Lord of the conscience, and God alone set the boundary of marriage; no authority, however exalted, may loose what God has bound, and the claim to do so is not a liberty but a usurpation. To Turretin the whole dispute is a test of the first commandment, a question of whether the church will bow to God or to the power that would speak for God. The section before us is, in his hands, a bulwark of the very doctrine of the sufficiency of Scripture. A. A. Hodge, in his commentary on the Confession, gathers the strands into a system, and he is especially helpful on the single point that most readers miss: the equality of affinity with consanguinity. The ground of the whole doctrine, he insists, is the one-flesh union. When a man and a woman are married, Scripture declares that they are no more twain but one flesh, and by that union the man is brought into such a relation to his wife's kindred as he bears to his own. Her mother becomes his mother, her sister his sister, her daughter his daughter, because they are hers, and she is one with him. The prohibition therefore rests not on a scruple about blood but on the sacredness of the union itself; the man who would marry his wife's sister does injury to the very bond that made her his wife's sister. Hodge draws from this the pastoral conclusion that the degrees are to be reverenced in their full extent, for to narrow them is to narrow the sacredness of marriage itself. And he is careful to add what the Confession itself implies, that the question is not one for the state or the heart to settle but for the Word of God alone, which has named the degrees and named them once for all. Robert Shaw, with his accustomed economy, gathers the whole into a sentence that has the weight of a closing argument: the degrees of consanguinity and affinity forbidden in the Word are determined by the moral law, and therefore no human authority, civil or ecclesiastical, can make such marriages lawful; the consent of the parties, however full, cannot sanctify what God has declared unclean. And Watson, turning the doctrine as he always does toward the heart, sets the whole matter in the light of the purity that befits the people of God: if the marriage bed is to be undefiled, the boundary around the family must be kept with a holy jealousy, for a people who reverence the degrees of kinship show themselves to be a people who reverence the God who set them. The testimony of these witnesses is one, and it is a beautiful thing to see the same doctrine taught in Geneva and in Princeton and in the Scottish kirk, not because the church devised it but because the Word declares it. The degrees of marriage are the guard of the family, and the guard of the family is the guard of all that is holy in the common life of men.

Puritan Application

First, reverence the natural affections of your own family, and keep them in the pure kind in which God gave them. The love of a parent for a child, of a brother for a sister, is one of the sweetest mercies of this life, a gift planted by God to be a shelter and a joy. But it is a gift that must be kept in its own channel, for the same affection that blesses when it is reverenced becomes a corruption when it is kindled into what it was never meant to be. Guard the tenderness of your home with a holy reserve. Let there be warmth without familiarity, closeness without the loosening of the boundaries that make the warmth safe. A family in which the natural affections are held in reverence is a garden enclosed; a family in which they are allowed to wander is a garden whose wall is broken down. Ask yourself whether the affection of your home is the pure thing God made it, and pray that it may remain so to the end. Second, extend the same reverence to your kin by marriage, for they are truly your kin. The one-flesh union that bound you to your spouse bound you also to your spouse's family, and the nearness that blood would have given is given no less truly by marriage. Treat your wife's mother as a mother, your husband's brother as a brother, and let the same reserve that guards your own kindred guard your kindred by marriage. This is a duty easy to forget, for the affection we bear our in-laws is often less warm than the affection we bear our blood; but the boundary is not measured by the warmth of our feeling but by the nearness God has made. The man who would treat his wife's sister as no kin to him has forgotten what it means that he and his wife are one flesh. Honour the whole circle of the family God has given you, whether by birth or by marriage, and keep its boundaries with a jealous care. Third, hold the line of this doctrine against a world that has forgotten it, and hold it with tears and not with triumph. Our age has redefined nearly every boundary, and it is now common to hear the degrees of kinship spoken of as relics of a superstition, and the love of two consenting persons exalted as a law above every law. Do not be surprised that the world thinks so, and do not answer it with scorn. But neither be moved by it. No law of man, no consent of the heart, can make incest lawful; the vote of a parliament cannot unmake the word of God, and the sincerity of two persons cannot turn a forbidden union into a holy one. When the question is pressed upon you, speak the truth plainly and gently, as John spoke to Herod, whatever it may cost; and remember that the truth spoken in love is a mercy, however unwelcome it may be to the hearer. The church that loves its neighbours most is the church that tells them the truth about the line God has drawn. Fourth, let those whose homes are already tangled by these sorrows receive the word of grace, and not of condemnation. It may be that some who read these words bear a wound that no section of a Confession can neatly bind: a home broken and re-formed, a union entered in ignorance or in defiance, a family in which the degrees have been crossed and cannot now be uncrossed. To such the Word of God does not come only as law but as gospel. The law that forbids the crossing does not undo what has been done, nor is the sinner beyond the reach of the grace that reaches to the uttermost. There is a fountain opened for sin and for uncleanness, and it is open for these sins as for every other. Let the wounded flee to it. Let those who have crossed the line repent, and rest, and by the grace of God order what remains of their lives in the fear of the Lord; and let the church receive the penitent with the tenderness of him who said to the woman, Neither do I condemn thee; go, and sin no more. The doctrine of the degrees is a hedge to keep men from a fall, not a sword to destroy those who have fallen. Fifth, and above all, lift your eyes from the family of blood to the family of grace, and find there the deepest ground of every pure affection. The earthly family, with all its holy boundaries, is a picture of a greater family into which we have been adopted through Christ. We were by nature strangers and afar off, and yet God, in his astonishing mercy, has brought us near; he has made us his children, and Christ is not ashamed to call us brethren. There is a kinship in the church closer than blood, a brotherhood of those who are one in the Spirit, and in that family every affection is pure and every love is safe, for it is ordered by the Spirit and not by the flesh. This is why we keep the boundaries of the earthly family: not as an end in themselves, but that the family may remain the pure picture God meant it to be, a sign of the holy household into which we have been gathered. And when we fall, and we all fall, we have this comfort, that the family of grace is not kept by our keeping but by the faithfulness of him who has loved us, and that nothing in all creation shall separate us from the love of God which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.

Prayer

Almighty and everlasting God, who didst ordain the family, and who hast drawn the degrees of kinship within which marriage may not be contracted, we bless Thee for the boundary Thou hast set, for it is the guard of the affections Thou Thyself hast planted, and a mercy hidden within a commandment. Forgive us, we pray Thee, that we have so often thought lightly of Thy law, that we have been ashamed of its plainness, and that we have too readily let the manners of the age loosen what Thou hast bound. Grant, we beseech Thee, to every household among Thy people the grace to reverence the affections of the family, that the love of parent and child, of brother and sister, may be kept in the pure and holy kind in which Thou didst give it, and may never be turned to the thing that would defile it. Extend the same reverence to our kin by marriage, that we may honour the whole circle of the family Thou hast given us, and keep its boundaries with a jealous care. Give us courage to speak Thy truth plainly and gently in a world that has forgotten it, and keep us from the spirit of triumph, that we may hold the line with tears and not with scorn. And where the line has been crossed, O Lord, Thou who art the healer of the broken and the restorer of the years the locust hath eaten, open to the penitent the fountain that cleanseth from all sin, and give them grace to order what remains of their lives in Thy fear, and to walk henceforth in newness of life. Receive them, we pray Thee, as Thou didst receive the woman at the well, with a word of grace and not of condemnation. We thank Thee, O Father, that Thou hast brought us, who were strangers and afar off, into the nearest of all families, that we are now Thy children and Christ is not ashamed to call us brethren. Help us so to keep our earthly homes that they may be living pictures of that holy household, and that the watching world may see in our purity a glimpse of Thine. And bring us at last, one and all, into that family of glory where every affection is pure and every love is safe, where we shall be forever with the Lord, and where the home Thou hast prepared for Thy people shall never be broken. We ask it in the name of Jesus Christ, our elder Brother and our Lord. Amen.