The theology of Christian marriage

Go take a gander at Khanya on his paper entitled "Marriage: an Orthodox view." It begins ...

A couple of years ago, when our Constitutional Court was considering the question of homosexual marriage, I was asked by my bishop, His Eminence Metropolitan Seraphim, Archbishop of Johannesburg and Pretoria, to prepare a short paper on Christian marriage. In view of the confusion and conflicting opinions and controversies among other Christian groups on the topic, I thought it might be useful to post something on the Orthodox understanding of marriage.

This doesn’t deal directly with the question considered by the Constitutional Court, but rather focuses on the theology of Christian mariage from an Orthodox point of view. I did blog about the Constitutional Court question and homosexual marriage here: Notes from underground: The State should get out of the marriage business.

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The Christian understanding of marriage, therefore, is primarily in relation to the Eucharist, which is the sacrament of all these things. In the early Church there was no separate marriage ceremony. Married couples brought their life together into the Church by participating together in the Eucharist. The development of a separate marriage service is basically an extension of this.

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The marriage is not simply between the couple themselves, but there is a third person present, Christ Himself. If their life together is to be a “little church”, then it cannot be without Christ who said “without me you can do nothing”. So everything in the service is done in threes: the rings and crowns are blessed three times, and the Dance of Isaiah is a triple circling of the analogion. And their marriage is a preaching without words, a preaching whose content, like that of the apostles and martyrs, is the consubstantial Trinity.

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The Orthodox Church believes that marriage is intrinsically and ontologically based on the union of two human beings, one male and the other female. Though this has become distorted in human society as a result of the fall, the aim of Christian sacramental marriage is to express and make present the promise of its restoration. Natural marriage has the potential of being restored in this way, as shown in the dual rite of Betrothal and Crowning.

There is, however, no way that a “marriage” between two persons of the same sex can be seen in this way. In the view of the Church such a union is not a marriage at all.

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Complete article here.