Defining and Redefining Marriage

Marriage can no more be “re-defined” than can gravity or honesty. Like the one, it is a design of God and so possesses an intrinsic nature. Like the other, it is a moral reality and so answers to obligations and bears consequences in the totality of human life. And yet here we are. 

Putting things in this way tells us that there will be general revelation arguments in defense of marriage, and special revelation arguments. Marriage means what its Maker meant it to be, whether viewed from the lens of natural law or of divine law. I will weave these two “books” into one, as the way that the Bible speaks about marriage is very much in keeping with our most common sense reasoning about its nature.

Marriage According to Scripture

Genesis 1:26-27; 2:18-25 is clear that God made them male and female, and that specifically in the context of this social sphere that we call marriage (cf. Matt. 19:4-6). Although this is something that becomes a type and shadow of Christ’s relationship to the church in the gospel (Eph. 5:32), it is nonetheless God’s order for all mankind because of it being set up from the beginning. Because this is true, any attempt to use sexuality in any other way violates God’s law and will result in misery.

Many people will acknowledge that marriage is as old as the Bible’s record of things, but they have never taken the time to study what God says about it. This leads to discussions about the essential attributes of marriage that ignore that specially revealed history. 

Detached from a fuller understanding of marriage, it may appear to outsiders as if the Christian doctrine is entirely concerned with functionality in society. In addition to being false, there is another disadvantage to this. If we conceive of marriage entirely in terms of childrearing (or childbearing), then it can easily become unclear why other arrangements can not do the job just as well. I won’t bore or disturb the reader with examples of potential candidates. But this should alert us to the importance of relating a holistic biblical picture of marriage to this debate.

Some may think that the historic Christian view is that marriage is only for procreation because sex is only for procreation. One then concludes that it changed only to cater to modernity. However, this may be refuted on several grounds: First, there are elements of intimate relationship for which bodily pleasure and the various ways of two souls coming together are a fitting part of God’s intended nature (cf. 1 Cor. 7:3-5). Second, we can appeal to the entire Song of Solomon, and the constant refrain not to awaken that passion before its time, implying that it has such a time. Third, the two are called one flesh in a way that represents Christ and the church (Eph. 5:33) which strains the imagination to suggest that its only function is to produce children. Finally, we would credit the devil or blind nature with too much by attributing even sensual pleasure to anyone less than God as to its designer.

Coming back to the question of root definition, we might ask: Is marriage a covenant or a contract?1 Is it primarily vocational or consensual? Is its sexual dimension merely procreational or also relational? These are the sort of questions that are explored whenever the institution of marriage is under fire in the culture around us. However, it may clarify things to first ask whether it is an “institution” at all. In other words, what if one’s definition of marriage included elements that—by definition (pun intended)—defy singular objective status?

Whether a thing is by covenant or contract may first appear to be a distinction without a difference. However, the latter may arise entirely out of bilateral and voluntaristic aims. What matters in such agreements is that they be honored. Whether one ought to enter it in the first place or recognize certain definable non-negotiables to the endeavor are relative.

In the covenants between God and man, there is an obvious unilateral starting point. And this is certainly the case in marriage. God arranged the marriage of Adam and Eve (see Gen. 2:15-25), and He did not do so by consulting with their parents. So here I mean a more abiding “arrangement” that those of culture-specific arrangements. While Roman Catholic teaching holds that marriage is a sacrament of the Church, Modernity says that marriage is merely a contract arising from the State. The former undermines both the gospel means of grace and ethics in society. If such marriages owe their foundation to the Church, and that, specifically to baptized and communicant members, well then, by resistless logic, outside the Church there are no marriages. In the Enlightenment view, there is no objective argument against the State taking with one hand what it gave with the other. 

Now if God designed marriage and if its purpose is all that the Bible tells us it is, then both its highest aims and its social ramifications are inseparable. Using any of its elements for some contrary purpose is sin that incurs God’s wrath, but also a social pathology that will lead to misery. Calling such behavior “marriage” does not make it so. Persuading the mob to enshrine such barbarism into law does no better. 

The Indefinability Problem

Let us test the following maxim: A thing that can be anything by implication is nothing in particular. This may seem unfair. After all, even the most open-ended inclusivists are not talking about anything and everything. They mean only that “Love is love,” or so they say.

When one tallies up all of the potential attributes of marriage, what might look like many different models really boils down to two. The authors of What is Marriage? (2012), Sherif Gergis, Ryan T. Anderson, and Robert P. George, compare what they call the “conjugal view” and the “revisionist view” of marriage. The former is of a comprehensive union, not only of a body and soul union, but one which is linked to child welfare and the public good. The latter is “essentially an emotional view, merely enhanced by whatever sexual activity the partners find agreeable.”2 One of the early arguments in this work is that,

“the revisionist view fails on its own terms: no coherent version of it can account for three points common to both sides of the debate: the state has an interest in regulating certain relationships; that interest exists only if the relationships are sexual; and it exists only if they are monogamous.”3

To see how this plays out, let us ask: If a “right” has been denied to “marriages” other than the traditionally-recognized, permanent, one-man one-woman union, and if this is to be understood in terms of subjective fulfillment, then it would seem that all friendships (or even pleasant acquaintances) are marriages. Of course this is not the revisionist position. Hence the second attribute: a sexual nature. Before the past few years, the next phase of the argument would typically try to avoid a slippery slope by adding “domestic care” as an attribute. Enter the authors’ “Oscar and Alfred” scenario.4 It turns out they are just old college roommates. However, they are trusting each other for medical care if one becomes ill. Are they a marriage? If not, why not?

The next step in exposing the incoherence of all this comes from asking why not three (or more)? The same indefinability problem further exposes itself. It turns out that this conception of “marriage” comes to mean anything but objective marriage. And of course (some of us knew and tried to tell you) that was the whole point—to outlaw marriage and make all children wards of the State by a slow and imperceptible march through sugar-coated irrelevancies.

Now, the authors of that book were much more methodical. However, a final step must be taken in asking why consent should count. In years gone by, the very suggestion would be met by outrage by the other side. What once was merely ignoring consent as an attribute has morphed into subtly questioning what counts for consent. The recent legislation in California to create “sanctuary states” for “gender affirming care” is nothing less than a pretext for abducting children for a mass sterilization campaign. Are we oblivious enough to think that “gender affirming” counseling in the lowest grades of school that ends in genital mutilation cannot also end in child confiscation, rape, and eventual trafficking into the sex slave industry?

Who Gains from a Redefinition?

Is anyone really surprised by this? Well, actually, yes. Many are taken off guard for no other reason than that they think “always being on guard” is very un-Christ-like. Redefining marriage may be an error, they suspect, but surely it is not all that malevolent. That’s conspiracy theory! It is at least not “a gospel issue.” And so on with many such absurd platitudes we bury our heads in the sands of pietism.

Lost in the shuffle is a more illuminating question: Who is gaining from all this? That seemed an easy question a generation ago. Even if one did not believe in such a “right,” they might still have conceded that same-sex couples are gaining certain rights and recognitions. And so the story went, and so the pastrix at Our Lady of the Misplaced Rainbow happily obliged, and some wedding photographers and cake-bakers not so happily went out of business.

Now what? If this were really about basic rights being denied, well then, why not simply change those laws? You remember the argument, don’t you? Whether tax breaks were for couples only or whether hospital visitations would be denied to “significant others” — Remember those arguments? No, of course you don’t, because they were a momentary farce meant to distract and demonize.

Think about it: What law of logic demands that only a redefinition of marriage could change the tax code or the rules of a hospital? The ruse was obvious to anyone who was not busy burning down marriage or else slobbering all over themselves to not appear insensitive to all the wrong people.

Try viewing it from another angle. Why is it that those who have consistently wanted to erase the traditional definition of marriage are the same people that would use the power of the state to end private education, private property, voluntary assembly, and free speech itself? Does that not make you the least bit curious that there might be a connection? Or are we still playing: “This has nothing to do with eternal issues.”

Like it or not, the reason for the redefinition is the same old showdown between Moses and Marx that plays out in the institutes of labor and law, education and religion. Those orders of creation that God called “good,” Marxism calls “opiate to the masses,” “false consciousness,” and yes, even “middle class prostitution.”

You see, permanent things were really—we are slowly and slyly, conditioned to believe through the revolutionary culture—the inventions of the powerful classes to keep down the masses. God’s natural design and providence were just the religious narrative to pat the exploited worker on the head, saying, “There, there: Be content with your place.” And that central place is a home. And that home really is a man’s castle, a bulwark of independent allegiance that keeps each generation resistant to the claims of the omnicompetent state.

I can remember so clearly that I can still hear both of their voices now. On the floor of the House of Representatives (probably in 1996), Republican Steve Largent and Democrat Barney Frank arguing over this very thing. Frank’s predictable objection, “What does a gay marriage have to do with your marriage? How does it hurt?” to which Largent replied, “It is that it undermines the institution of marriage.” Frank’s quick response was typical of what is still the clueless sentiment: “That argument should be made by someone who is in an institution!”

But of course Congressperson Frank was not clueless in the least. In addition to being the first openly homosexual member of the House, he was active agent of the Marxist revolution against that more permanent house that God set up before the state was ever conceived in the womb of the fallen world.

But there was Frank’s witty comeback. You’ll likely still hear it, in spite of its (one would think) now obviously exposed status. A few cheap laughs at a moment in time, and the feeling that one is in the in-crowd. But little else. A quarter century later and the proof is in the pudding—or at least the forced wedding cake. Slippery slope, they said. Love is love, they said.

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1. In God, Marriage and Family (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2004), by Andreas Kostenberger and David Jones, a chapter is devoted to the question of whether marriage is a covenant, contract, or sacrament. My purpose is not an in-depth treatment here. Suffice it to say, the Protestant view does the most justice to balancing the common grace foundation of marriage and the deeper gospel meaning of marriage.

2. Sherif Gergis, Ryan T. Anderson, and Robert P. George, What is Marriage? Man and Woman: A Defense (New York: Encounter Books, 2012), 4.

3. Gergis, Anderson, and George, What is Marriage? 15.

4. Gergis, Anderson, and George, What is Marriage? 16-17.