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The story of God’s people in the Bible shows that marriage, as the church came to understand it, had a long history of development. For example, while the marriage of Ruth and Boaz (Ruth 4) may look in some respects fairly familiar to us, Jacob’s marriage to both Leah and Rachel at the same time (Genesis 29.15-35) looks strange. We will see later in the book how the practice of distinctively Christian marriage has changed over history. The Church discerned in the Hebrew Scriptures a stable form of marriage even amidst the changing practices of Israel. Secure in its roots, the Christian understanding of marriage has been sufficiently supple to respond to changing cultures, and suitably rich in meaning to allow God’s gift to be received in different ages, even if its purposes have been lived out with greater clarity at some times more than others. Like every form of life, it needs always to be shaped more deeply by the liberating gift of God’s love that brings us into fulness of life.

Jesus, quoting the Book of Genesis, traced the roots of marriage to ‘the beginning’ (Matthew 19.4,8).

Have you not read that the one who made them at the beginning ‘made them male and female’, and said, ‘For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh’? So they are no longer two but one flesh. Therefore what God has joined together, let no one separate. (Matthew 19.4-6)

This is why the church’s liturgy describes marriage as ‘a gift of God in creation’.⁸ It is a gift given to bring life and to give life. God wants us to live fully and offers us ways to live that draw on God’s life of love. The joining of a man and woman in marriage is a gift given together with the gift of humanity itself. It is a gift given ‘at the beginning’ – before God’s people Israel were formed, before the law arrived and even before sin came. It is a gift given to all peoples. The Church of England has resisted practising marriage in a way that is inaccessible to those who are not baptized and active followers of Jesus Christ. Rather it has wanted to help everyone who enters into marriage to do so more truly and deeply – to receive more fully the gift that God has given.

Marriage’s form, as described by Jesus, is the union of a man and a woman, and one that is intended to last for life. That is why the church’s ‘canons’ (its laws), echoing the liturgies which have been heard in our land for centuries, say that ‘Marriage is in its nature a union permanent and lifelong, for better for worse, till death them do part, of one man with one woman, to the exclusion of all others on either side’.⁹ Marriage is defined by mutuality (sharing life) and fruitfulness (bringing life), characteristics belonging also to the wider framework of relationships we explored in the last chapter. As the 1958 Lambeth Conference affirmed, marriage is ‘a vocation to holiness, through which men and women share in the love and creative purpose of God’.¹⁰

This description of marriage is very close to one offered in the fifth century by St Augustine. Augustine spoke of fides, faithfulness, and proles, offspring, as the goods or gifts of marriage, believing that they belong to the character of marriage and are the gifts that it brings for the good of humanity. He also spoke of marriage as sacramentum, referring to the lifelong pledge between husband and wife, which echoes or points to God’s love for the Church – a theme we will explore more fully below.¹¹ The Church’s teaching and liturgies over the years, including those of the Church of England, have worked with these three foundational goods of marriage in different ways, sometimes emphasizing one more than others. Nevertheless, in one way or another they have remained the basis of the Christian understanding of marriage.