Diocesan Resources
Acquire a Wife in Holiness and Honor: Christian Marriage in the New Testament by Prof. Pheme Perkins (2006)
Acquire a Wife in Holiness and Honor: Christian Marriage in the New Testament by Prof. Pheme Perkins, Boston College
First century Christians lived in a world where marriages were contractual arrangements between families, not personal choice. High mortality rates and easy divorce made it likely that individuals would marry more than once. For slaves, former slaves and others from the laboring class, marriage in the full legal sense was not possible. Many of the first Christians who heard Paul’s teaching on marriage may have been living in family relationships that were technically not marriage but concubinage. Though governed by Mosaic law and tradition, Jewish marriages were also a matter of legal contract and social custom much like their non-Jewish contemporaries.
Examples for the Pauline letters provide glimpses of how Christians began to redefine marriage. Two considerations played a key role: (a) Jesus’ criticism of divorce as a concession to human weakness, not God’s intention in creating male and female; (b) recognition of the communal body of Christ and the physical bodies of its members as a zone of holiness in which God’s Spirit is present. Paul’s moral instruction asks his converts to conduct themselves with the holiness appropriate to persons worshipping in a temple. Marriages that included the sexual fidelity of partners to one another are part of that holiness (1 Thess 4:3-8; 1 Cor 7:1-5).
Pauline letters seek to regulate actual situations of celibacy, divorce, marriage and widowhood as they impacted local churches (1 Cor 5-7; 1 Tim 5). In seeking a renewed appreciation of the sacrament of marriage in the 21st century, we would do well to distinguish between such immediate pastoral regulations and the larger vision of Christian holiness as lived in the Spirit-filled Body of Christ.