booklogging

Just Cohabiting? The Church, Sex and Getting Married: Duncan James Dormor: Amazon.co.uk: Books
This is a slim volume which does what the title suggests by looking at the matter from some historical perspectives, a little biblical theology and some contemporary cultural analysis. It is based in Britain and takes British figures and the Church of England's official reports as primary data. It certainly can't be the last word on the matter, but it does have some important insights.

I'm left thinking that the most important things that this book presents are as follows. We are given some guidance as to how marriage tended to work in Roman society in the first Christian centuries and in particular to what was regarded as constituting marriage, the place of sex, procreation, social status, extended family and so forth. In the course of this exposition of late classical marriage we uncover the matter of the importance in Roman law was consent and that this is what Roman law has bequeathed to western Christian understandings of weddings and marriage. We also discover at least two forms of marriage and some forms of quasi marriage in Graeco-Roman society. We are also led to consider the development of marriage, and in so doing discover that marriage has often been about family, dynasty, property more than the relatively modern preoccupation with love. Equality (in terms of station in life, family class etc) was a concern in Roman law and that Augustine of Hippo (whose influence on such matters has been very big) reckoned that what made a marriage a marriage was not so much mutual society (important in later eras, including our own) but procreative intent.

This serves to remind us that the late classical platonising culture tended to be suspicious of the bodily and material and that because of the perceived moral seriousness of this strand of Graeco-Roman culture, Christians tended to adopt this and interpret their own scriptures with that perspective to the fore. Such a perspective contrasts with the more Hebraic affirmation of the somatic and of the importance of sexual union as a good thing in itself.

The upshot of this is to see that the notion of marriage in relation to matters of sharing a house, entering a sexual union and raising a family, has tended to be a bit more blurry than we often seem to think. Dormor gives a brief history of the way that in England marriage was registered by the state in the late 1700s and that at the time this was seen to be something of an intrusion into private matters, by some at least, and brought a variety of marriage-by-recognition-as-such forms to an end. Some of these seem to have been remarkably similar to what we would now see in cohabitation, particularly where joint economic ties are embraced and children come along.

Dormor also examines the effect of the 1960s -or more precisely the effect of relatively reliable contraception. This began to push apart the connection between childbearing and sexual experience and so the arguments relying on the connection between sex and procreation began to seem worn and implausible. In addition the cultural distrust of institutions has eroded the felt-importance of 'a bit of paper' registering a marriage or partnership. Nevertheless, there is considerable evidence to suggest the continuing importance in popular consciousness of marriage or marriage-like partnerships.

The book doesn't really offer a way forward except to suggest that we acknowledge that society at large has moved away from the formal and institutional towards the informal, but that this is a place that the church has been before, when it only solemnised marriages in the form of weddings and that the legal aspects are only part of the matter but that we seem to have made them primary. There is a call in the book for considering afresh the recognition of betrothal and an implicit call to think again about the complex of things that make a marriage in terms of how the church takes them on board.

Labels: culture, ethics, theology