Pauline Perspective on Marital Unity and Fidelity
In the context of
degrading sexuality and family life, how do we understand and live out
Christian marriage and family life and esteem the sacredness associated with
it? Family is the most essential and important unit of a society and of the
Church. Marital union and fidelity is held sacred and honoured in India and in
the Church. As per the promise, marital commitment should be faithfully
observed by both partners till the end of their life. Children have the right
to live under a harmonious and responsible parentage as it is a must for their
constructive growth as persons.
In this paper, I am trying
to investigate into the contributions of St
Paul towards marital unity and fidelity. In the
letters of Paul, he constantly exhorts the primacy of marriage and we should
pay heed to the valuable lessons on marriage from these letters. Through
baptism we are sanctified and raised to the sphere of God’s holiness (I Cor.
1:2). In baptism we accept Jesus Christ and thus become children of God,
freeing ourselves from the clutches of original sin. The sacrament of marriage
is in a special way a participation in the sanctifying service of Christ (Eph.
5:26). This sanctification includes two elements: being taken into the service
of God and his work in creation and redemption and being made inwardly capable
of carrying out that service by sanctifying grace. So married couples are, in
their love for and faithfulness to each other included in the love and
faithfulness of God in Jesus Christ, with the result that their love for each
other is an effective and fulfilled sign of the love of God.
God who created human
persons out of love also calls them to love one another; which is the
fundamental and innate vocation of every human being. For man is created in the
image and likeness of God (Gen. 1:27a) who is Himself love. Since God created
him man and woman (Gen. 1:27b), their mutual love becomes an image of the
absolute and unfailing love with which God loves man. It is good, indeed very
good, in the Creator's eyes as it is only human beings who are able to respond
to this revelatory love of God by loving God and loving one another. And this
love which God blesses is intended to be fruitful and to be realized in the
common work of watching over creation: "And God blessed them, and God said
to them: 'be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it (Gen 1:28).'"[2] He
thus made man and woman the steward of the whole creation. In the letter to Timothy,
St Paul exhorts
the sanctity of marriage as it is created by God (1 Tim. 4:3-4).
The man-woman dualism is
very strong in the letters of Paul. He does not treat them as one entity. So we
need to treat them as two separate realms of existence to understand marital
unity and fidelity from the Pauline perspective.
Many scholars have labelled
Paul as anti-woman. They cite ample instances where the women are given a very
submissive role in his letters (1 Cor. 11:3-16, 1 Cor. 14:34-35, Col 3:18-19,
Eph 5:22-33 and 1 Tim.2:11-12). However, we should understand them with the
then socio-cultural setting and the influence of Greco-Roman thought. When Paul
speaks of man as the head of his wife, he actually communicates the fact that
woman originates from the rib of the man (Gen. 2-22). Indirectly Paul indicates
man’s duty to take care of the woman and not to master over her. Aspects of
woman’s silence, head covering, and submission to husband were cultural
elements of Paul’s time and that Paul never wanted the ‘new Way’ to contradict
these cultural elements.[3]
Paul brings equality
between husbands and wives by bringing the aspect of mutuality. The relationships - (a) in the Trinity, (b)
between husband and wife, and (c) between Christ and individual believers (or
Church) - are analogous to each other. Each of these relationships points to
the unity of individual believers and the Church with Christ and with the
Father. In 1 Cor. 7:4, we see that Christian marriage is portrayed as the
epitome of mutuality. Neither
spouse owns her or his own body; that body belongs to the other spouse and to
them both jointly (Eph. 5:28-30).
Equality between a wife and husband produces the
most intimate, wholesome and mutually fulfilling marriages. St. Paul
The interdependence of man and woman is
exemplified by Paul in choosing woman disciples, deacons and preachers (Rom.
Marital union (communion) constitutes the
foundation on which the broader communion of the family, of parents and
children, of brothers and sisters with each other, of relatives and other
members of the household are built.
God created human beings
as man and woman and the Bible tells us that this was good, even very good (Gen
1:27, 31).The bond that God wanted to establish between man and woman is an
image of God’s covenant with humans that was definitively concluded in Jesus
Christ and a likeness of God’s love and faithfulness for humans is also
reflected in the marital commitment between a man and woman (Eph. 5:21-33).
From this we can conclude that marriage belongs to the order of creation and to
the order of redemption. So marriage between Christian, as a real aspect of
God’s creation, is also a real aspect of God’s salvation. As Paul, speaks about
the unfailing love of Jesus, each husband /wife should be able to say, “Who can
separate me from the love of my wife/husband? Will hardship, or distress, or
persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword? (Rom. 8:35)
The most all-embracing
form of personal bond between man and woman is marriage. The relationship of
the believers to Christ is at once more intimate and more profound: intimate
because the bond is so strong, so powerful; profound because “the two are” not
just “one flesh” but because the “body” has become the residence, indeed the
temple, of the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit resides in the believers in such a
way that their bodies, their very selves, have been transformed into a shrine
dedicated to God, who gave them the Holy Spirit and thereby constituted them a
temple (1 Cor. 6:15-17). The wife is
like her husband's own body (Eph. 5:30–32).
Just as Christ loves the
Church as a Church of sinners, purifies it and makes it holy, so too must
married couples accept each other again and again with all their conflicts, in
all their dissatisfactions and with all their guilt. Accomplished by Christ's
self-giving love, husbands should love their wives with similar devotion. The
letter to the Ephesians does not imply that husbands are agents of holiness for
their wives. Holiness comes to individual Christians through their
incorporation into the body of Christ. However, the audience might assume that
husbands are responsible for instructing their wives in holiness (1 Cor.
14:34-35). The relationship between husband and wife modelled upon Christ's
self-sacrificing love indicates a constant concern on the husband's part for
her well-being that is not part of other hierarchical relationships in the household.
The wives are to respect their husbands and the husbands are to love their
wives and never to treat them harshly (Col
3:19). The husbands and wives should give each other their conjugal rights (1
Cor. 7:3).
For this is the will of God, your sanctification, that you abstain from
sexual immorality; that each one of you know how to take a wife for himself in
holiness and honor, not in the passion of lust like heathen who do not know God
(1 Thes. 4:3-5). Paul warns that sexual immorality among the couples defile the
Church (1 Cor. 5). Paul enumerates the works of flesh in which sexual
sins and impurities takes primacy and fruits of spirit in which love takes
primacy (Gal. 5:16-26) thus exhorting us to uphold purity in marriage (2 Tim.
2:22).
When married life is lived
with sanctification and devoid of sexual immoralities we live a life pleasing
to God (1 Thes.4:3-7). Paul exhorts that God has called us to holiness not to
impurity.
Marital faithfulness is
both a symbol that points to a reality beyond itself and a participation in the
faithfulness of God. By its very nature conjugal love requires the inviolable
fidelity of the spouses. The deepest reason is found in the fidelity of God to
his covenant, in that of Christ to his Church. Through the sacrament of
Matrimony the spouses are enabled to represent this fidelity and witness to it.
Through the sacrament, the indissolubility of marriage receives a new and deeper
meaning.[4]
Being rooted in
the personal and total self-giving of the couple and being required by the good
of the children, the indissolubility of marriage finds its ultimate truth in
the plan that God has manifested in his revelation: He wills and he communicates
the indissolubility of marriage as a fruit, a sign and a requirement of the
absolutely faithful love that God has for man and that the Lord Jesus has for
the Church.[5]
The shared responsibility
of the partners for their children is the essential argument for the
indissolubility of marriage. The love of the spouses requires, of its very
nature, the unity and indissolubility of the spouses' community of persons,
which embraces their entire life: "so they are no longer two, but one
flesh (Eph. 5:31b)." They “are called to grow continually in their
communion through day-to-day fidelity to their marriage promise of total mutual
self-giving." This human communion is confirmed, purified, and completed
by communion in Jesus Christ, given through the sacrament of Matrimony. It is
deepened by lives of the common faith and by the Eucharist received together.[6]
Indissolubility depends on in the sacramentality of marriage in such a manner
that Christ and the Church cannot be separated as Church is the body of Christ
(Eph. 5:23b).
Paul extensively and
elaborately uses marital union as an analogy to show the relationship of Christ
to his body, the Church. The communion between God and his people finds its
definitive fulfilment in Christ, the bridegroom who loves and gives himself as
the saviour of humanity, uniting himself as his body.
For Paul, the Church and
Christ are like the man and woman inseparable through the sacrament of
marriage. The partners in Christian marriage behave in such a way towards each
other that their conduct is always oriented towards the obedience, love, and
faithfulness and self-giving of Christ for his Church. So in marriage, we are
made ‘being of the mind of Christ’ (Phil. 2:5, Eph. 5:25).[7] Marital
relationship is used also as an analogy to show our death to the law and
binding to Christ (Rom.7:11-6).
Human faithfulness became
a sign of God’s faithfulness to the covenant in Jesus Christ and was
incorporated into humanity’s orientation towards God as the ultimate ground and
objective of its existence by the sacramental sign of marriage. Marriage is the
grammar that God uses to express his love and faithfulness. The foundation for
the sacra- mentality of marriage is Ephesians 5:21ff which analogically
explains the mutual love of husband and wife to that of Christ’s love for the
Church. By virtue of the sacra mentality of their marriage, spouses are bound
to one another in the most profoundly indissoluble manner. Their belonging to
each other is the real representation, by means of the sacramental sign, of the
very relationship of Christ with the Church.[8]
We can note
there are many other aspects of the Theology of Paul can complement and support
marital fidelity and union. Let us look into some of them.
In Ephesians 3, Paul makes
the following prayer; “that according to the riches of his glory, he may grant
that you may be strengthened in your inner being with power through his Spirit,
and that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith, as you are being rooted
and grounded in love (Eph 3:16-17). When we dwell in Christ through the Spirit
we dwell in love. Our fidelity with Christ is also manifested in our fidelity
with our spouses.
Again in the first letter
to the Corinthians Paul extensively speaks of love and shows its priority over
faith and hope (1 Cor. 13:1-13) which should be practiced and perfected first
in our families especially between the husband and wife (Tit.2:4-5). However,
Paul wishes that let this love transcend to the neighbourhood (Rom. 13:9b-10,
Rom. 12:9).
When we study the epistles
of Paul we see that some themes play important role. Other than Pauline love of
I Cor. 13: 1-13, we have the following themes which can enhance and foster
unity and fidelity in marriage; prayer, kenosis, endurance of suffering, sense
of gender equality, Eucharist and family in the mission of the Church.
Prayer: One of the
Pauline themes that could help us to maintain unity and fidelity in married
life is to pray always. Paul exhorts us to remain in the Spirit through prayer
(Eph. 6:18a), (2 Thes.5:17). The couple should resort to prayer to overcome the
temptations of Satan (1 Cor. 7:5b).
Kenosis:
Self-emptying aspect of marriage is to be realized by imitating Christ’s
humility (Phil.2:5-11). In marriage each partner should regard the other as
better than oneself (Phil.2: 3b). In humility each of the partner should look
not to his / her interests, but to the interests of others (Phil. 2:4). Let
them also know that love of money as root of all kinds of evil (1 Tim. 6: 10).
In situations of misunderstanding and conflicts couples should aspire for
immediate reconciliation. Thus, we truly witness to the self-emptying of Christ
and become ambassadors for Christ in the message of reconciliation (2
Cor.5:20).
Endurance of suffering:
Married couples should adhere to the advice of Paul to bear one another’s
burdens (Eph. 6: 2). The partners in marriage are called to share in suffering
like a good soldier of Christ Jesus so as to obtain the salvation that is in
Christ Jesus (2 Tim 2:3, 10-13).
Sense of gender
equality: It has been already mentioned above that the husband and wife
should maintain equality among them as Christ is the head of the family and
both are sanctified by their faith in Christ (Gal. 3:28).
Eucharist: Jesus’
giving up of Himself should enable us to give ourselves up to others thus
witnessing love and care for others. Couple who attend regular Eucharist are
able to understand the self-gift attitude of Christ and show that in their life
as husband and wife. Eucharist challenges the couple to live for the other in
service and sharing (2 Cor. 5:15).
Family in the mission
of the Church: Marital union exercised and fostered in family is seen by
Vat II as miniature or domestic Church.[9] So
they are entrusted with a mission of the Church. The couple make an active
contribution to the building up of the Church by accepting and bringing up the
children whom they are given, to both the internal and external growth of the
Church as the children are born holy irrespective of the faith of the parents
(I Cor. 7:14) thus witnessing the obedience of the faith (Rom 1:5). So in their
mission of helping the other to attain holiness, the couple grow in unity and
fidelity.
After having studied the
Pauline perspective on marital unity and fidelity, I have understood that
marital union is very central to our Christian life. It is this union which can
show us God’s unconditional love for us in the most perfect manner. The
following are my reflections and observations on Paul’s view on Christian
marriage.
a. Paul
uses the entire salvation history of the Israelites to show the importance and
sacredness of marriage. He takes the aspects of creation, of covenant, of
redemption through the incarnation of Jesus and also the continuation of this
through the Church, the spouse of Christ.
b. The
underlying values of Paul’s view on marital fidelity and unity are love and
life. Building on these two values Paul bases marriage of the order of creation
and redemption. In marital union life is promoted and thus it becomes in the
order of creation. In mutual love, when husband and wife come together and
become one body, new life emerges. They thus become partners of God in
creation. This aspect of creation is permitted only in marriage. So marriage is
basically life-giving (generating) and life-sustaining. If we take away this
aspect of marriage, then it nullifies itself.
In a similar fashion we
can look at marriage from the angle of love. Love is the centre of marital
life. Now how love makes marriage of the order of redemption? We see that it is
love that causes creation and also it love that is the centre of redemption. To
understand this we have to look at the Old Testament where the love of Yahweh
is rooted in His covenant. Redemption has come to us through this love of
Yahweh and His fidelity to the covenant which finds its fulfilment in Jesus. So
when love marked with fidelity is sustained in a marriage we partake in the
redemptive act of God. So Paul is giving importance to these fundamental values
of love and life to show the meaning and mission of marriage.
Unity and fidelity of the
marital life is proportional to the degree of love and life that is shared
between the partners. All the teachings of Paul on marriage have its foundation
on love and life. Thus, for Paul, God-the Father of Jesus Christ is the God of
life and love.
c. For Paul, the physical acts of procreation transcends
the realm of pure biological act but concerns the innermost being of the human
person as such. It is realised in a truly human way only if it is an integral
part of the love by which a man and a woman commit themselves totally to one
another until death.
d. Marital
bond is a source of abundant graces due to its own creative and redemptive
value. If the couple put their trust in God, they can live out this married
life in the most pleasing manner to God.
e. Being
in the Pauline year, I personally feel that in my ministries I should give
myself in a special way for family ministry aiming to build strong family ties.
If we build family we build better humanity. Many of the crimes we witness
today can be eradicated if we build good families. Our visits to the families
should be motivated with this concern and strive to bring unity and fidelity in
family.
We see that St Paul is very much concerned with
the whole idea of marriage and family life as it is there the seeds of faith
can easily be sown. Pauline privilege is yet another example for this. The
Pauline privilege or the privilege of faith is aiming at salvation of husband
and wife with the help of each other (1 Cor. 7:12-16) at the pretext of the
imminence of Christ’s second coming. Again the purpose here is to foster life
and love in marriage.
According to Paul, the fundamental idea of marriage
is that marriage is intended to be a faithful, exclusive, lifelong union of a
man and a woman joined in an intimate community of life and love. They commit
themselves completely to each other and to the responsibility of bringing
children into the world and caring for them. The call to marriage is considered
to be woven deeply into the human spirit. Man and woman are equal. However, as
created, they are different from, but made for, each other. This
complementarity, including sexual difference, draws them together in a mutually
loving union that should be always open to the procreation of children.
1.
Flannery, Austin O.P., ed. Vatican Council II. Mumbai: St. Paul’s, 1975.
2.
Paul II, John. On the Family. Washington D. C.: United States
Catholic Conference, 1981.
3. Kasper,
Walter. Theology of Christian Marriage.
New York: Crossroad, 1983.
4. Ronald, Witherup D. 101 Questions and Answers on Paul. New
Jersey: St Paul’s, 2003.
5.
The Canon Law Society of Great Britain and Ireland. The Code of Canon Law. Bangalore: TPI,
2005.
[1] http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/Delhi_Times/Whatmakes_Delhi_the_divorce_capital/articleshow/316.cm
[2] Canon Law No. 1604
[3] Witherup Ronald D, 101 Questions and Answers on Paul (New
Jersey: St Paul’s, 2003), 190.
[4] Canon Law 1647
[5] John Paul II, On the Family (Washington D. C.: United States Catholic Conference,
1981), 17.
[6] Canon Law 1644
[7] Walter Kasper,
Theology of Christian Marriage (New
York: Crossroad, 1983), 29.
[8] John Paul II, On the Family (Washington D. C.: United States Catholic Conference,
1981), 11.
