Episcopal Church and Church of Sweden in Full Communion

I did not say that marriage is not necessary. I said that the bishop’s actions likely fit the criteria for marriage. All it takes for a marriage to be morally effective is the free exchange of promises between the two parties. Whether that exchange is then registered with the State in exchange for certain legal protections and privileges is an important but entirely separate issue.

There’s nothing that actually says there must be a ceremony in a place of worship, or any ceremony at all for that matter. You can have a marriage without a wedding, in other words, and many people in the Middle Ages did just that. And the Church did sanction it: this bishop and others like him weren’t deposed, and in some places the priesthood was the occupation of the father of a family across multiple generations, just as it is in Eastern Orthodoxy today.

Although public recognition is inherent in marriage as such, the idea that you have to have State recognition and a formal ceremony and celebration in order to have a “real” marriage from a moral standpoint is one of those modernist (and classist) errors. That’s not exactly the way the institution has actually worked throughout history. To accuse this particular bishop of immorality and hypocrisy for his living arrangements is both inaccurate and anachronistic, and this has important practical implications for the way in which the Church engages cultural shifts in the way the family is understood today.

We should not be too quick to condemn those whose pattern of raising families differs from what was the cultural norm a mere 50 years prior. As the example under discussion shows, there is historical precedent for a less rigid understanding.

 

The RCC could not have sanctioned it, because RC priests took a vow of celibacy (which he violated) and were forbidden to marry! So any statement that "the bishop's actions likely fit the criteria for marriage" is simply foolish blather.

The Catholic Encyclopedia says that Aranson "was a typical Icelander and a man of extraordinary talents, though poorly versed in Latin, and openly neglectful of the law of celibacy." The Wikipedia article which @DadHocHypothesis shared a link to (in post #5, immediately preceding my initial comment in post #6) says, "Clerical celibacy was only practiced in medieval Iceland in the sense that priests did not marry their partners, and Jón Arason had at least nine children by his long-time partner Helga Sigurðardóttir, of whom six lived to adulthood... Jón officially adopted four of his children as his heirs..." My comments were based upon this documented premise that Aranson was not married; his sexual relationship did not meet the criteria for a valid marriage, and even the laws of Iceland at that time (such as they were) recognized this fact because the children were not legally 'his' until he adopted some, not all, of them.

 

Even when the church to which a person claims membership takes the position that no valid marriage exists?

The point I've been trying to make is that any Christian marriage, to be moral in God's eyes, should be conducted properly by the church. The reason is simple: as a sign of submission before God, we come before Him in His 'house' to have our relationship officially formed and recognized. It's just the right thing to do! If a Christian couple make promises to one another, sign a paper to send in, and declare themselves to be married--when they eschew the opportunity to appear before a cleric of their religion whom God has placed in office for the purpose of conducting marriage ceremonies--they tacitly distance themselves from God and show disrespect for the holy ordinance He established. Stating that a (supposedly Christian and faith-based) marriage created apart from the church can be "morally effective" is little better than claiming that a hog wallow is an effective location for bathing.

 

From a purely Christian standpoint, marriage is purely an agreement between a man and a woman to be faithful to one another until the death of either, to love and care for any offspring of their union and to treat one another strictly according to Christ's and his Apostol's advice, within their relationship. Their appearance before a congregation and a priest merely serves to bear witness to the sacred nature of THEIR original vow and agreement before God. Therefore the congregation, the priest and the piece of paper with their signitures or marks, declaring their intentions to the state, are ALL unnecessary, (as far as God is concerned). They are all just conventions instituted and required by men. Therefore not specifically REQUIRED by God.

Adam and Eve were married. They had no guests, no witnesses, no priest, no marriage certificate, no reception, no tax relief and no mortgage on a new home. That wasn't progressive, it was foundational. You could say they were 'living in sin' but THAT was certainly not because they weren't properly married. The Christian concept of marriage comes from the teaching of Jesus Christ. i.e. that marriage should be monogamous and for life, in order to preserve the wellbeing of both partners in their mutual agreement.

The context of his teaching was concerning the effects of divorce on women in the Jewish society of his time, and the Pharisaical rules surrounding the issue, under which women on becoming divorced, faced possible penury, social exclusion and starvation.
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50 or 100 years ago, practically every Christian knew that marriage should be conducted by clergy. They also knew that the "we don't need an officiant, we merely can say our promises to each other" was a commonly-utilized, unethical ploy of men to get women into bed with them (i.e., make a sexual conquest). But today we have all sorts of young people who have fallen for that dastardly lie and they don't bother getting the marriage counseling, the marriage license, or the officiant; is it any wonder or any concidence that so many of these relationships soon fail? Is it mere coincidence that so many of these younger people are also weak in faith and have fallen away from church?

I think I have made my point sufficiently. The reader has enough information to evaluate the contrasting positions and discern (quite easily, I think) which is the more godly one versus which is the more modern/progressive one.

 

Do we have anyone in this forum willing to describe exactly what a Wedding Ceremony comprised of in the time of Jesus Christ, for surely THAT would have been what Jesus Christ was referring to. Not our idea of what constitutes a 21st century, North American or European, traditional church wedding. I don't think Jesus was insisting that anything other than that would not be legal and therefore not valid in God's eyes. Even going with a prostitue constitutes 'marriage' as far as God is concerned. Clearly there are many men in the USA and elsewhere on earth who are technically committing adultery on some previous relationships, even though happpily married now in church, by a priest, in front of all their friends and relatives.
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Well we know it consisted of large amounts of alcohol. Take the wedding at Cana this differed to other weddings in that the best wine was kept till the end as apposed to the more normal getting everyone inebriated to such an extent they didn't realise they were drinking cheap plonk after they had finished the good stuff.

 

I was given to understand the whole thing often lasted several days.
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For those who could afford it, anyway.

 

On such occasions I think perhaps generocity from the family was expected by the community. There were probably too few opportunities to let ones hair down.
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Even so, that might have been out of reach for many families, just as it often is today. One has to remember that the vast majority of the population was illiterate and lived at the bare subsistence level.

 

But since when has illiteracy stopped anyone boozing at a wedding feast. There's no mention of anyone reading at the wedding in Cana. Plenty of drinking mentioned though. We should not equate the ways that 21st century 1st world couples can find ways to flaunt their family wealth or demonstrate their generocity at weddings. The principal still stands that weddings everywhere were regarded as a reason for celebration, and celebration was generally accompanied by copious amounts of wine and food unless the society had prohibition on alcohol.
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Never, I suppose. But at that time, it would have stopped many from having the ability to throw such a party, which is part of the point I’m making. We aren’t warranted in concluding from one isolated report that this was simply the way things were done for the vast majority of the population at that time.

 

Wow, this has gone off the rails!