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Weddings Weren't in Churches for a Thousand Years · Theology Made Podcast

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  [music]
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  SPEAKER_00: Welcome to The Theology Made Podcast.
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  SPEAKER_00: I'm Jordan Vale.
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  SPEAKER_00: In today's episode,
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  SPEAKER_00: we're going to look at how weddings weren't in churches for a thousand years.
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  SPEAKER_00: Close your eyes and picture a wedding.
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  SPEAKER_00: You didn't have a choice about what appeared.
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  SPEAKER_00: Probably an aisle,
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  SPEAKER_00: pews on either side,
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  SPEAKER_00: a man in vestments or a suit standing at the front with a book,
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  SPEAKER_00: a white dress in the doorway,
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  SPEAKER_00: an organ or a string quartet,
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  SPEAKER_00: or today a guy wearing suspenders and a guitar doing a rendition of
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  SPEAKER_00: an Ed Sheeran song.
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  SPEAKER_00: A father's arms,
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  SPEAKER_00: and then those words,
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  SPEAKER_00: Dearly beloved,
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  SPEAKER_00: we are gathered here today in the sight of God and this congregation.
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  SPEAKER_00: And that picture feels eternal.
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  SPEAKER_00: It feels like the way Christians have married since the catacombs,
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  SPEAKER_00: the sacred original that courthouse weddings
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  SPEAKER_00: and beach weddings are casual departures from.
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  SPEAKER_00: So here's today's demolition, and it's a big one.
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  SPEAKER_00: For roughly the first thousand years of Christianity, no wedding looked like that.
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  SPEAKER_00: Christians married at home the way everyone married,
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  SPEAKER_00: with a family feast, joined hands, and no clergyman required.
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  SPEAKER_00: No church buildings, no aisle, no officiant, a pope in the year 866 put in writing.
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  SPEAKER_00: The ceremony is optional, and skipping it is no sin.
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  SPEAKER_00: When weddings finally did migrate toward the church,
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  SPEAKER_00: they stopped at the door, literally at the porch for centuries.
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  SPEAKER_00: The rule that a priest must witness your vows for the marriage to count as
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  SPEAKER_00: a birthday is And the birthday is 1,563.
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  SPEAKER_00: And the white dress?
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  SPEAKER_00: That's younger than the railroad.
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  SPEAKER_00: The wedding new picture is real, and it can be holy, and I've officiated a lot of them.
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  SPEAKER_00: In fact, as a pastor, it's one of my favorite things I do.
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  SPEAKER_00: But it's also, historically speaking, brand new.
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  SPEAKER_00: So today we're going to look at how Christians actually married for a millennium,
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  SPEAKER_00: why the church eventually took over,
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  SPEAKER_00: and what the long domestic centuries have to say
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  SPEAKER_00: to anyone who's ever felt their courthouse marriage was second class.
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  SPEAKER_00: Let's start at the only wedding in the Gospels,
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  SPEAKER_00: because we tend to read right past his logistics and go to the water turned to wine.
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  SPEAKER_00: John chapter 2, Canaan of Galilee.
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  SPEAKER_00: Notice everything that isn't there.
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  SPEAKER_00: No synagogue.
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  SPEAKER_00: No temple, no fishing of any kind, no ceremony that John bothers to describe.
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  SPEAKER_00: What we get instead is a house,
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  SPEAKER_00: a master of the banquet who's essentially a head caterer,
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  SPEAKER_00: servants,
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  SPEAKER_00: stone jars,
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  SPEAKER_00: and a wine supply calculated for days of feasting
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  SPEAKER_00: because Jewish village weddings ran about a week.
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  SPEAKER_00: Man, the Scots would love that.
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  SPEAKER_00: The crisis of the story is hospitality logistics.
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  SPEAKER_00: When Jesus performs his first sign, it's not a blessing pronounced over the couple.
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  SPEAKER_00: It's a catering rescue, and the bridegroom's family gets the credit.
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  SPEAKER_00: That's what a wedding was in Jesus' world, a domestic feast marking a contract between families.
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  SPEAKER_00: Jewish practice had two stages,
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  SPEAKER_00: a binding betrothal,
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  SPEAKER_00: the stage Mary and Joseph were in,
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  SPEAKER_00: and then the celebration when the groom brought their bride home.
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  SPEAKER_00: With a written contract protecting her and a canopy and a week of eating.
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  SPEAKER_00: Rabbis might attend and bless as honored guests bless things.
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  SPEAKER_00: Nobody officiated because the family themselves made the marriage.
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  SPEAKER_00: Roman weddings, the other world the church was born into, worked the same way at home.
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  SPEAKER_00: Consent, not consummation, makes a marriage.
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  SPEAKER_00: The ceremony for those who could afford one It was like a domestic theater.
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  SPEAKER_00: The bride in a flame-colored veil,
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  SPEAKER_00: the joining of right hands of four witnesses,
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  SPEAKER_00: a feast, a torch-lit procession to the groom's house.
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  SPEAKER_00: Beautiful and entirely optional and entirely unofficiated by any priesthood as a requirement.
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  SPEAKER_00: So when people became Christians in the first centuries, how did they marry?
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  SPEAKER_00: Exactly like their neighbors, minus the sacrifices to household gods.
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  SPEAKER_00: We know because of what doesn't exist.
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  SPEAKER_00: There is no Christian wedding liturgy from the early centuries.
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  SPEAKER_00: None.
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  SPEAKER_00: Paul writes at length about marriage in 1 Corinthians 7,
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  SPEAKER_00: whether to marry,
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  SPEAKER_00: when to marry,
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  SPEAKER_00: and never breathes a word about how,
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  SPEAKER_00: ceremonially, because there was no Christian how.
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  SPEAKER_00: The one adjustment we can document is oversight.
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  SPEAKER_00: Church officials around 110 suggesting that believers marry with
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  SPEAKER_00: the bishop's blessing so the match would be according to the Lord.
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  SPEAKER_00: Meaning, marry a believer, marry wisely.
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  SPEAKER_00: More or less, it's premarital counseling.
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  SPEAKER_00: The bishop approved matches, but he didn't perform weddings.
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  SPEAKER_00: Tertullian,
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  SPEAKER_00: around 200,
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  SPEAKER_00: has a gorgeous passage about the happiness of a marriage that the church cements and
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  SPEAKER_00: the blessing seals,
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  SPEAKER_00: and it shows Christian couples were seeking the church's blessings on their union,
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  SPEAKER_00: sometimes at the Eucharist.
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  SPEAKER_00: But it was exactly that,
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  SPEAKER_00: a blessing sought on a marriage the families made the way you might have
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  SPEAKER_00: a new house blessed.
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  SPEAKER_00: The blessing was gravy, the marriage was the meal.
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  SPEAKER_00: Now the receipt I promised.
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  SPEAKER_00: In the year 866,
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  SPEAKER_00: the newly converted king of Bulgaria sent Pope Nicholas I a long list
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  SPEAKER_00: of practical questions, over a hundred of them, about how Christians actually live.
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  SPEAKER_00: Question, how do Christians marry?
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  SPEAKER_00: And the Pope of Rome wrote back a description we still possess.
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  SPEAKER_00: He walks through the customs,
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  SPEAKER_00: the betrothal of the ring,
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  SPEAKER_00: the dowry contract,
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  SPEAKER_00: the crowning, the nuptial blessing available at churches for those who want it.
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  SPEAKER_00: And then comes the sentence Nicholas adds.
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  SPEAKER_00: All of this he says is custom.
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  SPEAKER_00: If any of it is omitted, there's no sin.
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  SPEAKER_00: Especially since the festivals are costly and many people can't afford them.
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  SPEAKER_00: So what makes a marriage?
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  SPEAKER_00: He answers with the old Roman maxim,
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  SPEAKER_00: baptized whole into church teaching, the consent of the parties.
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  SPEAKER_00: Consent alone suffices.
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  SPEAKER_00: If consent is lacking, all the celebration of the world means nothing.
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  SPEAKER_00: So a Pope, in writing in 866, the ceremony is optional and we shouldn't burden the poor with it.
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  SPEAKER_00: I'm glad we don't do that anymore.
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  SPEAKER_00: But as a requirement, nothing.
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  SPEAKER_00: For a thousand years,
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  SPEAKER_00: you could be fully,
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  SPEAKER_00: sacramentally,
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  SPEAKER_00: unquestionably married in the eyes of the church without a church,
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  SPEAKER_00: a priest, or a single word of liturgy.
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  SPEAKER_00: The first law anywhere requiring a church blessing for a valid marriage came from
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  SPEAKER_00: a Byzantine emperor, Leo VI, around the year 893.
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  SPEAKER_00: And that was imperial law in the east.
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  SPEAKER_00: The west wouldn't require anything of the kind for almost seven more centuries.
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  SPEAKER_00: So how did the church end up owning weddings?
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  SPEAKER_00: And through a genuine crisis, and the crisis was a monster of the church's own principle.
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  SPEAKER_00: So let's follow the logic.
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  SPEAKER_00: If consent alone makes a marriage,
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  SPEAKER_00: then two people alone whispering vows in a barn
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  SPEAKER_00: with no witnesses are validly married.
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  SPEAKER_00: Medieval church courts,
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  SPEAKER_00: which had acquired jurisdiction over marriage by the 11th and 12th centuries,
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  SPEAKER_00: drowned in the consequences.
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  SPEAKER_00: Here's some examples.
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  SPEAKER_00: He says they secretly exchanged vows before he married his current wife,
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  SPEAKER_00: which would make the current marriage wrong and the children illegitimate.
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  SPEAKER_00: She says he promised himself to her in the orchard and there were no witnesses
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  SPEAKER_00: and he denies it.
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  SPEAKER_00: So that means inheritance, legitimacy and souls all hung on unprovable whispers.
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  SPEAKER_00: Clandestine marriage was the medieval world's paternity test crisis.
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  SPEAKER_00: Where is Jerry Springer when you need him?
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  SPEAKER_00: And the church's remedy was publicity.
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  SPEAKER_00: Get the vows out of the barn and into the open, before the whole village.
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  SPEAKER_00: And so developed the institution that sounds like a riddle until you know the reason.
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  SPEAKER_00: The wedding at the church door.
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  SPEAKER_00: Not inside, at the door.
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  SPEAKER_00: The most public spot in the parish facing the street.
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  SPEAKER_00: There, the wedding was seen by all.
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  SPEAKER_00: There, the dowry and the bride's property rights were announced aloud.
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  SPEAKER_00: Legal notice to every neighbor in earshot.
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  SPEAKER_00: There, the ring was given and the consent spoken where
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  SPEAKER_00: a hundred witnesses could later testify it.
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  SPEAKER_00: And then for those who wish, the party moved inside for the nuptial mass.
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  SPEAKER_00: Chaucer's wife of Bass says it herself.
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  SPEAKER_00: Husbands at church door, I've had five.
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  SPEAKER_00: The door was the wedding.
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  SPEAKER_00: The church interior was the after party for the devout.
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  SPEAKER_00: In 1215, the Fourth Lateran Council required the bans and condemned secret marriages.
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  SPEAKER_00: But here's the astonishing part.
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  SPEAKER_00: These secret marriages, they still counted.
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  SPEAKER_00: The church punished them as illicit while conceding they were valid
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  SPEAKER_00: because consent makes marriage and
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  SPEAKER_00: the church would not unsay its own millennium-old principle.
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  SPEAKER_00: For three more centuries, a couple could still marry themselves in total privacy.
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  SPEAKER_00: Sinfully, but they really could.
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  SPEAKER_00: And only in 1563 at the Council of Trent did the Catholic Church finally rule that a marriage...
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  SPEAKER_00: And that
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  SPEAKER_00: decree is the birth certificate of the mandatory church wedding.
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  SPEAKER_00: 1563.
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  SPEAKER_00: The requirement that feels eternal is younger than the printing press.
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  SPEAKER_00: Younger than the Reformation, it was partly answering.
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  SPEAKER_00: And the Protestants?
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  SPEAKER_00: In theory, they demoted the wedding.
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  SPEAKER_00: Luther called marriage a worldly thing belonging to the magistrate.
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  SPEAKER_00: And the Reformers denied it was a sacrament.
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  SPEAKER_00: In practice,
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  SPEAKER_00: Protestant states funneled everyone to the parson anyway,
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  SPEAKER_00: and England eventually made it a statute from 1754
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  SPEAKER_00: under Lord Hardwick's Marriage Act.
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  SPEAKER_00: Almost no marriage was valid in England without an Anglican church ceremony.
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  SPEAKER_00: Rome required the priest in 1563.
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  SPEAKER_00: England required him by act of parliament in 1754.
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  SPEAKER_00: Both branches of Western Christianity arrived at the mandatory church wedding
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  SPEAKER_00: within two centuries of each other, roughly 1,500 years after Cana.
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  SPEAKER_00: As for the rest of the eternal picture,
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  SPEAKER_00: the white dress swept the world after Queen Victoria wore one in 1840,
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  SPEAKER_00: before which brides simply wore their best dress in any color.
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  SPEAKER_00: The wedding march arrived in the same era,
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  SPEAKER_00: and most of what we call a traditional wedding is a Victorian production design laid
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  SPEAKER_00: over a legal requirement,
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  SPEAKER_00: laid over a medieval fraud remedy, laid over a Roman family feast.
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  SPEAKER_00: And time to say what the history is for and first what it's against, which is a feeling.
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  SPEAKER_00: A quiet, corrosive feeling carried by a lot of people, probably more than they want to admit.
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  SPEAKER_00: We just did the courthouse.
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  SPEAKER_00: We eloped.
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  SPEAKER_00: We couldn't afford a real wedding.
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  SPEAKER_00: So somehow our marriage feels like it's less real, less Christian.
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  SPEAKER_00: And the first thousand years of Christianity would like a word.
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  SPEAKER_00: Every married Christian of that millennium,
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  SPEAKER_00: including the saints,
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  SPEAKER_00: including the martyrs,
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  SPEAKER_00: including your entire spiritual ancestry before roughly the year 1100,
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  SPEAKER_00: they were married in what we would call a civil or domestic ceremony.
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  SPEAKER_00: Their marriages produced the church you attend.
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  SPEAKER_00: If then you made marriages holy, Christianity was built by the unhallowed.
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  SPEAKER_00: The tradition's own deepest principle,
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  SPEAKER_00: spoken by Roman jurists and repeated by a pope to a Bulgarian king,
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  SPEAKER_00: is that consent makes the marriage, two people giving themselves with their word.
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  SPEAKER_00: Everything else, Nicholas said, can be omitted without sin.
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  SPEAKER_00: The courthouse couple is not a discount version of the church's couple.
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  SPEAKER_00: In fact, historically, they're the original recipe.
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  SPEAKER_00: And the church's millennium of restraint carried a theology I think worth recovering.
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  SPEAKER_00: The church did not invent marriage and doesn't manufacture it.
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  SPEAKER_00: Marriage came before the church, before Sinai, out of the oldest chapter in the book.
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  SPEAKER_00: The church receives marriages, blesses them, guards them, and teaches what they're for.
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  SPEAKER_00: What made a marriage Christian in the year 500 wasn't the room it started in.
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  SPEAKER_00: It was the way two baptized people kept their consent for the next 40 or 50 years.
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  SPEAKER_00: That's a standard no venue can meet for you,
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  SPEAKER_00: which may be why we prefer talking about the venues and the dresses.
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  SPEAKER_00: There's even a word here for the wedding industry, and Pope Nicholas already said it in 866.
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  SPEAKER_00: The festivities cost so much that many cannot afford them, so let no one be burdened.
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  SPEAKER_00: The average American wedding now runs into the tens of thousands of dollars,
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  SPEAKER_00: and couples delay marriage for years to afford a single day,
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  SPEAKER_00: which is precisely the burden a 9th century pope waved off as unnecessary.
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  SPEAKER_00: The most traditional thing a couple can do,
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  SPEAKER_00: it turns out,
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  SPEAKER_00: might be to marry simply at home,
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  SPEAKER_00: surrounded by family,
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  SPEAKER_00: with a feast they can afford and a blessing they actually want.
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  SPEAKER_00: Because that's a Canaan wedding, and it was good enough for Jesus to attend.
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  SPEAKER_00: He even helped with the wine.
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  SPEAKER_00: If you enjoyed this and found this helpful,
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  SPEAKER_00: please like and subscribe on wherever you're listening.