Dean's Letter

July 2008

From The Very Reverend David Bird, Ph.D., Dean and Rector

The Changing Nature of Marriage

As we approach the 2008 Lambeth Conference of Bishops—a meeting every ten years normally of the bishops of the worldwide Anglican Communion—my mind returns to the preparations for the Lambeth Conference of 1988. Just as this year, when much of the debate focuses on marriage, so in 1988, there was also serious
discussion of marriage. This year the topic is homosexual marriage; in 1988, it was polygamy.

At a pre-Lambeth Conference workshop in 1987, I was captivated by an address from a West Indian archbishop. Fired up by a reference to polygamy in Africa, he asked, “and what about serial monogamy in the United States?” We were appropriately silenced and, understandably, we began to reflect upon the Christian understanding of marriage.

Now our West Indian archbishop could have had a field day with some of the “marriages” of the patriarchs in Genesis, the first book of the Bible. There we read that Jacob took four wives: Leah, Rachel, and the maidservants of each. Esau had at least five wives, while Abraham had two wives and an unrecorded number of concubines (see John Mitman’s book, Pre-Marital Counseling). Clearly for the fundamentalist, there is good biblical evidence for the practice of polygamy in the early stories of the Bible. Few fundamentalists, however, have made this point.

Simply put: the development of marriage has been ongoing. Wives are no longer enjoined to be subject to their husbands. Wives now “love and cherish” rather than “honor and obey” their husbands. Whereas the marriage vows Diane and I made included the vow “and all my worldly goods with thee I share,” society has formulated pre-nuptial agreements.

When I worked as a school chaplain in New York City, then unmarried, I was quite disturbed when a much loved teacher remarked to colleagues, “Well, my first marriage lasted seven years—the national average—let’s see if I can manage that again.”

No matter how we look at it, and we could spend pages analyzing the various stages of development in our contemporary understanding of marriage, there is no doubt that marriage is a living institution, adapting and recreating itself over the centuries. The task in this generation is surely to come up with at least a tentative proposal of how we in the church should understand marriage. This will not be easy. One of my tasks this summer is to work through the first draft of a new text on the theology of marriage written by a close friend. At the same time it appears that a task force in this diocese will be evaluating what the key ingredients of marriage are. Perhaps I will have a much better idea of marriage by the end of the summer.

For now, I will content myself with some of the concepts that have become part of my life blood. Marriage is about partnership, mutual affection in good times and bad, help and comfort given to each other, a determination to stay together (using “determination” to mean both a decision and a forceful act of the will), trying accurately to estimate the other’s need (and not always their wants), forgiveness, understanding and all those other qualities you have just thought of and believe me to have missed here. Come to think of it marriage is such a personal and multi-faceted vocation that no list can do it justice.

— David

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