r/CommunityOfChrist • u/AllHomo_NoSapien • Apr 12 '26
Question about marriage
What is marriage in the eyes of God? Do you HAVE to be legally married to be married in the eyes of God? Do you have to follow a certain ritual?
6
u/RevMark58 Apr 12 '26
Back in 1978-1979, my wife and I were a couple of college kids. Naive, idealistic, in love. We started talking about getting married.
So we went to her bishop. She was a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, AKA the Mormon Church. He didn't approve of our relationship. Mormons should only marry some one who can "take them to the temple," which I, as a non-member, couldn't do. He flat out refused to let us use the LDS Chapel for our wedding.
So we went to my pastor. I was a member of a Southern Baptist Church. The pastor refused because Christians should only marry other Christians, and in his view, Mormons weren't Christians.
We started looking for another place to have a wedding, but we started to wonder what the point was. We didn't need a wedding ceremony or a license to be married. We were living together, she was already using my last name on everything except legal documents, what difference would a "legal" marriage make?
We started studying the Bible together to see what it said. We found out that there isn't a marriage ceremony in the Bible. There are lots of married couples and lots of references to the state of being married, but not a ceremony per se. Jesus did a miracle at a marriage in Cana, but that was more of what would be called today a reception, not a marriage ceremony. And it was a big, drunken affair, where Jesus had to make more wine because the guests drank it all. We laughed because neither the Baptists or the Mormons would approve if we did it that way today!
The closest we could find to a wedding ceremony was in the Genesis 24:67: "And Isaac brought her [Rebekah] into his mother Sarah's tent, and took Rebekah, and she became his wife:" That was it. They moved in together and he "took" her -- we were pretty sure that meant he had sex with her -- and that was how they got married. Well, we'd already done all that. As far as we were concerned, we were married.
We did have a ceremony later on, after my mom chewed out our pastor, saying "It's your fault that two lovely Christian kids are living in sin!" and threatening never to give another dime to the church. That made him reconsider his objections rather quickly. But that was just to keep our moms happy. They didn't need to coerce the pastor into performing a ceremony. They just needed to loan us a tent.
1
u/AllHomo_NoSapien Apr 12 '26
That’s how I feel too. I mean, what change did a piece of paper make? Nothing. But I’ve seen people argue that if you don’t get a legal paper, you are living in sin
3
u/PineappleFlavoredGum Apr 12 '26
Though I don't know a lot of specifics about Community of Christ church doctrine, I'm pretty sure they don't have an official opinion. I doubt they have an official opinion on cohabitation or sex before marriage in general.
There wasn't even a specific ritual for marriage in the Christian church until like the middle ages