The Purposes of Marriage

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Marriage is purpose-driven, that is to say, driven by God’s design from the beginning. In the marriage liturgy, after the majestic words introducing the origins of marriage, there follows a statement of its “causes” or purposes:

The union of husband and wife in heart, body and mind was ordained by God: for the procreation of children and their nurture in the knowledge and love of the Lord; for their mutual joy, and for the help and comfort given one to another in prosperity and adversity; and to maintain purity, so that husbands and wives, with all the household of God, might serve as holy and undefiled members of the body of Christ; and for the upbuilding of his kingdom in family, church, and society, to the praise of his holy name.

Book of Common Prayer (2019), 201-202

Procreation and the Nurture of Children

The first purpose mentioned in the Bible and the liturgy is the procreation of children and their nurture in the knowledge and love of the Lord. In procreation, God invites a man and a woman to participate in a miracle, the ongoing miracle of God’s creation. When two bodies come together, it is for a moment of pleasure, and then they separate. When a child is conceived, a new body and soul come into being, with DNA from each parent in equal measure. This child will someday pass on that genetic heritage to another generation. The embryo encodes this surprise: the child is either male or female (with the XY or XX chromosome). Hence the exclamation at birth: “It’s a boy!” or “It’s a girl!”

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The sexual union of husband and wife necessarily entails the possibility of conception and birth of children. While the Anglican church does not teach that every sex act must be equally “open to reproduction”—that is, Roman Catholic teaching—it does say that marital sex is inherently procreative and that abortion is immoral. Contraception, likewise, is acceptable only for family planning, not for family prevention. While having children is God’s general mandate, the Bible affirms a divine mystery in conception. Some couples experience difficulty or an inability to conceive.

Marriage: the Start of Good Christian Formation

The procreative purpose is only half-baked without educating children and young people. The Bible makes clear the need to “train up a child in the way he should go” (Proverbs 22:9). Parents, godparents, and indeed the whole congregation promise in baptism to rear the child in the Christian faith and life.

Hence, Christian formation and education are essential responsibilities of the family and the church and are especially relevant in a society where skepticism and overt anti-Christian views abound in schools and the media. For this reason, many Christians in the West are considering private or homeschooling alternatives or supplemental catechetical programs.

Marital Love

C.S. Lewis wrote a famous book, The Four Loves, in which he identified four kinds of love: family affection (storge), sexual desire (eros), friendship (philia), and God’s love (agapé). So, which kind is it that we find in marriage? I would claim all four, and they manifest in different ways over time.

Sexual desire, in the normal course from courtship to marriage, is aroused. The lover’s eye fastens on the beloved and says, “This is the one for me, and I want her or him for myself.” Intense desire for the other widens during the betrothal period, as one connects with the other’s family and imagines a family of one’s own.

Lovers who wish to share everything become friends and find an intimacy that includes, but goes beyond, sex. Finally, Christians see in this whole process the loving hand of God. He guides them through the wedding day and beyond.

Here is only the beginning. On the day of the wedding, sexual desire is fulfilled in mutual joy and transformed into a practice that the Bible describes as a “seal as strong as death.” The sexual bond becomes the basis for the flowering of other loves as husbands and wives become friends, helpers, and parents. In old age, marital love remains. However, sexual passions might reduce.

Promotion of Purity

The classic Prayer Book is blunt in this regard, saying that marriage “was ordained as a remedy against sin, and to avoid fornication that such persons as have not the gift of continency might marry and keep themselves undefiled members of Christ’s body.”Fornication is a biblical word (porneia) that covers a variety of sexual practices outside marriage (the word “pornography” comes from it). According to the Bible, sex in marriage is right and good; sex outside marriage is sin. There is really no way around this moral divide.

There is a “natural” logic to monogamy: God seems to have designed an equal number of males and females for mutual fulfillment. But in a fallen world, this natural math quickly fails. Before long, boastful Lamech took two wives (Gen 5:19-24), and polygamy, formal or informal, became the norm of most societies, even in ancient Israel. Today, polygamy exists even in some Christian cultures.

Where Purity Leads, and How to Keep It

Leo Tolstoy begins Anna Karenina, his great novel about adultery, with the famous line: “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” Survey after survey confirms that faithful couples have good sex lives. The Bible itself includes a vivid book called The Song of Songs, which describes erotic love as “strong as death.” In the same breath, it warns that “jealousy is fierce as the grave” (Song of Songs 8:6).

Nothing is more tragic than a marriage torn apart by adultery, abandonment, or abuse, with the lifelong scars on spouses and children. St. Paul puts it bluntly: Flee fornication (1 Corinthians 6:18), and I might add specifically to men before or after their wedding day: flee online pornography, which is the bastard child of the technological revolution.

Building Up Christ’s Kingdom

The Anglican tradition has always considered marriage essential to human happiness. As the Lambeth Conference of Anglican bishops stated a century ago:

…to live a pure and chaste life before and after marriage is, for both sexes, the unchangeable Christian standard…and an essential condition of human happiness.

Resolution 66

In the past century, Western societies have, by and large, abandoned this understanding of Holy Matrimony (let the Global South reader beware!). Recent court decisions in the USA have claimed to redefine marriage and even human sexual identity as a matter of personal choice. Not surprisingly, these societies, known by various social pathologies under the “LGBT+” umbrella, are accompanied by overwhelming human loneliness and the sense of being lost in the cosmos. If the Word of God is true, denying God’s design for marriage will inevitably lead to personal unhappiness.

The Anglican Church in North America’s rite places the vocation of marriage firmly in missionary terms: service of the Kingdom. Christian marriage—along with Christian singleness—is a form of discipleship, of taking up the Cross and following Jesus. In the early church, widows were the special care of the church. Today, the church needs to offer love to a variety of single persons, from the not-yet-married to divorcees, widows, and widowers. It also needs to offer love to those whose sexual attractions lead them to remain celibate.

Many people in high places today think they can blithely tear down the King’s design for society without consequences. Hence, the scandal of being a Christian in our culture may include acts of resistance to the law of the state and the opinions of friends and colleagues. By God’s providence, the day will come when God restores his order to the benefit of the public sphere.

Prayer and Blessing

Blessed is everyone who fears the LORD, who walks in his ways! You shall eat the fruit of the labor of your hands; you shall be blessed, and it shall be well with you. Your wife shall be like a fruitful vine within your house; your children will be live olive shoots around your table. Behold, thus shall the man be blessed who fears the LORD. The LORD bless you from Zion! May you see the prosperity of Jerusalem all the days of your life! May you see your children’s children! Peace be upon Israel! (Psalm 128)

This article is adapted from Stephen Noll’s book, Marriage: According to the Book of Common Prayer, now available from Anglican House Publishers.

Image: Unknown Author on Pixabay.

Published on

February 4, 2023
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Stephen Noll

The Rev. Dr. Stephen Noll is Professor Emeritus at Trinity Anglican Seminary and retired Vice Chancellor of Uganda Christian University. He served on the Statement Group of the first three Global Anglican Future Conferences and gave an inaugural address at the fourth. He currently serves on the ministry board of Anglican Compass.

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9 Comments

True and personal for a couple who chose to follow Christ. Enjoyed and changed my view of my marriage.

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This is wonderful to hear, Gerald. Thank you for sharing!

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This is excellent!

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I’d like to question a possible typo in this excellent article: “such persons as have not the gift of contingency” — surely you mean continency?

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Thanks for catching that, Bob!

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Hi! Could Rev Noll (or an editor on his behalf) offer a citation of some sort for the article’s claim that “the Anglican Church… [teaches that] contraception is acceptable only in family planning and not in family prevention?” I’m not aware of that teaching among any documents that could be considered the official teaching of the Anglican Church. I’d be grateful to learn the substantiation for this statement. Thank you for any time given to this!

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Greetings, Fr Aaron! Dr. Noll may chime in with additional ideas, but my understanding would be that he is drawing from Resolution 115 of the 1958 Lambeth Conference, to wit:

The Conference believes that the responsibility for deciding upon the number and frequency of children has been laid by God upon the consciences of parents everywhere; that this planning, in such ways as are mutually acceptable to husband and wife in Christian conscience, is a right and important factor in Christian family life and should be the result of positive choice before God. Such responsible parenthood, built on obedience to all the duties of marriage, requires a wise stewardship of the resources and abilities of the family as well as a thoughtful consideration of the varying population needs and problems of society and the claims of future generations.

We see here the emphasis on family planning, which also assumes “responsible parenthood.” Thus contraception is taught as a method of planning, but not of preventing, procreation. To intentionally prevent all procreation would be to contradict the first purpose identified in the service for Holy Matrimony, for which reason a minister should probably decline to solemnize any marriage in which (in circumstance of normal health) the participants expressly deny any intention to have children.

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Fr Peter, thanks for your helpful reply!

Lambeth has been speaking on contraception since 1930 I think. The Lambeth statements I’ve read (admittedly limited) have been thoughtful and nuanced. I would contend that Dr Noll’s claim is too sweeping and definite when compared to them, even compared to the particular one you have helpfully provided here.

My other concern here is equating a statement from Lambeth with “the Anglican Church teaches.” My perspective (right or wrong) has always been that the 39 Articles of Religion are “what the Anglican Church teaches.” Everything else falls into the category of “what Anglicans have taught,” and there is notable diversity therein. That is, to my mind, a critical distinction and a definitive mark of Anglicanism when compared to most other manifestations of the Church.

I’d like to offer one more thought. (Thanks for your patience!) I don’t fully agree with the alleged dichotomy between “family prevention” and “family planning” in the realm of the practice of contraception. In the act of contraception, these are not qualitatively different things. Contraception is designed and employed to “prevent (further) family” at that moment. It is a bit of semantic confusion to speak of family prevention and family planning as discretely different from each other in this sense. Perhaps what we mean is “conditionally and momentarily avoiding conception” versus “categorically and unconditionally opposing it?” If a couple were “categorically and unconditionally opposed to children,” that would be cause for their priest to press in with pastoral curiosity. My concern is that ambiguous terminology (“planning/preventing”) mixed with sweeping statements (“the Anglican Church teaches”) on a topic of high sensitivity (contraception) causes real problems for readers.

Closing point of clarification: I make my comments not to pick at one small piece of a large post, nor to butt heads with Dr Noll or with Anglican Compass (I respect and appreciate both), nor to change their minds even; rather I thought to offer a different perspective for the sake of any readers who, like me, needed to hear it.

Keep up the good work, and thank you again for engaging helpfully.

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Thank you for this helpful re-posting of Dr. Noll’s writing on marriage in his book. I found the section on procreation extremely helpful, and the subsequent clarification where you cite Lambeth 1958 to be very, very helpful and clarifying.

Regarding the promotion of purity, I would have loved to see a bit more said about the value of “romancing”. In 2020 I had the privilege of traveling with Bishop LeMarquand to Ethiopia. We discussed the nature of romance in an ethics class. The African ordinands and clergy tenderly admitted that they were not taught anything about romancing their wives – and in fact, most of them had never even read the Song of Solomon! Prior to this it had not occurred to me how important it was to stress God’s positive purpose in romance and sexuality (perhaps because we are bombarded with it in the West?) as I assumed it. “Mutual joy” does need to be taught and explained.

Regarding the Building up of God’s Kingdom, I have always had a debate with Dr. Noll about this. I have always loved the old language (see the older versions of the Declaration of Intention) that stated that the third reason or purpose for marriage was the “safeguarding and benefit of society”. This language I found helpful in so much as it emphasized that a couple, in wholesome love for each other, were actually serving a missionary task: the witness of their love gave a light to a dark world around them. This aligns with what The Rev. Peter Johnston, has written about the historic effect of Christian marriage through the tradition of St. Valentine. However, having said that, I am grateful for Steve Noll’s comment: “Many people in high places today think they can blithely tear down the King’s design for society without consequences.” This speaks to my concern clearly.

Thanks so very much for this posting and sparking some good reflection on Valentines Day!

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