How the church's understanding of marriage developed from the apostolic age to the present.
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The Christian church has not always spoken with one voice on marriage. What the earliest fathers regarded as a concession to weakness, the Reformers championed as a positive good, and the Puritans celebrated as a means of grace. This paper traces that development — not to relativize the biblical teaching, but to show how the church's reading of Scripture on marriage was shaped by its cultural moment, its polemical needs, and its growing understanding of the covenant.
The trajectory matters for the prenup project specifically: a marriage contract that takes the covenant seriously must reckon with which theology of marriage it is building on. The patristic elevation of celibacy, the medieval sacramentalization of marriage, the Reformed desacramentalization, and the Puritan theology of companionate marriage each imply different things about what a covenant of marriage requires and what violating it means.
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Paul's treatment of marriage in 1 Corinthians 7 is the seedbed for nearly every subsequent debate. Several features are critical:
While 1 Corinthians 7 provides the raw material for the celibacy-vs-marriage debate, Ephesians 5:22–33 provides the covenantal and Christological framework:
The tension between these two Pauline texts — 1 Corinthians 7's pragmatic "better to marry than to burn" and Ephesians 5's exalted "this mystery is profound" — generates much of the subsequent history.
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The earliest post-apostolic writers inherited Paul's preference for celibacy and amplified it considerably. Several factors drove this:
Tertullian (c. 155–c. 220):
Origen (c. 185–c. 253):
Jerome (c. 347–420):
Augustine (354–430):
On marital sex and sin: Augustine's position on the purpose of sexual intercourse within marriage deserves particular scrutiny. In De bono coniugali he writes:
> "Then follows the connection of fellowship in children, which is the one alone worthy > fruit, not of the union of male and female, but of the sexual intercourse."
The implication is stark: sexual intercourse within marriage is only without sin when directed toward procreation. Sex for mutual comfort, pleasure, or the "rendering of the debt" (1 Cor. 7:3–5) is, for Augustine, at best a venial sin — excused by marriage but not sanctified by it. This goes well beyond what Paul says in 1 Corinthians 7, where mutual sexual availability is presented as a positive obligation, not a concession to weakness.
The biographical factor: Augustine's severity on marital sex cannot be understood apart from his own history. By his own account in the Confessions, he kept a concubine for roughly fifteen years (from age 17), fathered a son (Adeodatus) outside marriage, and struggled profoundly with sexual desire. His famous prayer — "Grant me chastity and continence, but not yet" (Confessions VIII.7.17) — is not merely a literary device; it reflects a man who experienced sexual passion as a dominating force.
When Augustine finally embraced continence after his conversion (386), the break was total. His subsequent theology bears the marks of overcorrection: having experienced the destructive power of disordered sexual desire firsthand, he could not fully separate ordered marital sexuality from the concupiscence he knew so intimately. The result is a theology in which even lawful marital sex carries a residual taint — a position that owes as much to Augustine's personal struggle as to his exegesis of Scripture.
This matters because Augustine's framework dominated Western Christianity for over a millennium. His three goods of marriage shaped Catholic canon law, scholastic theology, and even (indirectly) Protestant thinking. The procreation-only view of sinless marital sex became the default Latin position, and when the Reformers and Puritans later pushed back — affirming marital sex as a positive good in itself — they were correcting not just a theological error but the long shadow of one man's biography.
John Chrysostom (c. 349–407):
Augustine is often treated as the architect of the procreation-only view, but the ideas were already circulating well before him:
Augustine did not invent the procreation-only position. What he did was systematize it — the three goods framework, the concupiscence theory, the grading of sinfulness within marital sex — into a coherent theological package that could be taught, cited, and built upon. He gave the tradition its operating system.
Augustine's framework did not persist by its own weight. It was transmitted and amplified through a specific chain of authorities:
The chain is: Clement/Jerome (pre-Augustinian precedent) → Augustine (systematizer) → Gregory the Great (transmitter and radicalizer) → Lombard (codifier) → Aquinas (moderate refinement) → Trent (dogmatization). Augustine is not the sole author, but he is the indispensable node. Remove him from the chain and the medieval theology of marriage looks fundamentally different.
One of the most revealing features of the patristic theology of marriage is its position on sex as couples age. If procreation is the sole legitimate purpose of marital intercourse, what happens when procreation is no longer possible?
The fathers answered consistently: the properly ordered married couple should trend toward celibacy.
Augustine is the clearest voice here. In De bono coniugali, he argues that as the possibility of children recedes, the married couple should progressively abstain from sexual relations. The bond of marriage remains — sacramentum does not require ongoing sexual union — but the use of marriage (sexual intercourse) should give way to continence. Augustine held this up as the natural arc of a godly marriage: sexual union for the purpose of children in the earlier years, then a mutual, voluntary turn toward celibacy as a higher form of marital devotion. The couple who achieves this has, in Augustine's view, ascended from the good of marriage to something better within marriage.
Jerome went further, predictably. In Against Jovinianus, he suggested that the truly devout married couple would abstain as soon as sufficient children were produced — not waiting for age to force the issue, but choosing continence as a spiritual discipline. For Jerome, the goal was not merely to stop having sex when procreation became impossible, but to stop as soon as possible.
Gregory the Great elaborated the practical expectations. In his Pastoral Rule, he taught that married couples should approach sexual relations with reluctance and penitence, and should welcome the cessation of sexual activity as a spiritual liberation. Old age was not a loss but a gift — freedom from the burden of concupiscence.
Chrysostom is again the partial exception. While he affirmed the superiority of virginity, his homilies on marriage place greater emphasis on the ongoing companionship and mutual devotion of aging couples. He does not push the marital celibacy ideal as aggressively as the Latin fathers, though he does not reject it either.
The practical result of this teaching was a vision of marriage that treated sexual union as a temporary, instrumental phase — necessary for procreation but ideally transcended. The couple who continued sexual relations beyond the procreative years was not committing grave sin, but they were failing to pursue the higher path available to them.
This stands in stark contrast to the later Puritan view, in which marital intimacy — including sexual union — was celebrated as a lifelong good, an expression of the "mutual society, help, and comfort" that the marriage covenant exists to provide. The Puritans did not merely reject the celibacy hierarchy in principle; they rejected the trajectory it implied for the lived experience of marriage from beginning to end.
The patristic devaluation of marriage had implications not only for sexual ethics but for the church's understanding of how the faith propagates. If virginity is the higher calling and marriage is a concession, what role do children play in the mission of the church?
Augustine addressed this directly in De bono coniugali:
> "And on this account it is good to marry, because it is good to beget children, to be a > mother of a family: but it is better not to marry, because it is better not to stand in > need of this work, in order to human fellowship itself. For such is the state of the human > race now, that (others, who contain not, not only being taken up with marriage, but many > also waxing wanton through unlawful concubinages, the Good Creator working what is good > out of their evils) there fails not numerous progeny, and abundant succession, out of > which to procure holy friendships."
The argument is remarkable: Christians need not have children because the rest of the world — including those in fornication and concubinage — will produce enough offspring for the church to evangelize.
But Augustine goes further. When confronted with the obvious objection — what if everyone chose celibacy? — he does not retreat. He embraces the conclusion:
> "But I am aware of some that murmur: What, say they, if all men should abstain from all > sexual intercourse, whence will the human race exist? Would that all would this, only in > 'charity out of a pure heart, and good conscience, and faith unfeigned;' much more > speedily would the City of God be filled, and the end of the world hastened."
This is, by any honest reading, a form of eschatological anti-natalism. Augustine is not merely saying celibacy is preferable — he is saying that the cessation of human reproduction would be a positive good, because it would accelerate the filling of the City of God and hasten the eschaton. The human race ending through universal continence is not a catastrophe to be avoided but a consummation to be wished for.
The theological move here is significant. Augustine ties the celibacy preference directly to eschatology: the purpose of history is to fill the predetermined number of the elect. Once that number is complete, history ends. Every generation of human reproduction extends the timeline. Therefore, reproduction — even lawful, marital reproduction — delays the coming of the kingdom. The most pious course of action is to stop having children entirely and let God complete His harvest from the existing population.
This puts Augustine in a peculiar position. He is not a Manichaean — he does not say creation is evil or that the body is a prison. He affirms marriage as good. But his eschatological framework leads him to a conclusion that functionally aligns with the anti-natalist impulse: it would genuinely be better if humans stopped reproducing. The goodness of marriage is real but provisional — a good that would ideally be rendered unnecessary by universal continence.
The Reformers and Puritans never engaged this argument directly — by their time, the celibacy hierarchy had been rejected on other grounds. But the logic is worth surfacing because it reveals how far the patristic framework could go when followed to its natural conclusion. A theology that treats celibacy as categorically higher than marriage will eventually reach the point where it treats the end of human reproduction as desirable. The Puritan celebration of the fruitful household is not merely a different emphasis — it is a rejection of the entire eschatological framework that made Augustine's anti-natalism coherent. God, in His providence, works good out of the world's sexual sin by generating a surplus of souls available for conversion. The church's task is not to produce the next generation of believers through the covenant family but to recruit them from the world's abundant progeny into "holy friendships" (spiritual community).
This logic follows necessarily from Augustine's premises. If celibacy is higher than marriage, and if marriage exists primarily for procreation, then the most spiritual Christians will not be producing children at all. The church must therefore rely on conversion rather than covenant succession for its growth. The celibacy ideal and the evangelism-over-family model are two sides of the same coin.
The Reformed and Puritan reversal on this point was dramatic and rooted in covenant theology. The Reformers and Puritans did not merely disagree with Augustine's conclusion — they operated from a fundamentally different ecclesiology:
The contrast with Augustine could hardly be sharper. Where Augustine saw the world's children as the church's recruitment pool, the Puritans saw their own children as the church's future. Where Augustine could afford to be indifferent to Christian reproduction because evangelism would supply the deficit, the Puritans understood the family as the frontline of the church's mission. The Great Commission and the covenant household were not in tension — they were complementary, with the family as the more ordinary and reliable means.
This has direct implications for the prenup project. A marriage contract grounded in the Puritan and Reformed tradition treats children not as a biological byproduct excused by marriage but as one of the covenant's central purposes — a ministry entrusted to the couple, a means of grace to the church, and a heritage from the Lord.
By the end of the 4th century, the patristic consensus was clear:
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Jovinian, a Roman monk, made four propositions:
It is proposition 1 that concerns us. Jovinian was not arguing that marriage is superior to virginity — he was arguing they are equal. Both are good. Neither earns more merit.
The reaction was swift and overwhelming:
Jovinian was exiled. His writings do not survive — we know his arguments only through his opponents' refutations.
The Jovinian controversy is the hinge point. The church formally committed itself to the hierarchical view: virginity is objectively superior to marriage as a state of life. This was not merely a pastoral preference — it became dogma.
The Reformers, when they later rejected this hierarchy, were consciously reversing a 1,200-year-old consensus. Understanding what Jovinian actually claimed — and how modest his claim was — puts the Reformation's reassessment in sharper relief.
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Marriage was not formally listed among the seven sacraments until Peter Lombard's Sentences (c. 1150) and the subsequent scholastic development. The Council of Florence (1439) and finally the Council of Trent (1563) dogmatized it.
The key theological moves:
Paradoxically, making marriage a sacrament did not elevate it to parity with celibacy. Instead:
The medieval church thus held two things simultaneously: marriage is a sacrament (and therefore sacred) and marriage is inferior to virginity (and therefore second-best). This tension was unstable, and the Reformers attacked it directly.
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Martin Luther's contribution was radical in its simplicity: marriage is not a sacrament.
Luther's desacramentalization freed marriage from the medieval hierarchy without yet providing a robust positive theology of marriage as spiritually good.
John Calvin moved the discussion forward:
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The Puritans did not merely accept marriage as permissible or desacramentalize it as a civil matter. They positively celebrated it as a spiritual good.
William Gouge (Of Domesticall Duties, 1622):
Richard Baxter (A Christian Directory, 1673):
William Perkins (Christian Oeconomie, 1590):
John Milton (The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce, 1643):
The Puritan contribution is not just theological but tonal. Where the fathers spoke of marriage with apology ("it is good, but virginity is better"), the Puritans spoke of it with enthusiasm. Marriage is:
This is the tradition that the prenup project inherits. The contract presupposes that marriage is a covenant of profound spiritual significance — not a second-best option for those who cannot attain celibacy.
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The Enlightenment and Romantic periods introduced a new emphasis: love as the basis of marriage. Previously, marriage was understood primarily in terms of covenant obligation, household order, and procreation. Romantic love was welcomed but not foundational.
The shift to love-based marriage had consequences:
The legal revolution of no-fault divorce (California, 1969; widespread by 1985) severed the last connection between covenant violation and legal consequence. Either party can dissolve the marriage for any reason.
This is the context the prenup project is responding to: a legal regime in which the covenant character of marriage has been entirely evacuated.
The modern Reformed world broadly holds the Puritan position:
The prenup project sits within this tradition and attempts to operationalize it: if marriage is truly a covenant with defined terms, those terms should be explicit and enforceable within the church.
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| Period | View of Marriage | Key Move | | -------- | ----------------- | ---------- | | Apostolic | Good but secondary to celibacy | Paul's eschatological framework | | Patristic | Good but inferior to virginity | Ascetic amplification of Paul | | Jovinian controversy | Equality condemned as heresy | Hierarchy formalized | | Medieval | Sacrament, but still inferior to religious life | Sacramentalization | | Reformation | Desacramentalized; covenant, not sacrament | Luther and Calvin | | Puritan | Positively good; normative calling | Celebration of married life | | Modern | Love-based; covenant framework eroding | No-fault divorce |
The trajectory is not linear progress — it is a series of corrections. The fathers corrected Gnostic rejection of the body by affirming marriage as good. The Reformers corrected medieval sacramentalism by recovering the covenantal framework. The Puritans corrected the residual celibacy hierarchy by celebrating marriage as a spiritual good. Each correction brought its own risks and overcorrections.
The prenup project builds on the Puritan and Reformed recovery: marriage as a binding covenant of profound spiritual significance, with defined terms, mutual obligations, and ecclesial accountability.
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To be expanded as research develops.