Covenant Marriage in Comparative Perspective (review)

The term "covenant marriage" has acquired two widely accepted definitions. The first is the historical sense, derived from Calvinist theology. John Calvin, who rejected traditional Catholic notions of the sacramentality and indissolubility of Christian marriage, wished to ground his new vision of Christian marriage on a fresh interpretation of biblical texts. In the revolutionary sixteenth century, he sought marital stability even while rejecting the old theological and canonistic understandings. He found that stability in the emphasis he placed on the biblical notion of "covenant." God made a covenant in the Book of Genesis with the people of Israel, and he renewed this covenant with the Christian people through the atoning acts of Jesus Christ and the heartfelt conversion every Christian must experience as the first step toward salvation. Marriage, Calvin argued, should replicate, in the terrestrial world, this grand and transcendent vision of God's relation to His creation. Man and wife should bind themselves as lovingly and irrevocably toward one another as God has bound Himself to those He lovingly brought into being and whose welfare He continues to look after.

If this is the generally accepted theological meaning of the term "covenant marriage," it has acquired a second sense also, in recent American debates over no-fault divorce. Thanks to the tireless efforts of the Louisiana legal scholar Katherine Shaw Spaht, covenant marriage has acquired in those American states that have adopted such statutes the general legal sense of a binding relationship that requires greater formality and commitment than other forms of legal marriage. Parties to a covenant marriage must, as a matter of state law, undergo premarital counseling to gain a deeper sense of marital permanence and fidelity; they must pledge to take measures to preserve the marriage in the face of difficulties; and they agree in advance to abide by narrowly drawn grounds of divorce and not seek divorce under the state's no-fault provisions.

The contributors to this collection of essays take these two senses of covenant marriage as basic and seek to accomplish two further goals: A number of contributors seek to expand the ambit of "covenant" marriage by finding analogues to this tradition outside the Calvinist and the American legal experiences. Other contributors, meanwhile, seek to explore in greater depth and detail the significance of covenant marriage to the reformed Protestant tradition and to American law. Edited by John Witte, one of the most prodigiously creative and versatile members of the American legal academy and by Eliza Ellison, the Projects Director for the Emory University Center for the Study of Law and Religion, this book achieves both ambitions. The result is an interdisciplinary work of great originality and skill.

Several essays stand out as especially significant for the readers of the Catholic Historical Review. These include, first, Michael Lawler's article "Marriage as Covenant in the Catholic Tradition." Aside from some ambiguous references in Hosea and Malachi, Lawler finds little support for an explicit biblical understanding of marriage as covenant. Similarly, he finds that, aside from a reference to marriage as a foedus in the fourth-century Arnobius and again in the letter of the ninth-century Pope Nicholas I to the Bulgarians, the medieval writers eschewed the language of covenant in favor of sacramentum. This tendency became fixed with the twelfth-century rise of scholasticism and the Council of Trent's subsequent inclusion of marriage as one of the seven sacraments. And yet, Lawler continues, the Catholic tradition is not hostile to the ideal of covenant marriage. Indeed, Lawler stresses that the Second Vatican Council has spoken approvingly of the concept.

If Lawler succeeds in reconciling the Catholic sacramental tradition of marriage with the reformed covenantal perspective, two essays treat explicitly of the history and significance of covenant marriage to the Protestant tradition. James Turner Johnson, in "Marriage as Covenant in Early Protestant Thought: Its Development and Implications," traces the growth of this way of...