Weddings, Divorces & Soul Ties, Oh My! (Part 2)

Trigger Warning:
This two-part series may challenge those of us steeped in Christian doctrine, especially those raised within or around modern American evangelical culture. It certainly challenged me to write it. I hadn’t intended to tackle this topic so early in my blogging journey, but the political conversations surrounding “covenant marriage” told me the time was now.

If you were taught that God sanctions civil marriage and that divorce is always wrong, you may feel unsettled. That discomfort is not my aim, but honest examination sometimes produces it, for both reader and writer. This was a complex piece to wrestle through, so bear with me.

In Part 1 of this series, I explored whether we may have misunderstood the scripture: “What God has joined together, let no one separate.” This verse is often quoted as a warning against divorce. But rarely do we pause to ask a more fundamental question: How does God join two people together in the first place?

Historically, the idea of a divine union, created by God and symbolized by Adam and Eve, was gradually ritualized into what we now call marriage. Over time, layers accumulated: polygamy, arranged marriages, dowries, inheritance laws, church sacraments, and eventually civil contracts. By the time marriage reached the modern West, it was deeply entangled with property, patriarchy, and social order.

In the ancient world, marriage functioned primarily as an economic and social institution. Women were transferred from the authority of their fathers to that of their husbands. Bride prices were negotiated. Sexual access was assumed. Consent, as we understand it today, was largely absent.

Biblical marriage reflects this reality. Wives were legally dependent. Concubinage was permitted. Polygamy was normalized. A woman’s survival often depended entirely on attachment to a male household. By modern standards, many of these arrangements resemble coercion or ownership, uncomfortably close, at times, to what we would call trafficking or slavery.

Despite the precarious position of women, divorce was not forbidden. In Jewish law, it was regulated. A get, as it was called, existed precisely because marriages could, and did, end. Many scholars argue that when Jesus spoke on divorce, he was responding to certain debates about easy “any cause” divorces that left women vulnerable, rather than issuing a universal ban. Paul later allows separation when peace and, possibly, safety are absent. Permanence was never the highest value. Humanity was.

Interestingly, despite our modern fixation on marriage, early Christianity did not strongly promote it. Paul explicitly says it is good not to marry, framing marriage as a concession rather than the pinnacle of human existence. In fact, there was initially no early Christian wedding liturgy, no marriage sacrament, and certainly no mandate. For the first few centuries, Christians generally married under Roman civil law, with distinct Christian rites gradually developing over the next several centuries.

As Christianity matured, marriage became more formalized, but alternative forms of deep partnership were also recognized and preserved: spiritual companions, vowed friendships, monastic pairings, celibate marriages, and lifelong opposite-sex spiritual friendships that sometimes involved traveling and working together. Intimacy was not equated with marriage, and marriage was not the sole container for love.

For example, Paulinus of Nola and Therasia were an early Christian aristocratic couple who, after personal tragedy, renounced wealth and adopted a celibate ascetic life while remaining legally married. They appear to have maintained separate living quarters consistent with ascetic practice. Therasia stayed in Spain while Paulinus resided in Italy.

Then there is St. Gregory of Nyssa and Macrina the Younger, siblings in a prominent fourth-century Christian family. Macrina lived an ascetic life and founded a monastic community. Gregory later portrayed her as his spiritual and theological teacher in works written after her death. Their relationship is a profound example of sibling spiritual partnership; together, they were central to the development of early Christian theology.

St. Jerome and Paula shared another personally intense and spiritually collaborative partnership. Paula left elite Roman society to join Jerome in Bethlehem and helped fund and establish monastic institutions. She supported his biblical scholarship, including the Latin translations that became foundational to the Vulgate tradition.  Their relationship combined spiritual direction, intellectual companionship, institutional collaboration, and deep personal devotion, making it one of the most consequential partnerships in early Christianity.

There are others too numerous to detail here: Melania the Elder and Rufinus of Aquileia (spiritual friends and co-pilgrims), St. Basil the Great and Gregory of Nazianzus (deep spiritual friends who shared travel and retreat), groups of female ascetics journeying to Jerusalem and visiting monastics in Egypt, and so many more.

Then there is adelphopoiesis. I had never heard this term before this marriage “deep dive” and was more than a little startled to learn what it entailed. The word literally means “brother-making,” and it was a formal church rite in the Eastern Christian world that created a spiritual bond between two people of the same sex. It appears in ancient Christian texts no later than the 700s and included prayers, references to David and Jonathan, the joining of hands, shared communion, and a concluding kiss of peace.

The ceremony itself resembled both a marriage rite and a monastic profession. It created formal kinship rather than marriage and, in some societies or legal systems, established obligations of mutual support, shared property, inheritance rights, and even joint burial. In effect, it formalized an intense same-sex spiritual bond of friendship within the life of the Church.

Taken together, we can see that early Christianity recognized multiple relational categories: marriage, monastic brotherhood, spiritual fatherhood and motherhood, godparenthood, and adelphopoiesis (ritual siblinghood). Celibate companionships of many kinds were normal, and sometimes even preferable to marriage. Spiritual intimacy, even across sexes, was not automatically sexualized. Not all deep bonds were marital.

The details varied across time and geography, but most ancient forms of Christianity agreed on several things: marriage was not permanent, as divorce was permitted in some circumstances; celibacy was highly valued, sometimes over marriage; mutual separation for the sake of God was acceptable when freely chosen; and celibate marriages were sometimes celebrated as spiritually superior for those called to them.

So, while we tend to think of divorce as a modern evil, even a cursory study of early Christianity and the Jewish culture that preceded it reveals that it was permitted.  Our modern religious ideas about divorce are more like Western Latin Christianity, which increasingly restricted it, moving toward indissolubility by the Middle Ages. Early Christian practices surrounding marriage and other same-sex and opposite-sex relationships look very different from later medieval law and from our modern cultural norms.

All of this brings us to the current calls for covenant marriage, a legally distinct form of marriage currently available in some states and under discussion in others, including Missouri. Typically promoted as a solution to rising divorce rates, covenant marriage requires premarital counseling and makes divorce extremely difficult.

My concern with covenant marriage is twofold.

First, it is often framed as a return to God’s original design for marriage. Historically and theologically, there is little basis for this claim. Covenants in the ancient world were typically sacred, asymmetrical bonds, such as those between God and humanity, rather than agreements between two private individuals. Marriage in biblical Israel functioned primarily as a contractual household alliance, even though prophetic texts sometimes used covenant language metaphorically.

Second, covenant marriage disproportionately disadvantages the partner with less power,  historically, and often practically, women. Making marriage difficult to exit substitutes endurance for relationship and permanence for justice. This is precisely why no-fault divorce was so transformative.

At best, covenant marriage is a modern invention cloaked in ancient language. At worst, it is a grave error, an attempt to legislate holiness by confusing civil law with divine will. It reflects a fear of impermanence more than a commitment to history.

So where does this leave us?

After researching, writing about, and living the topic of marriage, I have come to believe that some marriages ARE holy. Others are provisional. Some are mistakes. Then there are the soul-level unions that transcend legal recognition entirely. The Creator does not require the state’s permission to join what He has joined, nor does He bless every union the state records.

So I ask again: What if marriage is not something we create, but something encoded by our Creator that we remember? What if the Creator’s intention looks less like our modern marriage market, complete with dresses, cakes, contracts, and lifetimes of endurance, and more like Adam recognizing Eve as his Divinely ordained counterpart?

Perhaps the task before us is discernment rather than enforcement, not how to trap people in institutions in the service of society, but how to recognize where love, justice, and Divine intention are truly present.  If we are willing to look honestly at history, scripture, and lived experience, we may discover that true spiritual marriage is far more mysterious, and far less controllable, than we were ever taught.

Grace and light to you all.