Big news! This past weekend, the Wall Street Journal heralded, “American Women Are Giving Up on Marriage.” Now that the majority of American women, aged 18-40, are single, the essay explained the reasons variously as not enough educated men to marry up to (47% of young women have a bachelor’s degree, but only 37% of men), not enough politically similar guys, or seeing themselves as happier than their married friends, etc.
These reasons all boil down to the dissolution of gender. Because, when you lose gender in relationship, you lose relationship. You could try to address the huge problem of women rejecting marriage with various measures. But you will make little difference if young women can no longer see the goodness of masculinity. Ask one you know, today, what does great manliness (in contradistinction to womanliness) look like? Listen to the confusion in the answer. Of course, add to this the denigration of childbearing and the numbers make sense.
Women (as well as men) need a better vision. There is a deeper meaning that can answer and inspire those questioning the value of marriage. Imagine if we could proclaim how marriage meant something much more than financial stability or eventual bliss (which it does). More than these, marriage bespeaks, through a glass darkly, truths about the divine Trinity. When God said, “Let Us create…in Our image, male and female…Be fruitful and multiply” (Genesis 1:26-28), He was proclaiming His plurality in unity, as those two come together and from their love proceeds a third.
Now, this is not my idea. A number of theologians have guided us in this direction, though their paths are now not often traveled. One such is the great medieval theologian of the thirteenth century, sometimes called the Seraphic Doctor: Bonaventure.
Bonaventure might not be a name you know, so allow me a brief introduction. He, along with his contemporary, Thomas Aquinas, successfully petitioned the Pope to prevent excommunicating Franciscan monks for preaching outside of the church. No less a theologian than Herman Bavinck, who also guides us in this direction, praises Bonaventure’s greatness in holy thinking. The 20th century Dutch Reformed theologian signals his esteem in his writings with statements like “Bonaventure says it even better [than Thomas Aquinas]…” and “Much sounder [than other medieval theologians], therefore, is the position of Bonaventure…” Let us consider, then, the vision this theologian provides of marriage.
Thomas McCall gives a concise summary of Bonaventure’s Trinitarian vision (in his excellent article about Divine Simplicity and Love, “What’s Not to Love?: Rethinking Appeals to Tradition in Contemporary Debates in Trinitarian Theology”). Listen to the Seraphic Doctor:
[Bonaventure] maintains that the Father and Son ‘concord in spirating the Holy Spirit’, and he insists that the concord just is love. Moreover, he offers an example (exemplum) of this love that produces a third. This example comes from ‘created love’, and while the Seraphic Doctor knows that created love and uncreated love are not ‘entirely similar’ (non omnio est similis) and thus it is not appropriate to assume univocity, nonetheless he employs the example without hesitation. He points to the love shared between a bride and a bridegroom: ‘they love themselves with a social love to live together (amore sociali ad convivendum); they love themselves furthermore with a conjugal love (amore coniugali) to procreate offspring . . .’ Similarly, the Father and Son love one another and spirate a third in concord.
Dr. McCall’s quotations of Bonaventure, besides proving that Sam Andreades is not the only creedal, confessional Christian who talks this way, give an appropriately careful explanation of marriage. And Bonaventure and Bavinck do it from within what I like to call Nicaean orthodoxy. The Trinity in Their inner life is supremely unlike us (Isaiah 40:18, 25). And God is ultimately unknowable (Exodus 33:20, 1Timothy 6:16). And yet, as noted above, He has deliberately splayed out an image of Themself in space and time in making us. Our marriages are an analogy of Trinitarian truth we can understand. We are an ectype of something much greater.
Of course, sometimes people do not marry for valid reasons, and there are those large stretches of our lives during which we are likely to not be married, for which God has many blessings also. But herein is the vision to inspire those single women who can marry but may be choosing not to.
Thus, it is not an arbitrary lifestyle choice. In getting married, women, as well as men, are re-enacting something cosmic. Constrained by the moral commands of Scripture, we live out a Trinitarian exemplum as “we love with a social love to live together and with a conjugal love to procreate offspring…” Which is why, when people do get married, they discover deep truths about themselves and about the Almighty.
Why marry? Because in doing so you are learning God.