Countercultural Marriage

The following is a quote about marriage from theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer. It is taken from a letter that he wrote from his prison cell in Nazi Germany to a young newly married couple. It’s a little heavy, but well worth reading:

Marriage is more than your love for each other. It has a higher dignity and power, for it is God's holy ordinance, through which he wills to perpetuate the human race till the end of time. In your love you see only your two selves in the world, but in marriage you are a link in the chain of the generations, which God causes to come and to pass away to his glory, and calls into his kingdom.

In your love, you see only the heaven of your own happiness, but in marriage you are placed at a post of responsibility towards the world and mankind. Your love is your own private possession, but marriage is more than something personal—it is a status, an office. Just as it is the crown, and not merely the will to rule, that makes the king, so it is marriage, and not merely your love for each other, that joins you together in the sight of God and man.

I like this quote because it expresses a truth about marriage that radically opposes the dominant view in our culture. I can’t count how many times—in movies and in real life—I have heard someone proffer the flimsiest excuses for exiting a marriage: “We just fell out of love,” or “We didn’t make each other happy anymore.” These lines are delivered with straight faces, as if the only criterion for evaluating marriage is personal happiness.

In our me-first era it’s good to be reminded that marriage isn’t all about us. Don’t be fooled by the messages coming from the surrounding culture. Marriage is not a flippant agreement, easily voided the moment it fails to deliver emotional benefits. It’s a sacred covenant with a much larger purpose than just making us happy. It involves God, our family and the whole of society.