The ideals of contemporary Christian marriage
In the past decade, in Australia and elsewhere, what used to be understood as Christian marriage has been subject to criticism and in some cases ridicule. We have emerged from that cultural moment with a broader definition of marriage, a better understanding of the complexity of modern social practices, and a stronger sense of the rights and obligations of individuals and institutions.
This article is not about the cultural politics of marriage quality. Here, I want to reflect on the themes of Part 1 and Part 2 of this series, and draw together some thoughts about best practice for marriages today – from a Christian perspective.
More often than not, Christian marriage is described in theological language so elevated that ordinary relationships can scarcely bear its weight. There are times when I have contributed to that trend. At other times, marriage talk is reduced to romance, sexual attraction, personal fulfilment, or domestic partnership. A more adequate account must hold together theological seriousness and human realism.
Marriage is a covenantal form of shared life in which two persons undertake to love one another faithfully across changing circumstances. Such a covenant involves learning how to give and receive love, negotiate difference, practise forgiveness, seek justice, sustain companionship, and pursue one another’s good. Lewis’s account and the four Cs together suggest that marriage cannot be reduced to a single form of love or a single relational virtue. At its richest, it incorporates Affection, Friendship, Eros, and Charity while cultivating compatibility, commitment, companionship, and character.
Marriage may therefore be understood not as a static achievement but as a vocation in which love is repeatedly received, tested, practised, repaired, and renewed.
Marriage as affection
Marriage provides a natural context for Affection. Over time, extraordinary declarations of love are accompanied, and often surpassed in significance, by ordinary acts of care: preparing food, sharing news, remembering preferences, recognising moods, offering comfort, maintaining routines, and remaining present in illness or difficulty. Such practices create familiarity, trust, and a sense of home. As a result, much of married love is enacted through forms of attention that are easily overlooked because they are habitual.
The moral danger lies in allowing familiarity to become entitlement. A spouse who was once approached with curiosity and attentiveness may gradually be taken for granted, while care may become intrusive or possessive. Faithful affection requires renewed attention to the person whose presence has become familiar and ordinary. Marriage may rightly say, “You belong with me,” but must never imply, “You belong to me.” Genuine closeness deepens knowledge and attachment without abolishing the freedom or distinct personhood of the beloved.
Marriage as friendship
Marriage also flourishes when it includes the qualities of friendship. Spouses develop a common history and inhabit a shared world whose significance extends beyond the internal dynamics of the relationship. This common space may include vocation, family, faith, intellectual life, recreation, hospitality, service, community engagement, or creative activity. Such shared purposes prevent marriage from becoming excessively introspective. Couples require not only someone to love but also goods, practices, and commitments that they can love together.
The implications for vocation and leisure are significant. Employment, ministry, parenting, study, recreation, and service all make claims upon time and attention, and these claims must be negotiated within the relationship. Neither spouse’s vocation should automatically be treated as primary, nor should leisure become merely parallel consumption in which two persons occupy the same space while inhabiting separate worlds.
Marriage should also remain embedded within wider forms of community. Friends, family, congregations, colleagues, and neighbours provide relationships and sources of meaning that no spouse should be expected to supply alone. A socially connected marriage is generally better protected against the unrealistic expectation that one person must meet every emotional, spiritual, social, and practical need of the other.
Marriage as erotic communion
Eros gives marriage a distinctive embodied dimension. Sexual love may express desire, tenderness, pleasure, trust, vulnerability, reconciliation, and mutual belonging. Its significance should neither be exaggerated nor minimised. Sexual intimacy is one important dimension of marriage, but it is not the sole measure of marital health.
Sexual relationships also change across time. Pregnancy, parenting, ageing, illness, disability, medication, stress, hormonal change, psychological wellbeing, and ordinary fluctuations of desire may all alter the experience and frequency of sexual intimacy. Faithful erotic love requires sustained communication, patience, consent, generosity, humour, and freedom from coercion.
Theologically, the embodied character of Eros is significant because it resists any dualism in which marriage is understood primarily as a spiritual friendship. Human persons are embodied, and bodily affection and sexual intimacy may become genuine forms of communion. Yet they do so only when shaped by fidelity, mutuality, respect, consent, and recognition of the other person’s dignity and agency.
Marriage as covenantal charity
Charity, or altruistic love, gives Christian marriage its deepest moral and theological orientation. It asks not merely what one receives from the relationship but what genuinely serves the good of the beloved. Embodying this orientation does not abolish reciprocity. A healthy marriage involves giving and receiving, and Christian self-giving cannot mean the permanent self-subordination of one spouse to the interests of the other.
Moreover, charity joins generosity with justice, mercy with truth, forgiveness with accountability, and commitment with respect for personal dignity. This clarifies the meaning of covenant. Marriage vows do not amount to a promise to tolerate whatever may occur; they constitute a commitment to a form of life characterised by fidelity, truthfulness, care, responsibility, and mutual good.
The moral seriousness of covenant therefore lies not simply in permanence but in the quality of the relationship it seeks to sustain.
Marriage and compatibility
Marriage brings difference into sustained proximity. Differences concerning personality, religion, money, sexuality, children, vocation, family obligations, politics, leisure, or lifestyle may all become significant over time. Some differences may be accommodated relatively easily, while others require sustained negotiation or raise deeper questions of conscience and justice.
Compatibility should therefore be understood as partly created rather than simply discovered. Couples learn habits, routines, compromises, and forms of communication that allow them to construct a shared life without suppressing individuality. The goal is not to eliminate difference but to learn how to live faithfully within it.
This requires discernment by both parties in the couple relationship. Some differences should simply be accepted, others negotiated, and still others treated as morally substantive where they affect dignity, safety, freedom, or deeply held convictions.
Marriage and commitment
Commitment gives marriage temporal continuity. It allows spouses to know that the relationship rests upon more than immediate emotional satisfaction and can therefore provide the security necessary for vulnerability, honesty, and trust. Commitment also allows long-term projects, responsibilities, and forms of dependence to develop because the relationship is not understood as permanently provisional.
Yet permanence must be interpreted morally rather than mechanically. A marriage may continue institutionally while its covenantal substance has been profoundly damaged. Violence, coercion, abuse, manipulation, and persistent betrayal constitute serious violations of covenant rather than unfortunate exceptions to an otherwise intact relationship.
Christian teaching should therefore affirm fidelity without confusing it with captivity. Commitment has moral content: truth, responsibility, care, justice, mutual obligation, and the refusal to treat the other person as disposable.
Marriage as companionship
Companionship is the gradual construction of a common life. It develops through meals, conversation, travel, worship, recreation, parenting, work, hospitality, service, humour, grief, and shared memory. Its importance lies in the fact that marriages can become organisationally competent while relationally thin. Couples may successfully manage households and responsibilities while ceasing to remain attentive or curious toward one another.
Companionship must therefore be renewed through common attention. Shared interests, sustained conversation, ordinary enjoyment, and deliberate time together help preserve the sense that the relationship is more than a partnership in administration.
At the same time, companionship must preserve individuality. Marriage does not require the extinction of separate friendships, vocations, interests, or aspirations. The aim is not fusion but faithful closeness. Communion is mature when it creates sufficient security for distinct persons to continue developing rather than requiring either to disappear into the identity of the couple.
Marriage as a school of character
Marriage exposes character because another person encounters both strengths and weaknesses at close range. Impatience, pride, insecurity, resentment, selfishness, generosity, courage, tenderness, and gratitude become visible within the ordinary pressures of daily life.
For this reason, marriage may function as a school of virtue. Difference may cultivate patience, conflict may require honesty, failure may demand humility, and vulnerability may call forth courage. This formative potential should not be romanticised. Marriage does not automatically make people morally better, and the opportunities it creates for growth may be resisted.
Character must therefore be deliberately cultivated. The health of marriage depends not only upon finding an appropriate partner but also upon becoming a person capable of sustaining faithful love. In this sense, character may be the most fundamental of the four Cs because it determines how compatibility, commitment, and companionship are enacted.
Marriage as a school of grace
A Christian theology of marriage must move beyond moral exhortation. Virtue, communication, discipline, and commitment are indispensable, but no relationship is sustained by moral achievement alone. Spouses misunderstand one another, repeat unhelpful patterns, become defensive, neglect important needs, and sometimes cause harm despite good intentions.
This is where grace a central role. Christian marriage requires the possibility of confession, repentance, forgiveness, repair, renewal, and beginning again. Grace does not negate accountability. Rather, it allows failure to be acknowledged truthfully without defining either person permanently by the worst moment in the relationship.
More could be said. This article is far from exhaustive in its reflections on ideals of contemporary Christian marriage. But the most essential point is this: a marriage is sustained over time not because two people finally become sufficiently virtuous to deserve one another. It endures because they learn, imperfectly and repeatedly, how to give and receive grace.
Rev Dr Rod Benson is General Secretary of the NSW Ecumenical Council and a minister of the Uniting Church in Australia serving at North Rocks Community Church in Sydney.
Image source: author.
Taking it further….
Reflection questions
- What does it mean to describe marriage as both a covenant and a vocation, rather than simply a relationship based on romance, personal fulfilment or domestic partnership?
- The article argues that the goal of marriage is “not fusion but faithful closeness.” What distinction is being made here, and why is preserving the individuality, freedom and agency of each spouse important to Christian marriage?
- How can confession, repentance, forgiveness and grace operate within marriage without minimising wrongdoing or weakening the demands of justice and accountability?
Application questions
- What ordinary habits or acts of care could help spouses resist taking one another for granted and renew curiosity, gratitude and attentiveness toward each other?
- If a marriage has become “organisationally competent while relationally thin,” what practical changes could restore conversation, enjoyment, intimacy and common attention?
- Which personal quality—such as patience, honesty, humility, courage, generosity, tenderness or gratitude—most needs deliberate cultivation in order for you to love another person more faithfully? What concrete practice might help develop it?
All Told 