Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!usc!sdd.hp.com!wuarchive!ukma!seismo!dimacs.rutgers.edu!aramis.rutgers.edu!athos.rutgers.edu!christian From: ok@goanna.cs.rmit.oz.au (Richard A. O'Keefe) Newsgroups: soc.religion.christian Subject: Re: The Laws of the Old and New Covenants Message-ID: Date: 27 Mar 91 02:28:58 GMT Sender: hedrick@athos.rutgers.edu Organization: Comp Sci, RMIT, Melbourne, Australia Lines: 38 Approved: christian@aramis.rutgers.edu In article , balistik@nevada.edu (SHAWN HICKS) writes: > When you or anyone says 'marriage' what do you mean? Are you refering to the > social/legal marraige where a Justice of the Peace declares you wed or are > you refering to a religious wedding? Usually christians get wed in church and > register that marriage with the government so that it can be legally > recognized. Sexual activity outside marriage in the christian church is a sin. > Fact. For the record: the idea of marriages needing to be registered with the State is rather recent. For example, "Marriage by Declaration" (where if a man and a woman eligible to marry say in front of witnesses that they are married, then they _are_ married, no church or state intervention required) survived until quite recently in Scotland, and someone told me that it survived even later in some of the American States. Then there's "common-law marriage"; it used not to be a euphemism. In the Common Law of England, if a man and woman eligible to marry lived together for a year and a day, they were _married_. The Napoleonic code changed things in many European countries; my understanding is that a church wedding in (say) the Netherlands has no legal status, so the custom is to have the civil wedding and then procede immediately to the church. A book I've got (but not handy) on the former English custom of "wife-selling" (which, interestingly enough, made it to Australia, but seems to have died out) states that sometimes even witnesses weren't required; it gives historical examples of marriages where the only ceremony was someone saying "Do you agree to be my wife now" and the other saying "yes", and of such marriages being defended in court. The idea that a marriage _had_ to be recorded by the State or _had_ to involve some kind of religious ceremony would have come as a surprise to Paul, from both his Jewish background and his Hellenistic background. So if two people eligible to marry regard themselves as permanently committed to each other, especially if they have said so in front of witnesses (and I'm thinking of the cliche "we don't need a piece of paper to keep us together" here), then for religious purposes I would regard them as married. So would some ministers I know (not liberals, either). -- Seen from an MVS perspective, UNIX and MS-DOS are hard to tell apart.