As the title indicates, the book is an overview of over three millennia of marriage practices, leading to diverse attitudes toward marriage and written from a liberal point of view. The broad narrative is characteristically liberal in at least two ways. First, it tells the history of marriage in the church as a story of diversity and discontinuity from one historical epoch to the next. The main point of discontinuity is between the history of marriage as a social institution and the modern assumption (shared by Coleman) that marriage is rightfully a psychological/interpersonal and mainly private bond. Second, the book's historical outline is progressive from cultural (premodern) constraints to individual liberty.

The author expresses some despair about the social contradictions of individualism and the privatisation of marriage, but this course of things in the West is understood to be inevitable – on such matters, for instance, as gay marriage and extra-marital sex. The story is the church's role in Western civilisation. In a civilisation far beyond its traditional influence, the church will simply have to adjust to contemporary practices. Conservatives and traditionalists will lose to time. Within this frame, the author is fair-minded. Bishop Coleman's pastoral sensitivities come to bear on the presentation, and he is conciliatory on contentious issues. His readership appears to be moderate Anglicans, those who are interested both in a historical overview and in constructive freedom from the constraints of the tradition.

The first chapter is a survey of ‘Israel's Inheritance from its Near Eastern Neighbors’, beginning with the codes of the Mesopotamian, Babylonian and Hittite empires and ending with marriage among the Patriarchs, Abraham and Sarah, Isaac and Rebekah, and Jacob and Rachel. The second chapter is a study of the Old Testament. Bishop Coleman's pastoral experience comes through when identifying issues and problems of biblical interpretation. For example, he offers an illuminating review of translations of Gen 2:18–20, rendered with much liberty as ‘it is not good that man should be alone. I will make him an helper to bear him company’ by William Tyndale in 1534 (p. 31). Chapter 3 treats marriage in the classical world, and chapter 4, ‘Judaism between the Testaments’; chapter 5 gives an account of ‘Marriage in the New Testament’.

The chapter on the NT deals well with the unsystematic and occasional nature of its teachings on marriage (particularly in sections of Jesus and Paul). It ends of with a helpful discussion of the biblical meaning of love – the Hebrew chesed and Greek agape. ‘This kind of love involves constancy and selflessness, initiated by God, revealed in Christ and reciprocated by Christians’ (p. 119). Chapter 6, ‘Constructing the Christian Ethos’, explains Christendom's Augustinian inheritance, and chapter 7 describes the codification of marriage in Christendom. ‘Once the medieval Church had firmly taken over the supervision of marriage it was necessary to sort out a coherent policy from a welter of different theological opinions about what made a valid marriage, and what grounds, if any, there could be for ending it’ (p. 165). Chapter 8 reviews the reformers, including Erasmus, Luther, Calvin and Cranmer.

Chapter 9 is titled, ‘From Elisabeth I to Elisabeth II’, giving considerable attention to the Lambeth Conferences (1867–1998) on divorce, mixed marriages, polygamy, birth control and extra-marital sex. This last chapter shows the book to be labour of love. It is edited by Michael Langford from a manuscript left incomplete by Coleman's accidental death in 2001. Langford's work is commendable. He provides for a consistent flow of the chapter while allowing the author's voice to be heard. Bishop Coleman concludes with a defining statement on marriage. ‘Sex is about breeding and desire but also about joining and entering a sustaining relationship, as Jack Dominian would say. We are called by God into sustaining relationships with him through Jesus and with each other by friendship and one-flesh activities’ (p. 234). This statement sums up the constructive aspect of the book. It is at once comprehensive and conciliatory, yet as vague as the term ‘relationship’.