Gregory Roeber's history of protestant marriage in early modern Europe, India, and North America is deeply researched and wide sweeping. With knowledge drawn from primary source material in several early modern languages across several centuries and continents, Roeber's grasp of the heart-centered evangelicalism derived from Martin Luther is masterful and full of implication. Engaging with historiographies of marriage in theology, law, and social history, Roeber makes advances in all three fields that many scholars will draw from.
Roeber charts the complicated development of protestant marriage, beginning with its theological roots of Luther's attempt to define wedded life in terms of the spousal relationship between Christ and his church celebrated in the fifth chapter of the pseudo-Pauline Letter to the Ephesians. Attentive to every glimmer of respect for real mutuality in marriage among Luther's followers, Roeber investigates his sources with the sense of purpose paralleling that of his subjects, as captured in the title of his book, “Hopes for Better Spouses.” Searching for evidence that early modern protestants prized mutuality through selfless love, Roeber draws attention to a forgotten theology of Christian marriage that Luther's followers failed to fully support and articulate. Roeber's recovery of this theology constitutes an important contribution to the intellectual tradition of protestant evangelicalism.
Roeber highlights Luther's quasi-sacramental vision of marriage as the first major advance in Christian thought on marriage since Augustine. Referencing Ephesians 5, Augustine had identified one of the “goods” of marriage as its representation of the sacramental union between Christ and his church. Inspired by Johann Tauler and other thirteenth-century mystics who represented nature and grace as bound together in a relational dynamic, Luther applied that relational dynamic to marriage, building on Augustine's recognition of the sacramental aspect of marriage. Luther highlighted the potential for grace to become directly infused into the natural bond of marital union. But the shadow of natural depravity loomed over all, as Roeber explains, and Luther failed to say enough about grace in marriage to propel his insight into the future without foundering. Tracing the history of ideas about marriage expressed by early modern Christians who ascribed to Lutheran theology, Roeber shows how the hope of finding grace through marriage resurfaced among pietists yet failed at every turn to reach full articulation as the basis of Christian community. If ordinary couples inspired Christian fellowship in the people around them, they did so without full theological support from Christian writers.
Roeber is just as interested in analyzing the forces that worked to undermine this quasi-sacramental vision of marriage as he is in locating the wisps of its presence after Luther. Luther's own emphasis on the total depravity of nature dampened his vision, as did his increasing stress on civil obedience and the need social order after the peasants' rebellion that some blamed on Luther and his denunciation of priestly authority. Philipp Melanchthon's insistence that the body of Christ remained firmly ensconced in heaven, uncorrupted by nature, further undermined Luther's vision of marriage. Ambivalence over whether marriage was a civil or religious institution led to more trouble, allowing proponents of marriage as a civil contract to gain momentum for their approach, especially in countries where the covenantal language of Reformed protestantism took hold. Even more destructively, in Roeber's view, fear of sexual license led pietists to abandon Luther's quasi-sacramental view of marriage. When radicals applied Luther's view of the dynamic interplay between nature and grace to the act of sexual intercourse, more conservative pietists were horrified. Sexual license popular in European culture also disturbed pietists, as did the practice of polygamy among Tamil people in India, where pietists from Denmark, Norway, and Germany established missions. Spine-tingling accounts of sex-soaked Hindu deities and their temple prostitutes fueled pietist alarm at the idea of practicing sex as a sacrament. Feeling surrounded by a vast world of disorderly people who seemed to lack all respect for monogamous marriage as the bedrock of Christian society, pietists backed off from saying anything about Christian marriage that might be construed in terms of either sexual pleasure or egalitarian mutuality. By the time Lutherans became firmly ensconced in the United States in the nineteenth century, a contractual approach to marriage compatible with U.S. civil law and the Reformed protestant tradition predominated, and the memory of a quasi-sacramental vision of marriage as the basis of Christian community had all but disappeared.
The breadth and implications of Roeber's story are impressive, as is the massive evidentiary support he marshals for his argument. Without detracting from this achievement it is nevertheless possible to see alternative explanations for the long history of dashed hopes for better spouses Roeber describes. While he includes informative bits of biographical evidence about particular marriages and marriage partners, very few words from early protestant marriages come into Roeber's book. Limited by available evidence, the book is primarily a history of ideas about marriage espoused by men in positions of authority seeking to define and regulate marriage as they thought it should be.
My point is not to fault Roeber for the lack of evidence at his disposal but rather to press the question of what more the religious texts about marriage that Roeber does have might suggest about early protestant marriage. What was the relationship between early protestant instructions for marriage and marital practice? What role did these religious texts play in marriage? These questions merit discussion as a way of putting aside judgment about what early moderns did or failed to do to the end of asking why they wrote as they did.
Ministers' demands for more order, more restraint, more humility, and more obedience in marriage dominate Roeber's account, reflecting the dominance of ministers over the production of texts about marriage, and their authority as preachers and interpreters of scriptural texts they perceived as templates for marriage. But complaints from married women must also have informed ministers' perceptions that marriage partners were falling short in their responsibility to make wedded union the bedrock of protestant social order. We know that women have rarely if ever lagged behind men in numerical representation or devotion in protestant churches, and it is reasonable to assume that ministers understood that their reputation depended on women's engagement and support. If the apparent advantages of protestant life had not outweighed its disadvantages for a significant minority of women, protestant religion would not have been so popular. Ministers depended on support from married women who, in their turn, relied on ministers for support in their efforts to sustain Christian homes. While the vast preponderance of writing about marriage came from men, and more often than not from ministers, men's control over the production of marital texts should not keep us from recognizing that women's voices must have informed some of the content of early protestant writing about marriage.
In addition, the dearth of christocentric mysticism in early protestant writings about marriage might represent something more—or something other—than a failure of religious vision. If early protestant women had expressed more enthusiasm for conceptions of spousal love rooted in Christ's relationship to the church, one would think ministers would have written on that subject more often and fervently. The disadvantages of a sacramental view of marriage must have been at least as obvious to protestant wives as it was to their husbands. The image of Christ as one's husband might be appealing for women without a sexual partner, but imagining one's husband as Christ would be another matter. The long history of female virginity as a requirement for espousal to Christ, and as a symbol of the purity of the church, might explain married women's lack of interest in conceptualizing protestant marriage as a sacrament. As Roeber shows, Luther went a long way in his attempt to reframe sacramental language for marriage. But rather than seeing him and his followers as failing to follow through in that vision, perhaps Luther went as far as there was to go. Perhaps the effort to draw inspiration from Ephesians 5 was too counterintuitive to be of much use to early protestant couples. Even in Luther's reformulation, sacramental expectations for marriage many have stood in the way of marital intimacy. For protestant women eager to make domestic life the building block of a better society, any retention of sacramental language for marriage may have caused more problems than it solved.
Luther's endowment of Christian marriage with quasi-sacramental status implied that Christian marriage was by quasi-analogy a representation of scripture itself—the word made flesh. If baptism and the eucharist were material expressions of God's word, and thus sacramental, the fleshy side of God's word would be even more apparent in marriage, if it was practiced as a sacrament. When some pietists began to travel down that road with sacramental implications for sex, other pietists backed away. For some couples at least, freedom from sacramental expectations and iconography might have been a blessing, or at least a relief.
It would be a mistake to pursue this line of thought in isolation from discussion of how writing about marriage served as a vehicle for men to express their concerns, some of which surely involved maintaining male dominance in marriage, and keeping women in line. Whatever elements of sympathy and respect for wives might be found in early protestant writings about marriage, emphasis on the hierarchical order of creation and the need for wives' obedience to husbands predominated. Disproportionate emphasis on women's need for humility in marriage does more than reveal a conservative trend in these writers. It also suggests that women acted assertively, and perhaps even equally in marriage. While Roeber reads conservative concern for order in marriage as a failure of heart-felt mutuality, it might also be read as evidence that women, and perhaps married couples as well, were flattening the hierarchical relation between husbands and wives that Christian marriage was supposed to reflect.
A similar comment might be made about the shift to civil marriage. Growing interest in legal rules for managing property in relation to marriage contributed to the shift to civil marriage, as Roeber explains, as did the covenant rhetoric prevalent in Reformed protestantism and its close relation to contract theory. While Roeber shows how this shift weakened the influence of the quasi-sacramental theory of marriage stemming from Luther, he does not pursue the question of how or whether it affected partnership or satisfaction in marriage. Puritan literature provides some evidence that covenant theology may have supported marital happiness more straightforwardly than sacramental theology, and that its application to marriage may even explain some of the success of covenant theology. Thus for example, the Puritan poet Anne Bradstreet would write with respect to her covenant of marriage, “If ever two were one, then surely we. If ever man were lov'd by wife, then thee” (“To my Dear and loving Husband,” The Complete Works of Anne Bradstreet, ed. Joseph R. McElrath, Jr. and Allan P. Robb [Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1981], 180).
If quasi-sacramental companionate Christian marriage was difficult to sustain in early-modern Europe, it was impossible to reconstruct in India. As Roeber describes in wonderful detail, pietist efforts to communicate a vision of marriage already fraught with complexity and ambivalence failed utterly in India, where different expectations for marriage prevailed, along with very different ways of thinking about, and embodying, divinity in relation to sex. In North America, Moravian efforts to develop Luther's vision of the dynamic relationship between embodied nature and divine grace proved somewhat more successful, but eventually disappeared, having created more problems for practitioners than it solved, much like Luther's vision itself.
Important historical questions remain regarding how participants in early modern protestant marriage understood their unions, how they understood their own responsibilities and satisfactions in marriage, and how they understood their spouses. The fact that early protestants committed so little of this lived experience to writing may be regrettable. But for people who so deliberately organized religious life around words, early protestant reticence about married life as it was practiced is revealing in itself. Roeber's book takes us to the edge of this obscure and remote terrain, leaving me to ask him for a sequel.
