Abstract
Lina Toth's book Singleness and Marriage after Christendom reminded me of a conversation I had a few years ago with a group of students. As we chatted over lunch, one of them casually mentioned that she had gotten married the previous weekend. ‘What?’ I exclaimed. ‘I thought you were getting married in a few months. And if you got married a couple of days ago, why are you here with us instead of off on your honeymoon with your husband?’ She calmly explained that they decided to get married early in order to solve a housing issue, but they would still have the ‘big wedding’ in a few months. She and the other students in the group then began discussing the pros and cons of informing the future wedding guests that the couple was, in fact, already married. Several students advocated for keeping it a secret because that would make the wedding ‘more fun’ and ‘more meaningful’. Besides, if people knew they were already married, they might not come. I listened quietly, mostly because I didn’t know what to say in response. The questions I wanted to ask—What do they think marriage is? Why would the families go along with this? What would the ‘big wedding’ in a few months be or mean?—were never raised. As a result, I have found myself thinking about her story on more than one occasion, because it highlights the paradigm shift that Western culture has been undergoing in its relationship to the ideas of ‘marriage’ and ‘singleness’. It is this very shift that Lina Toth seeks to address in her book Singleness and Marriage after Christendom.
Toth is clear that she does not intend to explore or construct a theology of marriage as such. Rather, her primary interest is the ‘everyday theology which undergirds the way we live as singletons, married couples, or those somewhere in between’ (p. 4). With this in mind, she sets out to investigate what that theology is and where it came from. Her approach to this task is primarily historical. In chapter 1 she describes the current state of affairs with regard to singleness and marriage in both the larger Western culture and in the Western church, surveying statistics and perspectives.
In chapters 2–4 Toth examines the nature of marriage and singleness is the pre-Christendom era. She begins with an overview of the Old Testament's teaching and then demonstrates how shocking Jesus’ statements on marriage and family would have been to his Jewish audience. She also contrasts the earliest Christians’ views on the family with Roman law and ethos, again demonstrating how shocking the Christian approach would have been to a culture which saw marriage and family as a stabilizing and foundational element of society.
In chapters 5–7 Toth moves into an analysis of marriage and singleness during the time of Christendom (i.e., from the time of Constantine through the twentieth century), from examining various types of singleness during the medieval period, to looking at the Victorian ideal of marriage and family, to analyzing the progression of Western culture's understanding of romantic love.
It is only in chapter 8 that Toth truly moves into a discussion of the post-Christendom world of Western culture. In this chapter she argues that the church must once again take seriously Jesus’ rather shocking declarations on marriage and celibacy in order to recover true community, real friendship, and a deeper understanding of sexual fulfillment and family.
Toth's book is at its most helpful as a concise, introductory summary and overview of Western culture's relationship with and practice of the ideas of marriage and singleness. She ably contrasts the Old Testament teachings on marriage with Jesus’ teachings on marriage and celibacy, highlighting just how odd Jesus would have sounded both to his Jewish audience and to the larger Roman world. Her treatment of the family in Greco-Roman life is fascinating, particularly the discussion of the political nature of marriage and child-bearing, the role of women, and the significance of the sibling relationship. She draws the reader's attention to some little-known but potentially helpful groups from the medieval period, such as the Beguines and advocates for the importance of the Radical Reformation and its understanding of the church as a new family. She also rightly identifies the Victorian ideal as one of the primary influences on the modern Western world's conception of family and happiness.
Toth's book succeeds as a summary of the topic of singleness and marriage over the millennia. Unfortunately, the book struggles under the weight of its misnamed title. Only a small part of the book deals with the post-Christendom era, and even that offers little in the way of analysis of that era or its undergirding assumptions or beliefs. The book does an excellent job of describing major ideas and movements related to marriage and singleness over the last several millennia, but it does not situate these ideas and movements within the ideology of Christendom or the pre- and post- eras of Christendom. The reader is left to figure out what Christendom and post-Christendom are and then contextualize the historical data on their own. In other words, there is little in this book that helps me make sense of my student's sudden marriage, her continuing desire for a ‘big wedding’, or the discussion about whether or not the actual marriage should be disclosed prior to the ‘big wedding’. Singleness and Marriage after Christendom does not clarify what post-Christendom is or how it differs from Christendom. Therefore it also does not clarify how either of these eras and their undergirding philosophies has affected the way Western culture and/or the Western church thinks about and practices singleness and marriage.
Because of this, the last chapter has an unfinished feel to it. Throughout that chapter, Toth regularly encourages local groups of Christians to think creatively about how to put into practice the teachings of Jesus regarding marriage and singleness, but it is unclear if this creative thinking should be based on earlier practices of the church as seen in pre-Christendom and Christendom, or whether the church should be trying to do something new. The fact that the majority of the book is about how marriage and singleness were practiced during pre-Christendom and Christendom seems to suggest that we should find inspiration for our current practice of marriage and singleness in those historical eras. However, the very idea that post-Christendom is, in fact, after Christendom, suggests that the era we are currently living in is something quite new and therefore requires new ways of living out Christ's teachings on marriage and singleness. In other words, is it better for our understanding and practice of marriage and singleness if the church seeks to recover and re-institute Christendom, or is post-Christendom an opportunity for the church to be the church in a new way that is quite radically different from its existence during Christendom? Without a clearer explanation of these designations and the theological, political and social assumptions undergirding them, Singleness and Marriage after Christendom gives us little guidance on these questions.
This may be a function of the fact that this book is just one of a series entitled ‘After Christendom’. A short preface by Stuart Murray provides a brief definition of ‘post-Christendom’ and informs the reader that this definition was fully explored in the first book of the series, entitled Post-Christendom, written by Murray himself. Given that, perhaps it is unfair to expect Toth's book to rehash the work done by Murray in the first book of the series. However, it may be that this book is simply in the wrong series. But that doesn’t mean that it is not worth reading. On the contrary, the concise historical overview offered in this book would work very well in a college-level class or for an adult education class in the local church. Indeed, the last chapter is directed specifically at the local church, encouraging its members to think creatively about how they, as a community desiring to follow after Jesus, can live more fully, freely and creatively into that calling as people who are both single and married.