Some more positive points:
Genesis 2:18
And the LORD God said, It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him an help meet for him.
Matthew 19:6
Wherefore they are no more twain, but one flesh. What therefore God hath joined together, let not man put asunder.
TOm:
So in keeping with the idea of #2 above, earthly marriages are until death do us part, but heavenly marriages are forever.
In fact, in the Garden of Eden man an women where united. The fall lead to death. If death resulted in the separation of man and woman, and the atonement did not renew the original unity God called “good” in the Garden of Eden, then it was not an infinite atonement.
Another thing I might note. The unity associated with becoming one with God will result in a different type of closeness than that experience by earthly couples. In a sense this will be different than marriage, but Christendom generally recognizes that we will know each other in heaven. With this knowledge and the heavenly bond of marriage we formed upon this earth, the two will still be united. I know that LDS place a greater emphasis upon this than non-LDS, but I believe this common ground does not fail either of our theologies.
Barry Bickmore:
fairlds.org/pubs/conf/1999BicB.html
Finally, many Jewish Christians
did practice a form of celestial marriage, and this can be traced back to the first century. The Christian philosopher Origen complained in the third century about the Jewish Christians and others who believed in a literal millennial reign of Christ, and he added this:
Certain persons…are of the opinion that the fulfillment of the promises of the future are to be looked for in bodily pleasure and luxury…. And consequently they say, that after the resurrection there will be marriages, and the begetting of children…. Such are the views of those who, while believing in Christ, understand the divine Scriptures in a sort of Jewish sense, drawing from them nothing worthy of the divine promises.
Cardinal Daniélou infers a similar interpretation from an enigmatic passage in the
Didache, a first-century Jewish Christian document, where prophets are mentioned as performing something called “the cosmic mystery of the Church”. Daniélou links this mystery to the type of “spiritual marriages” some Gnostic groups practiced:
The expression “cosmic mystery of the Church” seems to stand in opposition to a “heavenly mystery of the church”. This heavenly mystery is the celestial marriage of Christ to the Church, which also finds its expression in this world. The allusion in this passage would therefore seem to be to those spiritual unions which existed in Jewish Christianity between prophet-apostles and a sister. . . The relation of these unions to their heavenly ideal is explicitly stated by the Gnostics: “Some of them prepare a nuptial couch and perform a sort of mystic rite (mystagogia)…affirming that what is performed by them is a spiritual marriage after the likeness of the unions…above” (Adv. haer. I, 21:3).
The Gnostic rite is described in the
Gospel of Philip as being performed in “the mirrored bridal chamber”, and “those who have united in the bridal chamber will no longer be separated.” Stuart George Hall writes that Melito, Bishop of Sardis in the late second century, may have preserved a fragment of the ancient bridal chamber ceremony in his writings, as well.
Charity, TOm
