Traditional Marriage vs White Wedding: Separating Facts from Fictitious Misconceptions
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As I pen down this write up, I am sadly reminded of a story of a young lady who committed murder through abortion in a particular city in this country because she did not want to be denied the chance of being wedded in the church by her pastor. Based on what she told me,it is a standard practice in her church to deny marital blessings to a couple expecting a child before the white wedding. It happened that after her traditional marriage, she moved in with her husband and,to God be the glory,she took in. News like this should ordinarily have attracted wild, ecstatic jubilations from anyone but not for this lady. Instead, she became gloomy and uncomfortable for the sole reason that her church, one of the new generation protestant churches, would no longer allow her to be wedded in the same manner she should have been wedded as a fresh couple. They see it as a sin. Oh my God! To buttress her points further, she quoted profusely and passionately from the Letter to the Hebrews how marriage bed is undefiled and that adulterers would be punished. The part of the letter to the Hebrews she quoted reads "Marriage is to be honoured by all and husbands and wives must be faithful to each. God will judge those who are immoral and those who commit adultery" (cf Heb.13:4). I wondered if she committed adultery by sleeping with her legitimate husband in the first place. But I had to listen to her even though I knew she had quoted that verse wrongly and out of context too. In the end, she had to abort the pregnancy.The white wedding was held and they returned home.
After listening to her story,I was simultaneously struck by a twin feeling: I was mad and appalled. I felt so because of the way those with Sunday school's understanding of the Bible use such shallow understanding of theirs to cause griefs and confusions in many homes in the name of "the Bible says". How on earth would a so-called pastor tell a congregant preparing for marriage that she could not have a white wedding in the church if she was found with a legitimate pregnancy before the white wedding, not considering the fact that such a couple would have already been in a legally-sanctioned and societally-approved marriage? If the white wedding was more important than the traditional marriage, how come couples cannot approach the Church for a white wedding without a substantive evidence that the traditional marriage rite has been concluded? In fact, in some churches, the presentation of a paper called "paragraph 14" or so is sine qua non for the Church wedding to go ahead. The paper contains an attestation from the wife's family that a couple has successfully carried out all traditional marriage rites to warrant them the status of a husband and a wife.
Let us face it honestly, the issue of some churches seeing the white wedding after traditional marriage as a mandatory thing without which the couple is denied marital blessing is becoming more embarrassingly disturbing by the day.A historical journey into the past would reveal that our progenitors, prior to the advent of Christianity, never had anything called the white wedding. Yet,they lived happily and prosperously. God blessed them with longer life's spans. Divorce rate was lower too. Their marital success was never even tied to the apron string of a white wedding. Why then have people become so suddenly obsessed with the idea and practice of having a white wedding as a do-or-die exercise to the extent that they can now abort a legitimate pregnancy because of a so-called church's rule? Only God knows how many young couples go bankrupt and slip further into huge debts not because of the traditional marriage celebration but on account of the white wedding which our young girls have been brainwashed to see as an irrevocable pre-condition for contracting marriage in the first place.
From my elementary social studies background, I was taught that we had four types of marriage namely traditional marriage, Christian marriage or the white wedding,court marriage and Islamic marriage.
African traditional marriage is domestic and homely to us. The Europeans favour the white wedding and court marriage more. Unfortunately, we have chosen to duplicate marriage by holding a separate white wedding after the traditional African marriage as if one is not yet legally married after the traditional marriage.This is one false belief we must strive hard to disband.
Honestly, we have reached a stage when people need to begin to understand that what happens in Church during the white wedding is a blessing of marriage. The church has no power to nullify a traditional marriage,it can only nullify a white wedding.By the way, the preponderance of traditional marriage with its various conventions over the white wedding is obviously conspicuous in the Bible and should serve as a pointer to the fact that God could not have intended that having the traditional marriage alone was inadequate and sinful. I must honestly admit that I have never read where Jesus ever attended a white wedding but I have read where he attended a traditional marriage. (Cf John 2:1-11). Why then should we kill ourselves or put our partners through serious financial stresses? Why should we abort a legitimate pregnancy all in the name of "I must have my white wedding before I can move to your house?" If you can afford it,feel free to do it almost immediately but if you cannot, you can just go meet your priest and have your marriage blessed in the chapel. It is the same blessing.
Am I against church weddings? No! But I am against the almost generally-acceptable misconception, in many quarters, that it is sinful for a customarily-married couple to live together before having their white wedding. Go and study the scripture very deeply and understand its contextual meaning. The most basic requirements to be met for any marriage to be valid are parental consent and payment of bride price or dowry ( dowry is brought by the bride to her groom). I have found it very difficult to locate a substantive teaching on the white wedding in the scripture. What I have found however is the traditional marriage duly sanctioned and approved. There is no where it is written in the scripture that, not having a white wedding after traditional marriage is sinful. It is not sinful.
Therefore, my brothers, as long as both your parents and you are in agreement and you have paid her bride price,she is your legal and bonafide wife. My sister, if he has fulfilled all the necessary traditional marriage rites culminating in the payment of your bride price and your parents handing you over to him through an intermediary, then you become his legal wife. And so you commit no sin in the eyes of God if you move in with him and start a family even before the white wedding. No pastor anywhere should deceive you into abandoning your marriage on account of not having a white wedding. It is the wrong interpretation of the Bible by those with a shallow understanding of its contextual meaning that brought about the confusion.
Let me ask you.Have you ever seen Europeans or Americans holding your kind of African traditional marriage among themselves unless a European or an American was getting married to an African lady? They do not. But here, we hold our traditional marriage and duplicate marriage by having another one of the white. Unfortunately many customarily-married couples are gradually been conditioned to believe that it is not right for them to consummate their marriage by having sex until the white wedding is done. Those with this kind of warped understanding of the scripture and who give this kind of convoluted teaching do not care about whether or not the couple has the financial wherewithal to do everything at the same time. But is that what the scripture says,that after traditional marriage, the wife should not sleep with her husband? It is a pity how we often quote the Scripture out of context in order to satisfy a personal opinion and interest. Let me reiterate that there is no evidence of white wedding in the scripture in the sense that we understand it today,only traditional marriage. The white wedding,as we know and practice it today, was a sole creation of the Europeans,not Biblical.
Frankly,it is disturbing how a lot of people who have little or no scholarly understanding of the scripture go about quoting and interpreting it out of context. A deeper scholarly and contextual understanding of the Bible is absolutely different from the Sunday school's understanding of it.
It is on this note that I would like to appeal to our priests to start consulting in order to come up with an arrangement that will see couples having their marriage blessed on the same day of their traditional marriage, if possible at the same venue, to avoid unnecessary duplication of marriages and wastages.The traditional marriage is both compulsory and necessary but the white wedding is not but only necessary. To borrow from Research Methods, the traditional marriage is an independent variable while the white wedding is a dependent variable. I do not intend to extend the frontier of this debate beyond what it seeks to achieve,which is situating it within the context of our experience as Africans vis-Ã -vis the scriptural basis of what marriage is. We must therefore separate scriptural facts from fictitious misconceptions.
Note: Do not come here to preach to me about this. I would appreciate if could offer a convincingly comprehensive scriptural foundations of the white wedding. Do not tell me what your pastor said,tell me what the scripture says!
©Ogiri John Ogiri.
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