Gillian Clark, Christianity and Roman Society - Huntington University

108 BOOK REVIEWS
John Witte, Jr. and Robert M. Kingdon, Sex, Marriage, and Family in John
Calvin’s Geneva, Vol. 1, Courtship, Engagement, and Marriage. Grand Rapids:
Eerdmans, 2005. Pp. 544. $32.00.
Reviewed by David C. Fink, Duke University
In this first of a projected three-volume series on Sex, Marriage, and Family in John
Calvin’s Geneva, John Witte Jr. and Robert M. Kingdon combine the genres of scholarly
monograph and source-text anthology to document and analyze the process whereby
Calvin and his colleagues “constructed a comprehensive new theology and jurisprudence
that made marital formation and dissolution, children’s nurture and welfare, family
cohesion and support, and sexual sin and crime essential concerns for both church and
state” (1). This first volume introduces the reader to the questions in view, argues for the
decisive importance of the Genevan reforms for Western domestic and sexual mores, and
introduces the wide array of documentary evidence under consideration before moving
on to a detailed engagement with the materials making up the first third of the project.
Tracing the formation of intimate bonds from the singles’ scene (Ch. 3, “Looking for
Love in All the Right Places”) to the honeymoon suite (Ch. 13, “Now I Take Thee”), this
volume includes chapters on courtship and matchmaking, individual and parental
consent, impediments to marriage, theology and law of interreligious marriage,
economics, the premarital delay (with all its attendant perils), and the wedding day itself.
Subsequent volumes in the series promise to take up the issues of family life and family
disruption.
Of particular interest in this initial volume are the first two chapters, where Witte
and Kingdon combine their respective expertise to present a brief sketch of the marriage
bond as it had developed in Western theology and canon law, and then to take stock of
the changes made during Calvin’s tenure in Geneva. Taking the papal revolution of the
High Middle Ages as their starting point, the authors highlight the threefold nature of
marriage in medieval Christian practice as “(1) a created, natural association, subject to
the laws of nature; (2) as a consensual contract, subject to the general laws of contract;
and (3) as a sacrament of faith, subject to the spiritual laws of the faith” (29). Though
ordained by God, marriage pertained primarily to the maintenance of social order, rather
than to the advancement of specifically spiritual goods. Yet, like the other sacraments,
marriage could serve as a channel of grace when no impediments were put in the way. In
its most essential features, medieval marriage was a “simple exchange of present
promises between Christian parties” (31), requiring neither physical consummation nor
the blessing of the church to render the union sacramental and open a channel of grace
which could only be closed by the death of one of the parties. This is not to suggest that
the church did not have an active interest in regulating marriage, however; where
theology left off, canon law took over, identifying the specific conditions under which an
authentic sacramental union might be established.
Calvin’s initial critique of this institution was based on the typically Protestant
notion of the “two kingdoms.” There is a “twofold government in man” (38), he argues,