Hebrews 13:4
Let marriage be held in honor among all, and let the marriage bed be undefiled; for God will judge the immoral and adulterous.
In C.S. Lewis’ famous book The Screwtape Letters, Uncle Screwtape writes to Wormwood, a young tempter out in the field on his first assignment and reminds him that humans are subject to the “Law of Undulation”. That is, says Screwtape, we are “amphibians”: half animal and half spirit. “As spirits,” Screwtape writes of us, “they belong to the eternal world, but as animals they inhabit time. This means that while their spirit can be directed to an eternal object, their bodies, passions, and imaginations are in continual change, for to be in time means to change. Their nearest approach to constancy, therefore, is undulation—the repeated return to a level from which they repeatedly fall back, a series of troughs and peaks.” This being so, God has ordained for us, at certain critical junctures in life, oaths which carry us through the troughs when mere feeling is not enough. If we live in that oath with the help of the Holy Spirit, we become more like Christ. If we simply follow our feelings from one cheap affair to the next, we subject ourselves to the judgement of God. That is why we make marriage vows. For it is precisely because the feelings of erotic attraction come and go (and are even subject to temptation in directions other than our spouse) that God has commanded us to bind ourselves with a vow here. For marriage is not primarily about the husband and the wife. It is, says St. Paul, about Christ and his Church (Ephesians 5:32). God did not fashion an image us in speaking of Christ the Groom and his Bride the Church. Rather, he made us little images of Christ and called us to do in our small way what Christ has done in an infinitely great way: laid down his life for his Beloved.
