Marriage among Catholics and Protestants: A Reformation Perspective

Of all the questions that hit my inbox, the most regular ones concern romantic relationships between Catholics and Protestants, particularly whether it is wise for one to pursue marriage across the religious divide. Last summer I wrote two posts on the topic, one on dating and another on marriage itself. Since then, a couple of readers asked me an interesting question for which I didn’t have an answer: “What would the Protestant Reformers have said about the issue?” I wasn’t sure, that is, until this morning when I read a fascinating passage in Peter Martyr Vermigli’s (1499-1562) Loci Communes. Following is a copy of the sixteenth-century English version translated from Peter Martyr’s Latin by Anthonie Marten (London: Henry Denham and Henry Middleton, 1583), a summary using the words of the text, and a few interpretive comments.

“Let us chiefly examine whether the parties which are to be joined in matrimony, do agree together in the chief points of religion.”

• Trinitarian Faith. “Whether they believe in one very (true) God, as touching the essence, and three persons together in one substance.”
• Need for Christ. “Whether they believe that for our sins we have need of Christ to be an only mediator in whom be two perfect natures, divine and human, the properties of them being preserved”
• Justification by Faith Alone. “Whether they believe that we be unified by faith without works”
• Future Hope. “That there shall be as well a resurrection, as a general judgment, and other things of like sort, which I adhere in (maintain) because it were an infinite thing to descend unto more particularities.”

It is interesting to consider these tenets in the light of what today we would identify as “evangelical distinctives.”  On the whole, they are compatible notwithstanding the omission of the doctrine of Scripture alone, which Peter Martyr seems to assume. It is noteworthy that Vermigli’s criteria make no mention of Eucharist, of which he had a great deal to say over and against Lutheranism, but it does specify a position on justification, which would have prevented marriage to Catholics.

If you’re having difficulty reading Marten’s sixteenth-century translation, here is what it literally says: 

“These reasons do very much move me, howbeit I would that the matter should be mitigated, as we might not be more careful than reason would about the easier sort of controversies and disagreements. But let us chiefly examine whether the parties which are to be joined in matrimony, do agree together in the chief points of religion, namely, whether they believe in one very (true) God, as touching the essence, and three persons together in one substance. Whether they believe that for our sins we have need of Christ to be an only mediator in whom be two perfect natures, divine and human, the properties of them being preserved; Whether they believe that we be unified by faith without works; that there shall be as well a resurrection, as a general judgment, and other things of like sort, which I adhere in (maintain) because it were an infinite thing to descend unto more particularities. But, admit that when the marriage is made, the husband and the wife do agree in religion, what must afterward be done.”