I still refuse to see how a promise to each other and sex is all that's needed. They had many more traditions back then to go along with their marriage.. none of which we observe now like the sheet thing, the dowry, etc.
So any two people who are in love and have sex are married? Only one night stands where there was no real emotional connections are considered fornicaters?
It's perfectly suitable to all of you if your daughter/son loved someone and they promised that they'd be together forever.. that they start having sex? Because that's how it supposedly works in the Bible and in God's eyes?
What is considered sex before marriage to you? Where is the line between "marriage" and sin?
I don't think anyone here is saying that simply saying you love each other, and having sex, = God sanctioned marriage. For myself, I definitely think marriage entails more than that. There is a sense from scripture in which there is a sense of communal accountability. To leave ones father and mother and to be united to your spouse, for instance, seems to acknowledge that marriage does not happen in a vacuum, but instead is conducted with an awareness of a greater social community and whole.
Similarly, Paul's discussion in 1 Corinthians about a person having sex with their mother, and the action to be taken by the church in response, assumes that the church body has a role in interacting with a married couple. It is not in isolation.
The question that seems to arise in this thread is more - "What rituals or processes are necessary to have a marriage?". I'd be interested, Christianrkchk, in what processes you believe are required? Is a state sanctioned marriage necessary? Why or why not?
Personally, I would be married formally in a church and with it approved by the state. That's largely a function of the culture I live in. However, that isn't to say that I need to be married by the state to be 'married' in a biblical sense. OT marriages were not authorised or administered by the state, mostly because for large parts of the OT, there was no state to speak of with such a role. Marriages were administered by the families directly, and were overseen in a sense, in an informal way by the broader community of God.
I think any Christian couple that wants to be married would desire to have that marriage not only acknowledged, but supported and overseen, by the wider Christian community. I think to not want that is a mistake. However, the actual ceremony of marriage is, to me, neither here nor there. Plenty of people get married formally but then completely make a mockery of that ceremony by how they actually live as a married couple. Why do we treat the wedding 'day' as what validates the entire married life? What matters are the promises made, and the humility and will to see them out. It's no better to have a formal ceremony and fail those promises than to have no ceremony and also fail those promises, but neither is it any worse.
