From: asket@acad2.alaska.edu
Subject: When is a couple married...
Organization: University of Alaska
Lines: 31


     I used to be a marriage commissioner for the Alaska Court
System (sort of a justice of the peace).  I had great difficulty
with that duty.  I used to pray earnestly in the courthouse
bathroom before the ceremonies, mostly asking that the couples
would come to appreciate and fulfill the true holiness and
divine purpose in marriage--couples who obviously didn't realize
that marriage is God's institution, not the state's.  Gradually,
however, I came to conclude that because I was acting in a
strictly secular, public capacity, established as such by both
the state and the expectations of the couples involved, I was
really conducting a purely secular, legal civil event, with no
greater moral or religious implications than if I had been
conducting a civil trial (the couple who told me, mid-ceremony,
to "please hurry it up" may have helped me to this conclusion). 

     I thought I had neatly rationalized a clear and sharp
distinction between marriage before God, and "marriage" before
the state, until I had to deal with my own divorce.  Keeping
Matthew 19:6 in mind, I felt that the state had no business
dissolving my marriage established before God, but of course it
assumed jurisdiction nonetheless.  

      I would ask those of you proposing answers to this
question to consider this issue's logical extension: If
intercourse, or the mental intent of the parties, or the
ceremony of the church, or any combination thereof, establishes
marriage, then at what moment is it dissolved?  

                                   Karl Thoennes III
                                   University of Alaska
