Stirring the Affections: The Place of Marriage in the Soteriology of Martin Luther and Jonathan Edwards

Martin Luther and Jonathan Edwards have been hailed as two of the greatest, and most influential, theologians of all time. Against the Roman Catholics, Luther’s life and theology provide a new method and way to understand justification. Edwards, emerging in the wake of Luther’s Reformation, develops a similar theology of justification but in a Calvinist framework. Through the key metaphor of marriage, both figures illustrate the beautiful union between Christ and the Church. For Luther, this new theology of marriage followed his evangelical conversion, and was warmed by his own marriage to Katharina von Bora. For Edwards, Luther’s use of marriage becomes the answer to the question of origin – the reason God created the world. In their two different approaches to the subject, one theological and one philosophical, we gain an insight into the effectiveness of marriage as a picture of the divine reality: Christ’s marriage to the Church.