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Marriage as a path to salvation in Orthodox teaching: what “sacrament” and “theosis” mean for a couple

How Orthodox teaching understands marriage as a sacrament and a path to salvation, and what that changes about dating, engagement and married life.

By Orthodate Editorial18 minute read

Ask most people what a wedding does and they will say that it makes a couple legally and socially married, perhaps with a religious blessing added. The Orthodox Church says something larger and stranger. In the sacrament of marriage, a man and a woman are given the grace to become one in a way that human love cannot achieve by itself, and that union is meant to be a road along which two people travel together toward the Kingdom of God. This guide explains what that claim means, using the Church’s own words and the Scriptures and Fathers on which it rests. It then turns to the practical question that matters to anyone who is dating or engaged: if marriage is a path to salvation and not merely a happy arrangement, how should that change the way you choose a spouse, prepare for the wedding and live the first ordinary years?

At a glance

Key takeaways

  • The Orthodox Church does not treat marriage as a contract with vows, but as a sacrament in which the Holy Spirit unites the couple, and the wedding service itself speaks of crowns given to witnesses, children and heirs of the Kingdom.
  • Salvation in the Orthodox sense is union with God and healing, not a reward for good behaviour, and marriage is one of the ordinary settings in which a person learns to give himself or herself away, to forgive and to bear another’s weakness.
  • Understanding marriage this way changes what to look for in a spouse: not only attraction and compatibility but a shared willingness to repent, pray, receive the sacraments and carry one another, which is why the Church asks couples to prepare spiritually and not only practically.

1. The short answer

In Orthodox teaching, salvation is not a verdict handed down at the end of life. It is a relationship with God that begins now and is completed in His Kingdom. The Church’s name for the full experience of that relationship is theosis: to be united to God, healed of sin and death, and filled with His life. Christians do not travel this road in isolation. They travel it in the Church, through the sacraments, and in the particular circumstances of their lives, which for most people include a family.

Marriage is therefore not a detour from the spiritual life or a concession to the weakness of those who cannot be monks. It is, for those called to it, the ordinary place where they learn to love someone who is not themselves. The Orthodox Church in America describes the sacrament in these terms: in it, a man and a woman are given the possibility to become one spirit and one flesh in a way that no human love can provide by itself, and the Holy Spirit is given so that what begins on earth does not “part in death” but is fulfilled and continues most perfectly in the Kingdom of God.

That sentence contains the whole of the Church’s understanding. Marriage is a gift of the Spirit, it makes two people one, and it is oriented to the Kingdom and not only to the household. Everything else in this guide is a way of unpacking one of those three ideas.

2. Why the Church calls marriage a “mystery”

The word “sacrament” in Greek is mysterion, “mystery”. It does not mean a puzzle. It means that something of God’s life is present and active in a visible, tangible act. Saint Paul uses the word of marriage itself in the Epistle to the Ephesians, after quoting the passage from Genesis in which a man leaves his father and mother and is joined to his wife so that the two become one flesh: “This is a great mystery, but I speak concerning Christ and the church” (Ephesians 5:32).

Saint John Chrysostom, in his homily on that passage, dwells on how strange the arrangement is. He observes that a man is asked to leave the father who gave him life and the mother who bore him in labour, people to whom he owes the greatest debts, and to be joined to someone he has not known, and to honour her before all others. He calls it, in so many words, a great mystery. For him the strangeness is the point: no natural affection explains it, and the Spirit is what makes it possible and good.

The Church’s rite reflects this. The Orthodox Church in America notes that when a special ritual for marriage developed, it was patterned on the sacrament of baptism and chrismation. The couple confess their faith and their love of God, are led into the Church in procession, are prayed over and blessed, listen to the Word of God and are crowned. The same source makes a point that surprises many people: the Orthodox service is not a juridical contract and contains no vows or oaths. It is, in essence, the baptizing and confirming of human love in God, by Christ, in the Holy Spirit.

This explains something that Western couples sometimes find odd: there is no exchange of promises in the Orthodox ceremony. Whether a couple or their parish adds anything to it is a matter of local custom, and the guide to vows covers it. But the core of the service is not what the couple say to each other. It is what God is asked to do for them.

3. Theosis in plain language

The Second Epistle of Peter says that God has given His people exceedingly great and precious promises so that through them they may become “partakers of the divine nature” (2 Peter 1:4). Saint Athanasius of Alexandria, in his work On the Incarnation, put the same idea in a sentence that Orthodox writers have quoted ever since: the Son of God “was made man that we might be made God”. Neither writer means that a creature becomes the Creator. They mean that a human being, by grace, is brought into the life that belongs to God by nature: made new, forgiven, immortal and full of love.

It helps to think of theosis less as an achievement than as a healing. In the Orthodox understanding, sin is not first of all a legal debt but a sickness that distorts the person, and Christ comes as the physician. Healing takes time and cooperation. A patient who refuses to take the medicine does not recover, and a patient who takes it without being willing to change what makes him ill recovers slowly. This is why the Church’s tradition speaks of repentance, prayer, fasting, almsgiving and the sacraments as the ordinary means of the spiritual life.

Now consider what a marriage is. It is a continuous, intimate, unavoidable exposure to another sinner who loves you and whom you love. You see each other at your worst. You are asked, daily, to put someone else’s needs before your preferences, to forgive what you would rather resent, to be patient when you are tired and to remain when you would rather leave. These are not accidental features of marriage. They are the very exercises through which a person is, over time, healed of self-absorption. The Orthodox Church in America puts it in a phrase: the sacrament is the deification of human love in the divine perfection and unity of the Kingdom of God.

4. The crowns: kings, queens and martyrs

The most recognisable moment of the Orthodox wedding is the crowning. The priest places a crown on the head of each partner, and the couple then walk in procession around the table with the priest. The ordinary explanation is that the couple are the king and queen of a small kingdom, the household. That is true and it is a pleasant picture. The Church’s own explanation, however, goes deeper.

According to the Orthodox Church in America, the couple are crowned “with the crowns of God’s glory to be his children and witnesses (martyrs) in this world, and heirs of the everlasting life of his Kingdom.” The Greek word martys means witness. In the early Church, to bear witness to Christ often cost a person his life, and the crowns of the martyrs in Christian art are crowns of victory won by self-offering. The marital crown carries the same note. A husband and wife are crowned because they have been called to witness, in the whole of their common life, to the love of Christ, and that witness will cost them something: their private schedules, their independence and the part of themselves that wants to be first.

This is why the service is joyful and solemn at once. The couple are being congratulated and also commissioned. No one at a wedding is promising that marriage will be easy. The Church promises that the Spirit will give what is needed, and that a life of mutual self-giving, when it is offered to God, is a real path to the Kingdom and not a consolation for people who did not choose the monastery.

5. How a marriage actually does this work

Teaching about theosis can sound abstract until it is set beside the ordinary events of a household. The following are the usual places where the Church’s language turns into experience.

  • Forgiveness after an argument. Saint Paul tells the Ephesians not to let the sun go down on their anger. The couple who can say “I was wrong, I am sorry” within the day, without waiting for the other to apologise first, are practising repentance and mercy in their purest form.
  • Carrying a burden that is not yours. A spouse who is ill, grieving, unemployed or depressed needs patience that does not feel like patience, because it is not a choice. The apostle’s instruction to bear one another’s burdens is fulfilled in exactly such weeks.
  • Receiving the sacraments together. The Orthodox Church in America says that, like every sacrament, marriage is fulfilled by the couple’s reception of Holy Communion together in the Church. A couple who confess, fast and come to the Chalice, whatever their jurisdiction’s customs for frequency, are placing the marriage inside the life of the Church and not alongside it.
  • Praying together, however briefly. A morning or evening prayer said side by side, a blessing over a meal, the sign of the cross over a sleeping child: these are small acts, but they make the household a place where God is addressed and not merely discussed.
  • Hospitality and service. A home that receives guests, feeds the poor, cares for an elderly parent or serves in the parish extends the marriage’s love beyond itself, which the Church treats as a sign that the love is real and not simply private.
  • The unglamorous middle. Most of a marriage is neither dramatic nor romantic. It is dishes, bills, tiredness and the same conversations. The tradition does not despise it. The faithfulness that goes on, in small things, for decades, is exactly what the Fathers have in mind when they write about the cross.

6. What this teaching does not mean

A serious claim can be misread in several ways, and some of the misreadings do harm. It is worth naming them.

It does not mean that marriage is a higher state than the single or monastic life. The Church honours both vocations, and the tradition of voluntary celibacy in the monastery is as old as the Church’s history. Marriage is a path to the Kingdom. It is not the only path, and a person who is not married is not behind. The guides on vocation and on the single life discuss this at length.

It does not mean that your spouse is your Saviour or that you can save him or her. Only Christ saves. A husband or wife can help, encourage and pray, but a person who treats a spouse as a project to be corrected is not practising theosis. He or she is practising control, and that is a different thing. A marriage built on the hope that the other person will fix your spiritual life will disappoint both of you.

It does not mean that an imperfect or painful marriage has failed its purpose. Many marriages are lived in the middle of illness, poverty, estrangement from family, difficulty with children or long periods of dryness. The Church does not say that such marriages are not paths to the Kingdom. It says that the grace of the sacrament is given in the actual circumstances, and that perseverance is itself a form of witness.

It does not mean that a person must stay in danger. Teaching about sacrifice has sometimes been twisted to tell people, usually women, to endure violence or coercion as if it were a cross to be carried. It is not. The Church distinguishes between the cross of life’s trials, which a person accepts, and the sin of another’s abuse, which no one is asked to accept, and the guide to leaving an abusive relationship gives practical steps and says plainly that safety comes first.

It does not mean that those who cannot marry, or whose marriages end, have lost the possibility of union with God. The same Church that teaches the beauty of one marriage has a service for second marriages, with a penitential character, and the Orthodox Church in America notes that members of second marriages are not excluded from Holy Communion if they sincerely desire eucharistic fellowship and fulfil the other conditions for participation in the Church’s life.

7. What this means when you are choosing someone

If marriage is a path to the Kingdom, the sensible question to ask about a prospective spouse is not only “Do we get along?” but “Can we walk this road together?” That is a different test from compatibility in hobbies or temperament, though those matter too.

It suggests asking whether the other person is willing to repent. Everyone has faults. The marker of a person who is able to be healed is the ability to say, honestly, “I was wrong”, and to try to change. Someone who is never at fault, who blames, who cannot apologise or who treats every disagreement as a contest is a poor candidate for a union whose purpose is mutual healing.

It suggests asking about their relationship with the Church, and not about how often they attend for appearances. Do they confess? Do they pray when no one is watching? Do they fast, even imperfectly? Do they have a priest to whom they can be accountable? None of these is a score to be tallied, but together they tell you whether the Church is the centre of their life or its decoration.

It suggests watching how they treat people with nothing to give them: a waiter, a younger cousin, an elderly parishioner, a child. The Fathers say that love of neighbour is the proof of love of God, and a spouse who is kind only to people who can reward him or her is displaying something that will eventually be turned on you.

And it suggests a quieter, harder question: do I want this for her, for him, and not only for myself? A person who wants to marry in order to be rescued from loneliness, to be admired or to be provided for, has not yet arrived at the question the sacrament asks. The healthiest engagements are those in which each person can say that they want the other’s salvation as much as their own happiness.

8. What this means for engagement and wedding preparation

The Church does not treat marriage preparation as a matter of logistics alone. Because the wedding is a sacrament, preparation is spiritual as well as practical. A priest will normally want to meet the couple, confirm that each is free to marry in the Church, ask about their life in the Church and often suggest confession before the wedding. Many priests also encourage the couple to receive Holy Communion at a Divine Liturgy shortly before the wedding, since the Church sees the marriage as completed by their communion together.

This is also the point at which the Church’s teaching about who may marry in the Church becomes concrete. The Orthodox Church in America states that the sacrament of marriage is, by strict teaching and practice, available only to baptized communicants, and that an Orthodox Christian may be married in the Church to a baptized non-Orthodox Christian on the condition that both sincerely work and pray for their full unity in Christ, without coercion or domination by either. Different parishes and jurisdictions apply this with different pastoral flexibility, so a couple in that situation should speak to their priest early and not assume.

The practical items still matter: the civil licence, the sponsors, the date within the Church’s calendar, the budget, the families. The checklist and timeline guides cover them. The point of reading them alongside this one is to keep the order of priorities straight, so that the weeks before the wedding are not consumed by the reception at the expense of the sacrament.

9. When life does not follow the pattern

Many Orthodox Christians reading about a path to the Kingdom through marriage are not in a position to marry, or are married in circumstances that look nothing like the pattern. It is worth saying directly that the teaching is addressed to them as well.

A single person who is waiting is on a path to the Kingdom through prayer, work, service and patience, and nothing in the sacrament’s theology says that the single life is a failure of vocation. A childless couple, as the Orthodox Church in America notes, can live a truly Christian life together, because procreation is not the sole purpose of marriage. The Church’s tradition encourages a widow or widower to remain faithful to a spouse who is dead to this world but alive in Christ, and one who remarries, with the Church’s blessing and in a penitential spirit, is not cast out.

The sacrament is a gift and not an examination. It does not guarantee a happy outcome. It promises that God will give what a couple need, if they ask and cooperate, in whatever shape their life takes.

Five habits that prepare you now, whether or not you are in a relationship

You do not need to be engaged to begin practising what the sacrament asks. The following habits are useful to a single person and are the best preparation a couple can bring to a wedding.

  1. Step 1

    Learn to say “I was wrong” without a “but”

    Practise this in small matters with family, colleagues and friends. An apology that is followed by an excuse is a defence in disguise. A clear one is the most useful skill a spouse can have, and it can only be learned before it is needed.

  2. Step 2

    Have a priest and a confession

    If you do not already have a spiritual father or a regular confessor, begin to look for one. A person who has learned to confess his or her own sins is far better placed to forgive another’s.

  3. Step 3

    Keep a daily prayer rule, however short

    Choose a few minutes in the morning or evening and keep them for a month. Marriage will make demands on your time. A habit of prayer that survives a busy week is worth more than a long one that collapses at the first inconvenience.

  4. Step 4

    Serve someone who cannot repay you

    Visit an elderly parishioner, help in the parish kitchen, mentor a young person or care for a relative. Love that is practised on people who cannot return it prepares a person for the hardest part of marriage, which is loving someone on a day when they are difficult to love.

  5. Step 5

    Read the wedding service before you need it

    Read the prayers of the Orthodox marriage service slowly, in your own parish’s translation, and note the sentences that surprise you. Take them to your priest or to a friend. Understanding what the Church asks for the couple will change what you look for in one.

Common questions

Is marriage a sacrament in the Orthodox Church?

Yes. The Orthodox Church counts marriage among the holy sacraments, or mysteries. In the Church’s teaching, it is the sacrament in which a man and a woman are united by the Holy Spirit so that their love, begun on earth, is fulfilled in the Kingdom of God. Its rite is patterned on baptism and chrismation and is completed by the couple’s reception of Holy Communion.

What is theosis, and how does it relate to marriage?

Theosis, or deification, is the Orthodox word for salvation understood as sharing, by grace, in the life of God and being healed by union with Christ. Marriage is one of the settings in which it occurs, because the daily demands of loving another person, such as forgiveness, patience and sacrifice, are the exercises through which a person is gradually freed from self-centredness.

Why are there no vows in an Orthodox wedding?

According to the Orthodox Church in America, the sacrament is not a juridical contract and contains no vows or oaths. Its centre is the Church’s prayer and blessing and the crowning of the couple, not a promise exchanged between them. Some parishes or families add personal words as a matter of custom, but the sacramental action does not depend on them.

Do the crowns at an Orthodox wedding mean that the couple are king and queen?

That is a common and pleasant way of explaining them, but the Church’s own account is fuller. The Orthodox Church in America describes the crowns as signs that the couple are crowned to be God’s children and witnesses (the word means martyrs) in this world and heirs of the life of the Kingdom. They mark both honour and vocation.

Is a married person closer to salvation than a single person?

No. The Church honours both marriage and celibacy as paths to the Kingdom, and nothing in the teaching on the sacrament ranks one above the other. Each person is called to a particular path, and holiness is found by faithfulness in that path, not by belonging to a particular state of life.

Can I be saved without marrying?

Certainly. Salvation is union with Christ through the Church and is not dependent on marital status. Many saints were never married, and many Orthodox Christians live as single people throughout their lives. The teaching on marriage as a path to the Kingdom is addressed to those who are called to marry, not as a requirement for everyone.

What should a couple do to prepare spiritually for an Orthodox wedding?

Speak to the priest early, confirm that both of you are free to marry in the Church, confess before the wedding as your priest advises, pray together, and take part in the Liturgy as communicants where that applies. Many priests also recommend premarital counselling. The details vary by parish and jurisdiction, so ask your own priest what he expects.

Sources and further reading

Pastoral practice can vary by diocese and jurisdiction. For questions about your circumstances, speak with the priest responsible for your pastoral care.