Charles and Susannah Spurgeon represent another strong marriage from church history, though she had a “very poor first impression” of the great Baptist preacher, Haykin said. The Spurgeons met when he preached for the first time at the London church that came to be known as the Metropolitan Tabernacle. “He was sweating profusely … and he pulled out this huge handkerchief with polka dots on it,” Haykin said. “And she thought, ‘What kind of country yokel have the deacons brought in to preach?'” But soon they were married.

NASHVILLE (BP) — In 1523, Martin Luther found himself the matchmaker for 12 nuns who had escaped in pickle barrels from a Roman Catholic nunnery near Wittenberg, Germany. He secured husbands for 11, but the 12th, Katharina von Bora, rebuffed two potential husbands.

Her heart was set on the great Reformer.

Finally Luther married her in 1525 for strikingly unromantic reasons: to provide his father with grandchildren and to spite the pope by breaking the vow of celibacy he had taken as a Catholic monk. Though it didn’t seem like the makings of a storybook romance, Luther’s marriage to Katie, as he called her, blossomed into one of church history’s most tender unions.

Learning about famous Christian marriages, like Martin and Katie Luther’s, can “breathe life” into the marriages of believers today and “give some guys and their wives courage to get real and be honest,” radio host and marriage expert Dennis Rainey told Baptist Press.

Good marriages demonstrate how a spouse’s love can lift a Christian “out of doubt and discouragement and perhaps even losing heart,” Rainey, president and co-founder of Family Life, said. Stories of more challenging marriages can encourage believers to persevere through their own marriage struggles, he said.

“There was only one who was perfect, and He wasn’t married,” Rainey said. Being part of God’s Kingdom requires “humbling ourselves and admitting our humanity and sharing the stories of our humanity in some of its stench and … coming clean and getting real — because that’s where everybody is.”

In contrast with the joyful marriages of Luther, Jonathan Edwards, Charles Spurgeon and others, Methodist movement founder John Wesley and revivalist George Whitefield struggled in their marriages. Wesley made his wife agree that she would not ask him to lighten his schedule of itinerant preaching. The couple eventually separated and she was dead for three days before he found out.

Whitefield once left his wife Elizabeth in America while he returned to England by boat without telling her. One of Whitefield’s protégés said the great revivalist viewed his marriage as a “distraction” and when Elizabeth died, “his mind was put at great liberty.”

“Uncommon unions”

The Luthers’ home was “joyful” and “playful,” Michael Haykin, professor of church history and biblical spirituality at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, told BP.

“Luther had a deep sense of the joyfulness of the Christian life, and marriage simply exacerbated that,” said Haykin, who has compiled “The Christian Lover,” a book of love letters written by famous Christians.

Though Luther refused to back down in arguments with the pope and fellow Protestant Reformer Ulrich Zwingli, he often yielded to Katie’s opinions and preferences, Haykin said. Among the ways he deferred to her was changing his custom of bathing only once a year — a common practice in the 1500s — because “she would not have it so,” according to one of Luther’s letters.

Since the Luthers raised pigs, Martin playfully referred to Katie by such titles as “high mistress of the Wittenberg pig sty,” Haykin said.

Fellow Reformer John Calvin “epitomizes the Protestant rediscovery of marriage,” Haykin said, referencing the Reformation critique of Roman Catholic celibacy vows.

At age 29, Calvin was driven out of Geneva, Switzerland, and settled in Strasbourg, on the border of modern-day Germany and France, where Protestant leader Martin Bucer attempted to find a wife for him. Bucer and other early Protestants believed that a pastor like Calvin should be an expert on family, and ideally be married himself.

The first three or four potential wives proved unsuitable, including one who spoke only German — a poor match for Calvin who spoke French and didn’t know German. Calvin wrote that he would never marry her “unless the Lord had entirely bereft me of my wits.” Eventually he met and married on his own Idelette de Bure, the widow of an Anabaptist he had known in Geneva.

They were married only eight and a half years before her death; they had experienced two or three pregnancies, though none of their children lived to be more than three days old. Calvin didn’t mention Idelette much in correspondence or sermons, but several surviving letters reveal the depth of their love.

In 1541 a plague raged through Strasbourg, so Calvin sent his wife away for her safety. He wrote to a friend that “day and night my wife has been constantly in my thoughts, in need of advice now that she is separated from her husband.”

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