Christian marriage continues to be framed theologically through covenant, yet it is increasingly practised within social environments marked by uncertainty, mobility, and structural precarity rather than stability and permanence. This tension raises a critical interpretive question: how should biblical ethics respond when the social conditions that nurture covenant are themselves fragile? Existing scholarship has largely centred on legal debates over divorce or sociological accounts of marital instability, leaving comparatively little attention to the theological imagination through which covenant is interpreted, embodied, and sustained. This article addresses that gap by rethinking biblical ethics through the interpretive lens of the African Christian imagination. Employing biblical-theological analysis in conversation with African biblical hermeneutics, contemporary African Christian thought, and interdisciplinary scholarship on precarity, it argues that marriage is best understood as a covenantal vocation sustained through moral imagination, communal responsibility, and pastoral formation. Rather than treating divorce as the primary theological concern, the study examines how economic insecurity, migration, changing gender expectations, and shifting moral cultures erode the social ecology within which covenant is lived in contemporary Nigerian Christianity. It further contends that churches function not merely as guardians of doctrinal orthodoxy but as communities that continually interpret and embody covenant amid social change. By relocating scholarly attention from regulating divorce to sustaining covenant, the article advances the African Christian imagination as a constructive framework for biblical ethics, pastoral theology, and African Christianity, demonstrating that the credibility of Christian marriage depends upon communities in which covenant remains morally imaginable, pastorally embodied, and socially credible despite enduring precarity.
