A Humiliating Death

by F. X. Turk

Back in 2008, Newsweek published an atrocious hack-job against Christian ethics for the sake of villainizing (of all things) traditional marriage.  Of course, we covered it here.  From my perspective, everybody wringing their hands about the current state of "marriage" in the laws of the United States ought to re-read that post, and all the comments which followed, for the sake of hitting their own reset button on this topic.

But because I am taking a little summer vacation from my permanent hiatus, I have a few more thoughts on this topic not-quite-a-decade-but-more-than-an-epoch later.

The first thought is this: it's critical to keep in mind that the facts of the matter are that those who express serious judeo-christian fidelity are still the least likely to divorce.  From a merely-sociological standpoint, that item is constantly eroded by false declarations by biased advocates who are trying to poison the well against the strongest advocates for the view of marriage which made Western Civilization possible.  And let's be clear: I list among those detractors the Barna Group, which is the worst wolf among the sheep when it comes to understanding who Christians really are.

But the follow-up to that note is critical: "divorce" is a terrible measure of whether or not people are doing what they ought to do in marriage.  It's like measuring the competency of drivers by how few people they kill while driving.  Since a lot of people lately have been worried about what Jesus might have said about this subject, when the Pharisees asked him about divorce he said to them, "Because of your hardness of heart Moses allowed you to divorce your wives, but from the beginning it was not so. And I say to you: whoever divorces his wife, except for sexual immorality, and marries another, commits adultery."  If what we're trying to measure is hard hearts, maybe divorce is a good key indicator.  A measure for great marriages ought to be looking for something else.

Let me suggest something to you which will make everyone angry -- which is the only good reason to take a break from hiatus anyway.  The proper measure of whether or not there are good marriages in the ranks of actual Christians ought to be whether or not husbands love their wives the way Christ loves the Church.  The rest of this post is for our primarily-male readership.  I have 4 good reasons for this, so if you're not already rolling your eyes you can at least hear me out.

First, the idea in Christian thought that the good of the marriage is the responsibility of the husband is not any kind of new idea.  That's actually the problem: it's an old idea which is somehow out of vogue, and those trying to rehabilitate it are, if I may say so, doing it wrong.  The prototype in Scripture for what we ought to mean is, of course, Jesus -- but before He did what He does, Hosea was out there doing it Old Testament style.  Let me tell you something, fellas: it doesn't matter what sort of woman your wife is.  Your marriage is not ruined because of what kind of wife your wife is.  It can only be ruined by what kind of husband you are to her.  And to put a fine point on it, it is also made into something else by the kind of husband you are.

In the example of Hosea, God tells the prophet (which, btw, this is a great object lesson for people who want God to give them a word of knowledge: if you really want to know what God knows, you are bound not to be made famous and well-regarded by it; you are likely to wind up doing something everyone else will see as a terrible idea) to "Go, take unto thee a wife of whoredoms and children of whoredoms: for the land hath committed great whoredom."  From God's perspective, His wife -- that is, his chosen people with whom he has a covenant -- is not merely a bad housekeeper or a lousy cook.  God's covenant partner has sold what belongs uniquely to Him to everyone for money and nice dinners.  And in that circumstance, God doesn't pretend that His wife has done nothing wrong -- but He also does not pretend it is her problem to make it right.  It is His problem to make it right.  And when He makes it right, it will be Right:

I will betroth you to me forever. I will betroth you to me in righteousness and in justice, in steadfast love and in mercy. I will betroth you to me in faithfulness.

You may not like this example because God actually promises to punish Israel for what they have done, and that's fine -- I understand we are all squeemish about Old Testament modes of Justice.  But Hosea doesn't punish Gomer: he buys her out of slavery, and when she returns to her old life, he goes and does it again.  And when God tells the prophet how to reflect on this, here's what he says:

How can I give you up, O Ephraim?
    How can I hand you over, O Israel?
How can I make you like Admah?
    How can I treat you like Zeboiim?
My heart recoils within me;
    my compassion grows warm and tender.
I will not execute my burning anger;
    I will not again destroy Ephraim;
for I am God and not a man,
    the Holy One in your midst,
    and I will not come in wrath.

Look: faithfulness has to come from someplace.  The foundation of the promises your marriage is based on have to come from someplace.  In an original sense, they come from God.  In the immediate sense, somebody right here and now has to start by being the ordinary means God intended for marriage.

But look at this, fellas: this is what it means in the Old Testament for God to love his people.

When we turn to the New Testament for our second example, it doesn't actually get any easier for you -- because the model of Hosea is multiplied by the moral perfection of the bridegroom.  The example of Jesus (as we read Ephesians 5) is of the perfect bridegroom who makes his bride his own flesh.  And the example Jesus sets is this: while we (the church) were yet sinners, He died for us.  At the right time, Jesus (the holy and righteous one) died for the ungodly.  Certainly: Jesus died for our sins and in that condemned our sins.  He made it clear that what we were doing was wrong -- but therefore paid the price for our sins so that we would not be put to death for them.  He was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, by taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men. And being found in human form, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross.  And in case you missed it, we ourselves were once foolish, disobedient, led astray, slaves to various passions and pleasures, passing our days in malice and envy, hated by others and hating one another. But when the goodness and loving kindness of God our Savior appeared, he saved us, not because of works done by us in righteousness, but according to his own mercy, by the washing of regeneration and renewal of the Holy Spirit, whom he poured out on us richly through Jesus Christ our Savior, so that being justified by his grace we might become heirs according to the hope of eternal life.  Mercy and Love are the way Jesus sanctifies the church, nurtures her, takes her out of sin.

What if, in your family, you were the guy who humbled himself in obedience to God to the point of humiliating death for the sake of your wife?  Do you think your family would look and act differently, or would they just be the same ol' people just like the folks down the street who are closet egalitarians (or maybe open egalitarians) who have nice, middle class economic goals and cut their grass twice a week?

Third, if we are measuring how good our marriages are, or we want to gauge them in some way, measuring the other people in our family is a fine form of legalism.  It is not a fine form of faith.  Reforming other people is for Politicians and other Charletans.  It also is a great way to create enemies.  We have a saying at our house: "You" is a full-time job.  Stick to your full-time job, and I suspect that what will happen is what God expected to happen when husbands love their wives the way Christ loves the church.  Everything else aside, the husband's job is to love his wife the way Christ loves the church.  Like his own body.  Not like a contractor.

Last, one of the most sickening things that has happened in the last 4 weeks is the way marriage has, again, been watered down in order to make sense of what has apparently happened by force of legal caveat.  Back in 2012, I was trying to help to think through what we were talking about when we said "marriage."  A highlight was this:

Now fire up your imagination for a second.  Imagine you are at dinner with some other person, and you've been thinking about this for a long time.  As the waiter leaves with your order of eats for the evening, you clench up a little, and then screw your courage to the sticking place.  You take a deep breath and you begin, "What I really want is to avoid incest, and embrace endogamy.  I want some rights and duties regarding sexual intercourse and property, and to establish a nominal division of labor.  I want a visible household economy.  And you seem like exactly the right person to do that with, at least for now.  Will you marry me?" 

Is there anyone who would really say that, or really want that?

The answer is apparently "yes" right now, except for the endogamy part.  Maybe the re-write from the script of the victors in this skirmish would be, "What I really want is for other people to celebrate all my urges, all the things I think I deserve including sexual pleasure.  I wants rights over property and to make sure someone doesn't cheat me out of it.  I also want someone to share my living expenses with in a way that the law will enforce, and a way to make them settle up like any contractor if they don't live up to their end of the bargain."

I bring it up as my last reason here because let's face it: what we ought to have makes that look like the corrupt and morally-blighted trap it is obviously intended to be.  If husbands loved their wives as Christ loves the church, when some famous idiot goes on TV and tries to make anything else look like that, what it really is gets painted with neon colors and stands out like an Easter egg on a putting green.

We ought to want to do that, gents.  We ought to want to expose the unfruitful works of darkness, exposing them to the light with the light which is Christ in us.

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Adopt That as Our Anthem

by Frank Turk


Yes: I have tricked you again.  You were expecting the Best of Phil and rather you got me spouting off about something which caught me late in the week and it needed to be set straight.  (A turn of phrase which, after you have read this post, will be very funny)

Also: warning.  Adult topics ahead.

The Huffington Post has been experimenting with me for LiveStream chats because they don't know any normal conservatives and they ran into me one week hoping they could find a stereotypical rube they could use to say they have diverse voices.  You can imagine how that turned out -- but they do keep calling me and somehow the video never makes it to the web.  In their defense, the first video had to be scrapped because one of the other bloggers interviewed did the LiveChat without headphones on, and the reverb through his/her computer ruined all the audio; the second video was a little stilted because they invited the guests for one topic and sprung another on us after we were all linked in -- it's hard to say anything useful when you're caught flat-footed and the host is a harridan.

Now, here's the thing: this week HuffPo ran what I would call an Op-Ed on the question of why there was a media kerfuffle over the fact that Anderson Cooper's boyfriend was caught out-out in NYC with someone other than Mr. Cooper. Here's the money quote from that essay:

If monogamy works for you, more power to you. If you and your girlfriend want to sleep with other people on occasion (or invite someone home with you at the end of the night), do it. If three men want to live as a throuple, let them live as a throuple. If a husband and wife want to take separate vacations and sleep around while they're apart, who is anyone else to say that that's unsavory?

I'm not saying that everyone is -- or should be -- throwing key parties or hunting for a plot of land to start a sex-based commune with 40 of their closest friends. I'm saying it's time to start breaking down our antiquated ideas about romance and relationships, many of which are largely based on ideas of control and fear, and start talking openly and honestly about what really works best for each of us.

Now, when I found this, I threw a line to soon-to-be-published atheist chaplain Chris Stedman to see if he would be helping us find out why we would be better together with that kind of thinking.  His feedback:

@frank_turk Not sure I'll write on it - I have a bunch of essays I'm still trying to finish up. But I do think it's a valuable discussion.
— Chris Stedman (@ChrisDStedman) August 15, 2012

Which, as we say around here: Aha!

This is the valuable conversation which, it turns out, nobody wants to have.  Look: I sort of gave Maury Povich the side-eye last week in pointing out the kind of morality which, allegedly, nobody wants to have.  We can watch Maury parade legions of self-destructive relationshipwrecks out of the docks and we can say in every case, "Wow -- at least I'm not that screwed up."  We can, on the surface, agree that whatever it is we think we want out of our emotional and family lives, it ain't that.  That, as they said in the gauzy and Rockwellian past, is wrong.

And while we have been told that, fortunately, there is no slippery slope from abandoning a traditional definition of marriage down to all manner of relational ruin and absurdity, suddenly Anderson Cooper ought not to be abashed or abased that his lover is not just his lover.  In fact, in spite of the third-rate sports entertaiment you can find on Maury Povich, maybe none of that is actually anything to be ashamed of, according to Michelson.

Think about this: last week, I did in fact state that the LGBT lifestyle was personally dangerous to the people in it -- and spelled out the public health reasons why.  But under those health reasons, there are clear and present emotional reasons that this lifestyle is hazardous -- as made transparently-clear by Noah Michelson at HuffPo.  And those reasons, frankly, are not because people like me object to this behavior or because we hold to an antiquated moral code which isn't relevant to our advanced society.  They are because that lifestyle is, ultimately, in the psychological and intellectual thrall of the reasoning Michelson has spilled upon the readers of HuffPo.

Listen: years ago, when the sadly-deceived Lisa Miller sprung it upon us in the pages of Newsweek that, in fact, it was the Bible which was foisting upon us a definition  of "marriage" which looked a lot more like a loose polygamy for the sensually and spiritually weak, or a vehicle only for the satisfaction of urges one cannot control for the fulfillment of promises one doesn’t think God is willing or able to keep, of course, she said: nobody really wants that.

And yet it seems that such a thing is exactly what the editorial staff at HuffPo says should be utterly blasé -- and they are a significant infotainment company.  They are allegedly main-stream.

Now, to wrap this up: so what?

There are a lot of things wrong with this.  This is the internet, after all.  But the thing which, it seems to me, must be mulled over immediately is the fact that the darkly-funny claim that people like Chris Stedman make about the ways we can be "better together" is suddenly exposed as desolately vacant.  I have asked him (often) how exactly we can establish any kind of common ground when the most-essential issues of interpersonal relationships cannot be part of our common ground.  How do I know what is and isn't even courteous let alone morally virtuous and exemplary when we ought to make moral equivalence between sleeping around and 50 years of monogamous hetero marriage -- both are fine, apparently, for whomever's boat is floated?  And when we find an example like this, where the rubber meets the road on that claim, he has other things to do.


But while there might be a demand for this breadth of activity to be accepted as patently bourgeois, the problem that these are really not morally equivalent has to rear its ugly head.  If not, Maury will go out of business: the shocking and subtle self-aggrandizing salve for our conscience dries up if these people entertaining us with their moral tragicomedies are suddenly not morally-entertaining at all.  There's no comfort in it if we are not better than they are.  If being joined as one flesh until death do you-all part ought to be just as acceptable as treating others' emotions and well-being like yesterday's newspaper, we might as well substitute a wet whoopee cushion and an inverted trash can for the brass and timpani in "Fanfare for the Common Man," adopt that as our anthem, and see what other innovative, open, and honest best practices we can concoct for our society.

Let me say this plainly: this is the kind of so-called "good" people figure out without God, especially the naive ones who are on about how they can definitely be without God.  The Bible says this is what seems right in our own eyes.  And it's the grand obstacle to having a purely-secular discussion about what we ought to do to improve our society: we don't know what's best for us, and we trade the true God for a fake god of our own creation, and we worship the god we desire instead of the God who made us.

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3 of 3: Why the Church needs Marriage

by Frank Turk

This is Part 3 of 3.  You can find part 1 here, and part 2 here.  And the audio of the whole thing is here.  Also: the audio for all the talks from the conference can be found here, including the panel discussion and both of Tim Challies' talks. For those who asked, the whole talk as I delivered it can be found here in PDF form.

In the earliest periods of Roman history, Marriage meant that a married woman would be subjugated by her husband, but that custom had died out by the 1st century, in favor of Free Marriage which did not grant a husband any rights over his wife or have any changing effect on a woman's status.  With this, the reasons for any divorce became irrelevant. Either spouse could leave a marriage at any point.

This was the state of things into the second century  -- as the Christian church entered the ancient world.  At that time, the Christians had no political power, no economic power, and were seen as weird and irrational atheists because they only worshipped one god.  They had nothing -- no publishing houses, no televisions networks, no newspapers, no blogs.  They had absolutely no advantages in the society in general.

In our view, that means the game is over.  I think our view of it is deeply influenced by our own prosperity and our own good standing in the culture, but if we had no legislative recourse and no way to make movies about what we say we believe, we would see the problem of helping our culture rethink, refine and restore the institution of marriage as completely without hope.

Yet, the Christians in the –pre-christian west didn’t see it that way at all.  We have a great way to document this.  There’s a manuscript of a letter from a fellow who calls himself “Mathetes” to his friend “Diognetus”.  This letter was written some time between 130 AD and 200 AD – plainly, safely, in the middle of the second century.  Mathetes says he is writing his letter for a specific reason to his friend:

Excellent Diognetus: I see you are very eager to learn the way of worshipping God prevalent among the Christians.  You have very carefully and earnestly asked questions concerning them: … what sort of relationships they have among themselves, and why this way of worshipping has come now rather than much sooner into the world.  I am happy to encourage your questions, and I pray to God, because he enables us both to speak and to hear: allow me to speak so that, above all, you are encouraged and enlightened; and allow you to hear, so that I shall have no cause of regret for having done so.

Mathetes is trying to tell his friend about these disenfranchised Christians.  As the primary exhibit of making this report to his friend, Mathetes says this (paraphrased):

These Christians are not distinguished from other men by country, language, or common customs. They don’t have their own cities, they don’t have their own language, and they don’t lead a lifestyle which is peculiar or spectacular. They haven’t developed a new philosophy invented by very smart men; they don’t proclaim themselves to be the advocates of any merely human doctrines. But, living in Greek and barbarian cities without preference, according to their lot in life, they follow the customs of the people who live where they live in respect to clothing, food, and the rest of their ordinary conduct.  But they display to us their wonderful and confessedly striking method of life. 

So they live in each country, but they live there as sojourners, travellers passing through. As citizens, they do what all citizens do, and yet endure all things as if foreigners. Every foreign land is to them as their native country, and every land of their birth as a land of strangers. They marry, they beget children; but they do not destroy their offspring. They have a common table, but not a common bed. They are in the flesh, but they do not live after the flesh. They live their time on earth, but they are citizens of heaven. 

They obey the written laws, and at the same time surpass the laws by their lives. They love all men, and are persecuted by all. They are insignificant and condemned; they are put to death, and restored to life. 

This view of life, but specifically of familial relationships, and especially of marriage, was a massive innovation from the Greco-Roman concepts and laws.  And that the Christians held fast to them in spite of slander and persecution was even of greater importance – because it spoke to, as Methetes said, a striking method of life.  They did not live in compliance to the law – their vision of what was right was not because the law set the standard.  Their vision was not lived out because they were seeking to change the law – because they saw themselves as people who were strangers, foreigners in a land that they did not belong to.  Their vision of life was completely apart from and above the Law.

Ultimately, Mathetes tells Diognetus why they live above the law:

As I said, what they believe is no mere earthly invention, nor is it a merely-human system of opinion, which they have decided to preserve.  God Almighty Himself, the Creator of all things though invisible, has sent from heaven, and placed among men, a man who is the truth.  He is the holy and incomprehensible Word, and He has firmly established Him in their hearts. One might have imagined, God might send a servant, or angel, or ruler, or any one of those who is influential in Earthly affairs, or one of with supernatural majesty and authority, but He did not.  … 

As a king sends his son, who is also a king, so He sent this man.  He sent this man as a man among men, and as God among men, and as a savior to men.  He came seeking to persuade, not to compel us; for oppression has no place in the character of God. He sent Him to call us, not as an avenger of justice to incarcerate us. He sent Him to love us, not as judging us – even though He will yet send Him to judge us, and who shall endure His appearing?  

But when our wickedness was fully grown, it had been clearly shown that its reward ought to be punishment and death, and was impending over us. God had before appointed for that time to come.  But God did not regard us with hatred, nor thrust us away, nor remember our iniquity against us because he manifested His own kindness and power, the one love of God, for men.  Instead He showed great long-suffering, and then He took upon Him the burden of our iniquities. 

He gave His own Son as a ransom for us.  He gave the holy One for transgressors.  He gave the blameless One for the wicked.  He gave the righteous One for the unrighteous many, the incorruptible One for the corruptible, the immortal One for those that are mortal. For what else was capable of covering our sins other than His righteousness? By what other way was it possible that we, the wicked and ungodly, could be justified, than by the only Son of God? O sweet exchange! O unsearchable work! O benefits surpassing all expectation! that the wickedness of many should be hid in a single righteous One, and that the righteousness of One should justify many transgressors!

Does that sound familiar to anyone?  Does it strike a chord? See: for Methetes, the Christians were people who weren’t concerned about making the Law acceptable to themselves – or worse, to make other people acceptable by the force of Law.  Methetes believed that the Christians had something greater in mind than the law – They had the very Gospel in mind.

And this is the view which, in spite of the very uncertain economic and political environment of the next 15 centuries of Western Civilization, became the common view of marriage.  That is, it is not merely a social construct or advantage, but an utterly spiritual endeavor which is rightly and primarily ruled by the church because of its deep meaning.  While we may disagree with it, we can grant that the Catholic Church’s high view of marriage as a “sacrament” which has a greater demand on the two people involved than only a contract arbitrated by law can have is an easy mistake to make when we listen to how Jesus describes marriage as built into the very fabric of creation.

Now, more or less, this is the home stretch of my talk, and I have an answer here for the problem we’re considering which the readers of my blog will recognize immediately, but it will need to be unpacked.  And it goes back to this argument of “have you not read,” or “God has said.”

The question for us today is the same as the question the Pharisees asked Jesus 2000 years ago: “Is it lawful to divorce one’s wife for any cause?"  That is: “Should we define marriage for our culture through the law?”  We know that society needs marriage.  And the definition of marriage we own in the West is the Christian definition – regardless of the arguments of those who want to change that.

But let me say it simply and seriously now: improving the Law is not going to improve the shoddy and shameful slanders against the conservative Christian definition of marriage, or against the institution of marriage in our culture.

There is a myth that the rate of divorce inside the church is the same as it is outside the church – the Barna Group perpetuates this myth all the time.  The truth is not quite that incriminating: a 2002 study by Larson and Swyers published in “Marriage, Health and the Professions” and cited in the National Review in 2006 spells it out that couples who attended church as often as once a month had divorce rates less than half of that of couples who attended church once a year or less.

Jesus has a definition of Marriage, and Society needs that kind of marriage – if for nothing else than stability and continuity.  But does the Church need Marriage?  Can the church abandon marriage to the culture and still be the sort of thing Jesus intended?

I think the answer, quite frankly, is no: the church must again bring marriage to society in a way that is greater than the Law.  You see: marriage is a necessary way in which the church brings the Gospel to Culture – and in this case, the Gospel is actually the solution to culture.

This is why our argument for marriage, our apologetic for this union, is not merely an evolutionary argument which says that because there are two sexes, marriage is for two sexes only.  Our argument rests not on the brute fact that men and women exist and seem to have the equivalent of matching Lego parts, but on the matter that God has actually said something about this.

This is why Jesus’ appeal, “have you not read,” is so shocking, so offensive: it is not merely that God has made things a certain way, but that he has given us a very extensive exposition of the union.  While the first description of this is in Genesis, which is where Jesus points the Pharisees, the Old Testament apex of the image is in Hosea – where a man takes a wife not only for himself, but for the purpose of redeeming God’s people.  And in that marriage, the question of adultery is utterly unquestionable: Hosea has married an adulteress.  She is utterly beneath him.  In fact, she leaves him for her former life.  But God says something else here: love in marriage is a picture of God’s love for those who abandon him, and cheat on him for other means of satisfaction.

This is the point: God says it.  That is: he makes it clear with words that this is what he means by it.  Jesus sums it up briefly in his response to the Pharisees, but that question of “one flesh” comes up again as Paul instructs the church in Ephesus:

Husbands, love your wives, as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her, … that she might be holy and without blemish. In the same way husbands should love their wives as their own bodies. He who loves his wife loves himself. For no one ever hated his own flesh, but nourishes it and cherishes it, just as Christ does the church, because we are members of his body. “Therefore a man shall leave his father and mother and hold fast to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh.” 

And to the wives he said:

Wives, submit to your own husbands, as to the Lord. For the husband is the head of the wife even as Christ is the head of the church, his body, and is himself its Savior. Now as the church submits to Christ, so also wives should submit in everything to their husbands.

Now let me ask you: how can this be translated into a Law when it is in fact utterly the woof and weave of the Gospel?  It cannot be translated into Law.  Trying to do so makes it something which human people cannot do.  You cannot legislate the humility this takes.  You cannot legislate the priorities this requires.  You cannot legislate the profound intimacy this creates.  You cannot legislate the love at the very heart of this relationship which God wrote into the very creation of our kind.

Listen to me now as I close up:

The church needs marriage because it is a necessary part of God’s order in creation.

You know: society knows it needs this because this is how human kind not only carries on but flourishes.  Marriage externally shows itself to be a good thing even when considered in the most superficial and materialistic ways.

But there is something the church knows which is not disclosed in mere creation.  It is only disclosed by God’s Special revelation, and specifically and particularly in marriage.  If we overlook that, or find that to be somehow second-rate in favor of other means, we will have made a Gospel fail – we will have given up something God made for the purpose of demonstrating His plan for all things.

If we think we can preach the Gospel and not use this example to preach it for reals, we’re kidding ourselves about how we understand what God is doing in and through the Gospel.

The church needs marriage because broken people need to be sanctified and to learn the meaning of sacrifice and love.

This is certainly not the least reason – this is the “for reals” of the Gospel.  Look: nobody ever married a perfect person.  My wife certainly didn’t – I confess it.  But think about this, as told by Tim Keller in a recent RELEVANT Magazine essay:

The reason that marriage is so painful and yet wonderful is because it is a reflection of the Gospel, which is painful and wonderful at once. The Gospel is—we are more sinful and flawed in ourselves than we ever dared to believe, and at the very same time we are more loved and accepted in Jesus Christ than we ever dared hope. This is the only kind of relationship that will really transform us. Love without truth is sentimentality; it supports and affirms us but keeps us in denial about our flaws. Truth without love is harshness; it gives us information but in such a way that we cannot really hear it. God’s saving love in Christ, however, is marked by both radical truthfulness about who we are and yet also radical, unconditional commitment to us. The merciful commitment strengthens us to see the truth about ourselves and repent. The conviction and repentance moves us to cling to and rest in God’s mercy and grace. 

The hard times of marriage drive us to experience more of this transforming love of God. But a good marriage will also be a place where we experience more of this kind of transforming love at a human level.

The church needs marriage to fully and rightly demonstrate the Gospel to society

I mentioned this right at the beginning of the talk: “For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus unto good works, which God hath before ordained that we should walk in them.” This is what the church needs to demonstrate to Society, and society needs the example because it frankly cannot come from anywhere else,  The message of the Gospel can only come from the church because we are the only ones entrusted with it, and we must deliver it through Gospel perfect example of marriage.

Is marriage the only way we send this message?  Absolutely not.  But consider the question we are asking today: what do we do about sexual confusion?  What do we do about our society where the norm is quickly becoming illegitimacy and an knee-jerk retreat to divorce when things get hard?  What do we do to show people what virtue is rather than beat them down over their failings when ours are frankly no less visible or obvious?

If our concern is whether or not our culture understands the right roles of men and women under God’s design and authority, the solution to the culture is the Gospel – as wrapped up in the design of marriage.  Missing this, and setting our hope on the transforming power of the Law rather than on the work of Christ in the message of the Gospel, is never going to achieve what we intend to achieve.

If the church was serious about this kind of love – which is Christ’s kind of love, first and foremost demonstrated on the Cross for a specific bride in order to make her holy and spotless before God – it wouldn’t abide a social Gospel of nondescript good will or idiotic exhortations about “your best life now”. Listen: often in marriage, you are not on the receiving end of good things but are in fact in the middle of hard doings. And if you expect that your marriage should be about satisfying you instead of sanctifying someone else through sacrifice, you will want to end your marriage in short order – kids and social appearances out the window. And let’s be honest: since divorce in the church looks like divorce in the world – that is, we do it for all the same reasons – I suspect we think of “marriage” in the same way the world does. So when the world simply wants to make the law look like what we are actually practicing, we have to look in the mirror and admit to ourselves that we are to blame for what the world thinks of marriage.

There’s one last thing I want to tell you, which is critical to taking action if we understand that we will teach the world what marriage out to be.  Paul said it to Timothy: “All who seek to lead a Godly life will be persecuted.”  We should expect that if we are committed to marriage, it will be hard work.  It will be hard to be a man who is literally giving up his life for the sake of his wife, for the sake of her nurturing and care.  It will be hard to be a woman who looks to her husband as the one who will do anything, no matter what the consequences, to care for her as if she was his own body.  But the benefit for you, for your marriage and family, for your church, and for society, is wrapped up by God in the very order of things.  Have you not read: he who created them from the beginning made them male and female, and said, 'Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh.'

If you can hear Him say that today, don’t harden your hearts against it.  Trust him that he did what is good for you, and believe it.

My thanks for your time today, and may God richly bless you.

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2 of 3: Does Society Need Marriage?

by Frank Turk

This is part 2 of 3.  You can find Part 1 (from yesterday) here.

This is an important point in this story: the Pharisees came to undo Jesus, to ruin him as a teacher and a leader, and in some sense as the very Messiah, with the Law.  They came to him with a point of law, with which they were experts, and they believed they asked him a question that could not be answered wisely – from the Law.  But Jesus gives them an answer that exceeds the requirements of the law.

“Why then did Moses command one to give a certificate of divorce and to send her away?"   They asked him.  He replied: "Because of your hardness of heart Moses allowed you to divorce your wives, but from the beginning it was not so. And I say to you: whoever divorces his wife, except for sexual immorality, and marries another, commits adultery."

Jesus doesn’t really give us a lot of wiggle room here by saying this.  If Jesus were conducting the argument for marriage in public today, he probably wouldn’t say to people, “well, as long as the law makes it clear that it’s men and women in biologically-compatible pairs we’re talking about, OK.  That’ll do.  Maybe that’s all you folks can keep up with anyway.”  Jesus says here something far more incriminating.

He says that the only purpose of the law regarding marriage is to manage your “hard hearts” – an interesting term lifted from the Old Testament.  He means that Moses gave that Law to manage your disobedience and your uncanny ability to do what is right in your own eyes.   It’s an effective way to tell them plainly: you’re asking this question because you are just like your fathers, just like the people in the book of Judges, and Joshua, just like the people in Kings and Chronicles and Isaiah and Ezekiel and Daniel and Zechariah.  Why did Moses give you the Law?  Because the Law is for law-breakers, and even with the law, it turns out that you fellows are still prone to abuse the Law and make yourselves and your wives into adulterers anyway.

In one sense, Jesus has painted a pretty hopeless picture here.  It’s so hopeless that the scene ends with his disciples saying, “wow.  In that case, maybe it’s better that nobody should get married at all.”  That is: when they understand what it means to have marriage defined by the law, it looks like a recipe for failure.  And let’s give the disciples credit here for knowing themselves pretty well: as they hear Jesus say these things, they realize that this is actually how they think about divorce: it’s an escape from something they no longer want, but Jesus says using the law like that only makes you worse, guilty of adultery.

So this brings us to the serious question we are considering today: do either the church or society even need marriage?    I mean: if the disciples could hear what Jesus was saying here, and their response was, “um, maybe we should just not do this thing,” what should our response be?  And how do we communicate that to society?  Does society need marriage, really?

Well, what are the choices?  For example, what if we compare those who are married, and stay married, to those who are either not married or not able to stay married.

In 2010, The National Review reported on the CDC numbers on birth rates in the United States, and Robert Rector had this to say about the results:

America is rapidly becoming a two-caste society, with marriage and education at the dividing line. Children born to married couples with a college education are mostly in the top half of the population; children born to single mothers with high-school degrees or less are mostly in the bottom half.

So plainly, having children outside of marriage is not a great idea – but can people thrive without marriage?  That is: does the average person do better or worse if they are married?

Consider this: the common way to determine whether or not people are “in poverty” is to take the total number of households in a nation (in our case, the US), order them from the lowest household income to the highest household income, and divide that set of data into 5 groups, each containing the same number of households.  This is called dividing the population into “quintiles” of income.  In the US, there are roughly 113 million households, so each quintile has about 22.6 million households.

When you do this, you can examine the characteristics of each quintile to see whether or not there are other features in common in each quintile besides income.  I know this is a little boring and seems off-topic, but follow me here: in the general population, 51.3% of all households are married couples – 58.1 million households.  Of those, 13.085 million are below the middle quintile – which is 22.5%.  The other 77.5% of married households are in the middle quintile or better, meaning that more than 3/4th of all married households are well above the poverty line.  Most tellingly, 80% of all households in the top quintile are married couples, and when you narrow that down to the top 5% of all households the percentage grows to more than 85% being married.

Far more telling is that single-person households only account for 16% of all households, and less than 8% of all households in the highest quintile.  It’s sort of an invincible fact that marriage is good for household units, and it’s not a very far leap to say that when you aggregate that family-unit benefit to larger sociological or political measuring units – town, city, county, state, nation, culture/society – the benefit for the household unit is a net benefit for society.

But that is merely the economic impact of marriage on household units.  Does society benefit is other ways from marriage?  Let’s consider another product of marriage:  People.  That is: children.  This information is mind-blowing, so pay close attention.

In April 1998, City Journal published a study of birth rates based on the CDC annual review of birth rates in the United States.  The author of the article, Heather MacDonald, had this to say about that review:

"Illegitimacy is the greatest cause of long-term poverty in this country; unless it comes down, the poverty rate won't, either. [women] who give birth [out of wedlock] will [statistically] drift in and out of low-paid work for the rest of their lives, futilely seeking the holy grail of a permanent, ‘living-wage’ job."

In April 2010, Robert Rector wrote the following in the National Review:

The disappearance of marriage in low-income communities is the predominant cause of child poverty in the U.S. today. If poor single mothers were married to the fathers of their children, two-thirds of them would not be poor. The absence of a husband and father from the home also is a strong contributing factor to failure in school, crime, drug abuse, emotional disturbance, and a host of other social problems.

And that’s a fairly-broad claim by Rector, but it is substantiated over and over again by all manner of sociological research.  David Kopel, former DA for NYC,  has pointed out that in that jurisdiction “Almost 70 percent of juveniles incarcerated in state reform institutions come from homes with no father or without their natural parents. Most gang members, 60 percent of rapists, and 75 percent of teenage homicide perpetrators come from single-parent homes.” (1997)  Nationally, according to the CDC and national law enforcement agencies:

• 63% of youth suicides are from broken homes. (Source: U.S. D.H.H.S., Bureau of the Census).
• 71% of all high school dropouts come from broken homes. (Source: National Principals Assoc. Report on the State of High Schools).
• 85% of all children that exhibit behavioral disorders come from broken homes. (Source: Center for Disease Control).
• 80% of rapist motivated by displaced anger come from broken homes. (Source: Criminal Justice and Behavior, Vol. 14, pp. 403-26).
• 85% of all youths sitting in prisons grew up in a broken home. (Source: Fulton County Georgia jail populations, Texas Dept. Of Corrections, 1992).
• 90% of all homeless and runaway children are from broken homes.

It’s simply unquestionable: whatever it is that happens in a home where there is a father and a mother, it completely outstrips the socialization and behavioral characteristics of homes without 2 parents.

So marriage as such is a massive benefit to society – it is more likely to create financially-prosperous household units which, by and large, produce children less likely to commit suicide, drop out of school, exhibit behavioral disorders, and break the law.  Society needs marriage.

Listen: society knows it needs marriage.  You cannot find a society at any point in history which doesn’t have some sort of norms for establishing marriages and households.  We didn’t really have the rattle off the long list of liabilities of non-married arrangements to make this case.  The question is only this: how and from where do societies get their ideas of marriage?

Every society has marital norms, right?  That’s actually a secular argument here -- You can find all manner of marriage arrangements if you do a little research.  Wikipedia – the fount of secularized information that it is – lists dozens of types of marriage:

• Arranged marriage
• Boston marriage
• Celestial marriage
• Chinese ghost marriage/Spirit marriage
• Covenant marriage
• Endogamous
• Female husband marriage
• Fleet Marriage
• Ghost marriage
• Group marriage
• Hollywood marriage
• Human
• Intermarriage or Mixed marriage
• Interracial marriage
• Lavender marriage
• Levirate marriage
• Line marriage
• Love marriage
• Mixed
• Monogamy
• Multiple marriages
• Open marriage
• Polyandry
• Polygamy
• Polygyny
• Same-sex
• Serial monogamy
• Sexless marriage
• Sister exchange

And let’s be honest: this is an attempt by secular advocates to say that as long as we call it “marriage,” it doesn’t matter what definition we use.  That is: the definitions here aren’t important, and the same outcomes will come under any of these arrangements – so let’s just settle on some kind of simplified version of this, something which appeals to the common denominator and common sense, and let’s move on.

Or worse still: it’s the way society reproaches us, the church, for the foundation of Jesus’ argument: “Have you not read,” and “God has said.”  You know: if it’s that clear, and God has said something, how do we come up with dozens – maybe hundreds – of different definitions of marriage when we look across cultures?  We may say that we should have read about this, but see here: none of these people have, and they’re perfectly fine.

A few years ago, Newsweek ran a cover story and featured articles about the definition of marriage, and this is what they had to say about the subject:

Let's try for a minute to take the religious conservatives at their word and define marriage as the Bible does. Shall we look to Abraham, the great patriarch, who slept with his servant when he discovered his beloved wife Sarah was infertile? Or to Jacob, who fathered children with four different women (two sisters and their servants)? Abraham, Jacob, David, Solomon and the kings of Judah and Israel—all these fathers and heroes were polygamists. The New Testament model of marriage is hardly better. Jesus himself was single and preached an indifference to earthly attachments—especially family. The apostle Paul (also single) regarded marriage as an act of last resort for those unable to contain their animal lust. "It is better to marry than to burn with passion," says the apostle, in one of the most lukewarm endorsements of a treasured institution ever uttered. Would any contemporary heterosexual married couple—who likely woke up on their wedding day harboring some optimistic and newfangled ideas about gender equality and romantic love—turn to the Bible as a how-to script? 

Of course not, yet the religious opponents of gay marriage would have it be so.

Listen to that:  “Would any contemporary heterosexual married couple turn to the Bible as a how-to script? Of course not!”  Not only does this writer get the narrative of the Bible on this subject completely wrong, she runs rough-shod over the historical fact that the way we view marriage today as “harboring some optimistic and newfangled ideas about … romantic love” is completely and utterly a function of the Christian influence over this cultural institution.

But let’s be a little self-aware about confusion: it’s a direct consequence of the Protestant Reformation.  Both Luther and Calvin, while having a very high view of the union of marriage, reacted against the Roman Catholic view of marriage as a sacrament by making it an important and God-ordained institution which, like all other vocations, ought to be administered by the civil magistrate.  Calvin had second thoughts about this before the end of his life, but it is unquestionable that the Protestant states of Europe were the ones which, in an effort to take this power out the hands of ecclesiastical courts, put it in the hands of the civil courts.  This migration had little immediate impact on the definition of marriage in Europe and America because all the judicial precedence for the civil courts were the decisions of the ecclesiastical courts.  But over time as Western culture moved through the enlightenment, the legal definitions of contract became more and more the model for how the Law ought to view marriage.  It was only in the 19th century that divorce became commonly legal in the English-speaking world, but the rate of divorce has become an epidemic in the last 50 years.

The collapse of the definition of marriage, folks, is because Christians wanted the Law to decide the answer to the question: “Is it lawful to divorce one’s wife for any cause?"  Because we have handed it over to the courts to decide, they are deciding it.

Well, to respond to that, let’s consider this: how did the West ever get a Christian view of marriage?  That is: Western Civ predates the church, the Christian faith.  How did marriage become the domain of the church in the first place?

The ancient Greeks considered the relation of marriage a matter not merely of private, but also of public or general interest.  The laws were founded on the generally recognised principle that it was the duty of every citizen to raise up strong, healthy and legitimate children to the state.  The ancient Athenians liberally allowed divorce, but only the state, the magistrate, could declare the divorce.

In the earliest periods of Roman history, Marriage meant that a married woman would be subjugated by her husband, but that custom had died out by the 1st century, in favor of Free Marriage which did not grant a husband any rights over his wife or have any changing effect on a woman's status.  With this, the reasons for any divorce became irrelevant. Either spouse could leave a marriage at any point.

This was the state of things into the second century  -- as the Christian church entered the ancient world.  At that time, the Christians had no political power, no economic power, and were seen as weird and irrational atheists because they only worshipped one god.  They had nothing -- no publishing houses, no televisions networks, no newspapers, no blogs.  They had absolutely no advantages in the society in general.

In our view, that means the game is over.  I think our view of it is deeply influenced by our own prosperity and our own good standing in the culture, but if we had no legislative recourse and no way to make movies about what we say we believe, we would see the problem of helping our culture rethink, refine and restore the institution of marriage as completely without hope.

Yet, the Christians in the -pre-christian west didn’t see it that way at all.

... to be continued ...

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1 of 3: Why the Church and Society need Marriage

by Frank Turk

Last weekend, I was fortunate enough to spend the weekend with my wife and the extremely-gracious folks in Warsaw, IN, at Christ Covenant Church & Trinity Evangelical Church (and their friends at the St. Regis Club) for a conference on the meaning of human sexuality & marriage.   Tim Challies gave two very fine talks about definitional issues surrounding sexuality and marriage, and I got the simple and uncontroversial topic, "Why Marriage Is Necessary to a Civilized Society." What follows today, tomorrow, and Thursday will be the substance of that talk, edited only to remove the topical items related to the conference.  Enjoy.

From the book of Matthew, Chapter 19:

1Now when Jesus had finished these sayings, he went away from Galilee and entered the region of Judea beyond the Jordan. 2And large crowds followed him, and he healed them there. 

 3And Pharisees came up to him and tested him by asking, "Is it lawful to divorce one’s wife for any cause?" 4He answered, "Have you not read that he who created them from the beginning made them male and female, 5and said, 'Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh'? 6So they are no longer two but one flesh. What therefore God has joined together, let not man separate." 7They said to him, "Why then did Moses command one to give a certificate of divorce and to send her away?" 8He said to them, "Because of your hardness of heart Moses allowed you to divorce your wives, but from the beginning it was not so. 9 And I say to you: whoever divorces his wife, except for sexual immorality, and marries another, commits adultery." 

10The disciples said to him, "If such is the case of a man with his wife, it is better not to marry."

Let’s open in a word of prayer:

Jesus, you are life for all men, and the light to all men.  You shine in the darkness, but the darkness has never understood it, and never overcome it.  The Law was given through Moses, but through you, we receive Grace and Truth.  Today, God, forgive us because sometimes we forget we are not the givers of law but in fact the ambassadors of Grace.  Teach us, God, to say what you say about this subject for the purpose that you say it – which is to call your people to yourself.  And help us, God, to be a light on a lamp stand in this dark world, the salt of the earth, and good and true neighbors to those who need you.  We pray this for your glory and honor, Jesus.  Amen.

Most of you have no idea who I am or why I’m qualified to speak at a conference like this.  Maybe I’m not actually qualified, but I am pretty deeply attached to this subject because I am a married man – and I haven’t always been one of those.  In fact, I can say with confidence that I was, for a long time, not qualified to be a married man.  When I realized this, I was ruined.  I mean: who doesn’t want to get married, right?  And it’s not like anyone would have stopped me – it wasn’t illegal for me to get married.  But there was no right-minded woman who would have married me.

And that was part of the conviction that led me to Christ: not that if I liked Jesus I could find a girl, but that there was something inside me which was deeply broken, and that anyone who knew me well enough to consider marrying me would know that much about me, and they’d say, “No.  No way!  He’s good for a laugh sometimes, but he’s a car wreck.”

So when I found Christ, I handed him my car wreck and told him simply, “I have no idea what to do with this.  I just need you to save it.”  And he did – he saved me from the car wreck of my sin so that the wrecker of judgment wasn’t going to haul me off to the junk yard of God’s wrath.

Which brings me back here to this topic of marriage.  The title of my talk today is, “Better Together: Why the Church and Society both need God’s plan for Marriage.”  It may seem obvious to most of you, but Jesus doesn’t just save us from the final judgment – although that’s important.  Jesus saves us for the sake of doing something with and for the sake of this Gospel we want to proclaim.  Right? Eph 2? “For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus unto good works, which God hath before ordained that we should walk in them.”

See: for me, I had to ask God to make me into a man who could be a good husband. God: what is a good husband?  God: who must I be in order to find a good wife?  God: what will our marriage look like, and how will I know when I have done what you have expected from me?

So to answer the first question here – that is, what qualifies me to come here to you and tell you why the church and society need God’s definition of marriage – it is because I need God’s definition of marriage, and you’re just like me.  It doesn’t matter if you’re a believer who will ponder these few minutes we have together deeply or an unbeliever who has already tuned me out because of my Jesusing up here: you are just like me, and you’re a car wreck.  I know what the tow truck looks like, and I know what it means to be towed out of the scene of the accident and be put back together.  Often.

Let’s turn back to our passage of Scripture for a few minutes, and find God’s definition of marriage.  I would be hard pressed to believe that most of you here today have never heard this story from the book of Matthew before: Large crowds were following Jesus around, and the Pharisees were worried about that.    So they came to him, as they usually did, with a question.  The question was simple: can a man issue his wife a divorce for any reason?

Now, this is a broad question – and in some way it seems almost too easy, right?  “Any reason?  You mean like for burning his lamb chop or not finishing the dishes?  What sort of question is that?  Of course divorce is not for just any reason.”

But it turns out that this is exactly what they meant – among the rabbis, there were two schools of thought on the matter.  One of them did in fact say that a man could divorce his wife for any reason at all, and the other taught that divorce was only for adultery, and even then only for intentional and persistent infidelity.  It’s a pretty big gap, and the commentators on this passage say that the purpose of this question was, of course, to trip Jesus up.  The thinking here goes that the question was made so that if Jesus answered in favor of one school or the other, it would effectively split his followers in half – or worse, split them so desperately that they fighting would disperse them altogether.

So in one sense, the question is asked to make sure Jesus cannot win.

But in another sense, the question is asked to measure Jesus against the standard of the Law – against the standard of Moses.  If Jesus did not answer the way the Law says he ought to, he was certainly a guilty man – someone inventing his own standard and teaching it to others.  It would be easy to call him wicked if he did not make it clear how the Law should govern the matter, or if he was releasing people to act in any way which looked right in their own eyes.

But let’s look at the question a moment before we get to Jesus’ answer. It’s one of those moments in the Bible when we have to be careful not to read too solemnly, or else we’re bound to miss how utterly human and relevant the text is.  Here are the Pharisees – the keepers of the Whole Law – asking Jesus when it was time for divorce because it was a common question. In a nutshell, the question is one that, if we are honest, is common in our culture: when is it OK to get a divorce?

Jesus, however, isn’t stumped by the question.  He’s not left to ponder it a minute – he sees right through the question and takes it directly to the heart of the matter.  We’ll come back to the first part of his answer is a few minutes: “Have you not read …?”  There’s a very important special plea there that we have to look at, but it’s important enough to take up last even though he started there.  But he said, “Have you not read that he who created them from the beginning made them.”  That is: if we’re going to talk about marriage, we can’t start anywhere but “the beginning,” which is to say, the purpose of men and women.

This is a hard sell even in religious circles today – that people are made and are not making themselves.  People want to be what they imagine they want to be, rather than what they ought to be.

This comes out of us in so many different ways.  You know: we want to be comfortable and leisurely, but look at how we are made – we are made to work.  We want to be somewhat sophisticated and cosmopolitan – in secular circles that is done by association with the rich and famous, and in our reformed circles, it’s done by quoting Calvin, Spurgeon, Luther and obscure puritans; we want to be very clever and be seen as clever, and if we were really clever, we’d write the pithy quotes rather than memorize them.  We’re not clever and self-taught: we need instruction.  We are made to be something by nature, by kind, and it’s no accident.

And Jesus underscores this: he actually takes out the question of “any reason” by pointing to the first reason: God made men and women.  That is: “he made them and said.”  That goes back to the over-arching argument, “have you not read?” but look at it simply from the standpoint of telling the story for a second: from Jesus’ perspective, God didn’t just make people with the animals, and the animals would be a kind of example for people and vice versa.  From Jesus’ perspective, when God created man and woman, he had something to say to them right at the beginning, and it matters.  What the Pharisees have asked him, then, is a sort of nonsense question: can marriage end for any old reason?  Well, of course not – because it wasn’t started for any old reason.  It was started when God made man and woman, so when you think about marriage, you have to think of God’s purpose in it, not man’s.

And here’s what God said, according to Jesus, right at the beginning when he made them: 'Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh.’

I think it’s interesting that a recent best-effort to set the law straight here in the United States was the Proposition 8 effort in California.  The State of California presented a ballot initiative called commonly called Proposition 8  which would amend its constitution and formally define “marriage” under the law.  The law read simply:

Section I. Title
This measure shall be known and may be cited as the "California Marriage Protection Act."
Section 2. Article I. Section 7.5 is added to the California Constitution, to read:
Sec. 7.5. Only marriage between a man and a woman is valid or recognized in California.

Jesus says, “Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh.”

In Malachi 2, the Bible says it this way:

      But did He not make them one,
      Having a remnant of his Spirit?
      And why one?
      He seeks godly offspring.
      Therefore take heed to your spirit,
      And let none deal treacherously with the wife of his youth.
      “For the LORD God of Israel says
      That He hates divorce,
      For it covers one’s garment with violence.”

And somehow we offer that up in secular law as, “we only recognize marriage between a man and a woman.”

See: when Jesus says what he says, there are things which, frankly, the people asking him questions have either not remembered, or never learned.  “The two shall become one flesh,” he says.  Paul picks that up later in Ephesians, and tells us that a man who is married must treat his wife like his own flesh, and care for her, and nurture her.  To say that marriage is only “between a man and a woman,” seems to be missing something by comparison.

Jesus’ point is that the first purpose is that man and woman are made for each other.  That is, before we can talk about what the law might say about marriage, we have to see what marriage is for, and who it is for, and where it comes from.  And Jesus’ point is utterly unambiguous: the law does not create marriage.  Marriage comes far before the law, and it is built into the purpose of creation.

Now, there’s nothing new there for anybody in this room, right?  Whether you’re a believer or an unbeliever, you have heard some version of this before.  It shouldn’t be news to anyone that the Christian ideal of marriage is that man and woman are made for each other, and that they are to be joined together in a permanent way, in a miraculous way.

When Jesus tells the Pharisees that marriage was meant, from the beginning, to be an inseparable bond, they ask him a question: “Why then did Moses command one to give a certificate of divorce and to send her away?"  That is: Jesus – what you’re talking about here doesn’t look like the Law of Moses. How do you run this thing?  We were asking you a practical question, Jesus, and you’re giving us a very lofty, but unworkable, answer. “One flesh? Moses gave us instructions on how to handle a divorce, and you come across with ‘one flesh’.”

It doesn’t look like a Law at all, does it?  It looks like something far more impossible, more incredible than any law.

This is an important point in this story: the Pharisees came to undo Jesus, to ruin him as a teacher and a leader, and in some sense as the very Messiah, with the Law.  They came to him with a point of law, with which they were experts, and they believed they asked him a question that could not be answered wisely – from the Law.  But Jesus gives them an answer that exceeds the requirements of the law.

... to be continued ...

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Of Course, she says

by Frank Turk

Before you start here today, Dan advised me to split this essay in half because it is exceeding long -- even by the standard of, well, what Dan and I usually write. I did not take his advice, so pack a lunch before you get started here -- and my apologies to your boss and your family as you dig in.

The blogosphere is absolutely a-twitter over that Newsweek essay reproaching the conservative view of marriage – and rightly so. I mean, we have all read at least this much of this piece of writing:

Let's try for a minute to take the religious conservatives at their word and define marriage as the Bible does. Shall we look to Abraham, the great patriarch, who slept with his servant when he discovered his beloved wife Sarah was infertile? Or to Jacob, who fathered children with four different women (two sisters and their servants)? Abraham, Jacob, David, Solomon and the kings of Judah and Israel—all these fathers and heroes were polygamists. The New Testament model of marriage is hardly better. Jesus himself was single and preached an indifference to earthly attachments—especially family. The apostle Paul (also single) regarded marriage as an act of last resort for those unable to contain their animal lust. "It is better to marry than to burn with passion," says the apostle, in one of the most lukewarm endorsements of a treasured institution ever uttered. Would any contemporary heterosexual married couple—who likely woke up on their wedding day harboring some optimistic and newfangled ideas about gender equality and romantic love—turn to the Bible as a how-to script?

Of course not, yet the religious opponents of gay marriage would have it be so.

And most folks responding have sort of lost it in various ways because let’s face it: if anyone read Hamlet or Harry Potter with the critical finesse exercised in this paragraph, well, one would think they were reading something from a blog with only 5 or 6 readers – not from a magazine which people would (and did) pay money for.

But the thing which I think is interesting is the underlined part: “of course not”.

Lisa Miller’s point here is clear: if this is what conservative readers of the Bible – the ones advocating against “gay marriage” – mean when they say a “Biblical definition of marriage”, of course no one would want that. There’s a certain irony in this, but if the “religious conservatives” would “define marriage as the Bible does” – and define it therefore as loose polygamy for the sensually and spiritually weak, a vehicle only for the satisfaction of urges one cannot control for the fulfillment of promises one doesn’t think God is willing or able to keep, of course nobody would want that.

The problem for Lisa Miller, and her editor Jon Meacham, and their publication Newsweek, is that this is not the definition of marriage religious conservatives are promoting.

I am about to pour out the 100-proof polemics here, so before I tell you what exactly “conservatives” are (or at least ought to be) demanding, let me make something transparently clear: what I am personally demanding is not some sort of crime of hate against people with whom we disagree. I could repost it here, but back last summer I posted this piece about apologetic encounters with people who have loved ones who are g-l-b-t-q, or are themselves g-l-b-t-q, and I stand by it emphatically. This is not about how to injure anyone.

Here’s where I’d start: there is no question that of course the Christian church does not define marriage the way Ms. Miller has in her opening salvo here. But the reason Ms. Miller can make her point as hap-hazardly as she does in her essay is that the church has done a lousy job of defining marriage in the last 100 years. Someone might want to make the case that the church has been doing a poor job longer than that – I leave that case to that person, whomever he or she may be.

But here’s the truth: nobody can frame Barack Obama as a supporter of the war in Iraq, right? Nobody can frame Bill O’Reilly as a supporter of Barack Obama, yes? Nobody can frame Sean Penn as a political conservative – or even as a moderate. In fact, nobody can frame the advocates against Prop 8 as advocates of marriage in spite of their repetition of the word.

But why? Why can these people not be carelessly framed with not just a caricature of their views but with an outright contradiction of their views? Let me say it plainly: it is because these other people and groups are clearly on the record regarding what they believe. Publicly, openly, often: they say exactly what they mean, they do not apologize for it, and they are categorically militant to say what they are in favor of and are not merely and glibly chanting slogans about what they are against.

“But Frank,” says the politically-conservative reader who has stumbled onto this blog post, “how can you say that? Aren’t the proponents of Prop 8 and like legislation clearly for the union of one man and one woman? Don’t they say that often enough?”

My answer, unequivocally, is:

NO.

There are very few problems in the church that make me this angry, but this one is in the top 3. See: this is why Ms. Miller can say exegetically- and theologically- ludicrous things about what “Christian” religious conservatives want. Religious conservatives don’t really know what they want, or how to get it. And frankly, they have effaced their own position so badly in this case, it is no wonder we can see the head of the hideous monster about to be born cresting behind what they say they want.

What the student of the Bible ought to want in this case is not a social agenda. What the student of Biblical principles here should want is not for the government to force people to one kind of, um, gender entanglement over another.

Here’s why I say that: if the primary need for marriage is a social contract, one which gives me rights over another person, and rights regarding another person’s property so that they do not cheat me or that I am not otherwise cheated, I say plainly: let everyone have that. If that is all, or even principally, what marriage is, then please let every person have that as often as possible and with as many people as possible. Let Government (great “G” intended) protect the rights of each person so that no one is cheated.

But here’s the thing: I think – and historically the church thinks -- that marriage is not the social construction of a network of rights – especially the “right” to some emotive or financial state of being appeased. In fact, the church (since it has come up) reads the Bible to mean that marriage is a surrendering of rights first to God and then to another person for manifold theological purposes – that is, a wide variety of purposes which, when acted out, give glory to God.

Marriage is about God. That is, the God who created us out of the dust for a purpose and subordinated to Himself. Marriage is about the Creator of all things and the purpose He made in mankind.

Now, all the people who liked Lisa Miller’s essay are thinking, “he’s going to break into the procreation riff here, and I’m checking out.” But because that is actually going to be my last and most derivative point, you should not check out. You think it’s a crude and dangerous club. Let’s wait a second here and put that purpose in its right place, and see if you still believe that.

The purpose of God in creating mankind is first to show the power of God over all things. The story goes like this:

YHVH-God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to work it and keep it.

and then God says:

It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him a helper fit for him.

Man’s purpose in God’s creation is to work and “subdue the Earth” as it says in another place, and God makes woman to help man. That word “helper” there in the Hebrew is later used in the OT almost exclusively to mean the kind of aid only God Himself can provide -- as in Psa 115:11, or Psa 124:8.

So God put Adam over all creation, and puts Eve with him as a divinely-given help in order to subdue the Earth. And Jesus – since Jesus’ opinion came up in Ms. Miller’s essay – says this about these events:

Have you not read that he who created them from the beginning made them male and female, and said, 'Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh'? So they are no longer two but one flesh. What therefore God has joined together, let not man separate."

That celibate, single Jesus said that – endorsing the story in Genesis not only by saying He believed that’s what happened but in fact by saying those words from Genesis 2 were actually spoken by God. So what we have is not just some human story but God’s very own story-telling, God’s very own words telling us that marriage was made for man and woman, that in marriage they would become one flesh, and that it should never be separated because God made it so.

Marriage is therefore a glorification of God in our obedience, to do a thing the way He said it should be done, and not to treat it – as we do today in our churches – as something which is often abandoned because the other person has become to us not our own flesh, but merely a room-mate or worse: merely a contractor who we can fire when we aren’t satisfied with their work.

And that’s not hardly all. This Paul fellow whom Ms. Miller seems to think held a very low view of marriage didn’t quite receive the husbands and wives in Ephesus as second-string, morally-weak jobbers for the faith. To the men he said this:

Husbands, love your wives, as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her, that he might sanctify her, having cleansed her by the washing of water with the word, so that he might present the church to himself in splendor, without spot or wrinkle or any such thing, that she might be holy and without blemish. In the same way husbands should love their wives as their own bodies. He who loves his wife loves himself. For no one ever hated his own flesh, but nourishes and cherishes it, just as Christ does the church, because we are members of his body. "Therefore a man shall leave his father and mother and hold fast to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh." This mystery is profound, and I am saying that it refers to Christ and the church.

Which, sadly, is the most powerful theological statement about human relationships and God in the entire Bible – and our churches treat it like it is some kind of cryptic betrayal of what we ought to stand for.

Yet to the women, Paul said this:

Wives, submit to your own husbands, as to the Lord. For the husband is the head of the wife even as Christ is the head of the church, his body, and is himself its Savior. Now as the church submits to Christ, so also wives should submit in everything to their husbands.

And of course, Ms. Miller and Mr. Meacham want none of that – even if they would concede that the man is called to die for the sake of lifting his wife up. How can they admit that submission to a savior is actually a work of right-minded obedience? It would be a fatal betrayal of the godless religion they have tried to advance in their essays.

And in that, let me say for all of them that of course they do not want this kind of marriage, either. A marriage which at its root is a union intended and created by God that glorifies Him by being for the good of mankind – man and woman both – which creates a permanent and unbreakable bond in which one submits to the other, and the other in turn commits even to die for the sake of the first in order to nurture her as his own body – and that this union (here it is now: watch it) is the union where God has ordained to bring more human life into this world -- is simply not what the opportunists who chant “gay marriage” want for themselves.

Now, so what? Read the rest of this essay carefully, because it makes two points against both sides of this public argument which ought to give both sides a reason to pause.

“So what?” #1 is this: if the church was serious about this kind of love – which is Christ’s kind of love, first and foremost demonstrated on the Cross for a specific bride in order to make her holy and spotless before God – it wouldn’t abide a social Gospel of nondescript good will or idiotic exhortations about “your best life now”. Listen: often in marriage, you are not on the receiving end of good things but are in fact in the middle of hard doings. And if you expect that your marriage should be about satisfying you instead of sanctifying someone else through sacrifice, you will want to end your marriage in short order – kids and social appearances be damned. And let’s be honest: since divorce in the church looks like divorce in the world – that is, we do it just as often and for all the same reasons – I suspect we think of “marriage” in the same way the world does. So when the world simply wants to make the law look like what we are actually practicing, we have to look in the mirror and admit to ourselves that we are to blame for what the world thinks of marriage.

But my final “so what” here is to Ms. Miller and her tribe of social liberation kin: don’t kid yourself about what you “of course” don’t want. I find it almost incredulously-ironic, as I said above, that when Ms. Miller lists the sins of the OT patriarchs, she overlooks how the Bible describes what these acts were: “every man did what was right in his own eyes,” and “they did what was evil in the sight of YHVH, and they provoked Him to jealousy with their sins that they committed, more than all that their fathers had done.” It is expecially vexing and darkly funny to see her editor Mr. Meacham appeal to the sacrament of marriage when what he wants isn't what God has specifically called holy. To appeal to sacrament is to appeal to God's view of a thing, and to call for a blessing on an invented standard which seems right to a man but ignores or contorts God's specific prescription for things is exactly the opposite of "sacrament".

You see: if what you want is the church to bless your social-contract view of marriage, and you admit that this view is about what you want and not about what God has prescribed for you – male, female, for His glory, to your obedience, that you will sacrifice and for the sake of bearing children – you are asking for what you abhor in others, what "of course" we should abhor in the patriarchs described by Moses and the Prophets. Demanding a higher standard from others when one will not abide it himself is called “hypocrisy”, as we all know well and enjoy saying to the poor, ill-advised conservatives who want to do through Government what they cannot do themselves.

The other side, however, is in the far more pitiable position of wanting the government merely to allow them to do what they see in others as rank stupidity and evil. I’m not sure there’s a word for that (the Bible has one -- you can find it in Prov 12:1) but if they come up with one that means what I mean, let's by all means use that word instead. They should own up to what they are asking for, but please do not call it "marriage".

Stop asking for “marriage”. You don’t want marriage but a way to make other people put their blessing on your life and choices; you want them to call your values "holy" when you can't even say where they came from. I say you should have what you want here – because frankly you deserve what you are asking for, and that is not a compliment.

We are at fault here: we have taught you that marriage is a cheap thing which is easily made and easily unmade, and that it is about the pursuit of happiness. Shame on us for teaching you such a thing -- may God have mercy on us for it; let us repent for making marriage about human urges and rights. But if we are willing to stand corrected -- because of course nobody should want such a thing as you have asked for, a thing like the sinners of the Old Testament have done -- you yourselves should change your minds. May God grant mercy that you, too, will stand corrected and you will repent of your offense against Him.

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