Is the Pope Catholic?

Growing up in a nominally Roman Catholic extended family, that snarky response to a question where the answer was obviously yes was an alternative to the fecal habits of bears in the woods. If you come from an ethnic Catholic Polish family, you have almost certainly heard that response.

These days that question might not be quite as tongue and cheek as it once was. Each day Jorge Bergoglio seems to be turning Catholic orthodoxy on it's head. Whether it is vaguely approving sounding language about homosexuality or railing against the "evils" of capitalism, the economic system that has done more than any pontiff to lift people out of poverty, it has to be bewildering and troubling for more traditional Roman Catholics because it sure is to me (bewildering anyway).

Today brings big news on the marriage front. In an unprecedented move, Jorge is making it even easier for married Catholic couples to get an annulment. Now annulment is a nice way of saying divorce accomplished by declaring that the marriage the church approved turned out to be a mess from the beginning. I don't know of many divorced couples who think their marriage was a swell idea in retrospective. By making it easier for people to ditch a marriage and go back to partaking of the Mass and remarrying, Jorge is talking out of both sides of his mouth, convening a summit on the family on one hand and installing a "6 marriages or fewer" express lane to end marriages on the other.

An analyst I was listening to on the BBC World News suggested that this was a compromise, Rome will go this far but no further. The problem with that logic is it never goes the other way. Every move to compromise, every move to placate progressives is permanent. You never come back, with the singular exception of the Southern Baptist Convention which managed to pull itself back from the brink before it went too far. Progressives will never compromise because they are ideologically driven rather than capital "T" Truth driven. That is why they denigrate Scripture and twist it for their own purposes. I don't think Jorge got snookered here, I think he is doing exactly what he plans to do in remaking the Roman Catholic religion in his own image. I have to wonder what the former "pope", Joseph Ratzinger, a very rare living former pope, thinks of what his successor to the "Chair of Peter" is up to. I imagine he might be regretting his decision to step down, at least privately.

The issue of divorce and remarriage, which led to the split with England and the formation of the Anglican church, has long been a non-negotiable with Rome, and rightly so. The Bible is crystal clear on this issue, even if one divorces for cause, i.e. fornication on the part of one party in the marriage, remarriage is forbidden. Compromise with the completely unBiblical and anti-Biblical "annulment" was bad enough but now the dam is is open and you can expect the Vatican to get a flood of annulments very soon. Make no mistake, it doesn't end there. Winning this one major concession will embolden those who are pushing for married priests, female priests and normalization of homosexuality. Rome is going to learn the lesson of her wayward former subjects in the Anglican communion, compromise to stem the loss of membership always has the result of speeding it up instead. This sort of stuff makes me glad that my source of authority is not some guy who gets elected in a religious political contest whenever a pope dies but the revealed and preserved Word of God.

So now what?

That is the question a lot of people are asking today. With the stroke of a pen the Supreme Court added by judicial fiat the "right" of two people of the same gender to "marry", placing Obergefell v. Hodges alongside Roe v. Wade, with the "right" of a woman to murder her child in the womb, in the pantheon of "rights" made up out of thin air by the court outside of and in opposition to the legislative process.

From a legal standpoint this was going to happen anyway. The tides of the culture were already moving in this direction and within a few years the entire nation was going to have legalized "gay marriage". Having the Court step in to circumvent the process is simply the latest dangerous precedent where the Court makes the law and there is not much you can do about it because that same Court interprets the law. It is somewhat akin to a baseball umpire getting up in the middle of a game and rearranging the scoreboard to achieve whatever outcome they want rather than ruling on balls and strikes. The American system of governance does not work when one branch stops being a checks and balances branch and becomes the de facto rulers of the nation.

The decision was as predictable as the sun rising in the east. The same court that ruled in favor of Obamacare a day earlier because the law is a mess and they decided not to make it worse, rather than sending it back to the legislature to fix like they are supposed to, was certainly going to have at least 5 members rule in favor of "gay marriage" no matter what the arguments were for or against and certainly without bothering to consult the Constitution. So there it is. America is not a "marriage equality" nation, to our shame and national degradation.

So what next?

If you think that those who pushed for "gay marriage" are going to be satisfied that they got what they demanded, you are delusional. There is always a next step. You need proof? Check out this tweet from our esteemed Commander-in-Chief:

Today is a big step in our march toward equality. Gay and lesbian couples now have the right to marry, just like anyone else. #LoveWins

— President Obama (@POTUS) June 26, 2015

A "big step". That implies there are more steps to come. Having won the "right" to get married, now comes the push to silence those who disagree and force at least external acceptance of homosexual unions. The institutional church is going to bear the brunt of this because that is where the money is and lawyers and activists always chase the money.

Imagine this scenario. Church X is a moderately conservative Southern Baptist church with a beautiful sanctuary. The family of Guy A are lifelong members there and Guy A went to church, youth group, was baptized there and accepted into membership as a youth. In his adulthood he decided he liked dudes and found "the one". So Guy A and Guy B want to get married and Guy A wants to have the ceremony in Church X because he is a "member" there and it carries deep emotional significance for him. Church X declines. Guy A feels upset by this. Do you seriously think that Guy A can't and won't sue to demand that they accommodate him and do you seriously think that he won't win?

Or, as many have predicted for some time, the courts are going to be inundated with appeals from polygamist groups. Given the complete lack of Constitutional interaction there is no reason that the same reasoning doesn't apply to polygamist groups. As the dissenting justices wrote: "The majority's decision is an act of will, not legal judgment." The five justices wanted something, so they did it. Simple as that. Justice Roberts has already made this point in his dissent:

One immediate question invited by the majority’s position is whether States may retain the definition of marriage as a union of two people. Cf. Brown v. Buhman, 947 F. Supp. 2d 1170 (Utah 2013), appeal pending, No. 14- 4117 (CA10). Although the majority randomly inserts the adjective “two” in various places, it offers no reason at all why the two-person element of the core definition of marriage may be preserved while the man-woman element may not. Indeed, from the standpoint of history and tradition, a leap from opposite-sex marriage to same-sex marriage is much greater than one from a two-person union to plural unions, which have deep roots in some cultures around the world. If the majority is willing to take the big leap, it is hard to see how it can say no to the shorter one. 

It is striking how much of the majority’s reasoning would apply with equal force to the claim of a fundamental right to plural marriage. If “[t]here is dignity in the bond between two men or two women who seek to marry and in their autonomy to make such profound choices,” ante, at 13, why would there be any less dignity in the bond between three people who, in exercising their autonomy, seek to make the profound choice to marry? If a same-sex couple has the constitutional right to marry because their children would otherwise “suffer the stigma of knowing their families are somehow lesser,” ante, at 15, why wouldn’t the same reasoning apply to a family of three or more persons raising children? If not having the opportunity to marry “serves to disrespect and subordinate” gay and lesbian couples, why wouldn’t the same “imposition of this disability,” ante, at 22, serve to disrespect and subordinate people who find fulfillment in polyamorous relationships? See Bennett, Polyamory: The Next Sexual Revolution? Newsweek, July 28, 2009 (estimating 500,000 polyamorous families in the United States); Li, Married Lesbian “Throuple” Expecting First Child, N. Y. Post, Apr. 23, 2014; Otter, Three May Not Be a Crowd: The Case for a Constitutional Right to Plural Marriage, 64 Emory L. J. 1977 (2015). 

I do not mean to equate marriage between same-sex couples with plural marriages in all respects. There may well be relevant differences that compel different legal analysis. But if there are, petitioners have not pointed to any. When asked about a plural marital union at oral argument, petitioners asserted that a State “doesn’t have such an institution.” Tr. of Oral Arg. on Question 2, p. 6. But that is exactly the point: the States at issue here do not have an institution of same-sex marriage, either.

Precisely.

As I have been saying for a while now, the church needs to disentangle itself entirely from civil marriage. Let the state do whatever it wants. The church will not recognize nor perform nor act as agent in civil marriages. Marriages in the church are marriage in the church alone. The state never should have had any sort of relationship with the church when it came to marriage and it is time to end our unequal yoking. For once let's be ahead of the curve and tell Caesar to take his marriage licenses and stick 'em. The church needs to focus on marriage and gender as God has designed and defined as a witness now more than ever. We have tried to play the respectable patsy for the culture for long enough and all it has gotten us is a smack on the hand when we got out of line. God intended marriage as not merely a sexual union with procreative results but also as a witness to the world. It is time for that role to be front and center for the church.

The church helped create the homosexual marriage problem, now it is time to fix it

Fairly recently there was a failed move in Alabama to stop issuing marriage licenses. It is the first of what is undoubtedly a lot of legislation like this in "red states" where the imposition of homosexual "marriage" by an act of judicial fiat is looming. The end result is obvious to anyone who is paying attention. Sooner or later, and probably sooner, the Supreme Court will whisk up a "right" for homosexuals to marry and that will be that. There is a great deal of wringing of hands among culture warriors but the die is cast and nothing is going to stop it now. All that is left to us now is a strategic retreat to get the marriage house in order.

Marriage is not really about property rights or tax breaks or who gets to make decisions about end of life medical issues. It is about the union of a man and woman and as a result, generally speaking, the creation of a family unit that is fruitful and multiplies and replenishes the earth. The ideas of creation, of marriage and of child-bearing and child-rearing are as inextricably linked to the Genesis account as sin and the Fall. It is through the course of history that man has added in things like dowries, inheritance rights, succession of children all the way up to the modern era where marriage, like church, is seemingly more a vehicle to get tax benefits than a sacred and inviolable covenant. If you doubt that, just wait until the Supreme Court inevitably decided that contributions to churches are not tax deductible and that clerical wages don't get special tax treatment and see what that does to the level of giving at local religious organizations.

Back to my point. The sacred covenant of marriage doesn't benefit from having secular benefits attached to it at all. Certainly individuals may benefit and many do. I am all in favor of anything that reduces the burden that the state seizes from individuals and families although I chafe at the notion of citizens having to come before Caesar, hat in hand, and beg for their own money back. Yet the cost to the covenant relationship of marriage for the church as a whole has been devastating. By simultaneously expanding the scope of marriage to include contractual and financial benefits and minimizing the sacred nature of marriage the church has created this mess where certain people can argue that the inherently exclusionary definition of marriage is discriminatory because it only confers benefits from the state on one specific form of union. Now that is true for a lot of benefits. Only veterans get veteran's benefits, railroad workers get their own retirement plan, etc. but inconvenient facts like that are irrelevant.

As I look back now, it seems like the push for "civil unions" might have been a better tactic and is still the way to go. Allow people to enter into binding contractual obligations that confer the non-sacred benefits of marriage to people and get rid of the entire concept of marriage as something controlled by the state and that brings with it state benefits. I have argued this before many times but actions like those we saw in Alabama are going to be accelerating and the time is now for the church to start talking about this. My position is as follows:

- The church should decline to perform marriage ceremonies for unbelievers or even for people who have a cultural, "I checked the 'Christian' box on a survey" kind of "Christianity".
- The church should not require state marriage licenses to perform ceremonies.
- The church should refuse to sign off on those licenses.

Let the state figure it out and decide how to confer benefits formerly reserved to married couples. Homosexual couples and any number of iterations of men, women, men who used to be women, women that used to be men, etc. are going to get secular marriage benefits so let's just take the concept of marriage out of the equation entirely. We helped make this mess by greedily taking Caesar's offer of financial goodies if we agreed to be his servant but being unequally yoked in this case has been as disastrous as it always is. It is time to fix this mess and only the church can do it, but if we insist on fighting culture war battles that are already lost we are going to be worse off than any of us can imagine.

Taking Marriage And Going Home

A quick note on the Great Divorce.

I have been an advocate for a while for the church getting out of the wedding business and really focusing on the marriage business. By that I mean no longer serving as a useful patsy for Caesar to administer weddings and instead make marriages within the church something done without the approval or permission of Caesar. See my post Is this the start of a separation of marriage and the state? Let's hope so. as a primer.

More and more we are seeing the church and other religious groups moving away from state sanctioned marriage. I would rather see Christian churches and groups like mormons, Roman Catholics, etc. administering marriage within the confines of their own faith traditions and leave the secular civil and legal aspects of marital-like relationships to the government. They can call it whatever they want but it really wouldn't matter to us because we would not be beholden or dependent on Caesar. I just find it baffling that two Christians who want to be married in the church have to come to the official ecclesiastical event with a permission slip from Caesar.

It is in light of this I was interested to see this post from Rod Dreher, A Separation of Church and State. Rod writes about an email notification from "Father" Patrick Reardon, pastor of All Saints Antiochian Orthodox Church in Chicago. Patrick wrote:

Because the State of Illinois, through its legislature and governor’s office, have now re-defined marriage, marriage licenses issued by agencies of the State of Illinois will no longer be required (or signed) for weddings here at All Saints in Chicago.

Those seeking marriage in this parish will be counseled on the point.

Father Pat

I think that is a good start. If I read this correctly it means that this particular religious group will perform an Orthodox wedding without the need for a license from the state of Illinois and also that they will not counter-sign wedding licenses. You can get married there but you can't get married there, if you see my meaning.

I really contend that the marriage process for Christians should be two part. Getting married in the church is the first and only required step. Our definition done our way. No one who is not a believer should be married by the church. The second step is optional, getting a state sanctioned recognition of marriage to confer legal and tax benefits. If you don't care about those you don't have to get Caesar's blessing. This is a pretty radical step but given the direction of marriage in our society it is really a necessary one. I hope that churches and other religious groups continue to move in this direction.

Confusing the Bride and the Dress

I saw yet another article last week conflating the institutional religious organization with the Bride of Christ, in this case an article titled Does Your Youth Ministry Mess With Christ's Bride?. The point being a concern that youth ministry takes away from the "mission of the local church", i.e. Christ's Bride. I am not much of a fan of most of what passes for youth "ministry" but this article misses a bigger point.

Jesus did not die for First Baptist of Dallas and their $130,000,000 "campus". He didn't even die for your local Presbyterian church. He died for His Sheep, for His elect people. Not to put too fine a point on it but He died for people, not for religion. That doesn't mean that all forms of local gatherings are inherently bad but it does mean we miss what ought to be a pretty clear distinction between the people and the trappings.

It is probably not unexpected. In our culture we place an enormous amount of emphasis on the wedding day and all that goes along with it, getting just the right dress and having just the right caterer serving just the right meal. What is missed is the marriage. Ask couples twenty years down the road of marriage if they would rather have had the perfect wedding and a miserable marriage or a small, simple wedding and a solid marriage. You know they answer for anyone not named Kardashian. The church tries but needs to do a better job of preparing young people for a lifetime of marriage rather than helping them plan for one day. In fact it might be appropriate for elders to pull a couple aside and suggest they spend as little as possible on the wedding to instead prepare the foundations for a financially responsible marriage.

Perhaps that same mindset is what leads us to focus on the trappings of religion rather than on the people of the church. When a pastor talks about his "vision" and urges a capital campaign to raise funds to build a fancy new building (that mainly benefits the donors), people trip over themselves to give money. When a family in the church is in need they are often too embarrassed to ask for help and if they do the request is often looked at with suspicion. It is so much easier to place our emphasis on that which is flashy and obvious rather than that which is often messy and uncomfortable. In doing so we miss the reality of the Bride of Christ and substitute an empty imitation.

Jesus didn't die for a wedding garment. Let's keep that in mind and focus instead on what He focused on, His actual bride, His people.

Love out of the corner of my eye

Today my wife and I celebrate 23 years of marriage. That seems like such a long time when you say it but looking back it appears as the blink of an eye.

We are past the gazing longingly into each others eyes stage. At least I am which is probably not to my credit. Twenty three years is a long time, more than half of my life. Today I as often as not see my wife out of the corner of my eye. Or hear her voice from the next room. Or just know that she is upstairs sleeping. She might never know just how comforting that is to me, how much of a desperately needed anchor that provides me. As a guy I understand that might not make much sense to a woman with their longing for more direct and overt connection but for me there is little more comforting than seeing my wife out of the corner of my eye, always there just on the periphery.

Twenty three years. Eight kids. All those moves, all those places we lived. No matter what, whenever I think back on the years gone by as I went from a haughty 20 year old who had it all figured out to the place where I am today, my wife is always there, sometimes right there in front of me but often just nearby. Regardless of the trial or the trauma she was there, even before I came to faith in Christ she was there modeling what it meant to love someone self-sacrificially. She submitted to my often deeply flawed leadership in our family long before I knew what that meant but I understand and am humbled by it now.

I do love and cherish my wife. Not as Christ loved the church, no husband has ever loved in the same way our Lord loves His Bride, but that is what I aspire to do. Our first meeting and our blossoming love was as unlikely as you could imagine but I am as certain as I am of anything that God's hand was guiding it.

Today we are in the midst of a transition of our family. Three of our kids are adults and the rest are growing up fast. Perhaps marriage for our children, children-in-law to welcome into our family and grandchildren to love are not far down the road. Whatever happens, until one of us goes home to the Lord, we will be together. She will always be there out of the corner of my eye.

Is this the start of a separation of marriage and the state? Let's hope so.

On more than a couple of occasions (like here) I have opined that it is high time to undo the unequal yoking of the church and the state in the matters of marriage. Being a tolerated agent of the state for purposes of administering marriage in the same capacity as a civil magistrate, an Elvis impersonator in Vegas and a ship's captain has been an unmitigated disaster. The church never should have gotten herself into this position and we need to undo that perverse relationship now. Let the state worry about issues of tax treatment and who gets Social Security survivor benefits. The church should be concerned with covenant making in marriage and then nurturing that marriage by equipping husband and wife for their God ordained roles as complementary image bearers and normally as parents. There is no reason Christian couples who are married cannot subsequently seek legal recognition from the state but it should be separate and distinct to any and all from marriage. Now it seems that a prominent religious publication has published a call from clergy to do the same thing. In First Things  there is a page with The Marriage Pledge that says:

Therefore, in our roles as Christian ministers, we, the undersigned, commit ourselves to disengaging civil and Christian marriage in the performance of our pastoral duties. We will no longer serve as agents of the state in marriage. We will no longer sign government-provided marriage certificates. We will ask couples to seek civil marriage separately from their church-related vows and blessings. We will preside only at those weddings that seek to establish a Christian marriage in accord with the principles ­articulated and lived out from the beginning of the Church’s life.

Interesting. I could do without the part at the end:

"Laymen are welcome to sign to express support for pastors making this pledge.  –Ed."

Well gee, thanks! We get to express our support for what these clergy are doing. Not that our pledge matters since we are mere "laymen" and get an italicized acknowledgement at the bottom. Anyway.

Like I said this is something I called for some time ago and am ever more convinced. Trying to meld Christian marriage with secular civil unions, and that is exactly what our system provides, has been disastrous for marriage, especially in the church, and disastrous for our public witness as the church. I don't really recognize any of the names of the signatories other than Peter Leithart but hopefully it will start to catch on.

I actually came to this post by way of Doug Wilson, who is usually about 50/50, giving equal time to piercingly accurate analysis and just out from left field notions so devoid of Scriptural basis as to boggle the mind. Doug Wilson is someone I read in the same way I listen to NPR, I know a lot of what I am getting is dumb or divorced from reality or both but still worth the time to sort through. Here is his coup de grace on why this is a bad idea:

In short, church weddings detached from the civil sphere are worthless unless the church is being given the contracted legal authority to adjudicate the divorce — property, custody, the works. Anything less than that is a sham and a farce.

What?! We need to maintain our servitude to Caesar in return for the pat on the hand and crumbs from Caesar's table in the form of tax breaks because we need to have a say in the divorce process? In case you were wondering that is not in the "piercingly accurate analysis" half of his offerings.

So Doug Wilson's theological leg gnawing aside, this is a positive move by people in the church and others that are thinking about getting back to what marriage is supposed to mean rather than tilting at culture war windmills.

Ecumenism is not the same thing as unity

In less than a week religious leaders from around the world and across the religious spectrum will gather in Vatican City under the authority of the Roman Catholic Church to discuss marriage. The conference, called Humanum, purports to be "An International Interreligious Colloquium on The Complementarity of Man and Woman". If you read me very often you know that I am a big advocate of complementarianism so surely I am all in favor of this. Actually no. Quite the opposite.

When I examine the speaker list as an American evangelical I see some names I recognize and a lot I don't. At the top of the list that I do recognize are men like: Russell Moore. N.T. Wright. Rick Warren. Johann Arnold, current leader of the Bruderhof. Along with them are a host of men and

women from other religious traditions, or as I like to call them false religions. A whole bunch of Roman Catholic dignitaries who ironically are forced into an unbiblical vow of celibacy and yet are considered authorities on marriage. A top mormon leader. A lot of Muslims. A smattering of more esoteric religious groups. What is glaring from the invitee list is that there are a few people who are Christians and a lot more that are not talking about something that models and demonstrates the New Covenant relationship between Christ and the Church.

An event like this doesn't happen in a vacuum. Like two sides of a sand dune, the dual forces of the cultural religion of America are collapsing at breakneck speed. While "progressives" are racing one another to see who can deny the most central tenets of the Gospel, the "conservatives" are desperately making alliances with unbelievers and blasphemers in a desperate attempt to maintain their political power and influence. As a result many men that I respect and that publically hold to the "right" positions are nevertheless making common cause on issues they would admit are secondary to the Gospel. It is symptomatic of the mindset that compelled Albert Mohler to not once but twice speak to mormons about our common ground. It brings to mind the Manhattan Declaration and other attempts to find common ground where the sole foundation for common ground is absent, namely the Gospel of Jesus Christ.

Make no mistake. To speak to people who deny Christ in a framework of the picture of husband and wife as a type of Christ and the church is to put the cart before the horse. Worse yet is for a Christian to attempt to speak on marriage without framing it in that way. You simply cannot truly begin to understand the blessing of marriage apart from the New Covenant relationship with Christ. Sure I loved my wife and cherished her and all of that before I was a Christian but I didn't understand what it meant to be united with her in a complementary relationship and I still am only scratching the surface of how I am to love her like Christ loved the church. Christian marriage as ordained by God is so much more than two people of the opposite sex pledging themselves to one another until death do us part and seeking some sort of fuzzy common ground, lowest common denominator definition and understanding of marriage inevitably diminishes marriage as instituted by our Creator.

Just to clear the air, yes what I am saying here is that Christians corner the market on understanding marriage. No, that doesn't mean that Christians are better at being married, that they make better husbands or wives or that unbelievers can't have fulfilling, loving marriages. It is simply to say that any understanding of marriage apart from the New Covenant in Christ is by definition incomplete and inferior. That sort of talk makes a lot of people twitchy. Too bad. In fact if you don't believe that I might gently suggest that you don't really understand the New Covenant, the eternal purpose of marriage (hint, it ain't about tax breaks and wedding registries) and the grand design of humanity made in the image of God as two distinct, equal, immutable and complementary genders.

Traditional marriage is not the Gospel. Religious liberty, whatever that means, is not the Gospel. Complementarianism is not the Gospel. The Gospel is the Gospel. What is on display here is trying to find unity in spite of the Gospel when the church can only have unity because of the Gospel. That unity is impossible to have with groups, sects and cults that deny that same Gospel that not only saves us but defines marriage for us. Russell Moore, anticipating the objections to his attendance, posted a preemptive strike with his post Why I’m Going to the Vatican. While I don't doubt the sincerity of his words and his conviction, his excuses ring hollow to me. The best thing he could do in an assembly hall full of unbelievers is not to talk about marriage but to preach Christ and Him crucified and call on those present to repent and be baptized. To do anything else is a betrayal of the Great Commission, even if done for the noblest of intentions.

I am going to try to watch and read what I can from this conference because it should be interesting. I suspect that it will be a lot of eloquent speech that amounts to nothing. I hope that in their time in Vatican City my Christian brothers have the opportunity to share the Gospel with the lost among them and that the Holy Spirit would soften those hearts. We can't preach marriage without preaching Christ. I pray that the fruit of this conference is not merely lovely speeches but changed hearts that are turned to Jesus Christ our Lord. 

Revisiting the wedding ring question

My wife and I stopped wearing our wedding rings a few years ago after 20+ years of marriage. It still feels a little weird after so many years of marriage. You can sort of see the mark the ring left on my finger even years later but we don't really think much about it anymore. This morning a friend linked an audio clip from John Piper asking the question Are Wedding Rings a Waste of Money? While he recognizes that they are not necessary, he then proceeds to break down why he thinks they are both helpful and not a waste of money based on a) serving as a warning to the world that the wearer is off the market and b) serving as a reminder of marriage to the wearers. I get what he is saying. I disagree. No surprise I wrote a post about this topic, reprinted below.

I am confident in saying that John Piper is a better husband to Noel than I am to my wife by a wide margin. Having said that and with the deep respect I have for John Piper I think this issue of wedding rings is rather analogous to "church membership" as being a unhelpful tradition. I will loop back to that in a moment but here are my objections to his two points.

First, if people that get to know you well enough in a setting where they might be sizing you up for a relationship, they darn well ought to know that you are married whether you wear a ring or not. The wearing of a ring is sadly not a dissuasion to many people seeking liaisons and the lack of a ring ought not be a green light to anyone that knows you. If you are hanging out in places where people hook up without getting to know each other, what the heck are you doing there in the first place? Pretty much anyone who knows me for very long knows that I am happily married with 8 kids.

Besides, the Bible already a) gives a warning about adornment, specifically costly materials like gold and pearls and b) also provides a symbol of marriage in the wife's covered head. Many Christians think nothing of wearing gold wedding rings and often with a very pricey stone set into one of them because that is what our culture and the jewelry industry marketers tell us we have to have but recoil at the idea of a wife covering her head. Imagine a Sunday morning in some 250-500 attendee suburban evangelical church where the parking lot is full of new cars and most of the ladies in attendance are fashionably dressed with the latest hairstyle being told that they shouldn't be wearing that $1000+ wedding ring and that they should have their hair covered. Hopefully that pastor updated his resume Saturday night!

Second, the same goes for our relationship to one another. If I need a ring to remind me I am married to my wife, that is a flaw in my relationship to Christ, something that a ring won't fix. Since my wife is still as selfless in our relationship as she has ever been it clearly wasn't the ring making her do it. The "symbol of our love" is our clinging to one another through thick and thin, including some pretty tough times (like right now). It is our children. It is not some golden adornment that can be slipped on and off the finger at will.

That may sound harsh and I don't intend it to, nor am I calling as sin the wearing of rings by fellow believers. I would however like to see the church as a people start to reject the perceived requirement of buying weddings rings made of the costliest materials as a requirement for getting married in the upcoming generations as they marry. Our marriages and our weddings already look indistinguishable from the world, the eschewing of the wearing of wedding rings might be a good place to start in distinguishing Christian marriages from whatever concoction the world thinks up next to call marriage. I did appreciate Piper's brief rant against the obscene amount of money people spend on their receptions. Now that really is a waste of money!

So back to church membership. I also wrote about a while ago, Marriage and membership. Basically, if the church doesn't know who to love without formal membership, it isn't much of a church. If elders don't know who they are to love and serve without a list, they shouldn't be elders in the first place. Membership and wedding rings are artificial crutches to remind us of something that should be second nature. Anyway, here is my post on this topic from a few years back.

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So this is an interesting conversation that has come up among some friends and one that generates a visceral reaction when broached.

Wedding rings are firmly entrenched in our culture. The exchanging of rings and wearing of them to signify that the wearer is married is part of our cultural heritage even to the point of being the focal point in a whole bunch of country music songs (“I put that little golden band on the right left hand this time….”). Removing a wedding ring can be an indicator of a marriage that is broken. Cultural nostalgia is a big deal when it comes to these small symbols of marriage. Getting an engagement ring is a huge deal for women (if you have ever worked with a young woman who gets engaged the next day at work is filled with her friends and co-workers ooohin and aaaahing over the diamond)

Here is the question. Should Christians wear wedding rings or for that matter should Christians wear any sort of jewelry at all? My wife wears a modest wedding ring and has a couple of other pieces of frankly fairly inexpensive jewelry that she rarely wears. Should she? Why not you ask? Because it certtainly seems that Scripture doesn't permit this tradition.

Scripture seems pretty clear on this, generally in the idea of meekness and humility which seems ill served by a ring made out of a precious metal and often adorned with a pricey diamond as well as more specifically in two passages. I copied the whole section, not just the verse in question to give us a more full view and highlighted the particular verses:

Likewise, wives, be subject to your own husbands, so that even if some do not obey the word, they may be won without a word by the conduct of their wives, when they see your respectful and pure conduct. Do not let your adorning be external—the braiding of hair and the putting on of gold jewelry, or the clothing you wear—but let your adorning be the hidden person of the heart with the imperishable beauty of a gentle and quiet spirit, which in God's sight is very precious. For this is how the holy women who hoped in God used to adorn themselves, by submitting to their own husbands, as Sarah obeyed Abraham, calling him lord. And you are her children, if you do good and do not fear anything that is frightening. (1 Peter 3: 1-6)

I desire then that in every place the men should pray, lifting holy hands without anger or quarreling; likewise also that women should adorn themselves in respectable apparel, with modesty and self-control, not with braided hair and gold or pearls or costly attire, but with what is proper for women who profess godliness—with good works. (1 Timothy 2: 8-10)

The principle invoked here is of not being adorned with attire (which would include jewelry) that is prideful and designed to draw attention to the external but rather women in particular should be adorned with good conduct, good works, a gentle spirit and submission to their husbands.

This of course raises some questions. If we are not supposed to wear wedding bands because they are costly adornments, what about a plain band? What if the band was plain and also not gold? Should we eschew any sort of accoutrement that sets us at all apart from someone else? I also note that these two passages apply to women, so is it OK for men to wear wedding bands but not women? Is the wearing of adornments something of particular prideful temptation for women but not for men?

What about name brand clothing with logos ? Clothing companies put their logos on the outside both as an ad for their product as well as to let the wearer signify that they are wearing something more costly than you are. The horse and rider on Polo brand shirts is a great example. I used to sell The North Face jackets to rich kids because the logo tells people that this is not mere fleece or rainjacket, it is a $300 North Face jacket! I think the principle might hold true here as well.

I wonder if we should wear anything that is not plain and handmade. I need to wear suits and appropriate business attire for my job but outside of work, what about that?

There is a real issue and an important principle here that we don’t seem to address in a straightforward manner in the church. I think it might be for the same reason headcovering is glossed over, because it flies in the face of our cultural expectations. On the other hand, this can turn into a point of pride. It is easy to see your own plainness as a point of pride, that I am more holy than that person because of the manner of my dress. Those sorts of heart issues are far more troubling than external obedience and that is true not just about adornment or modest dress or headcovering but also wearing suits to church or lengthy prayers or being contentious or giving our of obligation. It is not difficult at all to be externally pious but have hearts in rebellion.

Peter and Paul are both unanimous and unambiguous about this issue. This strikes me as a topic where the text is clear, so rather than trying to prove from Scriptures that we cannot wear wedding rings, we should see this as explaining why from Scriptures that we can.

There is also a stewardship issue, is the buying of $1000 golden ring topped by a diamond foolhardy in light of the very real temporal needs of our brothers and sisters, of orphans and widows, of missionaries? That is an ancillary topic but a real one.

Is it a coincidence that the One Ring, a golden band that looks suspiciously like a wedding ring, is the embodiment of evil in The Lord of the Rings? Hmmmm…..

Seriously though. Should we give up the wearing of wedding rings or am I making too big of a deal about it? Is this an issue of hyper-literalism and legalism or are we resistant to the idea of eschewing rings because we have been so heavily marketed to by jewelry companies that we have bought into the idea that we simply must wear rings if we are married? Maybe someone more familiar with the Greek text (Alan?) can help us out here, is there something in the context that I am missing.

A Great Reflection On 20 Years of Marriage

Russ Moore has written one of the best essays on marriage I have ever read, What I’ve Learned in Twenty Years of Marriage. He is one of the most thoughtful writers around, someone who often transcends the cheap applause lines of the evangelical subculture. Like my wife and I, he and his wife were married young and spent their twenties growing up together. Unlike us they also struggled with infertility and later became some of the most powerful advocates for adoption in the church. This essay looks back at twenty years of marriage and what he has learned. It is a great read for young people told that they aren't "ready" and for recently married couples that are wondering what they got themselves into.

The entire essay is full of great wisdom but I really liked this:

My grandmother wisely asked one night when I was finally going to ask “that girl from Ocean Springs” to marry me. I answered, “When I can afford it.” She laughed. “Honey, I married your grandpa in the middle of a Great Depression,” she said. “We made it work. Nobody can afford to get married. You just marry, and make it work.”

You are never ready for marriage. You can never be "mature" enough because maturity in marriage comes from being married. You can never be "financially secure" enough, it turns out people with tons of money, a nice house and retirement plans get divorced too. Being older doesn't make you ready, having already traveled to Europe doesn't make you ready. Being prepared to be married and stay married, no matter what comes, is what prepares you for marriage.

Give this essay a read and pass it on to others. They will thank you later.

Biblical Love Is Neither Mute Nor Blind

One of the most common mischaracterizations of Biblical teaching in the contemporary religious world called "Christianity" has to do with "judging". People throw "judge not lest ye be judged" in various iterations around as if that means that Christians should "just love people", further defined as "never pointing out sin in others". This is most commonly used in reference to sexual sins, especially homosexuality. We are told we cannot "judge" homosexuals, just love them. What if staying silent is actually far more unloving than spoeaking the truth in love, even when that truth is hard to hear.

This mindset of "no judging" is one of the most dangerous, Gospel undermining falsehoods around. If it were even remotely true we would have a much smaller New Testament. While that would make "Bible in a year" reading plans easier to complete, this philosophy is anti-Biblical and anti-Gospel. Peter, Paul and the other apostles didn't go around telling people "God loves you just the way you are. Heck we are just sinners too! Come to church on Sunday." They called out sin and called on people to repent, relying on the regenerating power of the Holy Spirit to change hearts and create born-again new creations.

Sexual behavior is one of the most powerful impulses in humanity. It is at the same time one of the most wonderful gifts we are giving within marriage, especially when it results in the blessing of children, but it is also, not coincidentally, perhaps the most twisted and abused impulses among humankind. The Bible is full of examples of this, from the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah followed by the incest between Lot and his daughtes to the rape of Tamar by her brother Amnon. Humanity bears this out all through history and every day still. It seems that there is no end to the human appetite to pervert God's design for sexuality in His image bearers and there is no counter to that insatiable appetite except the life shattering Gospel.

Where we run into trouble on this "judge ye not" idea is in application. Ought we judge unbelievers and believers alike, or not judge them alike as the case may be? Absolutely not. The only way to come to that conclusion is willfully ignoring the Scriptures in favor of the whims of contemporary culture.. Paul gives us a critical glimpse into how the church must deal with sin, especially sexual sin, in our midst in his first letter to the church in Corinth.

It is actually reported that there is sexual immorality among you, and of a kind that is not tolerated even among pagans, for a man has his father's wife. And you are arrogant! Ought you not rather to mourn? Let him who has done this be removed from among you. For though absent in body, I am present in spirit; and as if present, I have already pronounced judgment on the one who did such a thing. When you are assembled in the name of the Lord Jesus and my spirit is present, with the power of our Lord Jesus, you are to deliver this man to Satan for the destruction of the flesh, so that his spirit may be saved in the day of the Lord. Your boasting is not good. Do you not know that a little leaven leavens the whole lump? Cleanse out the old leaven that you may be a new lump, as you really are unleavened. For Christ, our Passover lamb, has been sacrificed. Let us therefore celebrate the festival, not with the old leaven, the leaven of malice and evil, but with the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth. I wrote to you in my letter not to associate with sexually immoral people—not at all meaning the sexually immoral of this world, or the greedy and swindlers, or idolaters, since then you would need to go out of the world. But now I am writing to you not to associate with anyone who bears the name of brother if he is guilty of sexual immorality or greed, or is an idolater, reviler, drunkard, or swindler—not even to eat with such a one. For what have I to do with judging outsiders? Is it not those inside the church whom you are to judge? God judges those outside. "Purge the evil person from among you." (1 Corinthians 5:1-13)

That is a passage that rarely gets attention from the "judge ye not" crowd but it should. Of course we are not to condemn the unregenerate for acting like unregenerate people dead in their sins. We do a lot of this in the church to the detriment of our witness. However we are to be discerning of those among the church who are in sin and likewise we cannot faithfully preach the Gospel without a call to repent and turn away from sin and toward Christ. We cannot tell people "come to Jesus and do as you like, He doesn't care!". That would qualify as "another Gospel" and ought to be condemned in the church. We must be heralds of the King, claiming His rightful ruler-ship over mankind and all of mankind's relationship and nowhere is that more true than in sexual relationships.

Human sexuality is designed only for enjoyment within the boundaries of heterosexual, monogamous marriage. That is incontestable from Scripture. We can look all the way back to the beginning to see the genesis (pun intended) of this vitally important human relationship:

The man gave names to all livestock and to the birds of the heavens and to every beast of the field. But for Adam there was not found a helper fit for him. So the LORD God caused a deep sleep to fall upon the man, and while he slept took one of his ribs and closed up its place with flesh. And the rib that the LORD God had taken from the man he made into a woman and brought her to the man. Then the man said, "This at last is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh; she shall be called Woman, because she was taken out of Man." Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and they shall become one flesh. (Genesis 2:20-24, emphasis mine)

A man shall leave his parents and be joined to his wife, becoming "one flesh". That is the pattern God created man and woman to fulfill. Any other expression of sexual behavior is disordered and contrary to God's design and as such is sinful. Sexual relationships are not left to the whims of mankind to continually define and redefine based on the winds of culture. We have shown our limitless stomach for deviancy in this area of human life for thousands of years. Sexuality is deeply embedded in humanity created in the image of God. His first prescriptive command to humanity is to "Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth...". His creation of woman as a complementary helper to man is inextricably entwined with the heterosexual, monogamous marriage covenant that serves as the bedrock human relationship, the method of perpetuating humanity through child bearing and a picture that prefigures Christ and His Bride, the church. This relationship cannot be overemphasized and it is not subject to revision.

Many people point an accusing finger back at the church for failing to show the same fervency toward other  sinful behavior like divorce, adultery, greed, gossip, etc. that we exhibit toward sexual sins It is absolutely true that we are far too quiet in many areas of sin in the church. The real question is what do we do about it? One "solution" is to be equally silent about sexual sins, if we aren't going to be consistent we should just shut up. The other is to redouble our discernment toward all sins in the church, not just the ones that are easy to point out like homosexuality. Failing in some areas is not a license to chuck the whole thing and replace it with an "anything goes" religion that guts the Gospel in favor of a happy clappy attitude that not only refuses to call sin what it is but embraces and celebrates it.

Biblical love is not our contemporary sappy notion of "love". Biblical love is not blind and it is not mute. Biblical love sees when one who bears the name of brother is sinning and speaks the truth in love in the hope of renewal and restoration. We do sinners no favors and are not their friends when we turn a blind eye and shut our mouths to allow sinners to be content in their sins. No one will thank us for our blindness and voicelessness when they stand before the Judge.

Book Review: To Date or Not to Date: What the Bible Says about Premarital Relationships

I recently purchased D. Kevin Brown's new short book on dating. As part of the Energion Publications Topical Line Drives series, To Date or Notto Date is a very short work that offers a counter-cultural view of the progression of relationships that all too often involves a lengthy period of dating.

I agree with most of what Kevin has to say. The dating culture infects the church to essentially the same extent it does the world. This is a culture that seeks to delay marriage for as long as possible and serves to create an acceptance of "falling in love" and then breaking up as a normal behavior. We wonder why the "church" has such a problem with divorce and never ask what we are doing to prevent this other than giving kids a pep talk on chastity while thrusting them into a model where intimacy ahead of marriage is almost inevitable and the idea of "breaking up" when things get rough or stale follows them into marriage.

According to Kevin there is a better way. I agree. It is not the job of Christian parents to drive their kids to Youth Group every week and then toss them out into the world to sample as many dating partners as possible before "finding the one" or settling because the biological clock is ticking. Parents should be far more involved in guiding their children through the process of finding a marriage partner than they are in driving kids to sporting events and selecting a college.

There is not really much that is new in To Date or Not to Date. A lot of this ground has been covered by much longer and comprehensive works. To introduce ground-breaking information is not Kevin's intent and not really the purpose of the Topical Line Drives series. This instead serves as a good introduction to a topic that seems incredibly foreign to most religious Americans. It is quite inexpensive as an e-book from Amazon, a mere $.99 and it is a great way to introduce new parents to planning for the inevitable conversations that will happen. 

Time To Get Out Of The Marriage Business

This morning CNN.com ran an article about polyamorous couples, or couples with more than two intimate partners. It is a pretty broad term and seems to include all sorts of relationships, two couples in a semi-permanent relationship with another couple, a couple "plus one" and a dizzying and potentially endless array of permutations. It is interesting to note the tentative "coming out"of the individuals involved in polyamory parallels and sounds an awful lot like the tentative coming out of more garden variety homosexuals. So what does this new love that dare not speak its name mean for the church? It is not outside of the realm of possibility, and is in fact completely plausible, that polygamy/polyamory will be extended the same legal recognition as same sex and traditional marriage.

I would like to propose once again that it is high time that the church get out of the legal marriage business entirely.

The largely political struggle to preserve the traditional definition of marriage in a secular society has been an unmitigated disaster for the church. Not only did "our side" lose, we lost a lot of credibility in the meanwhile and expended enormous effort and resources that could have and should have been used to advance Kingdom causes rather than paying for court costs and supporting Republican candidates. We have alienated the very people we are supposed to be reaching, i.e. lost sinners, and have nothing to show for it. Now that doesn't mean that same sex "marriage" is more legitimate because it carries tax preferred status in certain states. It isn't and is a perversion of the meaning of marriage as a picture of the created order for man and woman and the imagery of the church united in Christ. It is an unhealthy and deviant lifestyle seeking official sanction and approval, so two men or two women or three men and six women or whatever declaring themselves married doesn't make it a marriage in the eyes of God. What I am saying is that if Caesar wants to bless certain relationships with tax breaks and beneficiary benefits that has little to do with the church other than our continued insistence on being Caesar's agent in officiating marriages.

My proposal is this. The church should oversee covenantal marriages between believing couples. The church should decline to serve as an officiating agent for non-believers and should likewise decline to administer legal civil unions for purposes of governmental recognition even among believers.

So what would that look like? Other than removing the "by the power vested in me..." part, probably a lot like what it looks like today. The church would have a ceremony for the believing couple in whatever form that takes based on their tradition. If couples want the legal recognition from Caesar for tax and benefit purposes they ought to go to the Justice of the Peace or whatever legally recognized means people can avail themselves of. It takes just a few minutes to do. The church would sever a link between the government and one aspect the visible Body of Christ. Caesar would have no say over what we do and we would have little interest in what Caesar does.

When the church is entangled with Caesar, Caesar doesn't become more holy. What possible benefit to the church is there in being an agent of the state and letting the state dictate the rules for marriage? Marriage is the sole domain of God and should remain distinct from the interference or cooperation of Caesar. Marriage among Christians should be a picture of the church and Christ and a witness to the world, not a political issue that leads to the church being unequally yoked with the Republican party. Let's get out of the business of acting as Caesar's agent in civil unions and keep marriage where it belongs, in the church

What Makes Us Married?

An interesting conversation came up the other night on the topic of marriage. It seems like a simple question but it is more complicated than it seems at first blush: What makes a couple "married"?

The Bible speaks a lot about marriage, about being married, about relationships between husbands and wives in marriage, about marriage as a picture of the relationship between the church and Christ, about divorce, etc. Given the importance of marriage in the Bible Christians in American especially are likewise very concerned about marriage; we march to defend “traditional marriage” and we have voter guides to tell us who to vote for that upholds Biblical marriage. Of course our idea of traditional marriage is just that, tradition. One man, one woman, till death do us part. When it comes down to the details on issues like divorce and remarriage, abuse in marriage, having and raising children? Yikes. We are a people that loves marriage but doesn’t have much of a clue what that means outside of a “church wedding”.

The question that was raised the other night has to do with the relative silence of the Bible on the “how” of marriage. How do people go from single to married? Thanks to centuries of social and religious tradition we think we know the answer. You go to an ordained cleric (with a document showing that you have the permission of the state to get married) or you go to the justice of the peace and get legally married. Because you have the permission/blessing of the state to get married you get legal and financial benefits. Ergo, ceremony=married.

That isn’t how it was done in the Bible or at least we aren’t told that it was. We see precious little of the specifics of marriage "ceremonies" in the New Testament with the exception of the wedding feast at Cana and the parables using weddings as a setting and even those don't give us a clear "how" when it comes to marriage. I would guess that in spite of that most Christians would say that someone who has not gone through a state approved ceremony is not truly married. Thanks to our perverse system of religious-state symbiosis where we expect and indeed demand preferential tax treatment for our private religious functions, a marriage without the approval of the state and the accompanying financial/legal benefits is not viewed as legitimate.

Even though the Bible is relatively silent, we do see a fairly early sign that the church was moving toward a clergy controlled marriage system. In the Epistle of Ignatius to Polycarp he writes, almost in passing:

But it becomes both men and women who marry, to form their union with the approval of the bishop, that their marriage may be according to the Lord, and not after their own lust. Let all things be done to the honour of God.

The topic being addressed is more generally the duties of husbands and wives but it also seems to me that he was writing to address an issue that was cropping up, although I am not certain what it is. What is interesting to note is that the overarching principle here is all things being done to honor God. Does that necessitate a "church wedding" or a civil proceeding? Does it require the oversight and approval of clergy? I am not talking about a man and a woman seeking counsel from the elders of the church, something that seems a reasonable and prudent measure. I am talking about marriages only being seen as legitimate when officiated by a religious professional that has the approval of Caesar the state.

I just don't see the Biblical warrant for declaring some marriages legitimate by virtue of a legal construct of the state. Maybe I am missing something. Perhaps this is a Romans 13 issue where we follow the state's rules. Or maybe this is an issue of rendering unto Caesar something (i.e. marriage) that rightfully belongs to God. If two people declare their covenant, exclusive relationship to one another in marriage is that not sufficient for the church? Or must the church bow to the demands of the culture and tradition.

What do you think or is this just one of those weird questions that I think are fascinating and everyone else thinks is dumb?

Marriage and weddings

Eric Carpenter has an interesting post up this morning, What Makes Two People Married? . Eric looks at the idea of marriage from Genesis 2:24 and how that passage applies to marriage and what makes two people married in the eyes of God. Here is a snippet.


So what takes a couple from not being married to being married? We find the answer back in Genesis 2:24. Although the wording of the verse is directed to the male, it applies to both parties involved. There is a three-step process. First, they leave their parents. This is not necessarily a physical departure (in some cultures the young couple lives with one set of parents for quite some time). Instead, it describes a departure of identity. Second, upon leaving the parents the couple holds fast (clings) to one another. They become closer to one another than anyone else on earth. They hold on and don't let go. Third, they become one flesh. In many ways they go from being two people to one person. They are one unit. This describes much more than just physical union. It talks about a couple becoming one in covenant with each other, forsaking everyone else.


What we see described in 2:24 is usually accompanied by a public ceremony of some kind (a wedding). That's where the becoming one can be seen and declared publically. This seems appropriate. That's probably why it occurs in all cultures. However, it is not necessary.

Absolutely true. Not only is a public ceremony not necessary, I wonder if it is even beneficial, at least in its traditional form. I wrote something about this earlier in the year in my post, Marriage and membership. Here is the pertinent portion….

To get on my soapbox for a minute, I have long thought that the church should not be in the business of performing wedding ceremonies in partnership with the state. In other words the church should not serve as an agent of the state to facilitate legal weddings. I think that it turns “church weddings” into just another cultural institution and along with that it loses value as the culture devalues marriage. Marriage between two Christians who become one flesh in the eyes of the church should be completely separate from two generic people getting married in the eyes of the state. Two Christians do not need the approval of the state, the blessing of an ordained cleric or a piece of paper to be wed. If Christian couples who wed want to go to the justice of the peace to get legal recognition for various purposes in the eyes of the state after the fact, that is fine. I just think that the weird system where the state recognizes marriages performed by the church yokes the two parties together and we certainly should avoid that wherever we can. The church never makes the state more holy but the state certainly infects the church and diverts it from the work of the Kingdom wherever the two are combined.

I would still affirm this. Marryin’ and buryin’ are two ways the state gets the church to act as its proxy while bribing (and controlling) the church with preferential tax and regulatory treatment. If there is any example of the church being unequally yoked it is found in our perverse partnership with the godless secular government.

As Eric writes, this perspective should help us to frame the issue when dealing with “gay marriage”. As the state has no right to define marriage, it really means very little if the state declares “gay marriage” to be valid because it runs contrary to what God has decreed for marriage and therefore is by definition null and void, regardless of tax breaks and health benefits. Now, when a "church" recognizes and blesses sinful relationships and call them marriage, that is a different issue. Regardless, as my perception of marriage has changed from a church-state partnership I have become increasingly less interested in the fight to preserve “traditional marriage”. Keeping homosexuals from receiving state recognition of their union does nothing to bring them the Gospel nor does it make America a more holy nation. Since homosexual “marriage” is inherently invalid in God’s eyes, why should we expend our energy and money as the church fighting against “gay marriage” and preserving “traditional marriage” rather than preaching the Gospel to the lost and helping the poor, the widow and the orphan? Unbelievers in a lifelong monogamous heterosexual marriage don’t get a pass at the Judgment any more than homosexuals living a licentious lifestyle do. We should focus our efforts where we have been called rather than on trying to make unbelievers act externally less like unbelievers. Certainly homosexuality is abhorrent and a grievous sin but the remedy is the Gospel, not legislation. That doesn’t mean that as a citizen voting my conscience I would support something that God declares an abomination but nor does it mean that I should spend time, money and effort to preserve something that cannot be overturned or affirmed by the votes of man.

Marriage in the eyes of God requires far more than holding an hour long religious ceremony in a “church”. The world can do what it likes, it always has, but that doesn’t change what God has decreed. Our mission is not to preserve traditional secular marriage. It is to proclaim the Good News of the Kingdom of God and no amount of legislation can accomplish that.

Marriage and membership

A few days ago, I posted about "church membership" in a post titled A quick thought on ‘church membership’ and titles. Alan Knox picked up on that theme and wrote a companion post of his own, Is this the connection between love and membership? The comments that followed were interesting, including one that compared formal church membership with marriage. The point of the comment was that there is a need for church membership and suggested that is you didn't believe that, try suggesting to your wife that a marriage certificate and wedding ceremony are unneccesary. I thought that was a very interesting comment and it got me thinking about our cultural traditions that surround marriage and the parallels with the church.

If you are married, think about your marriage and what it means. Ask yourself a couple of questions:

- If you didn't have wedding rings to wear, would you still be married?


- If you didn't get a marriage certificate from the state, would you still be married in the eyes of God and one another?


- If you didn't have a wedding ceremony, would you still consider yourselves wed to one another, forsaking all others?

I would imagine that most people, and especially Christians, view marriage as transcending the wedding day and the marriage certificate and the wedding ring. I would also hazard a guess that the argument comparing weddings and marriage certificates to “church membership” would resonate with many Christians. My response to both assertions would be similar. If you need a wedding ring, a wedding ceremony and a marriage certificate to demonstrate your commitment to your spouse, you have a pretty shaky foundation for your marriage. If you require oaths and covenants of fealty to a local church organization to identify who you should love and serve and which men to follow you don’t have much of a foundation in the church.

Biblical marriage is a binding covenant relationship, not a legal contract, and being part of the church is a relationship rather than a formalized system. You cannot substitute contracts and formalities for either one. As I said in the prior post, If you love one another, “membership” is completely unnecessary. If you don’t love one another, “membership” won’t make a difference anyway. The same holds true in marriage. If you love one another, the wedding ceremony and marriage license are superfluous. If you don’t love one another you marriage will never last or at least never be one pleasing to God no matter how big the diamond or how lovely the wedding ceremony. You should check out Alan’s post and the comments that follow.

To get on my soapbox for a minute, I have long thought that the church should not be in the business of performing wedding ceremonies in partnership with the state. In other words the church should not serve as an agent of the state to facilitate legal weddings. I think that it turns “church weddings” into just another cultural institution and along with that it loses value as the culture devalues marriage. Marriage between two Christians who become one flesh in the eyes of the church should be completely separate from two generic people getting married in the eyes of the state. Two Christians do not need the approval of the state, the blessing of an ordained cleric or a piece of paper to be wed. If Christian couples who wed want to go to the justice of the peace to get legal recognition for various purposes in the eyes of the state after the fact, that is fine. I just think that the weird system where the state recognizes marriages performed by the church yokes the two parties together and we certainly should avoid that wherever we can. The church never makes the state more holy but the state certainly infects the church and diverts it from the work of the Kingdom wherever the two are combined.

Asking the wrong questions will invariably lead to getting the wrong answers

CNN asks the question, What's fueling Bible Belt divorces. Why in areas where people are more “religious”, less educated and married younger are divorce rates higher than the Northeast where people are more likely to have a college degree, more likely to get married much later if at all and far less likely to be religious? CNN thinks it knows the answer....

Youth and lack of education can lead to higher divorce rates, said D'Vera Cohn, a senior writer with the Pew Research Center, who wrote a report on "The States of Marriage and Divorce." There's also an interactive map on the website.

"There tend to be higher divorce rates in states where women marry young," Cohn said. "Education also may play a role. In general, less educated women marry at younger ages than college-educated women, and less educated couples have higher divorce rates."

Values about premarital sex associated with the Bible Belt and rural America may be encouraging people to marry early, at ages when they are likely to have less education and less income to support a long-lasting marriage, according to Naomi Cahn, law professor at The George Washington University Law School and co-author of "Red Families v. Blue Families: Legal Polarization and the Creation of Culture."

"There's a moral crisis in red states that's produced by higher divorce rates and the disparity between parental values and behavior of young adults," said Cahn. "There is enormous tension between moral values and actual practices."

All well and good. Except that in days gone by, people married at a much younger age, abstained from pre-marital sex at a much higher rate, had lower rates of education than today’s “everyone gets a BA” culture and yet divorce rates were much lower. Even compared to current Bible belt culture this was true. So what has changed?

Perhaps the problem is not getting married young and not going to college but rather a culture that devalues marriage? By almost any measure marriage is far less important as a cultural institution today than it was in prior generations. Today marriage is seen as an impediment to happiness rather than a means, something that traps you rather than fulfills you, an archaic institution that you enter into after you have lived your life and done your thing rather than the best institution for growing up. People see marriage as something to do once you are “mature”, which is ironic. I don’t think it is debatable that getting married in your early twenties is more likely to lead to maturity than going to college for five or more years. The confused masses of twenty-somethings living in their parents basements while wandering through life is not exactly a solid argument for waiting for marriage. Maybe if these kids would get married and have families they would get a clue and shape up?

Compounding this is the general muddled understanding of what marriage is, who should/should not get married and the separation of sex and children from the bounds of marriage. When no one in this country, including people in the halls of secular power and far too many “ministers” in mainline denominations, seems to understand what marriage is and what it is not and cannot be, is it any wonder that marriage is in such poor shape?

Furthermore, CNN makes the classic error of assuming that living in the Bible Belt, going to church and affirming some vague religious identifiers is the same thing as being a Christian. If you look at the divorce rate among people who are markedly more serious about their faith, the divorce rate changes dramatically for the better. Those inconvenient facts never seem to make into reports like this. There is more going on here than a dispassionate report.

Here is the no so subtle message of the article:

"The very fact that people feel less pressure to get married (in the Northeast) means they can be more selective about who they marry and take their time, " Coontz said. "They don't have to rush into it to please parents or avoid stigma of premarital sex."

So the message here is that you can do whatever you want and sleep around as much as you like until you find the “right” person to marry because that will lead to a healthier marriage. Again, that was not the case until fairly recently so what has changed? In spite of advances in contraception and our generally “enlightened” attitudes toward extra-marital sex , unintended pregnancies are still common, abortion is decimating entire populations and sexually transmitted diseases that common contraceptives don’t protect against are rampant. This is the new and brighter future we have been promised if we cast off the shackles of religion and repression?

If I were a conspiratorial fellow, I might wonder if there is not an agenda to these reports. Perhaps putting off marriage and delaying children is not as healthy as we are led to believe? Or perhaps just as likely this is a subtle shot at people in regions of the country that are more overtly religious. Sure people in the Northeast have lower divorce rates, they are getting married at a much lower rate in the first place and you can’t get divorced if you never got married! When you look at the cultural landscape of America littered with shattered families, promiscuity, institutionalized children, desperate couples who waited until they were too old to have children seeking ever more radical and moral bankrupt ways of turning back the natural biological clock, I hardly think that a rational answer is to further devalue marriage.

As the church, we musty be discerning when faced with reports like this. Our response is not to discourage marriage or follow the lead of the world in adjusting our priorities. Our response must be to embrace and encourage marriage in the church, especially among our young people and without apology. I hope my kids find suitable Christian spouses early in life and grow together as a couple through education, work and children and I make no apology for that. Nothing is more important for my children who have professed Christ than a God honoring marriage that is fruitful as God provides. Not a “good” job, not academic achievement. Nothing is more precious and nothing should garner more prayer for our believing children than their future marriage, spouse and children.

Men and boys

There is an article in the New York Times that is garnering a lot of attention on a familiar topic, the delay of adulthood or the extension of adolescence, however you want to look at it. The essay, What Is It About 20-Somethings? , is a fascinating and disturbing look at the state of 20-something adults.

The 20s are a black box, and there is a lot of churning in there. One-third of people in their 20s move to a new residence every year. Forty percent move back home with their parents at least once. They go through an average of seven jobs in their 20s, more job changes than in any other stretch. Two-thirds spend at least some time living with a romantic partner without being married. And marriage occurs later than ever. The median age at first marriage in the early 1970s, when the baby boomers were young, was 21 for women and 23 for men; by 2009 it had climbed to 26 for women and 28 for men, five years in a little more than a generation.

We’re in the thick of what one sociologist calls “the changing timetable for adulthood.” Sociologists traditionally define the “transition to adulthood” as marked by five milestones: completing school, leaving home, becoming financially independent, marrying and having a child. In 1960, 77 percent of women and 65 percent of men had, by the time they reached 30, passed all five milestones. Among 30-year-olds in 2000, according to data from the United States Census Bureau, fewer than half of the women and one-third of the men had done so. A Canadian study reported that a typical 30-year-old in 2001 had completed the same number of milestones as a 25-year-old in the early ’70s.

I read a take on this topic yesterday from Mark Driscoll. This should have been an excellent post from Mark but it didn’t turn out that way. Unfortunately Mark reverts back to form, going for cheap laughs in lines like this:

The tough retrosexual guys consume women, porn, alcohol, drugs, television, music, video games, toys, cars, sports, and fantasy leagues, as if being a man is defined by how much meat you can shove through your colon, how many beers you can pound, how fast you can drive, how stinky you can fart, how hard you can hit, how far you can spit, how loud you can belch, and how big your truck is.

Har har har! Guffaws all around!

This is a serious topic but it turns into a chortle fest, although frankly it is a pretty lame attempt at humor. I find it deeply ironic that in a diatribe against men acting like boys, you have a man trying to show how “real” he is by sprinkling locker room humor throughout his essay. Contrast what Mark wrote with this serious and thoughtful post from Albert Mohler on the same topic. Mark Driscoll apparently wants to have it both ways. On the one hand he wants people to take him seriously as a thinker and leader in the church, someone who has valuable insights and opinions (and who is someone that people will buy books from). On the other, he just can’t seem to resist delving back into potty humor to show that he is not some stuffed suit, that he is raw and real as if that makes his opinions more authentic, almost as if he were saying "Hey look at me, I am just as cool as you are but I talk about God too!"

The problem is here goes beyond internet pornography or video games. Those are merely symptoms of the problem and are examples of the market responding to reality. The deeper issue is that society no longer demands that men take responsibility as men and it does so by negating the single greatest maturing influence upon men: women. Getting married and having children pushes men into maturity. Having a wife and children to care for has an amazing effect on men but that is no longer a priority in society. Our cultural norms now tell women to put off getting “tied down” by marriage and kids and instead to give men what they want without expecting anything of them. What was interesting from the Times article was the impact of sexuality on maturity. We are living out the old and seemingly quant saying “Why buy the cow when you are getting the milk for free?”. It is little wonder young men don’t grow up, they are able to have all of the benefits of being an adult man without any of the responsibility. Instead of career, marriage and family maturing men, society waits around for men to become mature on their own and then get married and get a real job. Little wonder that without anything pushing them, men are acting like boys later and later into life.

I am a big believer that boys need to be prepped for being a man sooner rather than later but we find that a lot of what we value in society acts in opposition to this need. A big culprit is college (yes I am banging that drum again). Colleges have turned into hiding places where kids who have, against their will, become legal adults can extend out their childhood by 4, 5 or even more years of going to school. The line between “higher education” and “finding a place to hide until I can move back home” is getting pretty blurry. The other obstacle is enablement, parents and women enabling men to keep living out the behavior that prevents maturation. It wasn’t that long ago that men who lived at home or were unable to hold down a job were not terribly attractive to women and their parents were completely disinterested in having adult kids back in the nest.

This has a significant impact on the church. We already deal with a dearth of young men in the church. Scratch that, we have a serious lack of men at all and of those who do show up not many are terribly engaged. I would hazard a guess that the leading predictor of how engaged a man is with the church is his marital and family status and I am confident that studies would bear that out. The lack of men, especially mature men, in the church puts additional pressure on women to “fill the gaps” where men are absent and that leads to unbiblical usurpation of roles that they are not called to. In addition, more and more of the burden of ministry falls onto the shoulders of the few men that do step up in the church.

We are rapidly becoming a society of women, women without husbands and without children and that is unhealthy. More women are in the workforce than ever before as more men drop out. More women are putting off having kids until later in life or never at all. More kids are being raised by strangers in daycare and public schools and at home by women without husbands. More men are losing jobs and unable to find new ones, leading to a swelling population of men without jobs, wives or children and that is a dangerous situation.

Men and women were made to be together in the bounds of marriage and raising children together. Family both requires and fosters maturity in men and without the tempering influence of wives and children many men will stay in perpetual adolescence for decades. It is high time we demand that men and women alike grow up and start acting like adults instead of kids who can buy alcohol and drive cars.

Wedding Review: James and Rachel Lee

I figure since I do book reviews, movie reviews, conference reviews, etc. why not do a wedding review? So here is a review of the wedding of my brother James Lee and my sister Rachel who were married yesterday. I thought about live-blogging the wedding but my wife nixed that idea.

We haven't been to very many non-Catholic weddings. I was convinced for a long time that the chicken dance was specifically described in the Bible somewhere. So I was very interested to see what it would look like, especially given James' passion for the Gospel proclaimed and lived. I was not disappointed.

What I appreciated most about this wedding was....

a) It was Gospel focused. Unlike most weddings which are a fluffy exercise of civil religion, this wedding was saturated in the Gospel to the point of laying out the desperate need of sinners for a Savior right in the ceremony. I think some people might think that is odd. After all, this is the bride's day! Not for this couple. Every day is for Christ and His glory and when you have a mixed audience as you invariably do at a wedding, what better time to go through an exposition of Biblical marriage and the Gospel of Jesus Christ. I can say with confidence that none of the unregenerate who were in attendance were mistaken about what the Gospel is. The results are up to God but the wedding was a powerful witnessing opportunity.

b) The church gathered to celebrate a marriage, not just by showing up with a present but by really putting on the wedding. The photographs, the ceremony itself, the meal were all provided in large part by the church, not by professionals. Probably won't show up in a photo shoot in bridal mags but it was genuine and beautiful and most importantly God-honoring in a way a $30,000 "professional" wedding could never be.

So I can say that this was not merely two people getting married but was a gathering to celebrate marriage and praise the name of Jesus Christ. Congrats to James and Rachel, may your marriage be fruitful with children and may it serve as a witness to the world!

Admitting when you are right

In the political world beyond the health care debate, there is a minor kerfuffle in the Virginia governors race. The Republican candidate, Bob McDonnell, is being attacked based on a thesis he wrote 20 years ago when a law student at Regent University, known for its connection to founder Pat Robertson. This thesis is just chock full of juicy tidbit being used by the Democrat candidate governor, Creigh Deeds, to paint McDonnell as a frothing at the mouth right winger who wants men to club their wives and drag them back to the cave.

What are these horrific positions that Bob McDonnell holds?

He argued for covenant marriage, a legally distinct type of marriage intended to make it more difficult to obtain a divorce. He advocated character education programs in public schools to teach "traditional Judeo-Christian values" and other principles that he thought many youths were not learning in their homes. He called for less government encroachment on parental authority, for example, redefining child abuse to "exclude parental spanking." He lamented the "purging of religious influence" from public schools. And he criticized federal tax credits for child care expenditures because they encouraged women to enter the workforce.

"Further expenditures would be used to subsidize a dynamic new trend of working women and feminists that is ultimately detrimental to the family by entrenching status-quo of nonparental primary nurture of children," he wrote.

He went on to say feminism is among the "real enemies of the traditional family."

Horror! Traditional families are good! Less government intrusion is good! How backwards, what a Neanderthal!

Actually, I read that and said: right on!

I wish Bob McDonnell would come out and say what he should say: that many of those positions were right when he wrote them and they are right now. The tax system which incentives women to abandon their kids into day care has been a negative for America, culturally and economically. Divorce is too easy in America and maybe it would be good if couples were encouraged to stay together. Not much of what Bob McDonnell wrote is offensive to me and was the majority report in America until recently. Instead of standing up and defending what he clearly believed, he is running as fast as he can. I am no sure which is more troubling, that he refuses to stand up for what he believes or that he is willing to say what he thinks he needed to in college and willing to say something different to advance his own political agenda.

Ever since the Robert Bork hearings, the real political legacy of Ted Kennedy, politicians of all stripes are hiding from taking real stands. I wish we could have a real conversation about this stuff. We live in a world where no one is allowed to have a strongly held opinion and we are left with soundbytes and gotcha politics. Political discourse has suffered for it and as a country we are worse off fot not having real conversations about real issues.