My Thoughts on the Theology of Marriage Thus Far (Long)

Having been married for two months (so long?), this idea keeps pestering me. It keeps pestering me because it exists and I'm a Christian, so I have to deal with it. I could say that it's irrelevant, but that's intellectually dishonest on my part.

There's also the fact that some of my wife's friends are taking a "conservative" turn than what I figured they would. If you're reading this, you know who you are. This led to conversation and/or debate about how husbands and wives are to relate to each other. Honestly, as "conservative" as I am on the issue, I find that trying to impose a general rule of life and personality type on husband and wife is, well, stupid. My own reading of the commentaries on the Westminster's Larger and Shorter Catechisms exposition of the Fifth Commandment (where this issue is traditionally placed) has a more egalitarian twist than emphasized in contemporary "evangelical" discourse. Not only that, but every confessional Presbyterian I speak to rolls their eyes at the mention of the word "complementarian". So do I, mind you, but this makes this issue even more awkward for me.

So what follows are a series of thoughts that I have when I try to navigate this issue. As a result, it's going to be long and boring. They don't follow a logic, but rather think of them as a bunch of french fries that need to be eaten together in order to have an average experience.

1) The Song of Solomon needs to be talked about in all of this. I keep reading it because I like to know how marriage works. I read it and it seems that women have a lot more initiative than contemporary "evangelical" discourse allows for. In fact, one could call the woman "thirsty" for her husband to be. The woman is not frigid, comfortable in her sexuality, and is lusting for her husband to be. And every book and article I've read on marriage  does not talk about the Song. A huge oversight, in my opinion.

2) The story of Ruth needs to to be talked about in all of this. This is a continuation of the first thesis. Ruth went after Boaz, and some liberal interpreters thinks that Ruth slept with Boaz in order to have him. Not that I approve of premarital sex, but again, there are some preachers that say that men pursue and women stand there. But I don't see that in the Bible.

3) The Gospel and its benefits needs to be part of this conversation. Of course, everybody likes to say "Of course!" but I don't think people do it often. Again, I am a cynic. How does the doctrine of justification intersect with married life? How does does the doctrine of adoption intersect with married life?

4) In light of number three, the doctrine of sanctification needs to come into play. Specifically, the Pauline idea of cruciformity. Jesus dies and is raised and so the Church dies and live with Him. If this is the pattern presented to us in the Pauline corpus, it needs to be integrated into our understanding of marriage. Perhaps the husbands submits more than he thinks, perhaps the wife is raised more than she thinks.

5) Historical theological work needs to be done. Too much of contemporary "evangelical" discourse on marriage roles, as an observation, is a reaction/response to 2nd and 3rd wave feminism. How did marriage look like in the Church before feminism existed? I don't see this being discussed. Katie Luther is a saint in Reformation circles because she ran the home and put Luther in his place when he got absurd. Not that I praise Martin and Katie as a universal model for all marriages, but they seemed happy.

6) The mutuality of submission needs to be brought to bear. I see two errors occur when marriage is being discussed in contemporary "evangelical" circles. Number one, people try to tell the woman that submitting to the husband is a form of freedom. And it is, in as much as dying to yourself is a form of freedom. I guess what I'm trying to say is, marriage is slavery. But marriage is a slavery that has the possibility to sanctify because God can use general providence to sanctify His people. That sanctification is freedom because being conformed to the image of God in Christ is freedom.

This applies to the husband too, of course. He is a slave of the wife because her concerns are his concerns. But in that slavery, there is freedom, because the husband is being conformed to the image of God in Christ. Using the modern notion of freedom (autonomous self will) is a losing battle, so better to define freedom as St. Augustine understood it: being conformed to God's will.

Number two, and more explicitly, nobody talks about the mutuality of submission. St. Paul tells the husband to give his body to the wife and vice versa when it comes to sexual relations. St. Paul also talks about mutual submission before he goes and writes the "Table of Duties" in Ephesians. Clearly, there is something else going on here.

7) Greater flexibility is needed for our understanding of what gender is. Mind you, I find the tripartite separation of gender, sex, and orientation to be annoying because it opens the door to identifying as wolfkin. Saying that, a man is still a man if he doesn't like football. A woman is a woman if she play fantasy football religiously. A man is still a man if he likes to look nice. A woman is still a woman if she wears flannel. To steal a line, our pink and blue circles need to be expanded. Perhaps to go further, perhaps pink is not as feminine of a color as we think it is.  Though this requires an understanding of culture that is shallow not only in contemporary "evangelical" discourse, but in contemporary discourse in general.

8) The definition of leadership needs to be ripped from its corporate owners and thrust back into its Christo-centric context. In other words, being type A does not make you a leader. It just makes you, at best, excited, and at worst, an obnoxious human being. Leadership can be silent, behind the scenes, with no words. We must remember how Jesus leads: by serving us. The corollary for how respond to Jesus' leadership? By receiving grace. Pietism, however, reverses this. We talk about doing stuff for God and God receiving our right praise. Apply that to a husband and wife situation and you have abuse. Apply that to the way you see God and you have apostasy.

9) The discussion needs to be limited to marriage. John Piper and Wayne Grudem, to quote a saint of the Internet, need to stop. You cannot say that a woman is not able to a police officer because it robs a man of his masculinity. The Scriptures don't forbid it, therefore, we cannot speak to it. Does that mean that men cannot be nurses? They would not say that, of course, but that's where the logic leads.

10) The doctrine of God's Two Kingdoms needs to be applied to this issue. The way the Church is run is different from the way God runs the world. This is a controversial point, but I find it better to live with mystery and tension than to tell somebody how to live their lives when the issue is not in Scripture.

11) The doctrine of vocation needs to be recovered.

12) The doctrine of the image of God needs to be at the center of this conversation. People like to say that men and women are made in the image of God but nobody likes to talk about what that means. I mean, I think I know what it means due to my reading of Meredith Kline, Louis Berkhof, Michael Horton, and the Westminster Standards. But if you read an earlier post, we must remember this mantra: nobody likes to read dead or old white people.
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13) An understanding of the eschatological image of the marriage supper of the Lamb needs to be an element of this. If the Church is being married to Christ, and if sex is an image of that consummation, the eschaton informs our ethic.

13) The doctrine of "mind your own business" needs to be recovered. I don't think there is a name for it, but honestly, the way a husband and wife decide to relate is between the Lord and those two people. The pastors are involved in as much as the pastor is responsible for soul care, but even then, the pastor takes a ministerial role (speak what God's word says) and not a magisterial role (defining God's word).

14) The umbrella metaphor needs to be thrown out. It was used by Bill Gothard. It's dead.

15) The Ten Commandments need to be foundational to any discussion as to how a married couple relate to each other. Before a husband is a husband, before a wife is a wife, they are human. The Ten Commandments are a summary of what God requires of a human. It would behoove us to study them.

16) The abuse of men and women by leaders in the "evangelical" community using their gender theory needs to be acknowledged as a failure of said gender theory. "You shall know them by their fruit". I do not think God wants a husband or wife to be abused. However, we read of this abuse and instead of defending the weak, many leaders (TGC and associates) have decided to defend the abusers in the name of "right theology". I would venture to say that said theology is faulty and should be discarded.

17) There must be a return to confessionalism.  Contemporary "evangelical" discourse does not believe in confessionalism, Rather, the pastor acts as a pope more authoritative than the actual Pope, decreeing God's word without any attention to historical trajectory or the wisdom of history. The Reformed confessions speak of marriage of being between a man and wife. The Westminster Larger Catechism and commentaries thereof, while not modern defenses of an egalitarian view of the marriage relationship, are, I would argue, more egalitarian than what contemporary "evangelical" discourse would have us believe.

18) The Trinity cannot be involved in this. I mean, wanting God to be the root of the marriage relationship is a great thought, but St. Paul grounds his understanding of marriage in the Gospel and not in the relations between the persons of the Trinity. The Son does not eternally submit to the Father. He is One with the Father in authority and power. The Son submitted to the Father in the economy of salvation, as under the Law, but does not, in His ontology, submit to the Father. This leads in the direction of Arianism. Read this for an understanding of the issues involved.

19) General revelation needs to be involved in our discussion about marriage. We already do this when we interpret the Bible: we use Hebrew and Greek, we used archaeology, we use historical data. Where are the analyses of the differences between men's and women's brains (if there are any, which I think there generally are). What are the statistic for what men and women generally like to do? What is our epistemology for deciding how relevant this data is?

20) If the Lord's Supper is a participation in the body and blood of Christ, and if it points to the past saving work of God in Christ and to the future eschatology consummation of God in Christ and His people, how does it intersect with marriage? Mind you, if one does not believe in sacramental efficacy, this question is irrelevant.

21) If Baptism is sign and seal of God's grace to us in Jesus Christ, how does it intersect with our theology of marriage? Mind you, if one does not believe in sacramental efficacy, this question is irrelevant.

22) My pastor back home made a wonderful statement about the value of single people in the Church: they are an inbreaking of the eschaton in the Church because when Jesus comes back, there will be no marriage. Therefore, how does this figure into our theology of marriage?

23) "What is the chief end of man? To glorify God and enjoy Him forever." Contemporary "evangelical" discourse (at times) makes a woman's chief end to "Find a husband and pop out kids". The first question of the Westminster Shorter Catechism needs to be reckoned with.

24) Because feminism (in all its variants) has influenced the culture, it needs to be talked about, admittedly. However, I must ask, whose feminism? Black feminism? Womanism? Post modern feminism? Is intersectionality relevant to the discussion? Contemporary "evangelical" discourse tends to erase these distinctions and lump it all into one bag called "feminism". Christina Hoff Summers considers herself a feminist and many dislike her. Again, whose feminism? Saying that, it cannot be the controlling issue, and I think there are more important questions to be considered.

25) The discussion seems to center on an upper middle class vision of life. How does a marriage ethic play out when you're poor?

I apologize for the length of the post, but this issue has literally been on my mind for about a year. I have conclusions, but I won't write them. I will say this, though: I think, due to the destruction of any understanding of natural law and classic formulations of Christian theology, a tome needs to be written.

Maybe when I'm fifty I'll write it. But if somebody else writes it, wonderful.

Though when it comes to the every day life, perhaps we should stick to our own gardens and love the people that God's placed in our lives with the best understanding we have of His Word as we cling to Christ in faith for salvation. Because in the end, we won't be married anyway.

Stumbling as I try to love my wife,

-SJG

D I V E R S I T Y

Golly, look at me being hip, talking of a thing people seem to talk about, using a structure of writing that is known to those in the know.

Whatever.

My wife and I found a church, which is great. It's a boring Orthodox Presbyterian Church church. We get the Lord's Supper every week, the preaching is Christo-telic, and the folk are nice. I can't really complain.

Though let me tell you that my wife's boss thought I was lying when I said that there was a denomination that called themselves orthodox. Hey, but aren't we all?

Saying that.

I've been missing my church back home. Specifically, I started missing them when I saw that the General Assembly of said church's denomination (ECO) wanted to push for more diversity. Gendered, social, ethnic, they want it all. They want a diverse leadership to reflect the changing demographics of this country.

"Cool" I thought to myself. Then I rolled my eyes. "So where's the scholarship money?"

Don't get my wrong, my church back home walked the talk. They let me, a rough around the edges Cuban, teach them Sunday school whilst I went to seminary. These people cared about their city. I bet they still do.

Though if I don't see a denominational fund, I'm gonna see it as a bunch of folk talking about how awesome they are because they're open to having a "diverse" leadership. Wow, how righteous.

Saying that, what a denomination does isn't necessarily reflective of a congregation or Presbytery. I'm not a communitarian, after all.

But let me tell you a second story.

All of my wife's co-workers go to Bible churches. What's a Bible church? It's a church that believes in the Bible. With no regard for confessions, creeds, catechisms, or tradition. Don't get wrong, all of my wife's co-workers are wonderful human being. But, why would your friend not like Beyonce? I don't know, I know I don't. I think she's overrated.

But here we are.

Her co-worker invite me to their young adults Bible study. The leader, a nice guy, leads in a very mediocre fashion. I put up with it and answer the question. After all, I'm incredibly snobby. At one point I state that a person is a false teacher because they're making a frazzled woman pray more than need be.

I also stated I was Presbyterian. In a Bible church. A church that rejects denominational labels.

Whatever.

The Bible study leader, he meets with me for coffee. Here I am thinking he wants to use my seminary primed brain to help him. Or not, no, I'm full of myself, after all. Maybe he just wants to get to know me.

And he does.

But.

He then proceeds to tell me that I made people feel uncomfortable because I stated that I was Presbyterian and because I said somebody was a false teacher.

He then tells me that the leaders want diversity, but by me telling that I am Presbyterian, I am inhibiting that diversity even though I am probably the most diverse thing in that church (Seriously, what Latin American wants to be Reformed in this political climate?).

"D I V E R S I T Y"

But no, I hurt peoples' feelings. I was then told to answer questions by stating "according the Bible" and not "according to my tradition". Because, as much as I believe in the perspicuity of Scripture, even St. Peter says St. Paul is hard to read.

I dunno, I thought I was being humble and respecting their practices.

All of that to say.

Do people want diversity? Are people willing to do the hard work of putting up with what they perceive to be as stupid? Do people want to spend their money?

Eh.

Having a beard because I'm insecure,

-SJG