Marriage and the Gospel

Compromise on Marriage, Lose the Gospel from Crossway on Vimeo.

From Ray Ortlund at Crossway 

"We must not compromise on same-sex marriage. If we had invented marriage, we could reinvent it—there would be no problem with that. We could make it whatever we wanted it to be. But if God created marriage and revealed it—if it came down from above—then it is a unique social institution. It is sacred, it is divine, and it is representative of the gospel itself. If we compromise on marriage, we will lose the gospel."

Marriage Confusion

Another good and thought provoking article by Trevin Wax entitled Are Evangelicals More Revisionist on Marriage Than We Think?

I’m concerned about evangelicals and marriage.

Don’t misunderstand. I don’t think we’re about to see a massive capitulation of evangelicals on same-sex marriage. There are good reasons to reject the notion that evangelicals will adopt revisionist interpretations of Scripture or abandon the global, historic witness of the Church.

What concerns me is the possibility of evangelicals “holding the line” on same-sex marriage while adopting virtually every other wrongheaded aspect of our culture’s view of marriage.

Just because most of the people in your congregation reject same-sex marriage does not mean that their vision of marriage is biblical. Many of the folks sitting in church pews every week are just as revisionist in their understanding of marriage as their friends with rainbow avatars on their Facebook. That’s why I’m less concerned about our churches caving on gay marriage and more concerned about evangelicals adopting the underlying, revisionist framework that makes same-sex marriage possible.

Same-sex marriage is only the tip of the spear when it comes to the differences between the biblical vision of marriage and cultural counterfeit. If we focus only on current legal challenges regarding marriage, we may overlook just how deeply formed we are by our surrounding culture in matters related to sexuality and marriage. We may miss the fact that we, too, view our relationships in individualistic and therapeutic terms. We may think we’re “safe” or “faithful” if we adopt the “right belief” about gay marriage, when in reality, we may be just as compromised as the rest of culture. We may take pride in ”holding down the fort,” while the fort has been hollowed out from the inside.

Just how has society’s view of marriage changed? Andrew Sullivan, one of the leading voices in the gay marriage cause, lays out several ways in which marriage has shifted in recent decades. Each of these shifts affects evangelicals.

He then discussed in detail the three points made by Sullivan:

1. Marriage as temporary
2. Marriage a emotional commitment
3. Marriage as personal expression

Then in conclusion he makes this very  important point:

We underestimate just how much cultural cultivation we have to do if we think success is just getting people to say “no” to same-sex marriage. We need the wider narrative of Scripture, and the bigger picture of marriage, if we are going to make sense of Christianity’s vision for family.

When we share the same undergirding ideas about marriage as the culture, the Christian’s “no” to same-sex marriage looks arbitrary and motivated by animus toward our LGBT neighbors rather than being a part of a comprehensive vision of marriage that counteracts our culture in multiple ways.

We are not called merely to reject wrong views of marriage; we are called to build a marriage culture where the glorious vision of complementarity, permanence, and life-giving union of a man and woman, for the good of their society, can flourish. Rebuilding a marriage culture must be more than lamenting the current state of the world at multiple conferences a year. It must include the strengthening of all our marriages within the body of Christ: from the truck driver, to the police officer, to the teacher, and the stay-at-home mom.

Success is not having church members say gay marriage “is wrong.” Success is when the Christian vision of marriage is so beautiful that revisionist definitions of marriage “make no sense.”

Read it all at the link.

Convictional Kindness

Below is an excerpt from Evangelicals Won't Cave: Why Evangelicals Will Not Be Surrendering To The Sexual Revolution by Dr. Russell Moore via First Things: Dr. Moore has been one of the wisest commentators beforer and after the SCOTUS decision on marriage. The entire thing is to long to post here, but not too long for anyone to read. Please read it all. It is important that we all understand this.

....We can no longer assume, even in the Bible Belt, that people aspire to, or even understand, our “values” on marriage and family. These parts of our witness that were the least controversial—and could be played up while playing down hellfire and brimstone, for those churches wanting a softer edge—are now controversial. Churches that reject the sexual revolution are judged as bigoted. Churches that don’t won’t fare much better, for in a secularizing culture, churches that embrace the revolution are unnecessary—just as the churches that rejected the miraculous in favor of scientific naturalism were in the twentieth century.

In post-Obergefell America, Evangelicals and other orthodox Christians will be unable to outrun our freakishness. That is no reason for panic. Some will suggest that a Christian sexual ethic puts the churches on the “wrong side of history.” Well, we’ve been on the wrong side of history since a.d. 33. The “right side of history” was the Eternal City of Rome. And then the right side of history was the French Revolution. And then the right side of history was scientific naturalism and state socialism. And yet, there stands Jesus still, on the wrong side of history but at the right hand of the Father.

If we are right about the end of human sexuality, then we ought to know that marriage is resilient. The sexual revolution cannot keep its promises. People think they want autonomy and transgression, but what they really want is fidelity and complementarity and incarnational love. If that’s true, then we will see a wave of refugees from the sexual revolution, those who, like the runaway son in Jesus’ story, “come to themselves” in a moment of crisis.

Churches so fearful of cultural marginalization that they distort or ignore the hard truths of the Gospel will not be able to reach these refugees. Churches that scream and vent in perpetual outrage won’t, either. It will be of no surprise if the churches most able to reach those wounded by sexual freedom, and the chaos thereof, will be the churches most out of step with the culture. Whatever one thinks of the “temperance” of many wings of American Evangelicalism, it is no accident that so many ex-drunks, and their families, found themselves walking sawdust trails to teetotaling Baptist and Pentecostal churches, not to the wine-and-cheese hour at the respectable downtown Episcopalian church.

The days ahead require an Evangelicalism that is both robustly theological and warmly missional, both full of truth and full of grace, convictional and kind. This does not mean a kind of strategic civility that seeks to avoid conflict. The kindness that is the fruit of the Spirit is of the sort that “corrects opponents,” albeit with gentleness and patience (2 Tim. 2:24–25). A Gospel-driven convictional kindness will not mean less controversy but controversy that is heard in stereo. Some will object to the conviction, others to the kindness. Those who object to a call to repentance will cry bigotry, and those who measure conviction in terms of decibels of outrage will cry sell-out. Jesus was controversial among the Pharisees for eating at tax collectors’ homes, and he was no doubt controversial among the tax collectors for calling them to repentance once he arrived there. He sweated not one drop of blood over that, and neither should we.

While I am not worried about Evangelicals’ caving on marriage and sexuality in post-ObergefellAmerica, I am worried about Evangelicals panicking. We are, after all, an apocalyptic people, for good and for ill. We can wring our hands that the world is going to hell, but then we ought to remember that the world did not start going to hell at Stonewall or Woodstock but at Eden. Adam was our problem, long before Anthony Kennedy. Mayberry without Christ leads to hell just as surely as Gomorrah without Christ does. We cannot respond pridefully to the culture around us as though we deserve a better mission field than a sovereign God assigned to us.

This means that Evangelicals can best serve the culture by being truly Evangelical. We are not in a “post-Christian” America, unless we define “Christian” in ways that disconnect Christianity from the Gospel. The mission of Christ never calls us to use nominal Christianity as a bridge to redemption. To the contrary, the Spirit works through the open proclamation of truth (2 Cor. 4:1–2). It is the strangeness of the Gospel that confounds the wisdom of the world, and that actually saves (1 Cor. 1:18–31). The Gospel does not need idolatry to bridge our way to it, even if that idolatry is the sort of “Christianity” that is one birth short of redemption. Our frame of reference is not happier times in the 1770s or 1950s or 1980s. We are not time travelers from the past; we are pilgrims from the future. We are not exiles because American culture is in decline. We are exiles and strangers because “the world is passing away, along with its desires” (1 Jn. 2:17).

I don’t think American Evangelicals will fold on our sexual ethic. But if we do, American Evangelicalism will have nothing distinctive to say and will end up deader than Harry Emerson Fosdick. If so, the vibrant Evangelical witness God has called together in Nigeria or Argentina or South Korea or China will be alive and well and ready to send missionaries to preach the whole Gospel. Whether from America or not, a voice will stand, crying in the wilderness, “You must be born again.”

Please read it all at the link.

Preparing For Sexual Refuges

I encourage everyone to read this piece by Russell Moore on where our culture and laws are headed on marriage, gay marriage in particular, and how the church must respond. Let these three paragraphs just whet your appetite.

...What it will mean is that we will have to articulate things that we previously could assume. For a long time, especially in the Bible Belt, pastors could assume that most people understood what we meant by marriage, so we could speak about healthy marriages in shorthand. Now we have to define what we believe about marriage, why we believe about marriage. That's not a new situation for Christians -- that's what's happening in the context of the New Testament, defining Christian marriage over and against a Greco-Roman sexual culture. But it's a new situation for American evangelicals.

I think that the pro-life movement provides the model for the future. The pro-life movement is a long-term movement that is also multipronged, and that will be the case for the pro-marriage, pro-family movement as well -- to recognize that this isn’t simply about a presidential election or two. It's about working in the political arena, but also working in the cultural arena.

I believe the sexual revolution can’t keep its promises. I’m preparing our churches to receive the refugees from the sexual revolution. For those who ask 'What is there other than this?' I said this week at the meeting, there are two kinds of people who won't be able to minister to those refugees. One is the kind of person who has been screaming in anger at those who disagree with us. The other kind is the person who has given up the Gospel and the biblical view about marriage. So we have to stand with conviction and with kindness at the same time.

This is important. Please read the whole piece at the link. 

Tim Keller's Google Talk On Marriage

Tim Keller made an hour long talk on the meaning of Marriage from a Christian perspective to Google employees at their headquarters. This event took place on November 14, 2011, as part of the Authors@Google series. I can't think of anyone else who could do this, certainly not as well as he did. It's worth a listen!

Hat Tip: Reformissionary: Tim Keller | Google Talk On Marriage

Of course, his book The Meaning of Marriage is great too!