Tag Archives: marriage

#140: Societal Implications of Romans I

December 6, 2016 M.J. Leave a comment

This is mark Joseph “young” blog entry #140, on the subject of Societal Implications of Romans I.

We began this miniseries with The Sin in Romans I, where we stated

…ultimately there is only one sin listed in the first chapter of the Book of Romans:

…they did not give Him the glory or the gratitude that they owed Him, robbing Him of what He justly deserved….

We were deriving that from Romans 1:19ff. We then continued in Immorality in Romans I to explain that the “sins” we see described in that first chapter–the immorality, homosexuality, and total depravity–are not given to us as the proof of guilt but as the demonstration of punishment, that God punishes those who fail to recognize and thank Him by delivering them to the desires that destroy them. We ended that article with the thought

…if these are the punishment of God, why would I want them? Obviously, there is this draw that they have, because people are drawn into them, and many Christians will admit being tempted in those directions. The black hole of death pulls everyone toward it. The message of the gospel includes that Jesus saves us from this, that He enables us to be free from this death.

Then I noted that there was something else, something I had missed before.

That is where we are today, but to get there we are going to begin with a meandering discussion beginning with divorce law.

This has been not true for so long that some of my readers might be surprised to discover it was ever true. At one time, when a man and a woman signed their names to a piece of paper and swore before a public gathering that they would remain together for their entire lives, the government regarded those to be legally enforceable promises which it, the public at large, and the couple themselves fully expected they would keep. The part about “better or worse…rich or poor…sickness and health” underscored this: there were no outs. In England, if you wanted a divorce you often needed an Act of Parliament.

Of course, exceptions were made, what some will remember as “divorce for cause”. The promises that were made to each other included loving and caring for each other, and forsaking all others. If it could be demonstrated in court that one party had breached those promises, the other party was entitled to damages, including dissolution of the marriage. If the husband beat the wife, or abandoned her; or if the wife was sleeping with the neighbor–these were causes, breaches of the promises, and the injured party could be released from the obligation, often with compensatory damages in property settlements or alimony.

Usually.

By the middle of the twentieth century, affluent Americans who believed that they had earned what they had, and forgot that God had given it to them, began to be bored with monogamy. They felt like they should be able to divorce each other for no better reason than that they wanted to marry someone else, to find “happiness” with another lover. Hollywood gossip certainly fueled this–the stresses on the marriages of movie stars who were frequently separated working on different projects, frequently put into close relationships with other actors, and adored by fans who made them believe they deserved better caused many of them to fail, and the tabloid press popularized the idea that a star or starlet was escaping a bad relationship for a better one. Ordinary people thought that happiness was found in leaving the wrong person and finding the right one. The law in most places, though, was very much against them: you could not be divorced for a whim, only for a cause, a breach of the promise by one party against the other.

And the law was strict. There is a New York case in which a couple wanted a divorce but could not get one without cause, so the husband arranged for his wife to have an affair with his best friend, and they went to court and presented the matter to the judge–and the judge said no, that since the husband colluded in his wife’s infidelity he could not claim that he had been harmed by it, and therefore had no cause for a divorce. People were being forced to stay married to each other for no better reason than that at one time years before they promised each other and the government and the world at large that they would.

And somehow we no longer thought that a good enough reason. Why should you have to do something just because you promised, and benefited from the promise?

Gradually over several decades we changed those laws, to allow ourselves to break those promises. In the wake of that, the upcoming generation saw that the promises were becoming meaningless, and we entered the beginning of a “sexual revolution” in which such promiscuity became more open, accepted by larger and larger segments of society. Today promiscuity is the assumed norm. Unmarried adult virgins are treated as a comic element in popular media, a rarity, and sex among teens is expected even by their parents who don’t counsel them to wait but to be careful when they don’t.

And the law has moved to a place where it says, it is nobody’s business whether you have sex, whether you break promises made to a spouse, whether you get your pleasure from the opposite sex or the same sex. Follow your own moral compass, and if you don’t like where it points, break it and go where you want.

In the process we have lost the ability to commit, to keep promises, to love and trust each other. That is a serious loss.

This was the part I did not see a decade ago when I taught that class (or three decades ago when I taught Romans to those college students). I could see that the immorality, the homosexuality, and the depravity were punishments on individuals who were destroying themselves because they refused to acknowledge God. What I did not then see was that it was bigger than that. It was not that Joe would not acknowledge God and now was having an affair with Alice, or that Bill was rejecting God and now found himself in a relationship with Steve, or that Mary ignored God’s kindness toward her and now could not figure out what was right and what was wrong. That was all true, but it was also true that there were others who had failed to acknowledge God who still lived moral upright lives, who were not suffering from the punishment Paul described. It was not targeting every individual evenly.

However, it was targeting society. People who kept their marriage vows started to discover that their spouses did not. People who embraced only heterosexual relationships discovered that they had homosexual children. People who lived moral lives based on a moral compass that followed sound principles but not God found that those around them, even those closest to them, could see no reason to follow those principles and were ready to do whatever profited them, whatever felt good, whatever they wanted. The society that rejected God, the society that failed to acknowledge Him, was falling into a downward spiral into depravity.

The wrath of God has come upon us. We can see it in the world around us, and as Paul said, it proves that God has begun the end of the world with the judgment of those who reject Him.

There is at least one more piece to this miniseries, because this is not the end of the story.

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Bible and Theology

#139: Immorality in Romans I

December 5, 2016 M.J. Leave a comment

This is mark Joseph “young” blog entry #139, on the subject of Immorality in Romans I.

We began a miniseries with The Sin in Romans I, where we stated

…ultimately there is only one sin listed in the first chapter of the Book of Romans:

…they did not give Him the glory or the gratitude that they owed Him, robbing Him of what He justly deserved….

We were deriving that from Romans 1:19ff.

Some of you were undoubtedly struggling with that, because your understanding of Romans 1:24ff is that Paul begins cataloguing the sins for which mankind is being judged. He starts to talk about immorality, promiscuity, segueing into homosexuality and lesbianism, and then into an entire catalog that we can best describe as total depravity. Surely these are the sins for which men are punished, no?

No.

If we read what the next two verses say, we find

Therefore, God in His wrath handed them over to their promiscuous drives, so that they would lose all respect for their bodies. He punished them because they traded the truth they had about God for a lie, and worshipped and served creatures instead of their Creator, who is the source of all good things forever, and that’s certain.

All that promiscuity, all that immorality, that is not the sin–it is the punishment.

Some of you are thinking, what kind of punishment is that? God gets upset because we don’t recognize how good He has been to us, so He punishes us by sending us lovers, causing us to have affairs? Bring it on!

That actually demonstrates to some degree that you are already touched by that wrath; but then, why should sexual immorality be punishment? It has always been a temptation, something we desire. It seems, then, if we’re bad, God gives us what we desire. How should that be a problem? It sounds like punishing a bad child by giving him ice cream and candy.

It should be said first that if God says this is a punishment, there must be a reason for us to perceive it as a punishment. There must be something fundamentally undesireable about that thing that we desire. Maybe we don’t see what it is, but it must be there.

In fact, speaking in the abstract, God never forbids anything just because He doesn’t like it. He forbids that which is bad for us and others. We see short-term enjoyment in promiscuity, but God sees damage to people. Years ago I wrote a page entitled Why Shouldn’t You Have Sex If You Aren’t Married? in which I talked about all the people who are hurt by these casual liasons–beginning with the partners themselves, extending to their future loves, their children, and people around them. There I put some time into discussing how such promiscuous conduct is self-destructive, destroying the person’s reputation, their trustworthiness, their ability to love and be loved, and never really bringing any fulfillment.

God created us to form us into creatures who could engage in honest, trusting, loving relationships with each other and ultimately with Him. Promiscuity, immorality, adultery, fornication–whatever specific form you give it–destroys that.

So, too, as the punishment worsens, we find in 1:26f

Because they did this, God handed them over to strong self-destructive feelings; their women traded all for which their bodies were made for something unnatural, and the men also abandoned that for which women’s bodies were made and felt strong passions for each other, and so men performed indecent sexual acts with other men, and suffered the consequences of having rejected God.

–that is, God punishes those who refuse to acknowledge and thank Him by pushing them into homosexuality, another even more self-destructive conduct. This is the punishment. It then worsens in 1:28ff, restating the crime,

Further, since they were no longer willing to recognize God, God handed them over to depravity in their thinking, so that they could no longer understand that anything could be wrong in itself, being completely filled with injustice, cruelty, greed, malice; full of envy, killing, rivalry, deceit, nastiness; they are rumor mongers, slanderers, God-haters, insulting, prideful, braggarts, inventing new evils, disobeying parents, foolish, promise-breakers, unloving, merciless, who fully aware that God is right to sentence to death those who do things like these not only do them themselves, but encourage others to do them as well.

People who do not recognize God ultimately become parodies of what we are supposed to be.

Of course, arguably not all of them do, or at least, not that we can see. This punishment falls on some more harshly than others. Yet it is evident that today people are rushing into these traits.

I would say one more thing about the immorality, the homosexuality, and the general depravity before I end this article: if these are the punishment of God, why would I want them? Obviously, there is this draw that they have, because people are drawn into them, and many Christians will admit being tempted in those directions. The black hole of death pulls everyone toward it. The message of the gospel includes that Jesus saves us from this, that He enables us to be free from this death.

All of this I have covered elsewhere. Yet there was something else I only recently realized–which will be the next article in the miniseries.

Bible and Theology

#138: The Sin in Romans I

December 4, 2016 M.J. Leave a comment

This is mark Joseph “young” blog entry #138, on the subject of The Sin in Romans I.

Just over a decade ago, on February 6, 2006, with the permission of the Christian Gamers Guild, I began using one of their Yahoo!Groups lists to teach a Bible class–something more than a Bible study, on the level of an undergraduate course but that the pace would be moderated and there would be no homework assignments. I began with Paul’s Epistle to the Romans for some significant reasons–I had taught it as an undergraduate course before, I had recently rebuilt the notes I needed for it, and as primarily a Pauline scholar it made sense for me to begin with his most recognized and comprehensive work. That class is still continuing, currently studying the First Epistle of John; you can read more about it here.

I mention it because there are several significant points I learned from that book that most people get completely wrong, and in those lessons (still available through Yahoo!) you can read about this in detail–but I have more recently begun to realize that there was something very important in that which I missed.

It is going to take more than one article to explain it, so I will begin by trying to get you up to speed so you don’t have to read all of those posts.

The first thing to grasp is that this is, in a sense, Paul’s resume. He has never been to Rome, and it appears that the people he names in the greetings he sends at the end of the letter are all people he met somewhere else. He wants to preach in Spain, but he needs a base of operations, a church that will support him and send him that direction. Thus he is sending a letter to them in which he lays out the message that he preaches, the gospel of Jesus Christ as he understands it. This is what Paul preached in cities throughout the Roman Empire that changed the world; this is the fundamental Christian message.

He launches into this in the seventeenth verse, where he writes

For I am not ashamed to talk about the good news. The good news is what makes it possible for God to save everyone who believes in God from the just punishment that comes upon all wrongdoers as the world now comes to an end, starting with the Jews and reaching to everyone else.

That’s my translation from the Greek, made with a lot of comparison to a lot of other translations and a strong reliance on whatever materials I had available at that time. Notice, though, that what Paul is saying is that the end of the world has begun–sometime in the middle of the first century. However, any Jew then would have told you that the there would be two things that would happen at the end of the world: the righteous would be rewarded and the wicked would be punished. Paul says that this is now happening, that the punishment is starting and those who believe God are being rescued from it.

Then the surprise comes in verse eighteen, where he says

The good news shows us how God is right now acting as the just judge of the world, meting out rewards and punishments even now, if we have the faith to see it. After all, the scripture says, “The righteous person will live because of his faith.”

He in essence says that we know that the end of the world is arriving because judgment has already begun. The wicked are already being punished, and the righteous are already being saved.

We might at this point expect that he is going to launch into a description of how the gospel saves us, but he surprises us again:

We can see God’s just judgments in the world because His wrath can be seen plainly against all the ungodliness and injustice of men who unfairly try to deny and hide the truth, because within themselves they know something about God, and God has made his existence clearly evident to everyone. For God’s invisible attributes have been readily recognized and understood since the beginning of creation, in creation itself, which shows us His eternal power and divine nature, so that they cannot claim they did not know. Even though they knew God had to exist, they did not give Him the glory or the gratitude that they owed Him, robbing Him of what He justly deserved, but instead started to think and believe all kinds of silly things, and all together lost the light that they had. Claiming that they were becoming truly wise, they actually became fools, and gave up the glory of the God who remains forever in exchange for something that looked like a picture of men and birds and beasts and other creatures which all ultimately decay and are destroyed.

The chapter is going to continue to describe a lot of things God apparently thinks are terrible–beginning with immorality and infidelity, moving into homosexuality and lesbianism, and ending with a level of depravity that suggests the complete loss of any moral compass. Many who read this chapter, many who preach on it, think that it is telling us all the wickedness, all the sins, for which men and women are being punished. God rightly punishes people who act like that, we are told, and the punishment will come.

However, Paul’s entire case rests on the idea that the punishment already has come, and that he is going to describe that punishment which is obvious to everyone who looks at it the right way–and if those statements are the sins for which people are punished, he never gets to the punishment.

That’s because ultimately there is only one sin listed in the first chapter of the Book of Romans:

…they did not give Him the glory or the gratitude that they owed Him, robbing Him of what He justly deserved….

That is the crime of which humanity stands accused, and of which I think we all at some point have been guilty. That is the sin of which we repent to be saved. We agree to acknowledge that God is right, we should be grateful to Him for what He has given us, and we owe Him everything. Otherwise, we are robbing Him.

So, what about the rest–the infidelity and homosexuality and depravity and all that? Well, that’s the second thing everyone misses, and that’s the second article in this miniseries.

Bible and Theology, Law and Politics

#79: Normal Promiscuity

May 7, 2016 M.J. Leave a comment

This is mark Joseph “young” blog entry #79, on the subject of Normal Promiscuity.

A few weeks before his death, my father forwarded a link to an article which seemed to bother him. It included interview excerpts from young women, and put forward the notion that now that the governmnent was providing full coverage for birth control they felt free to sleep with as many men as they liked, and were taking advantage of this new-felt freedom by doing so. His comment to the link was a question as to whether this was really happening, and I was not at the time certain (and never did determine) whether he realized that the article was from one of the sites that rather poorly attempts to do what The Onion does so well: create parody that looks like news. They weren’t seriously suggesting that the availability of free contraception caused an abrupt upswing in the sexual activities of young women; they were rather facetiously suggesting the reverse, that those who thought this might happen were being foolish.

Yet the notion returned to my thoughts periodically. There was something there that bothered me.

L0059976 Model of a contraceptive pill, Europe, c. 1970 Credit: Science Museum, London. Wellcome Images images@wellcome.ac.uk http://wellcomeimages.org — L0059976 Model of a contraceptive pill, Europe, c. 1970
Credit: Science Museum, London. Wellcome Images
images@wellcome.ac.uk
http://wellcomeimages.org

Some years ago one of my then-teenaged sons was dating a girl in about as serious a relationship as teenagers have. On his first visit to her home, her slightly older sister gave him a tour of the house which included what I gather was a laundry and utility room in a finished basement, identified by the sister as the room where you go when you want to have sex.

I was not present; I heard this second or third hand. I suppose it might have been the sister’s idea of a joke: “I know you want to have sex with my little sister, well, this is the place for it.” Somehow I did not think so at the time. I was a bit upset, but did not know whether it should concern me more if their divorced mother did not know that her teenaged daughters were so open about having sex with boyfriends in the house, or if she did.

That latter possibility reminded me of another woman I had known some years before, a friend of my wife, who had a daughter. I never had a high opinion of her. From what I gathered she was certainly no virgin when, in high school, she seduced the boy she hoped to marry and then reported that she was pregnant with his son (it was sometimes questioned whether it was his child), but having failed thereby to induce him to marry her she decided to live with him. She was believed, even by him, to have had a series of affairs, but when their relationship was struggling she got pregant again and had the daughter (no one doubted that she was his) and finally got the marriage certificate. (That might be an oversimplification and I might have the wedding in the wrong place; it’s been a couple decades by now.) Again in what is second-hand knowledge I gather she had a talk with her daughter about having sex, when the girl was about twelve or thirteen. The gist of it was, “I know you’re going to have sex, so I want to make sure you do so safely.”

It is this underlying presumption that bothers me, this belief that everyone is having sex. What we once somewhat derisively called “promiscuity” is now regarded as normal. It was previously regarded as abberant, and I think that in an historical context we might have good reason to consider our age abberant in this regard. Of course, the majority in any era considers itself normal, its ancestors in error, and its future descendants extensions of its own values. The third being demonstrably false on the evidence of the second, we should doubt the first.

I understand the logic of the situation. It is asserted, correctly, that teenagers have always engaged in sex, hidden from their parents, and that single adults have similarly managed secret sexual liasons. Too, there have always been extramarital affairs, infidelities, as husbands and wives have taken lovers, either those single persons who are looking for sexual partners or the spouses of others. It has always been so; it is the norm. The difference, we are told, is that today we admit it and in most cases no longer attempt to hide it.

The error in this logic is evident when you realize that the statement “teenagers have always engaged in sex” is then taken to mean “all teenagers have always engaged in sex.” That was a misperception when I was a teenager. I think–I do not know–that there were among my peers some who were having sex, perhaps sporadically, perhaps frequently or even regularly. For any who were, I suspect that they thought everyone was doing it and they were thus no different; for those of us who were not, I think we thought that everyone else was doing it save for a few of us unfortunates who had been excluded. In retrospect, the facts of the case then were that very few of my peers were engaged in sexual relationships or activities despite the fact that we were in high school on the tail end of the “sexual revolution”, had regular “sex ed” classes explaining how it worked, and knew something about how to obtain and use birth control. I don’t know what percentage of us were virgins, but I gather it was considerably larger than even we thought, and that the majority of those who were not had very little actual experience.

I cannot say that my experience even then was typical in a country in which there are so many social and economic variables; I know it was not atypical. I also know that the idea that “all teenagers are having sex” is not true now. Nor is it true that all single adults are engaged in sexual activities, or that all married people are having or even have had sexual liasons with other partners. The supposed facts are untrue. Yes, there have always been some who have been what we called promiscuous. It may depend on how you count, but it was certainly not a majority in the past. It is not even certain whether it is a majority in the present.

However, because of the general attitude in the present, it is likely to be a majority in the future.

We once told our children that sex was a very natural part of being married. Then somehow we decided that this was too prudish, and started telling them instead that sex was a very natural part of being in love, and that if they were in love they should not be embarrassed about sex. There are good reasons for the old idea, that sex was part of being married, quite apart from the legal issues of responsibility and legitimacy. We, as a society, forgot them, and promoted a lesser standard, that sex was fine between any two people who were truly in love. Then that became too limited–as the Tina Turner song demanded, What’s Love Got To Do With It? Sex became a recreational activity, something people did for fun, and any suggestion that it was other than that was considered prudish.

Barry McGuire spoke somewhere of his own youth. His generation was raised by adults who had long lists of things one did not do, who were never taught why you did not do them. Thus he and his peers were told you do not do these things, and when they asked why not no one had an answer beyond, “You just don’t.” That being an entirely inadequate answer, he said, “we went out and did them all–and we discovered that you don’t do them because they end in death.” That has literally been the outcome for many who have lost control of their “recreational” drug use or their “social” alcohol consumption, and of many infected by the human immunodeficiency virus or other sexually transmitted diseases. It has also been true of many who live in the shadow of death, whose lives have lost meaning because they are so destroyed by these misperceptions–the world teaches them that alcohol, drugs, or sex will make them happy, and when it does not deliver beyond a moment of pleasure (and momentary pleasure is not at all the same as happiness) they wind up seeking the pleasure and abandoning any hope of anything more.

And so today we are teaching our children that sex is nothing more than a recreational activity they should feel free to enjoy carefully–like drinking alcohol or using drugs. We have lost the moral compass, the moral foundation, of a world in which some things were disapproved because they were ill-advised, hazardous, and thus wrong in the same sense that it is wrong to stick tableware in electrical outlets.

So we have created a world in which promiscuity is normative.

I mentioned earlier that it is a mistake to believe that our descendants will be extensions of our own values. We cannot predict what will happen even in the next generation. Perhaps the world will realize its mistake, and some sense of decency will return; perhaps, as with other cultures before ours, the deterioration will continue to snowball and the world as we know it will collapse into chaos from which some new order will arise. What we do know is that the future will be different. Our best hope is that we can inform it with values that will make it better. They are not likely to come from the mainstream of our present society.

Bible and Theology

#65: Being Married

March 11, 2016 M.J. 1 Comment

This is mark Joseph “young” blog entry #65, on the subject of Being Married.

These young couples, they don’t know–
They just think we’re old.
We took the silver years ago–
We’re going for the gold!

I have often thought about writing a piece about being married. My wife has argued that I am in no position to give people advice about marriage, and she has a point. Ours has been a rough marriage from the beginning. However, that beginning is now–well, these web pages stay up a long time, but as I begin this I note that we are closer to our golden anniversary than to our silver. It has been a long time. I have been married twice as long as I was single.

I don’t presume, though, to give you any insights I have learned for how to keep a marriage together from my own observations. Rather, over the years I have heard a lot of advice, and I have found some of it to be quite valuable, incredibly valuable. I do not remember where I got it all, but I’ll try to note those points I can credit.

Before we married, my father said that I needed to ask one question, and have an answer: why are you marrying this person?

My father’s experience gave him this, and it’s worth recounting. He had been dating a girl–I’m not certain whether he was still in high school or already in college, but she kept talking about what they were going to do when they got married. Finally one day he interrupted this by saying that he was not certain he was ready to marry just yet. He was quite surprised three months later to read that she was marrying someone else. Some people, he suggested, were in love with the idea of being married. That’s not a satisfactory reason to marry; you need a reason to marry this person.

The value of this particular bit of advice cannot be overstated. Believe me, the day will almost certainly come when you are going to ask yourself this question: Why did I marry this person? If you have already answered it, you will know the answer when the question comes. It can get you past some serious complications, knowing the answer, and particularly if it’s a good answer. Even if you are already married, take a moment and give yourself that answer if you can. If you’ve answered it adequately in the good times, the answer will be there in the time of crisis.
I think I had already heard or read this somewhere before we married, but I remember that one of the many counselors we visited in attempting to work out our difficulties in the early days repeated and reinforced it: divorce is not an option. That was our attitude going into this, and it’s an important one. Sure, people get divorced, even people who had no intention or expectation of doing so. However, if your attitude is, “If it doesn’t work, we can get divorced,” you’ve got a vulnerability, a weak spot in your corporate armor. The thing about marriage–about any commitment–is that it takes work, effort, in a word commitment. If you’ve given yourself an emergency exit when you’ve built the thing, you’re going to be more inclined to use it when things get tough. Face it, life has tough times, and there will be times when it will look like it would be easier to quit than to fight. If quitting is off the table up front, fighting is the only choice, and you are more likely to put the effort into getting through.

I should caveat that not every marriage can be saved. Some relationships are so broken that one party or the other is not willing to embrace the grace and forgiveness needed to heal it. Some people are so broken that they need to be mended themselves before they can be part of someone else’s life (but if you are that person, finding a different partner is just seeking to ruin someone else).
This one comes from Bob Mumford, but I’m not entirely sure whether he was applying it to marriage or to church relationships. It’s true either way: God gives us the person we need, not the person we might want. Mumford did say that God made one man and one woman, and they’re very different. That’s an important part of it. God is working to form you into his child; your spouse is part of that process, pressing you to become more loving. That means it will sometimes be difficult–as someone has said, it’s easy to love those that are lovely, but God calls us to love when we really don’t feel loving at all. You’re not always going to be happy with His choice, but ultimately His choice is going to be best for forming you into who you ought to be, and thus for your ultimate happiness.
The ideal spouse is an illusion, and the more so when you think that it is some spouse other than the one you already have.

C. S. Lewis addressed this somewhere, noting that to some degree the fact that you have been married has already been part of the process that makes this person your “other half”. Be married to someone for a week, and both of you change–maybe not in the ways either of you wishes, but the process has begun. That process is rocky, sometimes painful, sometimes seemingly counterproductive, but it is moving both of you toward what God wants you to be.

Meanwhile, the axiom that the grass is always greener on the other side of the fence does not mean that it is, but that it appears to be so. When you look at your reality, you see the bad parts; when you look at your fantasy, you see the good. The fantasy is unlikely to be as good as the reality. For one thing, you will be bringing your self into the next relationship, and you have just as much potential to spoil that one as you had to spoil this one, plus a bit more because you have added a track record for failure in the first relationship. If you could not make the first marriage work, you have less chance to succeed with the second.

It is true that the percentage of marriages which end in divorce has been rising over the years. However, part of that is because second marriages are less likely to survive than first ones, and third marriages less than seconds. Your best shot at long-term marriage is usually your first one. If you let that break, you prove that you are the kind of person who will let your marriage break.
The way forward in life is always into God. If our direction is taking us closer to God, it is moving us forward; if it is the right way forward, it will take us further into God. That often can help as a measure of which is the right path, as if we can see that one path takes us toward and the other away from God we can be pretty certain that if we’re seeing it clearly the former is the right choice. It also should be seen as assurance: if this is the right path, whatever it looks like from here, it is going to bring us closer to God. God says that He hates divorce. As a rule of thumb, then, breaking a marriage is moving away from God, and affirming one is moving toward God.
You are going to have to give up your expectations.

You probably will say that you don’t really have any expectations, but that’s not really possible. You formed an image of what a marriage is like, of how it works, from the relationships of your parents and other adults among whom you were raised. You are to some degree going to emulate that, and to some degree reject it; but similarly you are going to expect that your spouse has some of the same expectations about how it works as you do–and your spouse is going to have different expectations, for both of you.

That means the wife is not just going to fall into the role the husband expects, and the husband is not automatically going to be what the wife expects. Here are some “typical” clashes:
- Each party has a belief about which of them manages the money and pays the bills. Sometimes they won’t agree, and money is one of the top tensions in marriages. Even when it is agreed as to which of you will balance the checkbook and cover the regular bills, there is still going to be an issue concerning the control of the “extra” money–what do you have to do to be able to buy yourself a new outfit, or a quick lunch? Your parents probably had systems for this, but it is probably not the case that you both grew up with the same system.
- In some houses, the man is expected to fix anything that breaks, because that’s what men do; in other houses, if something breaks you call a repairman or buy a replacement. This is a simple example, but your relationship will be filled with things each of you thought, without ever considering it or recognizing that you thought this, was the way it would work.
- It has gotten more complicated. In today’s world, we cannot assume we know who washes the dishes, or who cooks the dinners. Child care expectations are no longer simple. There are also cultural expectations. Interracial marriages mean cross-cultural marriages, which means that his family and her family both have ideas about what a bride or a groom ought to be and do, and they are not going to match. You both will find yourself trying to explain to your extended families that this is not how things work in your spouse’s family, and that you have to adjust–without making them think you married someone who does not know how to be your spouse. Complicating it, you probably are not completely convinced that your family is wrong. After all, that’s how it worked when you were younger.
- Then there are the wealth of holidays. It is not even just which holidays you celebrate, but how you celebrate them. Do you have a Christmas Tree? Is it cut, balled, or artificial? Does it go up the day after Thanksgiving, or the last weekend in Advent, or Christmas Eve? When and how does it come down? On what holidays do you have a big dinner, and on which ones is snacking the order of the day? You expect that such celebrations will continue as they did when you were young, but so does your spouse, and there’s not a very high probability that those expectations will match.
These are just obvious ones. The point is that you expect each other to be and do certain things, and you expect that you yourself will fall into a specific role, and the role you envision for yourself is not going to match the one envisioned by your spouse. That’s normal. All of us take years figuring out how to make our relationships work, and you should not expect less for yourselves.
This was actually one of the first things I realized, and one of the hardest to apply; I still fail at this frequently. You must learn to express your love in two languages–the one you understand, and the one your spouse understands.

Near the end of Fiddler on the Roof, Tevye starts singing to his wife Goldie a song that asks, “Do you love me?” Her first reaction amounts to, what kind of question is that and why are you asking me this now, but they have had three daughters reject parental guidance and marry for love (and a slippery slope it proved to be, as the first married a good Jewish boy and the third a gentile Marxist). Ultimately, though, she lists all the ordinary household chores she has done for him, like cooking and cleaning and washing, along with bearing and raising his children, so she concludes that that she must love him: “I suppose I do.” He replies, “And I suppose I love you.”

We learn two things from this; the first is about speaking two languages.

You think that all those things you do, which on some level you are doing for your spouse and which on some level that fact that you are doing them means your spouse does not have to do them, is expressing your love. Whether it’s going to work, paying the bills, cleaning the house, making the meals, raising the children, maintaining the yard, driving, shopping, washing, repairing, whatever it is you do, you do it, on some level, because of love, and you think that’s understood. Your spouse thinks the same thing about everything of which you are spared because your spouse handles it. Yet you don’t see that as an expression of love for you. In fact, at least sometimes you think that your spouse likes to do those things. It does not occur to you that he hates driving, she hates laundry, but does it because of love for you. On the other hand, it sometimes occurs to you that you are doing the driving, the laundry, because of love. You are expressing love in a language you understand. That is important, because it reminds you that you love this person, and will do this because of that. However, your expression of love is not being heard.

You need to speak the other language, the language that will be understood. Michelle, ma belle, sont les mots qui vont tres bien ensemble, sings Paul McCartney–in French, Michelle, my lovely, are the words which go very well together. Most of us do not need to learn another spoken language; but we do need to communicate in a way that our spouse recognizes as an expression of love–whether it’s flowers and candy or dinner and a movie, or breakfast in bed or a sporting event, or simply saying the right words at the right time, the unexpected display of affection, some way of letting that person know that there is love here.

It also helps if you can learn to perceive the expression of love your spouse is constantly making in the language you don’t understand. It’s probably there, and it is a mystery to the other person why you don’t realize it, just as you don’t understand why your expressions of love go unrecognized.

The other thing we learn from Tevye and Goldie is that for the purpose of marriage love is not primarily somethng you feel; it is something you choose and do. Throughout history in most of the world, marriages were arranged: families chose brides for grooms and grooms for brides. It is really the “normal” way; selecting your own spouse is only a recent and limited practice. That means that most people learned over time how to love, or show love to, spouses who were selected for them by someone else. It is not really that difficult to decide to love your spouse. In the modern world, most people in arranged marriages will tell you yes, they do love their spouses. It is a choice you make. Feelings are too erratic to be the basis for commitment, but they will follow from decision.
In I Corinthians 7:32ff Paul comments that the unmarried man worries about pleasing the Lord but the married man worries about pleasing his woman, and then says the same (gender reversed) about the unmarried and married women. What is interesting is that Paul does not say that this is wrong; rather, he seems to be indicating that if you are married, pleasing your spouse is (at least) as important to you as pleasing the Lord, and that’s as it ought to be. Sure, he says that it is better not to marry for that reason, but he also says that for most people it is better to marry, and that means that for most people there is that one person in life, the spouse, who matters as much as Christ. We don’t like to think of it that way, but Paul says that we act that way, and he does not condemn us for it. Spouses are important.

I was developing this for a “permanent” web page in the Bible and Theology section of the site, but decided that that was not the best way to do it. That’s partly because when I had eight points I kept thinking of a ninth and then forgetting it before I had the chance to write it down, and then while I was trying to think of it I remembered the one that falls ninth here, which I know is not the one I kept forgetting. I conclude two things from this.

The first is that no matter how many things I remember and put in this page, I am going to miss something, something that undoubtedly helped me through one of the true rough spots in my life and marriage, and I’m going to wish I had included it. I could hold the page until I died, and still not manage to include everything. I thus hope these points will help you now, and perhaps before we reach our fiftieth (should we both live so long) I’ll post a few more.

The second is that I am not always going to remember all of these points–and neither are you. Make note of them, come back and read them again (as long as we manage to keep the site online through your support), and think about them more than just on the read-through. They are all worth remembering; they will all help keep your marriage together a little longer.

Bible and Theology, Law and Politics

#24: Religious Liberty and Gay Rights: A Definitive Problem

December 6, 2015 M.J. Leave a comment

This is mark Joseph “young” blog entry #24, on the subject of Religious Liberty and Gay Rights: A Definitive Problem.

Christians today are being forced to recognize the marital unions of homosexual (and lesbian) couples as just as valid as those of heterosexuals, and even to participate in the celebration of those unions by providing services, from signing marriage licenses to baking wedding cakes and taking photographs. Many Christians hold the view that homosexuals cannot legitimately be “married”, that homosexual relationships are an affront to God and to nature, and that it is an affront to our faith to be forced to participate–akin perhaps to insisting that Muslims and Jews participate in a feast at which a pig will be roasted and served to all the guests. We ought to be excused from such offensive events. Yet time and again the courts rule against us, despite the First Amendment to the Constitution which protects Americans from government intrusion into religious faith and practice. It is confusing, at the least. Why is this happening?

The answer is that over the past century or so the meanings of several critical words have changed just enough that our objections have been voided. Three words in particular have taken altered definitions, and left Christians behind.

Of course the word marriage has changed meaning over time. It comes into English through French from Latin, the Latin referring to a sexual relationship and thus, for the Romans at least, to an ongoing sexual relationship between a man and a woman. The Romans were rather specific about this, and that definition came with the word into English thanks largely to the Roman Catholic Church. A marriage, well into the early twentieth century, was a permanent commitment between a man and a woman with a view to producing and raising children; it was definitively a procreative relationship.

It was also primarily regulated by the church in most of the western world, even in the United States. Marriage “licenses” were created originally to bypass “the banns” (we’ve discussed this before), the rule that required an intended marriage be announced publicly several weeks in advance of the wedding in the home region of the couple so that objections could be known in advance; the parties could in effect post a cash bond guaranteeing that there were no impediments to the marriage, and so marry more quickly or in a place where one or the other was a stranger. They were optional, even through the early twentieth century–but they had become required first for interracial marriages, gradually for all marriages, and for the very telling purpose that the government wanted to regulate the number of mixed-race children and then additionally prevent incestuous marriages. Marriage licenses were about regulating sex, and guaranteeing that a couple who had sex would thereafter be jointly responsible for the children produced by their act.

Several things happened in the twentieth century. One had to do with the Federal Income Tax system, because someone decided that if a couple had children, or was trying to have children, that probably meant one of them (usually the woman) would not be working, and the income of the other would have to support both–and since the government wanted to encourage procreative relationships, such couples, identified by a legal “marriage”, were given a lower tax rate.

The second thing that happened was really many things. Divorce law changed such that gradually it became easier for couples to separate. Divorces being very messy cases, courts and legislatures tried to disentangle themselves from the mess by moving toward a system by which what had been presumptively permanent commitments now became readily dissolved. Further, attitudes toward sex changed, and the judiciary took the view that it was inappropriate for government to regulate sexual activities outside those special cases in which it was likely that someone was being compromised (rape, incest, possibly prostitution). That meant it did not matter whether someone’s sexual preferences were “aberrant”, as long as they were not abusive. Any adult could have sex with any other adult, and the government would mind its own business if no one was being harmed. There is still an issue as to whether anyone is being harmed in these relationships, but the government has decided that in most cases they aren’t even if they are, or at least that they assumed the risk that they would be harmed when they entered the relationship.

The upshot is that marriage is no longer defined as a permanent procreative relationship, but rather as a disolvable partnership between friends. A critical element has been changed.

The word homosexual did not not exist in the nineteenth century. Such men were called “sodomites”, and it had a very negative connotation. Early in the twentieth century someone in the psychology field coined the new word to identify what was then regarded a psychological aberration for study and treatment. The word itself was criticized as a nasty hybridization of a Greek prefix (homo, “same”) with a Latin root (sexual, “pertaining to gender”).

As attitudes about sex changed in the mid twentieth century, part of that was the notion that two persons engaging in sex were not hurting anyone and ought to be permitted to enjoy themselves. This justified what had previously been called fornication but was now called free love, what had previously been called adultery but was now called having an affair, and, eventually, what had been called sodomy but was now called same-sex love. What had been an unspeakable perversion in the nineteenth century by the dawn of the twenty-first was simply a different lifestyle.

However, the definitional change goes deeper than this. This is not so simple as a different lifestyle. It’s not like choosing whether or not to be a vegetarian, or deciding to join a convent, or moving to a farm. Although science has produced not a shred of evidence that homosexuality is genetic, homosexuals have insisted that they are born that way, and that therefore they cannot really be classed as “men” and “women”, but instead are two more, different, sexes, that homosexual male is no more heterosexual male than heterosexual female. The assertion is that they are a separate group, another sex, very much like a race. With the most recent Supreme Court decisions, it seems that the law has agreed.

Therein lies the key problem, the reason our bakers and photographers and caterers and honeymoon hotels are all being told that they cannot refuse service to homosexual couples. Under the law, it would be the same as excludng service to Blacks or Chinese because of their race. We went through this in the sixties, as Whites–not just southern Whites, it happened also in Chicago–tried to segregate Blacks by legislation and private practice, when restaurants would not serve persons of color and school boards sent black students to their own schools. It was an ugly time in that regard, and while we can argue to what degree racial discrimination has been ended (we’ve addressed that before, too) we can probably agree that things have improved from then, and that we do not want to go back to that. However, the problem is that under law homosexuals are in essence the new Blacks, the group we are not permitted to segregate or exclude, not permitted to refuse to serve, because they are not ordinary men and women engaged in a disgusting sexual perversion, but newly-recognized genders whose different proclivities are ordinary for them and protected by law.

The upshot is that homosexuality is no longer defined as an aberrant sexual practice, but rather as a third (and fourth, and maybe fifth and we do not know how many more) sex, to be protected as women are protected, and any expression of a different attitude on the subject has legally been defined as discrimination.

One more word has changed its meaning significantly over the past century. The word is wrong.

To say that the word wrong has changed its meaning is, well, wrong; it still retains most of the meanings it ever had. The problem is that in jurisprudence the acceptable meaning of the word has shifted, and things which were once almost universally understood as “wrong” are not. Not that this is news, nor even different–society has always been in flux concerning what it regards as wrong in the details. However, there has been something of a fundamental shift, not a problem with what specific things are wrong but a problem with what constitutes “wrongness” itself.

Jonathan Haidt has studied morality, and has written rather persuasively that the kind of morality we have in “Western Educated Industrialized Rich Democratic” (acronym WEIRD) societies is based primarily on one of six fundamental moral values that the rest of the world, now and from time immemorial, shares. For progressive liberals, the moral value that matters is dubbed “care/harm” (making the lives of others better, not worse), although they also recognize a “liberty/oppression” value (the primary value recognized by libertarians, individual autonomy). There is a third value, “fairness/cheating”, recognized, to which we will return.

Conservatives recognize these values, but also recognize three others that are embraced by most of the rest of the world (outside WEIRD areas). These are “loyalty/betrayal” (what makes it wrong to be a “traitor”), “authority/subversion” (respect and obedience within a hierarchy), and “sanctity/degradation” (the notion that some things, whether churches or flags or sports teams, deserve respect, and others are perversions deserving disgust). Thus for most of the world, yes, it is wrong to hurt others, wrong to oppress, wrong to cheat, but it is also wrong to betray your own family, to disobey your leaders, and to disrespect your flag or other culturally identified artifacts of identity. These meanings are not completely lost on people–when someone says, “That’s just wrong,” he is probably tapping into this notion of sanctity/degradation. However, progressives are so far from these understandings of morality that many of them consider them the enemy, obstacles to what genuinely matters.

I said we would return to the “fairness/cheating” value, because it is universally held but at the same time it is expressed in two distinct ways. For progressive liberals, “fairness” is about equality of outcome; the ideal for them is the socialist model, in which everyone gets everything he needs regardless of how much he is able to contribute. For everyone else, “fairness” is about proportionality, that you reap as you sow, that people who work harder should earn more, people who contribute more to society should get more from it. Thus for most of the world, it is “fair” for potentially procreative heterosexual couples who commit to long-term child-raising relationships to receive benefits which enable that which are not available to others (e.g., tax breaks), but for progressive liberals–and for the current United States legal system and that of other WEIRD countries–it is unfair for such couples to receive such benefits merely because they are giving society a future population.

Christians are thus stymied in finding an appropriate legitimately legal response to what a century ago would have been universally recognized as a complete perversion of the legal system, because over time the meanings of these three words have changed. To have said then that recognition of a procreative union between two members of the same sex engaging in sexual relationships is a perversion of that which is inherently sacred would have made perfect sense. Today the words “homosexual marriage is wrong” no longer mean that. They mean something like, “It is unkind to allow members of one sex to have the same rights available to those of other sexes regarding temporary relational partnerships,” which is not something anyone believes. To Christians, the old meaning is still the meaning; to the progressive liberals and their legal system in western countries, it is akin to saying that blacks cannot function as free people and need to be slaves. The world has changed, and expects us to keep up.

Yet as we have also previously said, keeping up with the world is not always the right thing to do.

Law and Politics

#4: Just Do the Job

October 1, 2015 M.J. Leave a comment

This is mark Joseph “young” blog entry #0004, on the subject of Just Do the Job.

There has been an increase in “self-driving” features on new automobiles. The popular one is the car that parallel parks itself. I remember that parallel parking was one of the most difficult parts of the driver road test, not only when I took it but for several of my sons. People failed on that frequently, and here in New Jersey we joke that you know you’re from New Jersey if you could negotiate a traffic circle before you could parallel park. What, though, if you take your road test in one of these self-parking cars, and when instructed to park you simply activate the car’s self-parking feature and remove your hands from the wheel so it can do what it is designed to do? Would the instructor be obligated to pass you, or to fail you?

Bear in mind that most people who receive their standard passenger vehicle drivers license are unable to drive a standard transmission. I was unable to do so when I got my license, and had only the vaguest notion of the purpose of that extra pedal. I learned eventually, but know many people who drive all the time and cannot drive “stick”. It is not really required that the driver is able to operate every motor vehicle in the class; only that he demonstrates the ability to drive one such vehicle. Further, note that our laws creating opportunities for the handicapped permit them to obtain licenses operating vehicles specially equipped to accommodate their specific disabilities–hand controls for accelerator and brake for those without the use of their legs, for example. In these United States, driving is for many a necessity, the only way to go to work, to obtain household supplies, to reach medical care. We attempt to facilitate the right for as many persons as possible.

So if a young driving license candidate uses the automatic parallel park feature on his father’s new car, should he pass, or fail? There is no evidence that he can park without that feature, and honestly the first car he buys for himself is unlikely to have it. Yet he did manage to park the car, and there is no proof that he could not have done so without that “assist”.

Yet how far can this be permitted? If a candidate arrives in a Google® self-driving car, so that all he has to do is give voice directions to an onboard computer which will operate the car using its sensor array, onboard maps, and computer uplink, does the fact that he can direct the car adequately to complete the driving test, without ever touching any of the controls himself, mean that he qualifies for a license?

What if he is blind?

Yes, certainly there are vision test requirements which must be met before one can take the road test, but if cars are made able to drive themselves with their own superior “vision” installed, that could well become “discriminatory”.

Now, imagine that you are a local motor vehicles agency test certifier: it is your job to test candidates for driver licenses, and to sign a form certifying that this candidate is qualified for a license. Remember, as I previously said concerning licenses:

…a license is government permission for someone to do something which would be illegal without a license….a license both permits specific categories of conduct and imposes certain responsibilities on the licensee….a license is a means by which the government regulates specific conduct, both to prevent conduct it wishes to discourage…and to encourage conduct it desires….

In the case of a license to drive, the signature of the test certifier asserts a belief by the certifier that the candidate is sufficiently skilled at driving as to be permitted to drive on the public roads unsupervised. It is therefore the certification that the candidate is qualified for the license.

I have of late seen many Internet images with the suggestion that there are people who do not agree with their jobs, or did not expect that their jobs would require them to do certain things, but they do the jobs anyway because these are the jobs. They are of course aimed at the Kentucky clerk who will not sign her name to marriage licenses for homosexuals (and to avoid being charged with discrimination, she will not sign her name to any marriage licenses). Yet this is the heart of the problem: the clerk does not believe that couples incapable of becoming biological parents can be certified as “married”. It is her job to make that determination, the determination of whether a particular couple is qualified for such a license; the voters placed her in that position for that purpose (among others–it is not the entirety of her job). She is undoubtedly expected to refuse such licenses to persons who are not qualified–incestuous relationships, bigamous marriages, applications from minors, cases of coercion or duress. Her signature on the license is not “just doing her job”; it is certifying that she is persuaded that the applicants meet the requirements for marriage as she understands them.

That to some degree puts her in the same position as the motor vehicle road test supervisor who is asked to sign a form stating that this blind person has passed his road test because he happens to have come in a car capable of driving itself based on his verbal instructions. It may be that this person has passed all the legal requirements technically, but in the opinion of the person required to make that certification the candidate is not qualified.

There are certainly arguments that Kim Davis should just sign the licenses, based on the fact that the candidates are fully qualified under the laws of her state; there are also arguments that she should not sign them, because under the constitution of State of Kentucky such marriages are unlawful. This is what is called a conflict of laws issue, and technically the Supreme Court decision requires the State to amend its constitution to comply with the Court’s ruling–but until it does, that constitution is a valid basis to conclude that her personal assessment that these persons are not qualified for a license is also legally supported. It is a weak argument, but in law it remains an argument made stronger by the fact that her oath of office (which I have not specifically read) undoubtedly requires her to “uphold” and/or “defend” that state constitution.

So stop saying that Kim Davis should just do her job. She is doing her job: she is assessing whether applicants are qualified to receive marriage licenses as she understands them. She is refusing to certify licenses for persons she believes are not qualified, and so as not to be discriminatory about it she is also refusing to issue licenses to persons she might believe are qualified. You might think that these people are qualified, but she does not, and she is the one who has to certify that they are. It is, as she has said, her name on the form.

In addition to the articles linked in this post (Homosexual Marriage and Miscellaneous Marriage Law Issues), the author has also written In Defense of Marriage, Christianity, Homosexuality, and the E. L. C. A., and blog posts in both the Law and Politics and the Bible and Theology categories bearing the Homosexuality and Marriage content tags.

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Bible and Theology

#3: Reality versus Experience

September 28, 2015 M.J. Leave a comment

This is mark Joseph “young” blog entry #0003, on the subject of Reality versus Experience.

I recently attended a family gathering at which a particular gentleman, not a family member, is often in attendance with his wife. My father usually seats me near him, as he is an intelligent man, a retired sociology professor with schooling from a liberal seminary, and we both seem to enjoy our conversations even though I do not know that we agree on much. (That is, after all, part of an education: examining and considering differing viewpoints. If you never got that ability, you were probably not well educated.)

On this particular occasion the Supreme Court decision on marriage was still pending, and that introduced a discussion of the subject of homosexuality. As I often do, I turned to Paul’s Romans epistle, and began to observe Paul’s (and, to my theology, God’s) point that homosexuality (like adultery and fornication) was not so much the sin as the punishment, the self-destructive conduct stemming from yielding to a pernicious and continuous temptation to which some were condemned.

His response was, That has not been my experience.

WASHINGTON, DC - JULY 24: Libby Enloe (2nd L) and Amanda Adams, both of Winston-Salem, North Carolina, embrace and kiss after being married outside the U.S. Supreme Court building on Capitol Hill July 24, 2013 in Washington, DC. Enloe's mother, Mary Ann Enloe (L) and Adams' sister, Meredith Boggs (R), were witnesses to the ceremony. A couple for more than 21 years, Enloe and Adams decided to get married outside the court after the justices struck down the Defense of Marriage Act last month. The location is symbolic, Enloe said. "This makes it official which is what we were waiting for," she said. (Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images) — WASHINGTON, DC – JULY 24: Libby Enloe (2nd L) and Amanda Adams, both of Winston-Salem, North Carolina, embrace and kiss after being married outside the U.S. Supreme Court building on Capitol Hill July 24, 2013 in Washington, DC. Enloe’s mother, Mary Ann Enloe (L) and Adams’ sister, Meredith Boggs (R), were witnesses to the ceremony. A couple for more than 21 years, Enloe and Adams decided to get married outside the court after the justices struck down the Defense of Marriage Act last month. The location is symbolic, Enloe said. “This makes it official which is what we were waiting for,” she said. (Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)

I am fairly certain that there are many things that are outside my experience which are undoubtedly true. It is undoubtedly true that as you approach the speed of light time slows and mass increases, but I have no direct experience with that. It is similarly true that I have no experience with the notion that gravity decreases with distance from the attractive mass, and that it is dependent on the mass of that object, but I have never been anywhere where that rule could be directly observed. There is a degree to which much of what I know to be true is known because someone I trust informed me. Assuming I trust that Paul was writing what God had told him, I have better reason to trust that than I do my own experience, or that of anyone else. But that is something of a subjective assessment. Most people undoubtedly believe the Bible to the degree that it is confirmed in their own experience. That is theologically dangerous–after all, many of us do not have the experience of perceiving ourselves as villains, selfish brats seeking our own interests at the expense of everyone else, even though the Bible identifies us very like that (and for most of us, there are people who would attest to that description concerning us, although probably not concerning themselves, who to us seem so like that). Yet it is at least a fair objection that one wants to find that the Bible is true before trusting it. For some of us, it is sufficient that the Bible have been demonstrated to be God’s message in its totality to support the acceptance of its details; for others, each detail must be individually and independently confirmed before being believed. That is a fundamental difference of viewpoint that cannot easily be argued either way. As with a textbook, either I trust that it is fully trustworthy (absent evidence to the contrary) or I do not trust it at all and get my information elsewhere.

I am digressing, to some degree, but that is very much the point which must be demonstrated.

I have within my nearest family and friends circle a man who is, at least to the knowledge of all his friends, an alcoholic. I do not know whether he believes that about himself. He is usually among the nicest guys I know, a hard worker, helpful in many ways and the sort of person who looks for ways to help. He is a diligent worker when he has work. He has a lot of problems, and probably drinks to escape them. However, if he is given a paycheck and a day off, he proceeds to drink the paycheck and is largely out of commission for several days, usually losing his job. Bill Cosby has said (in Bill Cosby Himself) that as an employer he finds that his employees do not know what to do with free time, as they always return to work hungover and complaining about the weekend. This person epitomizes that, and frequently loses jobs because he is too sick from drink to return to work on the scheduled day. Yet he does not believe he has a drinking problem; it is not his experience that alcohol is the problem, as for him it is the means temporarily to escape the problems.

We know someone else whom we have helped through some hard times, whose background includes cocaine use. He is generous to a fault, hard working, helpful, a wonderful nice guy. His employers are usually glad to have him. When he was staying with us he told us that he would never do anything to hurt us. Then he starts using the drug, and although in one sense he does not change at all, suddenly he finds himself in trouble and has to fix it, so he steals from his employer or from friends. He had a “crackhead” girlfriend who was in trouble with her supplier, so he stole one of our checkbooks and forged checks for about forty times what we had in the bank. Nice guy, though. Would give you the shirt off his back.

I can see in these lives that the alcohol and the drugs are destructive. Yet if you were not with these people long enough, you would not see it. They themselves do not recognize it in themselves (although they recognize it in each other).

I believe that these self-destructive lifestyles reflect the wrath of God on the world–not necessarily on these people individually, but on humanity as a whole. Paul says in Romans that people who fail to acknowledge God are subjected to such self-destructive judgements, immorality, impurity, and depravity–that is, infidelity and fornication, homosexuality, and the inability to identify destructive and self-destructive conduct and make wise choices. Just as the alcoholism and the drug addiction of my two examples are destroying their lives, so I believe the temptation toward homosexuality is destroying the lives of these people.

It is, of course, entirely the choice of the alcoholic and the cocaine user to pursue their addictions, and something only they can choose to stop. In one sense, it is not up to me to decide for them–impossible on its face–and if they prefer to continue destroying their lives that is their choice. That does not mean I ought to affirm that choice. I can recognize and disagree with the choice and still love the people who are so destroying themselves. If, as I am persuaded, homosexual conduct is a similar choice and “homosexuality” is a self-destructive condition like alcoholism or addiction, then I should not affirm such choices. I need not have experienced that self-destruction first hand to know that it is there. My experience tells me that the Bible is usually right about such things, and just as the adulterer and the fornicator are destroying some important part of themselves in the ability to form fidelitous long-term relationships, so too I think that the self-identified homosexual is destroying some part of himself related to the image of God and the nature of humanity. The Bible and I might be wrong, but my experience has been that the Bible has always been right, and that when it does not immediately comport with my experience it is usually that my experience is too limited.

The author has previously addressed homosexuality from theological, legal, and psychological perspectives in Christianity, Homosexuality, and the E. L. C. A., In Defense of Marriage, Homosexual Marriage, and Miscellaneous Marriage Law Issues.

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mark Joseph "young"

Tag Archives: marriage

#140: Societal Implications of Romans I

#139: Immorality in Romans I

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#24: Religious Liberty and Gay Rights: A Definitive Problem

#4: Just Do the Job

#3: Reality versus Experience

A generalist: learning less and less about more and more, one day to know nothing about everything.