the meaning of marriage.

Apparently, Tim Keller is out with yet another great apologetic book...on marriage.  I haven't read it, but the reviews and interviews were compelling enough, and I wanted to quote some of them here for anyone's encouragement.

From an interview on The Gospel Coalition, John Starke interviews the Kellers:

You observed that during the Enlightenment, social attitudes began to shift: “The meaning of life came to be seen as the fruit of the freedom of the individual to choose the life that most fulfills him or her personally.” How has this affected the Western view of marriage?

The older Western view was grounded in both Catholic and Protestant views that marriage was instituted by God for the common good. It was therefore a public trust. How you conducted your marriage affected everyone. Marriage was seen as the union of a man and a woman who make a permanent and exclusive commitment of each other. It was in the public interest that marriages would last, that divorce would be rare, that adultery would be punished. But the Enlightenment view—that marriage was for the fulfillment and happiness of individuals—essentially "privatized" marriage. It gave rise to the belief that married couples should be able to define and conduct marriage in any way that they found satisfying, and that if they found their marriage unsatisfying it should be easy for them to dissolve it. 

In order to put your spouse’s happiness in front of your own, you argue that we need to have good “love economics.” What do you mean?

It’s a metaphor. Philanthropy means investing money in a charity that does not pay you any dividends—you get no profit out of it. You give money and get no money back. So economically, you can’t be philanthropic—you can’t give away a lot of money—unless you have a good income from somewhere else. 

In the same way, I argue that you can’t do a good job of loving your spouse unconditionally unless you have a strong love relationship with God through Christ. Loving your spouse unconditionally means that, for a season that may be short or long, you love your spouse when you aren’t getting much or any love in response. Your spouse may be deeply discouraged or have become ill or troubled in some way. At a time like that you must serve and love your spouse without expecting much affection, service, or love in return. That is love "philanthropy." In any long-term marriage there will be times that require this. You will be giving a lot more love than you are getting. But if your spouse is the main or only source of love in your life, it will hurt too much to love without getting any love back. You won’t be able to do it. You will just blow up and attack your spouse or look elsewhere for love. God and his love must be a spiritual reality in your life if you are going to be able to love your spouse steadily over the long haul.

What’s wrong with merely looking for compatibility in a wife or husband? 

It’s not wrong if you define compatibility first as a common commitment to Christ and similar ideas of how to live out the Christian faith and minister in the world. Second, it is right to look for many common areas of delight—including books and art, landscapes, avocations, and so on. In the book, however, I resist the idea that dominates the contemporary notion of "compatibility"—namely that if you find a compatible partner, neither of you will ask the other to change at all, that each will completely accept the other as is. If there are conflicts and fights, or if there are calls to change, many people today just walk away complaining of incompatibility. The Christian view is that both spouses are sinners and, as such, have the deep incompatibility that any two self-centered human beings must share. The Christian understanding takes this fundamental incompatibility as a given, and even holds that, if addressed with the gospel, it becomes the occasion for revolutionary Christian growth in humility, self-knowledge, love, and grace in the marital partners over the years.

 

The cover story of the November 2011 edition of The Atlantic says this:

Recent years have seen an explosion of male joblessness and a steep decline in men’s life prospects that have disrupted the “romantic market” in ways that narrow a marriage-minded woman’s options: increasingly, her choice is between deadbeats (whose numbers are rising) and playboys (whose power is growing). But this strange state of affairs also presents an opportunity: as the economy evolves, it’s time to embrace new ideas about romance and family—and to acknowledge the end of “traditional” marriage as society’s highest ideal. 

What would you want readers of this article to consider?

It sounds like the author is assuming that “traditional marriage” meant, mainly, a husband who worked and a wife who stayed at home to raise children. But that is not the essence of traditional marriage. For centuries, husbands and wives labored together on the family farm, or in the family craft. Before the industrial revolution neither the husband nor the wife had to leave the home to make a living. Since then, they have, but it is wrong to identify the essence of marriage with one particular form of human economy. The essence of traditional marriage is one man and one woman uniting the entirety of their lives in a covenant relationship that is permanent and exclusive. Of course, this view of marriage is found in the Bible, and for Christians that is what matters, not cultural trends. But empirical studies (some of which I point out in our book) continue to amass evidence that traditional marriage is enormously beneficial to everyone—men, women, children, society—in multiple ways—economically, psychologically, sociologically.

And one more little quote from a review of the book:

"Never before, he argues, have humans held such selfish, idealistic visions for marriage. We want to marry someone who makes us look and feel good, so we set unattainable standards for potential mates. No wonder, then, that marriage has come to appear so oppressive and hopeless. Marriage is for “two flawed people coming together to create a space of stability, love, and consolation” (35). We have lost God’s meaning for marriage. Keller explains:

According to the Bible, God devised marriage to reflect his saving love for us in Christ, to refine our character, to create stable human community for the birth and nurture of children, and to accomplish all this by bringing the complementary sexes into an enduring whole-life union (16)."

In general, you should explore The Gospel Coalition - they have all types of articles, videos, book/music/art reviews you could ever hope for - all weighing the world around us in light of, and pointing to, Christ.  It's been a big source of encouragement for J as he has been here to hop on during a study break and watch a ten minute video or so to renew his mind, or get him thinking about a certain topic that he hadn't thought about before...and then he passes it onto me :)  Hope everyone is having a great Thursday in some glorious weather!  Today, Marieke and I head back to the orphanage to work with our other girl :) 

Much love.