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.
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.
"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.
A
brief synopsis: 5 missionary families living in Equador find out about a savage
tribe [the Aucas] known for random raids of violence, and desire to reach them
with the gospel. After many months of
friendly air-dropped trades and fervent prayer for the Lord’s guidance, the men
decide it's time to reach them in person, inviting them to meet on a beach that
had been chosen as a home base.
One day, three natives show up and one even flies in the plane he has
come to know so well [from seeing it fly over the village every week] and things
seem friendly. Two days later, the
men radio in to the home base [the wives] that they are expecting at least 10
Aucas to visit them as the pilot had spotted a bunch coming their way – “This
is the day!” 