Keeping Vows

One of the fatal weaknesses of the modern evangelical church, and to a great (though lesser) extent of those who are active Roman Catholics, is that we have not demonstrated, to a watching world, a radical commitment to honor our own marital vows through thick and thin. We allow the slightest things, even variations in our feelings and personal emotional states, to serve as excuses to walk away from our marriages and, when we deem it necessary, our children. Leaving our spouses to find greener pastures appears to be about as common among professing conservative Christians as everyone else. (I can back this up with a lot of hard-core data. If interested see my book, Christian Marriage.) 

High divorce rates, low and declining marital rates, high out-of-wedlock birth, and cohabitation rates all reflect this highly individualized, “therapeutic” view of matrimony. That is, marriage is seen as being just one relationship choice among many to be abandoned or turned down if it fails to deliver personal happiness or fulfillment, vows or not, children or not. Not surprisingly, the more Americans look to marriage as just another “voluntary committed relationship” to deliver subjective and emotional benefits on their own terms, the less it is able to actually deliver these desired “goods.”  As Robert Bellah et al pointed out in the 1985 social science classic Habits of the Heart:

‘Finding oneself’ is not something one does alone. The quest for personal growth and self-fulfillment is supposed to lead one into relationships with others, and most important among them are love and marriage. But the more love and marriage are seen as sources of rich psychic satisfactions, it would seem, the less firmly they are anchored in an objective pattern of roles and social institutions. Where spontaneous interpersonal intimacy is the ideal, as is increasingly the case, formal role expectations and obligations may be viewed negatively, as likely to inhibit such intimacy. If love and marriage are seen primarily in terms of psychological gratification, they may fail to fulfill their older social function of providing people with stable, committed relationships that tie them into the larger society. (P. 85)

Love and commitment, it appears, are desirable but not easy. For in addition to believing in love, we Americans believe in the self. Indeed…there are few criteria for action outside the self. The love that must hold us together is rooted in the vicissitudes of our subjectivity. (P. 90)

Every trend that Robert Bellah and his co-authors noted in Habits of the Heart regarding love and marriage has accelerated in the almost 40 years since it was first published. At that time the authors noted that the evangelical church was one of the few remaining groups consciously and intentionally bucking the therapeutic view of marriage. Since then, it too has increasingly succumbed to the siren call of rooting marriage in egoism, rather than seeing it as love realized in action within institutionalized and publicly affirmed solemn commitments. Marital love of this latter, more durable sort is actually able to deliver personal meaning and happiness better precisely because it is motivated by things far larger, better, more important, beautiful and profound than self-gratification.

Even the rationale for having children, what we expect from them and feel we owe them, is now seen in egoistic terms not only in the larger culture but, too often, in the professing church. Every time a professing believer says to me, “The main way to make sure children are happy is to ensure that the parents are personally fulfilled” (often as an excuse for “moving on” in divorce) I cringe and am saddened that even our commitments to our children are now subject to the adult quest for self-realization. A sad fact is that, according to most research, the presence of dependent children has little impact on the chance that a married couple will divorce.

Marriage as a disposable consumer good? It was not always so. As recently as the time when many Baby Boomers like me were born, believers and unbelievers alike accepted the idea that marriage was something larger than the individuals within it and their personal gratification. In our ideals, reflected in our cultural heroes, we admired those who simply kept their word, including their marital vows, though our execution was never as good as our aspirations. This meant men taking on the obligations of men, and women those of women, and both willingly sacrificing themselves for the welfare of their children, along with their communities, beliefs, and nation. The essential goodness of this was not questioned much, and we saw fictional and real-life examples of this all around us.

I have seen unbelievers, even atheists, standing by their marital vows faithfully through some of the worst that life can dish out. Can I learn from these men and women? Should we all learn from them?  Should we respect them?  Should we honor men and women like that?  Unbelievers or not, is Jesus modeled in this, as we are told repeatedly in Scripture that He is in marriage that fits, even roughly, God’s design?

Just as the ant informs us of the value of hard work, if we only pay attention, so to do such committed married people tell us something about our Savior. He who gave Himself for us completely has promised to never leave us or forsake us. By God’s grace, my wife and I hope we have that kind of commitment to each other, one that imperfectly but honestly proclaims these deep spiritual truths and the hope and comfort they embody. We know that the future could require just that kind of sacrifice to something larger than ourselves, and to each other. In fact, sometimes it already has, and what will old age bring?

Compare these faithfully-married unbelievers to an infamous word of advice from the late Rev. Pat Robertson, the famous television preacher, faith healer, and ordained Baptist minister. You may recall the dust-up a some years ago when he claimed, on national television, that it is acceptable for a committed Christian to divorce his wife and marry someone else if she has Alzheimer’s disease. His reasoning was that a wife with advanced Alzheimer’s was more or less dead, unable to meet her husband’s needs. So at that point, as long as her husband makes sure she is taken care of, he should be able to put her away, divorce her, and get himself another wife who can better fulfill his marital needs. That is a hideous claim. I know there are a lot of wonderful things that Pat Robertson has done and said, but the bottom line is that this counsel encouraged the man in question to defy the vow that he and his wife almost certainly made to each other before God and human witnesses when they got married. It does not, at all, fit the teachings of the Scriptures that married people are bound to their spouses as long as both of them live (or for many, unless the extremely serious moral failing of one party has created legitimate grounds for divorce).

From which person am I getting a more truthful statement about what marital vows should mean for, and might require from, me–that atheist who loves his spouse through thick and thin, no matter what, or Pat Robertson?  The answer is obvious.

Rev. Robertson would probably assert that his teaching on that occasion bears no resemblance to that of the Christian rock musician Trey Pearson who claimed some years ago that, having “discovered” that he was homosexual and would never change, he was being “led” to leave his wife and two children to pursue the gay life, apparently with the blessing and encouragement of his professing Christian counselors and pastors. It is interesting to see the way Mr. Pearson describes this, in terms that Robert Bellah and his co-authors would have found very familiar: “There is absolutely no conflict with accepting who I am and following Jesus. God wants me to be healthy, authentic, whole, integrated and my truest self.” Trey Pearson has to be “me.” Sadly, this type of reasoning appears to be, more and more, the norm among professing Christians.

Authentic identity for a true Christian can only be found in self-sacrificing service to the Lord Jesus Christ in obedience to the Word of God which He is also identified with and affirms as being the essence of (John 1:1-5). This includes this man keeping his public vows to his wife and two children. Apparently, these are not constraints that Mr. Pearson or his pastoral counselors felt should interfere with his pursuit of self-fulfillment. My heart breaks for him, as it does for the false guides who helped to lead him to this awful decision. I am further grieved by his choice to market this “revelation” to the larger Christian church. This hope that he has and that he was promised is a mirage; it is sand not water, and it will not deliver the goods for which he longs. “For My people have committed two evils: they have forsaken Me, the fountain of living waters, and hewn themselves cisterns—broken cisterns that can hold no water.”  (Jeremiah 2:13)

We find something similar in the “testimony” of the late, at one time well-known, Evangelical (now, “and Ecumenical”) Women’s Caucus speaker Virginia Ramey Mollenkott. What she describes as the “Voice” spoke to her brain, as her husband and son lay sleeping, and informed her that God just wanted her to be happy. Thus, she was able to joyfully leave her husband and son in order to pursue life as a self-described Bible-committed lesbian activist, in about 1973.

These kinds of stories, rare in 1973, are becoming increasingly common, and those of us who remain committed to a Biblical view of marriage and sexuality find them, and their broadening acceptance in both the larger culture and in the professing Church, disturbing and saddening. However, if we are honest, how much worse, or different are these than the many narratives of heterosexual professing Christians explaining and justifying why they have abandoned their spouses? 

I recall one very nice woman who was one of my students several decades ago. Describing herself to me as a committed, conservative, Bible-believing Baptist, she went on to tell me that she was in the act of divorcing her husband, despite the toddler son they had together, and despite, by her own admission, that he was guilty of no infidelity, abuse, desertion, and so on. Why? God wanted her to be happy, she informed me, and He had also promised to take care of her son after their marriage dissolved. She did not see any conflict between her Biblical convictions and leaving her husband. In fact, to her, the “promises” and love of God meant that it was not only alright for her to break her marital vows, but that He would make sure that her child was not harmed by it. This is not quite as bad as the woman I knew who left her husband for someone else’s husband because (she claimed) the latter was a “stronger Christian leader.” But it is right up there.

Years ago, my pastor in Texas gave me a book of sermons by a fellow that I had heard of but was not personally familiar with, named B.B. Warfield. Benjamin Breckinridge Warfield (1851-1921), the famous “Old Princeton” Seminary professor and minister, had quite a pedigree: his uncle was a former U.S. Vice President and Confederate general, his father a U.S. Senator and Attorney General, his brother a college president. This set of sermons my pastor gave me is called Faith and Life. It is a collection of sermons that he preached to Princeton Seminary students on Sunday afternoons. Every single one of these sermons is theologically rich but practical and inspiring. Dr. Warfield was the quintessential Renaissance genius, but the warmth of his heart was incredible. After reading a few of these sermons I decided that this is a man I wanted to know more about, to see what B.B. Warfield the man was all about. And here is one of the things I read about (sometimes exaggerated in some accounts, but even in recent, carefully checked biography still inspiring and convicting).

In 1876, Benjamin Warfield got married. He and his wife Annie took a honeymoon to Europe. When he was with his brand-new bride, probably married for a few weeks, they were in the mountains hiking. They were caught in a severe lightning storm. If you have ever been out in one of those, you know what they are like. Something happened to her that day, no one appears to be certain exactly what, but it appears to have led to a nervous disorder. She progressively got worse over time, eventually becoming an invalid. Though many accounts appear to have overstated the speed of the onset, and severity, of her disability, there appears to be little doubt that she required a lot of ongoing care that increased over time especially by the 1890’s, and that her husband lovingly cared for her until her death in 1915, then he died about five years later. They were never able to have children. Caring for her certainly meant limiting his engagements elsewhere (a tough thing for a world-famous Princeton theologian), especially in their later years. Interestingly, this appears to have increased his scholarly productivity.

People used to comment that B.B. Warfield was called “the Lion of Princeton” and “the last of the great Princeton theologians”. Dr. Gresham Machen, no slouch himself in the defense of orthodox Protestantism, said “When B.B. Warfield died, old Princeton died”. Some people were afraid of him. When he would go into a meeting and begin to attack heresy, his opponents had to hold onto their hats, because he was going to win. He hated to see professing Christians corrupting the church.

Imagine his students observing his care, devotion, and commitment to his wife and his marriage, living out the tenets of the Westminster Confession of Faith that he loved and defended so ably, including its categorical call to marital commitment and endurance in Chapter 24 section 6, and the reminder that the purposes of marriage include the “mutual help of husband and wife” in section 2 of that same chapter. We know that the quality of Warfield’s marriage had a profound impression on not only Machen but his famous student O.T Allis.

Warfield would be someone with real “street cred” when it comes to faithfully applying Biblical teaching on marital commitment, to use the modern slang. He would certainly not agree with Trey Pearson and his counselors, or Virginia Mollenkott and her Voice, or Pat Robertson; but his life also gave his faithful Biblical teaching authenticity. Nobody could say that B.B. Warfield was not committed to the institution of marriage and that he was not willing to give up personal pleasure if that is what it took to maintain his vows. Is this characteristic of the church today?  It should be.

In contemplating this, I will say that when I need examples of marital commitment, tenderness, fidelity, and self-sacrificing love I don’t need to only think of well-known Christians far away in status, space, and time like B.B. Warfield. I have had the privilege of knowing more than a few such people, some of whom I have profound theological and political differences with, who inspire me with the love they have given their spouses and continue to sacrificially serve when many others would have given up. I have seen, and been inspired by, this across decades of my Christian experience. Marriages that have withstood the overdose deaths or suicides of sons or daughters, spouses who have remained tender and faithful in the face of the complete disability of their partner through various forms of profound, chronic, and terribly disruptive mental and physical disability, permanent emotional and sexual rejection, and more. Yet, like Jesus to His Bride the Church, to His people, to us—they have remained faithful. May that be said of us, lesser, married saints also.