Sex, Children, and Marriage in the Natural Order

Christian social conservatives such as myself and many others recognize that men and women live out their lives within a natural order created by a loving God, in perfect wisdom, for His glory and delight, and for human flourishing. We understand that in this created order He has established not only moral boundaries, but also the basic categories of reality–of existence, of being. Has also established the ultimate aims (or, purposes) or every element of this natural order–their “telos.”

None of what God has established and willed is subject to negotiation or redefinition by us mortals. Neither can we ignore, violate, or reject God’s created designs without negative, and even catastrophic, consequences to ourselves and others. Living well means doing so within the world as it really is, not one that we have invented to suit our desires or the political and cultural fads of the moment. This includes accepting the fact that, since Adam and Eve sinned, the fallen world is broken and we must learn to live with that brokenness. However, none of this denies the moral parameters, essence, perfection, purposes of God’s created order, which, by His grace and mercy, shines through the brokenness in ways that benefit all humankind. “He makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the just and on the unjust.” Matthew 5:45

With this natural order, we are certainly given scope for a great deal of creativity and variation, including many ways to accomplish the appropriate purposes God has assigned to different aspects of reality. But there are limits to this flexibility beyond which we ought not go. When we fundamentally violate God’s design and intent, the lies we tell ourselves and the rebellion we engage in will catch up with us. Reality always wins in the end.

This way of approaching the created world naturally applies to our comprehension of human personhood. This is, for example, evident in the pro-life causes we champion that flow from this understanding. We know that every person is an image-bearer brought intentionally into being by a God who intimately knew and loved them from before their birth. No one is an “accident.” No one whom God created is fundamentally “unwanted,” because obviously, He wants them, and that should be good enough for the rest of us.

This is not just a so-called “religious belief,” but an actual fact. As Genesis 1, verse 27, clearly states: “So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him…” Consistent with this reality, in Psalm 139 we find David expressing his wonder over how he and all humans are “knit” by God …”in…[the] mother’s womb”, how each person is “fearfully and wonderfully made…” with every day of their lives ordained. God’s active knowing of, and thoughts toward, each individual person as they develop inside their mother’s womb are both personal and “precious.”

In fact, taking the innocent human life of any person, no matter their stage of development, or age, or degree of physical or mental wholeness, or beauty, or intelligence, is unthinkable. Redefining human personhood to render the extinction of any innocent persons morally acceptable is, before God, both impossible and abhorrent. In thinking about this, I am reminded of the passages in Harry Potter where murder is described as something that rips a person’s soul apart. It is that heinous, that evil.

The same knowledge of the created, natural order informs our understanding of humans as sexual beings–of men and women, of maleness and femaleness. As this essential binary, the two sexes together constitute humanity. Going back to our reflection on that pivotal passage in Genesis 1, verse 27, we find this declarative statement: “So God created man…male and female he created them.”  Man and woman are each equally human but essentially different and complementary types of persons. This is rooted in biology, not just in culture or learning. Together, the two sexes complete and need each other. Again, this is an established, observable part of the natural order, not merely a religious belief. It is true whether we like it or not.

Jan Brueghel the Younger: “The Creation of Eve”

Similarly, we perceive that no man or woman has within him- or herself a complete, “free-standing” reproductive system. Rather, men and women are designed by God to form a procreative entity only as they unite together in sexual intercourse, which is a distinctly heterosexual act. By this they may bring forth children, which is something that God wants them to embrace. As we are told in the very next verse in Genesis, having created humankind male and female, God instructs them to “be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth,” which is something they can only do together, and only as gender binaries, as sexual men and women. Humans do not propagate asexually, as liverworts or mudworms do.

Moreover, it is not enough for men and women to merely procreate. They must then rear and train their children over many years if their offspring are to grow up fitted to not only survive, but to function as righteous people, bringing glory and delight to God and blessings to others, as He has designed all of His creation to do. Essential to this is teaching children to treasure and uphold, in honor and reverence, their own essential natures as either male or female; boys and girls learning to be mature men and women. Raising children with such ends in view is something that God designed to be done, ideally, by a male and female united to and nurturing each other and their offspring within unbreakable bonds of love and covenant. As we see in Genesis 2, verse 24: “…a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and they shall become one flesh.” As John Calvin pointed out in his commentary on this book: “…God intends the human race to be multiplied by generation indeed, but not, as in brute animals, by promiscuous intercourse. For he has joined the man to his wife, that they might produce a divine, that is, a legitimate seed.” Thus, we have marriage, and we have well-ordered and stable families and households, which in turn become the foundation for all healthy human society.

Those of us who understand the created order, including male and female, sexuality and sexual nature, monogamous heterosexual marriage as the ideal means for joining men and women and for begetting and rearing children, and so on have not found much to comfort us in the social, cultural, legal, and political developments pertaining to these aspects of reality in recent years. Quite the contrary. Every essential element of our belief system in these areas is under sustained and increasing assault. Indeed, we now find ourselves portrayed as bigots–as people not appreciably different from Ku Klux Klansmen–for seeking to defend and advance traditional, orthodox views of human personhood, marriage, sex, sexuality, and sexual identity. And all this despite the fact that most of these understandings were widely taken for granted until very recently. Indeed, conservative religious believers are increasingly sharply criticized and rejected for even just wanting to quietly hold, teach, and live by these beliefs within their own churches and communities.

Moreover, to the extent that we care about our nation and fellow citizens, we have found much to grieve as we witness the harm that people are inflicting upon themselves, their offspring, our society by increasingly pursuing destructive delusions about the vital relationships between sex, marriage, the procreation and rearing of children, and human identity rather than seeking to live harmoniously with the need to unite all three whenever possible. Similarly, we are distressed to find these errors infiltrating and growing within our own churches and families, often tearing asunder our homes and fellowship in the process.

The disturbing changes that we are seeing are complex in their nature and causes. Certainly, evolutionary theory, radical individualism and relativism, post-modernism, the rise of humanism and of the self-actualizing and worshipping therapeutic self as the center of existence, the sexual revolution and with it the widespread availability of abortion and contraception, the decline of institutional religion, materialism and unprecedented wealth, urbanization, the break-up of rural communities, geographic mobility, globalization, and changes in the nature of the economy and work, among numerous factors, have shaped the landscape in important ways.

Though transformations of belief and practice in areas of sexual identity and practice, marriage, family, and perceptions of human personhood and reality have accelerated in recent years, especially since the Supreme Court’s infamous Obergefell decision of June 2015, they are rooted in a number of factors and dynamics such as these going back, in many cases, hundreds of years. However, as the Apostle Paul teaches us in Romans chapter 1 verses 18 through 32, ultimately it all comes down to the rejection of God in favor of various idols rooted in loving and worshipping the self and its imaginations rather than reverencing, gratefully acknowledging, and submitting to, the one true, creator God.

But I think that most of what has happened in these areas can be comprehended in terms of the separation of three created things that were designed by God to be united. These are, as I have already stressed, marriage, sex, and the procreation and rearing of children. The relationships among these are now being broken in terms of both our ideals–our values and beliefs–and in our practices.

Imagine, if you will, marriage, sex, and the procreation and rearing of children as three spheres united reciprocally as one interconnected system, in some ways similar to the Trinity. As recently as the time many of us were born and passed our childhood, every major social institution agreed that these things ought to be joined together. Where life in a fallen world, including human sin, broke them apart, we sought to restore their relationship, or make up for what was missing, to properly care for people, especially our children, and to ensure the stability and health of our society. Indeed, while anthropology shows us that there have been a variety of approaches to uniting marriage, sex, and the procreation or rearing of children across culture and time, some better than others, every successful culture has sought, in the main, to do so.

Yet in our day, we have witnessed, and are witnessing, the rapidly increasing severance of these three entities to a degree that most people even sixty or seventy years ago, including many self-identified progressives of even a couple of decades ago, would find stunning.  We are constantly seeing new ways these breakages are occurring, some of which are exceedingly extreme and even, occasionally, downright bizarre.

Over my next few blog posts, I will consider these breakages in order, starting with separating sex from the procreation of children.