Tag Archives: Bible

Commentary

Is cohabitation a better way to prepare for marriage compared than courting?

8 Comments

Matt from Well Spent Journey sent me this assessment of cohabitation from the liberal New York Times.

Excerpt:

AT 32, one of my clients (I’ll call her Jennifer) had a lavish wine-country wedding. By then, Jennifer and her boyfriend had lived together for more than four years. The event was attended by the couple’s friends, families and two dogs.

When Jennifer started therapy with me less than a year later, she was looking for a divorce lawyer. “I spent more time planning my wedding than I spent happily married,” she sobbed. Most disheartening to Jennifer was that she’d tried to do everything right. “My parents got married young so, of course, they got divorced. We lived together! How did this happen?”

Cohabitation in the United States has increased by more than 1,500 percent in the past half century. In 1960, about 450,000 unmarried couples lived together. Now the number is more than 7.5 million. The majority of young adults in their 20s will live with a romantic partner at least once, and more than half of all marriages will be preceded by cohabitation. This shift has been attributed to the sexual revolution and the availability of birth control, and in our current economy, sharing the bills makes cohabiting appealing. But when you talk to people in their 20s, you also hear about something else: cohabitation as prophylaxis.

In a nationwide survey conducted in 2001 by the National Marriage Project, then at Rutgers and now at the University of Virginia, nearly half of 20-somethings agreed with the statement, “You would only marry someone if he or she agreed to live together with you first, so that you could find out whether you really get along.” About two-thirds said they believed that moving in together before marriage was a good way to avoid divorce.

That’s a nice idea – wanting protection against divorce. If you asked me, I would tell you that courting is protection against a bad marriage. And the aim of courting is to interrogate and stress the other person so that you can see whether they understand the demands of the marriage and their duties to their spouse and children. In particular, men should investigate whether the woman has prepared to perform her roles as wife and mother, and women should investigate whether the man has prepared to perform his roles as protector, provider and moral/spiritual leader. Courting is not fun. It is not meant to make people feel happy. And this is because you cannot translate fun and happy into marriage, because marriage is about well-defined roles, self-sacrifice and commitment. Marriage is about following through for the other person, whether you get what you want or not.

Cohabitation is particularly stupid because what it says is that sex is not to be confined to marriage, but it is instead for recreational purposes outside of marriage. If men and women cannot demonstrate that they are capable of self-control prior to marrying by functioning in a relationship based on commitment and not based on pleasure, then they are not qualified for marriage. And that’s why cohabitation is associated with higher risks of divorce – because thinking that relationships are recreational is inconsistent with a life-long self-sacrificial commitment. Research has shown that pre-marital chastity produces more stable and higher quality marriages. And that’s because chastity helps people to focus on conversations and obligations instead of recreational sex which clouds the judgment and glosses over the seriousness of marriage.

Now look, the key to the difference between courtship and cohabitation is right in the article. You guys know about my evil ten questions to scare fake Christian women away ten questions to test Christian women for marriage, right? Those questions are designed to weed out women who are not interested in marriage as a commitment to serve God, regardless of whether it makes them happy or not. By making the woman work to prove herself in the courtship, the man is able to lead her to see that marriage is not some fairy tale of bliss where she will get her own way all the time. Those ten questions, if acted on by the woman, will clearly drive into her mind the idea that marriage is about her caring about her husband and children as a way of serving God. This sort of deliberate questioning is a reality check to women who think that peer-approval of the boyfriend and great sex and happy feelings and a big expensive wedding are all predictors of marital stability. That’s a popular delusion that is unsupported by research.

More:

Couples who cohabit before marriage (and especially before an engagement or an otherwise clear commitment) tend to be less satisfied with their marriages — and more likely to divorce — than couples who do not. These negative outcomes are called the cohabitation effect.

Researchers originally attributed the cohabitation effect to selection, or the idea that cohabitors were less conventional about marriage and thus more open to divorce. As cohabitation has become a norm, however, studies have shown that the effect is not entirely explained by individual characteristics like religion, education or politics. Research suggests that at least some of the risks may lie in cohabitation itself.

As Jennifer and I worked to answer her question, “How did this happen?” we talked about how she and her boyfriend went from dating to cohabiting. Her response was consistent with studies reporting that most couples say it “just happened.”

“We were sleeping over at each other’s places all the time,” she said. “We liked to be together, so it was cheaper and more convenient. It was a quick decision but if it didn’t work out there was a quick exit.”

She was talking about what researchers call “sliding, not deciding.” Moving from dating to sleeping over to sleeping over a lot to cohabitation can be a gradual slope, one not marked by rings or ceremonies or sometimes even a conversation. Couples bypass talking about why they want to live together and what it will mean.

The problem with young people today is that they want marriage as “a blissful state where I will get whatever I want without having to do anything, and where I am free from the consequences of my own selfishness”.  They don’t want marriage as commitment, moral obligations, serving others and self-sacrifice. By avoiding conversations about who will do what, and what needs doing, they can fool themselves by thinking that happy sex and happy drinking and happy dancing will naturally turn into happy marriage. As if marriage is just an extension of drinking, friends and dancing, and nothing more. I once asked a woman to give me her vision of marriage and she literally said that it would be having her friends over to drink wine and dance around. They want happiness, they think marriage is a path to happiness, and that cohabitation will lead to marriage without the nasty work of having to answer questions and perform duties during a formal courtship. They don’t want the work. They don’t want the questions. They don’t want the obligations. They don’t want the self-sacrifice.

And that’s why I encourage men to very gently and subtly guide the relationship in a way that will allow the woman to demonstrate her seriousness about marriage as marriage – the real marriage of self-sacrifice and commitment and serving God – instead of letting the relationship be about avoiding difficult conversations and just drifting from fun to happy and back again.  Marriage is a job, and you need to be prepared to hold up your end of it, and to make sure that your partner is able to hold up their end.

News

Lay Christians less likely than pastors to hold to exclusive salvation

3 Comments

J Warner Wallace of Please Convince Me tweeted this alarming news on Friday.

Excerpt:

Nearly eight in 10 Protestant pastors strongly disagree that eternal life can be obtained through religions other than Christianity in a new survey.

The survey, conducted by LifeWay Research, of 1,000 Protestant pastors asked respondents for their reaction to the statement, “If a person is sincerely seeking God, he/she can obtain eternal life through religions other than Christianity.” A full 77 percent of pastors strongly disagreed while 7 percent somewhat disagreed. Another 7 percent somewhat agreed, 5 percent strongly agreed and 3 percent were not sure.

[…]Pastors’ beliefs regarding the exclusivity of Christianity differ from those of their parishioners, according to a new study conducted for the upcoming book “Transformational Discipleship” by Eric Geiger, Michael Kelly and Philip Nation. When presented with the same statement, just 48 percent of adults who attend a Protestant church once a month or more disagreed strongly and 9 percent disagreed somewhat. A total of 26 percent agreed, including 13 percent who agreed strongly and 13 percent who agreed somewhat. Sixteen percent indicated that they neither agreed nor disagreed.

“One fact is clear: pastors are less universalistic than their church members,” Stetzer said. “A few heads nodding or an occasional ‘Amen’ does not indicate everyone believes Christianity is the only way. Church leaders will never know where their congregation stands unless they ask.”

According to the survey of pastors, those in large cities are more likely to believe that other religions lead to eternal life than their counterparts in other settings. Eleven percent of pastors in large cities strongly agreed. In comparison, 4 percent of pastors in small cities, 4 percent in the suburbs and 3 percent in rural areas feel the same.

Pastors identifying themselves as evangelical are less universalistic than those self-identifying as mainline. Compared with mainline pastors, evangelicals are:

  • Less likely to strongly agree that other religions can lead to eternal life (evangelical pastors, 2 percent; mainline pastors, 11 percent).
  • More likely to strongly disagree (85 percent to 57 percent).

I’ve written about how people who do not think that Christianity is true are more likely to think that religion is really about happy feelings, community and being a good person, especially when confronted by nice people doing nice things in other religions. The further a person gets from truth and apologetics, the more likely their theology is going to degrade into people-pleasing. That’s why apologetics is so important.

It’s much easier to say to a person “you are not saved” when you know enough to ask them “did the universe have a beginning?” and “was Jesus crucified?”. When they answer no to both questions, you take the religion question out of the realm of community, happiness and good deeds, and put it in the realm of truth. It is much easier to see why God would separate away from someone who doesn’t care enough about HIM (not other people, but HIM) that they would spend the time to study cosmology and history, etc. in order to form true beliefs.

As an evangelical Christian, it’s easy for me to believe that non-Christians will not be saved. I ask them questions, I find that they have beliefs that are obviously false. Then, when I propose that they do some studying, they tell me they won’t because religion is about being happy and being liked by your family and friends. When you understand salvation as being about truth, it’s very easy to understand why refusing to study religion to see what is and isn’t true isn’t just another flavor of ice cream – it’s sinful. It’s rebelling against God. It’s telling God “I don’t value you enough to know if you are really there and what you are really like”. And God isn’t obligated to spend eternity with people who don’t want him and who don’t want to know him.

People like Rob Bell and Brian Maclaren and Dan Barker start their drift away from orthodoxy by caring more about the people around them than the Person above them. A relationship with God is not the same as happy feelings and popularity. A relationship with God is work and being unpopular. That’s everywhere in the Bible, too. Followers of Judaism and Christianity are always taking the heat for sticking up for God. Nobody likes them except God. They perform for an audience of One, and they don’t care whether anyone approves or not. We need to get that back in the church. We need to get apologetics back in the church. Nobody feels guilty about telling someone who thinks that eating chocolate will prevent cavities. That’s what evangelism is – you tell the truth, graciously. If people get offended, that’s no reason to change your message.

I wrote a post before showing how to falsify a religion using science or history. We need to be comfortable doing that.

Polemics

Who are you to judge? Answering the challenge of moral relativism

3 Comments

Brett Kunkle explains. (H/T Apologetics 315)

Excerpt:

So how should Christians think about judging?  First, we must ask what one means by “judge.”  The dictionary distinguishes several definitions.  To judge can mean to pass legal judgment, like a judge sentencing a criminal at the conclusion of a courtroom trial.  Nothing wrong with this kind of judging.

To judge can also mean to form an opinion or conclusion about someone or something.  These are assessments or evaluations.  A coach judges the skill level of a player trying to make the team.  A mom judges the nutritional value of food she serves her family.  A plumber judges a clogged sink to fix it.  Such judgments or assessments are made all the time, everyday.  Again, nothing wrong with this kind of judging.

But Jesus definitely suggests some sort of judging is wrong, so what was He talking about?  Well, if you really want to know, never read a Bible verse.  To determine the meaning of a single verse, you must read the surrounding verses.  Context is king.  When we look at the rest of Matthew 7, we actually discover Jesus doing the very thing most Christians think He has forbidden.

In verse 6, He warns, “Do not give what is holy to dogs, and do not throw your pearls before swine…”  He calls out “false prophets” (v. 15) and says there will come a day when he will say to some, “depart from me, you who practice lawlessness” (v. 23).  Ouch, those are harsh moral judgments.  So clearly, not all judging is out-of-bounds for Jesus.

The context makes clear Jesus is after a particular kind of judgment:

For in the way you judge, you will be judged; and by your standard of measure, it will be measured to you.  Why do you look at the speck that is in your brother’s eye, but do not notice the log that is in your own eye?  Or how can you say to your brother, “Let me take the speck out of your eye,” and behold, the log is in your own eye?  You hypocrite, first take the log out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to take the speck out of your brother’s eye (vv. 2-5).

When Jesus warns “do not judge,” He doesn’t mean we should never assess moral behavior.  Rather, he warns against self-righteous and hypocritical judgments.  When you judge, take the log out of your own eye first.  This is something we Christians need to work on.  But notice that Jesus is not saying it is never right to judge, He is explaining how we are to judge rightly.

Now I don’t see why everyone seems to be so proud of not judging these days. I love to make moral judgments. My moral judgments aren’t arbitrary. I’m not trying to force anyone to agree with me if they don’t want to. But I do like to set out moral boundaries and then explain with evidence why those boundaries are there. And those boundaries are not arbitrary, they are there to protect myself and others from harm. It’s wrong to tell people that it’s fine for them to do whatever they want in order to feel “happy”. It is often in the pursuit of happiness that people break the rules and then cause the most harm to themselves and others.