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Commentary

The meaning of marriage: a lecture at Google by Tim Keller

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Disclaimer: I have reservations about Tim Keller. I consider him to be too liberal for my tastes, especially on scientific (intelligent design) and political/economic issues. However, I think he did a good job explaining marriage in the lecture below.

Here’s the the video: (H/T Reason to Stand)

Details:

Timothy Keller visits Google’s New York, NY office to discuss his book “The Meaning of Marriage.” This event took place on November 14, 2011, as part of the Authors@Google series.

Timothy J. Keller is an American author, speaker, preacher, and the founding pastor of Redeemer Presbyterian Church in New York City. He is the author of several books, including “The Reason for God: Belief in an Age of Skepticism.”

“The Meaning of Marriage” touches on topics that all readers can relate to, starting with the role of marriage in our culture, its history and the pessimism that is often associated with it. The Kellers also discuss the feelings of and acts of love, romantic relationships, gender roles, singleness, and the role of sex in a marriage.

I saw a lot of things in his lecture that echo my own views. One point where we agree is on not just looking for traits and virtues in the other person, but in seeing how they handle conflict and solve problems with you.  You have to give the other person things to do and see if they make progress and work cooperatively with you. Wes, who linked me the lecture, introduced the link by saying that this is the way that Christians should explain marriage to non-Christians. I agree, and I’ve added the book to my cart.

Here’s an article entitled “You Never Marry the Right Person“, that discusses one of the points in the lecture.

Excerpt:

In generations past, there was far less talk about “compatibility” and finding the ideal soul-mate. Today we are looking for someone who accepts us as we are and fulfills our desires, and this creates an unrealistic set of expectations that frustrates both the searchers and the searched for.

[…]The Bible explains why the quest for compatibility seems to be so impossible. As a pastor I have spoken to thousands of couples, some working on marriage-seeking, some working on marriage-sustaining and some working on marriage-saving. I’ve heard them say over and over, “Love shouldn’t be this hard, it should come naturally.” In response I always say something like: “Why believe that? Would someone who wants to play professional baseball say, ‘It shouldn’t be so hard to hit a fastball’? Would someone who wants to write the greatest American novel of her generation say, ‘It shouldn’t be hard to create believable characters and compelling narrative’?” The understandable retort is: “But this is not baseball or literature. This is love. Love should just come naturally if two people are compatible, if they are truly soul-mates. “

The Christian answer to this is that no two people are compatible. Duke University Ethics professor Stanley Hauerwas has famously made this point:

Destructive to marriage is the self-fulfillment ethic that assumes marriage and the family are primarily institutions of personal fulfillment, necessary for us to become “whole” and happy. The assumption is that there is someone just right for us to marry and that if we look closely enough we will find the right person. This moral assumption overlooks a crucial aspect to marriage. It fails to appreciate the fact that we always marry the wrong person.We never know whom we marry; we just think we do. Or even if we first marry the right person, just give it a while and he or she will change. For marriage, being [the enormous thing it is] means we are not the same person after we have entered it. The primary challenge of marriage is learning how to love and care for the stranger to whom you find yourself married.

Hauerwas gives us the first reason that no two people are compatible for marriage, namely, that marriage profoundly changes us. But there is another reason. Any two people who enter into marriage are spiritually broken by sin, which among other things means to be self-centered—living lifeincurvatus in se. As author Denis de Rougemont said, “Why should neurotic, selfish, immature people suddenly become angels when they fall in love … ?” That is why a good marriage is more painfully hard to achieve than athletic or artistic prowess. Raw, natural talent does not enable you to play baseball as a pro or write great literature without enduring discipline and enormous work. Why would it be easy to live lovingly and well with another human being in light of what is profoundly wrong within our human nature? Indeed, many people who have mastered athletics and art have failed miserably at marriage. So the biblical doctrine of sin explains why marriage—more than anything else that is good and important in this fallen world—is so painful and hard.

When you are courting, don’t worry about appearances and feelings and passion so much, because that is all subject to change over time, and those things won’t help you with the real challenges you’ll face in a marriage. Worry about whether they are the kind of person who can make commitments and love other people self-sacrificially – even if they are unlovable. In the long run, their ability to read and understand issues, to care for others and serve them, to keep promises, to be respectful and supportive, to argue respectfully and reasonably, and to solve problems constructively, will all be far more important than appearances and feelings and passion.

And let me be clear again: give them things to do that challenge them during the courtship and see how they handle being given responsibilities – giving a person hard things to do is a much better way to test a person than recreational nights out with recreational drinking, recreational dancing and recreational sex. Marriage means commitment and hard work, not recreation. And that’s what you should test for – the ability to work hard at the relationship and to keep promises and commitments and to communicate reasonably and to work through difficulties fairly.

Related posts

Polemics

Should government get out of the marriage business?

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Dina sent me three articles by Jennifer Roback Morse, post on The Public Discourse. The articles answer the charge from social liberals and libertarians that we should “get the government out of marriage”.

Here’s the first article which talks about how government will still be involved in marriage, even if we get rid of the traditional definition of marriage, because of the need for dispute resolution in private marriage contracts. She uses no-fault divorce as an example showing how it was sold as a way to get government out of the divorce business. But by making divorce easier by making it require no reason, it increased the number of disputes and the need for more government to resolve these disputes.

Here’s the second article which talks about how the government will have to expand to resolve conflicts over decisions about who counts as a parent and who gets parental rights. With traditional marriage, identifying who the parents are is easy. But with private marriage contracts where the parties are not the biological parents, there is a need for the state to step in and assign parental rights.

Here’s the third article which talks about how marriage is necessary in order to defend the needs and rights of the child at a time when they cannot enter into contracts and be parties to legal disputes.

The third article was my favorite, so here is an excerpt from it:

The fact of childhood dependence raises a whole series of questions. How do we get from a position of helpless dependence and complete self-centeredness, to a position of independence and respect for others? Are our views of the child somehow related to the foundations of a free society? And, to ask a question that may sound like heresy to libertarian ears: Do the needs of children place legitimate demands and limitations on the behavior of adults?

I came to the conclusion that a free society needs adults who can control themselves, and who have consciences. A free society needs people who can use their freedom, without bothering other people too much. We need to respect the rights of others, keep our promises, and restrain ourselves from taking advantage of others.

We learn to do these things inside the family, by being in a relationship with our parents. We can see this by looking at attachment- disordered children and failure-to-thrive children from orphanages and foster care. These children have their material needs met, for food, clothing, and medical care. But they are not held, or loved, or looked at. They simply do not develop properly, without mothers and fathers taking personal care of them. Some of them never develop consciences. But a child without a conscience becomes a real problem: this is exactly the type of child who does whatever he can get away with. A free society can’t handle very many people like that, and still function.

In other words I asked, “Do the needs of society place constraints on how we treat children?” But even this analysis still views the child from society’s perspective. It is about time we look at it from the child’s point of view, and ask a different kind of question. What is owed to the child?

Children are entitled to a relationship with both of their parents. They are entitled to know who they are and where they came from. Therefore children have a legitimate interest in the stability of their parents’ union, since that is ordinarily how kids have relationships with both parents. If Mom and Dad are quarreling, or if they live on opposite sides of the country, the child’s connection with one or both of them is seriously impaired.

But children cannot defend their rights themselves. Nor is it adequate to intervene after the fact, after harm already has been done. Children’s relational and identity rights must be protected proactively.

Marriage is society’s institutional structure for protecting these legitimate rights and interests of children.

I recommend taking a look at all three articles and becoming familiar with the arguments in case you have to explain why marriage matters and why we should not change it. I think it is important to read these articles and to be clear that to be a libertarian doctrine does not protect the right of a child to have a relationship with both his or her parents.  Nor does libertarianism promote the idea that parents ought to stick together for their children.

The purpose of marriage is to make adults make careful commitments, and restrain their desires and feelings, so that children will have a stable environment with their biological parents. We do make exceptions, but we should not celebrate exceptions and we should not subsidize exceptions. It’s not fair to children to have to grow up without a mother or father just so that they adults can make poor, emotional decisions and have fun.

News

“Problem families” cost British taxpayers £9 billion per year

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From the UK Telegraph. (H/T Dina)

Excerpt:

The majority of Britain’s “problem families”, some of whom are blamed for last summer’s riots, are fatherless, official research has found.

About 72,000 of the most troubled families, 60 per cent of those being targeted by the Government, are headed by a single mother. The rate is about triple the national average.

An official review into the causes of last summer’s riots is expected to highlight the lack of “male role models” for many of the youths arrested in the wake of the widespread disturbances.

The riot panel, set up to investigate the problem, is thought to have become frustrated that few details of the family backgrounds of problem children have previously been recorded, despite it being such an important influence on their behaviour.

The issue has now quickly risen up the Prime Minister’s agenda and Downing Street aides believe that family breakdown is one of the most urgent problems facing Britain.

Last night, Eric Pickles, the Communities and Local Government Secretary, said: “These troubled families are in total breakdown.

“The absence of a positive father figure is a huge problem and often the fathers who are present have severe drug and alcohol addictions and are not working.

“Clearly we want to work towards a situation where the fathers in these families provide stability, which means getting them back to work, so they can bring in money and be a positive role model to their children.”

It is understood that another “problem” identified among the troubled families is the large number of children. About 20 per cent of the 120,000 families have at least five children, which can lead to a lack of parental attention.

That’s about $15 billion U.S. dollars per year. The cost of family breakdown in the United States is $112 billion per year, and rising as the illegitimacy rate rises.

Reconstructing marriage

We need to stop the destruction of marriage to stop these runaway costs.

One of the ways to do that is to encourage men to marry. But the problem is that men without fathers in the home will not be as likely to marry, since they have never seen the way that a man operates in a marriage – as a protector, provider and moral/spiritual leader. Men need to see an example of mature, married love that is different from lust – an example of steady self-sacrificial service. The more we subsidize the destruction of marriage, the fewer younger men will understand what marriage really requires of men at the experiential level.

But there is another problem. Where does this money for social programs come from? It comes from businesses and taxpayers. In particular, a lot of it comes from working men and their employers. When business taxes and income taxes go up to pay for this problem, it is much harder for men to bear the financial costs of marriage.

Young women, take note: if you do not do your part to fight against divorce and unwed motherhood, then you cannot complain that men are not marrying. To get men to marry, society has to have in place a framework of laws, policies and economic incentives that make marriage natural and inviting to men. Taxing employers and incomes is not the right way to encourage men to marry. If we want men to be providers and to take responsibility for families, then we need to encourage them and make it easier for them to do those things.

Christians ought to care

Christians have an extra reason to be opposed to divorce and unwed motherhood – Christianity is “appropriated” by children most when there is a father in the home who is engaged as moral and spiritual leader. That means when the mother lets the father lead on moral and spiritual issues.

Excerpt:

In 1994 the Swiss carried out an extra survey that the researchers for our masters in Europe (I write from England) were happy to record. The question was asked to determine whether a person’s religion carried through to the next generation, and if so, why, or if not, why not. The result is dynamite. There is one critical factor. It is overwhelming, and it is this: It is the religious practice of the father of the family that, above all, determines the future attendance at or absence from church of the children.

If both father and mother attend regularly, 33 percent of their children will end up as regular churchgoers, and 41 percent will end up attending irregularly. Only a quarter of their children will end up not practicing at all. If the father is irregular and mother regular, only 3 percent of the children will subsequently become regulars themselves, while a further 59 percent will become irregulars. Thirty-eight percent will be lost.

If the father is non-practicing and mother regular, only 2 percent of children will become regular worshippers, and 37 percent will attend irregularly. Over 60 percent of their children will be lost completely to the church.

Let us look at the figures the other way round. What happens if the father is regular but the mother irregular or non-practicing? Extraordinarily, the percentage of children becoming regular goesupfrom 33 percent to 38 percent with the irregular mother and to 44 percent with the non-practicing, as if loyalty to father’s commitment grows in proportion to mother’s laxity, indifference, or hostility.

Women who are serious about serving God with their marriages should therefore get very comfortable with the idea with having a man in the home who will lead on moral and spiritual issues. I recommend that women prepare themselves by studying things like Christian apologetics, politics, economics, etc. so that they are able to test men on their knowledge of these things. There is simply no other way to know if a man can lead on moral and spiritual issues. The woman must study these things, and the woman must detect and select men who can lead. She must have enough of a developed, integrated Christian worldview in order to test his worldview. This is especially important if her own father does not have a well-developed worldview, since she will have to do more of the testing herself.

Christian women need to become comfortable with men who are solid on moral issues, especially when they can be persuasive using reason and evidence when articulating their views. Christian women need to become comfortable with men who are solid on exclusive truth claims, especially when they can be persuasive using reason and evidence when articulating their views. And the best way to get comfortable with men being bold and assertive on moral questions and truth questions is for women to study these things themselves.

Just as an example, I know a Christian woman who a year ago who was not using the standard arguments for God’s existence from physics. She sent me some pictures of her bookshelves and they are literally filled with apologetics books. She sent me a snippet of a conversation she is in with an atheist scientist and she is pounding him with peer-reviewed articles from science journals showing how the progress of science supports theism. Women need to be like that so that they are capable of recognizing and preferring men who will lead.

What church leaders don’t seem to get is that a man’s ability to lead on moral and spiritual issues is not strong enough if it is merely based on his “”faith” opinions. Moral and spiritual leadership is stronger when it’s grounded by studying the data and becoming familiar with the evidence pro and con. There is no shortcut to being a moral and spiritual leader through Bible reading, singing and praying. More is required. And more is required of women who expect to be able to be comfortable with such a man. Women need to study these things themselves, like my friend, so that they are able to recognize and prefer men who have those required skills.

To encourage marriage, we have to be practical. We have to think about dollars and cents. We have to think about incentives. We have to put ourselves in the place of men and ask ourselves: what does it take to make you commit? What are your needs? What are your fears? It’s not going to work to just order men around and spout slogans like “man up”. It’s a problem and it needs a rigorous engineering/economics approach to solve. We need leaders who think about problems as engineers and economists, not as charismatic speakers.