Christianity magazine and Mark Greene
Captain Sensible writes: I have a lot of respect for Mark Greene of the London Institute of Contemporary Christianity (LICC). Writing in the May issue of Christianity magazine, Mark treads on very controversial ground. He appears to be extolling the virtues of marriage and makes some excellent points, including an analysis of what marriage is for.
Here are a few extracts:
"The number of Britons choosing to marry has fallen to the lowest level in 111 years. Given that the number of people living in the UK 111 years ago was rather lower than the number of people Ken Livingston crams into a Jubilee Line tube at 8.35 in the morning, this is a remarkable statistic. And an alarming one, if you think that marriage is one of the building blocks of a healthy society.
"Eve is not just created to relieve Adam of existential loneliness. After all, Adam has direct relationship with God at the time and if God had merely wanted Adam to have relationship he could have created another male.
"When God says, 'it's not good for man to be alone', the context is vital. And the context is humankind's crucial role in the stewardship of the entire world and the creation of a community where human beings can flourish. The Garden in Eden is certainly beautiful but it's a context for work, not just the leisurely contemplation of the chrysanthemums. Human beings are responsible to God and have a responsibility for the whole created order. Relationship, then, is set in the context of a purposeful commission.
"And so it is that God brings Eve to Adam as an 'ezer cenegdo'...The Hebrew word 'ezer', meaning helper, however is not primarily used to describe psychological support but intervention in the active solving of a problem. Furthermore, this is not 'helper' in the contemporary English sense of someone who is essentially a subordinate and whose skills or effort might be nice to have but aren't necessary...No, the word 'ezer' in the Bible only elsewhere refers to God and most of the occasions when it is used...involve God saving human beings from impending disaster. The task cannot be achieved without him. The implication is that Adam's commission cannot be fulfilled without Eve -- it's a co-mission."
Greene goes on to illustrate that marriage is designed by God to "make the world a better place for human beings to flourish in", in addition to combating loneliness and procreating.
But then, in the penultimate paragraph, comes the killer line that renders all of his previous words null and void:
"Of course, single people can do the same, and do, as they participate in the same high calling to make the world a better place for others."
There is is then.
No need after all to worry about fewer marriages taking place now than 111 years ago! No need to view a spouse as an essential component in our co-mission to make the world a better place! No need, in fact, for the entire three page article!
Marriage is not important after all, apparently. Mark should apologise to his readers for wasting their time!
What is it with the church that they dare not, and will not, say outright that it is good for singles to pursue marriage? Is it a misguided attempt to be affirming and not offend single people? Or is it because they know that with the lack of men in our churches (and kudos to the LICC for holding an excellent debate entitled "Church is for Girls!" last night), they would have a lot of angry women on their hands, demanding that we take outreach to men more seriously?
Now isn't that a thought....
Here are a few extracts:
"The number of Britons choosing to marry has fallen to the lowest level in 111 years. Given that the number of people living in the UK 111 years ago was rather lower than the number of people Ken Livingston crams into a Jubilee Line tube at 8.35 in the morning, this is a remarkable statistic. And an alarming one, if you think that marriage is one of the building blocks of a healthy society.
"Eve is not just created to relieve Adam of existential loneliness. After all, Adam has direct relationship with God at the time and if God had merely wanted Adam to have relationship he could have created another male.
"When God says, 'it's not good for man to be alone', the context is vital. And the context is humankind's crucial role in the stewardship of the entire world and the creation of a community where human beings can flourish. The Garden in Eden is certainly beautiful but it's a context for work, not just the leisurely contemplation of the chrysanthemums. Human beings are responsible to God and have a responsibility for the whole created order. Relationship, then, is set in the context of a purposeful commission.
"And so it is that God brings Eve to Adam as an 'ezer cenegdo'...The Hebrew word 'ezer', meaning helper, however is not primarily used to describe psychological support but intervention in the active solving of a problem. Furthermore, this is not 'helper' in the contemporary English sense of someone who is essentially a subordinate and whose skills or effort might be nice to have but aren't necessary...No, the word 'ezer' in the Bible only elsewhere refers to God and most of the occasions when it is used...involve God saving human beings from impending disaster. The task cannot be achieved without him. The implication is that Adam's commission cannot be fulfilled without Eve -- it's a co-mission."
Greene goes on to illustrate that marriage is designed by God to "make the world a better place for human beings to flourish in", in addition to combating loneliness and procreating.
But then, in the penultimate paragraph, comes the killer line that renders all of his previous words null and void:
"Of course, single people can do the same, and do, as they participate in the same high calling to make the world a better place for others."
There is is then.
No need after all to worry about fewer marriages taking place now than 111 years ago! No need to view a spouse as an essential component in our co-mission to make the world a better place! No need, in fact, for the entire three page article!
Marriage is not important after all, apparently. Mark should apologise to his readers for wasting their time!
What is it with the church that they dare not, and will not, say outright that it is good for singles to pursue marriage? Is it a misguided attempt to be affirming and not offend single people? Or is it because they know that with the lack of men in our churches (and kudos to the LICC for holding an excellent debate entitled "Church is for Girls!" last night), they would have a lot of angry women on their hands, demanding that we take outreach to men more seriously?
Now isn't that a thought....
posted by Captain Sensible at 9:53 AM
5 Comments:
i'm glad you wrote another post on this blog because i thought you were sort of putting an end to the blogosphere; i hope you don't but if you do decide to do that please, please leave the blog up for readers.
as far as i am concerned, this blog and debbie maken's blog are a godsend compared to the whitewashed drivel i've seen on other christian sites regarding singleness.
ok now to the topic.
even though mark greene's comment on singleness didn't irk me the exact same way john piper's comments did, it doesn't mean that it didn't bother me. who knows whether the motives behind the author's comments were the same. if all we know, they could very well have been.
it seems as if the devil doesn't necessarily want to eliminate the human race but his primary target is christians. if you take a look at the parable of the weeds, it says that a man sowed "good seed" in his field that yielded grain) but his enemy came (while the man was sleeping) and sowed weeds next to it (presumably to destroy the wheat that had grown).
the enemy somehow is trying to sow these proverbial weeds into the christian population to destroy them and disable the christian population from growing fruitfully and yielding plentiful harvest. and what better way to plant those weeds, than by discouraging proactive approaches to singleness and extolling the so-called gift of singleness to people who are emotionally famished with loneliness and sexual frustration. i can just see this now. some of jesus' parables can unforunately drift away from my mind (simply because of their depth; that is why i find myself re-reading the gospels for the 3rd time now) but i think that the parable of the weeds is one that may not leave my head indefinitely.
the anti-marriage (and implicitly, anti-family - because without marriage, we cannot have family) vibe i am getting from this is eerily similar to the communist/socialist philosophy of dissolving the nuclear family. the church and communism are supposed to be enemies but it seems as though they have joined forces. and it seems as if too few people are realizing this.
my "friend" that i have is married and she is my age (27). she had told me how it was nothing short of agonizing being single. i do not think that she has ever told me once that she was completely content with it. yet i have expressed my agony over being single too, and while she is compassionate at times, i get the standard whitewashed answer that you cringe at the thought of seeing: how i need to learn to be content as a single, that i can serve God better as a single, that only when i devote myself 100% to God will i be happy being single, that marriage is a desire, not a need, etc. (i almost want to start an argument with her - saying that if she feels that way, then dump her pathetic husband and go back to being a spinster)
she would like me to eventually attend her church but if she is getting any of these ideas from her church, i want to run for the hills.
i don't need to repeat the idea that the closer i get to God, the more painful my desire for marriage is. it's bound to happen. any attempts to tell me that my desires for marriage will be quelled if i fill myself up with God are simply not going to work. the closer i get to God, the worse my desire for marriage will be; because God created marriage for the overwhelming majority of the human race for which even the SLIGHTEST amount of sexual desire can pose a problem down the line. any one of these whitewashed christians our day can tell me that i don't have a proper relationship with God and that is causing my frustration. it is actually BECAUSE of my strong relationship with God that i am feeling these things.
the worst thing is that i feel i am going to run into a lot more people like my "friend" if i were to express my desires for marriage.
Very insightful comment, Shazia, thank you for posting it.
Shazia, I like your comments, too.
I especially share your frustrations concerning friends who go from being discontent singles to platitude-spouting marrieds. In my experience, it usually begins to happen as soon as they get engaged, and my non-Christian friends are just as guilty as my Christian ones. Both inside and outside the Church, marriage seems to be very achievement- and works-oriented, and married people often (but not always, I realize) tend to feel they are on a moral plane that is higher than that of singles. I want more than anything to be married, but I am praying that I will never treat singles in manner that isn't compassionate, that I won't ever forget how hard it can be.
You've hit a really important nail on the head with this post, Captain. I believe that a large part of the problem concerning the way the church addresses singleness (and many other issues) is the offend vs. affirm dilemma.
Whereas a great number of churches (particularly in the fundamentalist arenas) have no compunctions going where angels dare not tread in offending the entire known universe in regards to contraversial topics OUTSIDE the church ranks, when it comes to speaking to members of the actual body WITHIN the pew, the church leaders fumble with the megaphones and suddenly become highly ambivalent about the Word of God.
And it's not that presenting the truth in love is a bad thing, and I think this Mark Greene's is a clumsy attempt not to exclude the singles. But we are excluded. We know we are. It's a natural thing. No matter how many singles' groups there are, how many Sunday School classes, how many Bible studies, how many cook-outs, luncheons, mixers, and get-togethers, Christian singles tend to find themselves, as a group, on the margins. That's just how it is.
Because there aren't supposed to be so many of us. The church IS a family-focused entity, that's part of its nature, and it's a generally observed truth that married couples have a much easier time establishing themselves in a church than singles do. It's not that married people are mean, but it's harder for singles to chisel a singular little niche. The only ones who can are rather like the Apostle Paul, who can really dedicate their entire lives to the church service, and not, as Debbie Maken notes, the singles like most of us who are breaking our backs trying to break even and having just enough time to spare running the church daycare on Sundays, which is hardly full-time service to God.
So, thanks, Mark, but that little one-sentence pacifier doesn't really help much. The ostracization is there no matter how you round off your articles, which are actually ENCOURAGING to the single folk reading them and saying YES! Marriage is GOOD! I SHOULD want it!
The problem, of course, is that the church (particularly the Protestant church) has taken no solid stance on marriage, and as a result there's so much hem-hawing you can barely shave it away to get at the truth underneath, and it's all done out of this mistaken idea of "speaking the truth in love," and not offending the people who aren't toeing the line, when really there's all this misdirected wrongdoing in the name of not living according to Scripture. But Paul did it much better. Take 1 Corinthians 6:9-11, where Paul states, baldly, that all sorts of sinners will not enter the kingdom of heaven. He doesn't soften his punches. And then he concludes, "And such WERE SOME OF YOU. BUT YOU HAVE BEEN WASHED, you have been cleansed," etc., (emphasis mine), and goes on to reaffirm their salvation and justification in Christ.
So some people sitting in the congregation are divorced. So some people have had abortions. So some were drug addicts, prostitutes, murderers, thieves, embezzlers, liars, alcoholics, etc. Right. We're all sinners. Check. That's where grace comes in. Our past is covered. But the leaders of the church had better not be softening the message for Christians CONSIDERING divorce, considering abortion, considering embezzlement, considering adultery, etc. Where's the strength and authority? Where's the fire? Not the fire and brimstone -- I hate those messages -- but the passion, the power, that runs all through the Bible?
What really alarms me is that it's vanishing from church leaders' mouths in more respects than singleness. It seems that it's coming to the point where preachers, teachers, reverends, priests, ministers and pastors everywhere are getting mumbly when it comes to living according to the truth in a lot of basic ways because they don't want to OFFEND anyone in the congregation, because they want to AFFIRM them instead.
And, just like in school, when the work is too easy and the teachers have no authority and the kids get bored and start vandalizing the desks and tormenting each other, the people stop paying attention and get destructive, because no one makes them listen.
It's not that bad everywhere. But it's not great everywhere either. I wish the church would stand up straight and tell the people to get in line. And marriage is definitely one of those things which needs direct support from church leaders.
Wonder if Mark Greene's editor made him stick in that last line?
Preach it Sarah!
You would be suprised how many things editors try to make you put in to make it "softer" or "more pallatable" or "accessible." Greene probably did not realize how those last three lines negated and undermined his original thesis-- that the rate of marriages were at an all time low and spelled the eventual death of a culture if trends continued.
Debbie Maken
Post a Comment
<< Home