Tag Archives: marriage

Jesus Wasn’t “Family Values”

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The iconic Cleaver family

I am what they call a “family man,” committed to my wife and children. I love my wife, I love my family. I love families. Nothing brings a smile to my face quite like watching families (especially young families) just being a family together—except for being with my own family being a family together.

What’s more, my thoughts and feelings about the significance of marriage relationships and the importance of families are grounded firmly in my understanding and experience of Christian Scripture and the way of Jesus. Devoted faithfulness, holy love, persevering hope—marriage and family can give powerful witness to these and other core Christian virtues.

Nevertheless, none of that keeps me from acknowledging a few difficult realities.

For example, the Genesis creation stories are not as clear cut on marriage and family matters as we might like. Yes, these stories highlight how marriage relationships can fulfill the human need for biological procreation, how they can satisfy our innate need for human companionship, and how a marriage forms a new kinship group within society. These stories also underscore the inherent equality of “male and female” before God, sharing the dignity and responsibility of all humankind “in God’s image.”

However, there’s the fascinating fact that in the first creation story adam is said to include both “male and female” (Gen 1:27; see also 5:2), and the intriguing possibility that the second creation story is describing the creation of a non-gender-specified adam who is only gender-specified once the second human is built from the first (that’s when ish, “man,” and ishah, “woman,” are explicitly mentioned). I know, weird, eh?

And then there are all the ways even the “sure teachings” I’ve highlighted above fray at the edges as soon as you stretch them a little. These stories can’t be teaching that only procreative marriages are valid—what about couples unable to conceive? They can’t mean that marriage is the only way our innate need for companionship can be fulfilled—what about celibate singles? They can’t require that “male and female” be some absolute binary—what about intersex persons? Childless couples, celibate singles, “eunuchs from birth”—these were all known in the ancient world.

Or, for example, “biblical marriage” and the “biblical family” were not what we think of when we hear those phrases. We can tend to think of “marriage” as a relationship built around the love of two people for one another, and “family” as a nuclear family of one father, one mother, and their biological children.

However, most of the biblical depictions of marriage either assume or describe an adult man marrying a post-pubescent girl as arranged by the man or his father with the girl’s father, in large part to provide some economic or other pragmatic advantage for these men. We’re not talking Christian romance novels here.

Not the iconic Cleaver family

And most of the biblical depictions of family think of it more in terms of “household”: not just dad and mom and kids, but maybe also grandma, maybe a single uncle or aunt, maybe orphaned cousins, and, if dad were wealthy enough, maybe a few slaves and their kids (and in Old Testament days, maybe an additional mom, or concubine, or two or three, why not—and their kids). No, this isn’t “Leave It to Beaver.”

And then we get to Jesus, who was more disruptive than supportive of “traditional marriage” and “family values.” Sure, Jesus sides with the stricter interpretation of Jewish Law in his day when it comes to divorce and remarriage. And yes, Jesus speaks out not just against adultery but even against men lusting after a woman who is not their wife.

However, Jesus’ “No divorce except in adultery—and no remarriage!” was geared at least in part to protect women in a strongly patriarchal culture from being abandoned by men without provision for their welfare. And his “No lust!” put the onus on men to control their sexual desires—not women to restrict their dress or their actions. This is patriarchy put on notice.

Then there is a lengthy list of other things Jesus was and said and did that are often ignored in discussions of “Jesus and marriage/family.” In a marriage-dominated culture, Jesus was single and celibate. He encouraged others to be single and celibate instead of getting married—if they could hack it. As a single man he caused tongues to wag because of his close relationships with women. When his mom and siblings came to visit, he feigned indifference, saying his faithful disciples were his true mothers and brothers and sisters. Then there’s that bit about “hating your father and mother and wife and children” to follow Jesus. And that other bit about “follow me, and let the dead bury their own dead”—to the disciple who wanted to bury his father first.

Topping all this off is Jesus’ uncomfortable conviction that people will “neither marry nor be given in marriage” in the resurrection age. Echoes of Genesis, with its potentially androgynous original Adam? Maybe, but at the very least it’s patriarchy overturned—“marrying” was the dominant male role, “being given in marriage” the submissive female, and Levirate marriage (which the Sadducees were referencing) was all about keeping the male line going. No marriage = no male-dominated society.

No, Jesus wasn’t “family values.” He was “kingdom values,” centred not on kith and kin but on kingdom—God’s kingdom, God’s vision of justice and peace and flourishing life for all, not just families and the tribes that emerge from them.

Also not the iconic Cleaver family

The Apostle Paul doesn’t teach any differently. In fact, he’s right in line with Jesus if you focus on the letters most scholars believe Paul directly authorized. Paul, too, was single, and he viewed singleness as preferable to marriage. He frequently referred to God as “Father” and fellow believers as his “brothers and sisters,” while leaving no unambiguous reference to his own biological family. His teaching on divorce and remarriage is an extension of Jesus’, including the anti-patriarchal overtones.

Even Jesus’ idea that there will be no marrying or being given in marriage in the resurrection is there in Paul—that’s the essence of Galatians 3:28. In this passage Paul apparently quotes Genesis 1’s “male and female” when he says, “there is…no longer ‘male and female,’ for all of you are one in Christ Jesus.” The resurrection age has arrived with the resurrected Christ, so now “in Christ” conventional—and even, it seems, creational—gender distinctions are irrelevant.

These radical ideas carried on into the early centuries of the church. For most early Christians, celibacy remained the ideal (even if they didn’t attain it themselves) and the church was God’s true family. For some, distinctive gender roles, at least within the church, were a relic of a bygone era. A few Jesus-followers even connected Jesus and Paul on this, passing around a saying of Jesus that “the kingdom of God would come” when “there is neither male nor female.”

However, not everyone could handle this. The Roman Empire certainly couldn’t—they, not the Christians, were the original guardians of “traditional family values.” These Christian teachings on marriage and family were seen by the powers-that-be as potentially subversive, even destabilizing for society (sound familiar?).

This led some early Christians to reassure their lords and neighbours that Christians were indeed pro-marriage, pro-familia. That’s the motivation for the so-called “household codes” in the New Testament, those passages that instruct wives, children, and slaves on how they were to relate to the pater familias, the patriarch of the proper Roman household. Yet even these capitulations to traditional Roman marriage and Roman family values were sometimes laced with subtle subversion. Imagine, the patriarch of the family being instructed at all in household matters, let alone having to love his wife and treat his slaves fairly!

What’s my point in all this? It’s not to mock the Bible, or to denigrate marriage and family—may it never be! That’s why I began this article the way I did (go back and start over if you need to). Rather, my point in all this is really three points.

First, we don’t do anyone any favours when we minimize the complexity and challenge of the Bible on marriage and family. The Bible’s teachings on these things are not uniform, and neither are they clear or simple. They’re certainly not easy. There are difficult laws and stories and teachings in the collection of ancient writings we call the Bible that do not fit neatly into our modern, western, nostalgia-for-white-1950s-suburbia way of thinking about marriage and family. If we want to take our Bibles seriously we must face up to this fact.

Which leads right to my second point: we need to be careful not to assume our understanding of marriage or family is the right one. The range of perspectives and practices on marriage and family throughout Israelite, Jewish, and Christian history is astounding. Polygamy, concubinage, monogamy, celibacy. Other-sex, same-sex, no-sex covenants. Households with slaves, extended families, nuclear families, adoptive families, single-parent families. Patriarchal, egalitarian.

All these and more have been represented among God’s people through history to today, all of them justified by divine revelation or human tradition or simple necessity. This doesn’t mean anything goes for Christians thinking about marriage and family. It means that a Christian perspective on marriage or family is not going to be determined by a facile appeal to Scripture or history.

Which then leads to a third point: it’s simply wrong to elevate marriage or family at all—let alone some specific idea of marriage or family—to the status of “essential Christian teaching” or a “gospel issue” or the like. I hear people say things like, “The Bible begins in Genesis with a marriage and ends in Revelation with a marriage, and that is why the nature of marriage is fundamental to our story as well,” and my first thought is, “But we follow as Lord an unmarried man who encouraged celibacy and taught that there would be no marriage in God’s good future.” Seriously, ponder that.

There’s a reason none of the New Testament gospel summaries or early Christian rules of faith or creeds said anything about marriage or family or even sexuality: these, like all dimensions of human existence, are impacted by the gospel, but they are not the gospel.

Here’s the thing: The crucial question of Christianity is not and never has been, “What do you think about marriage?” but Jesus’ question, “Who do you say that I am?” The central call of Christianity is not and never has been, “Stand up for traditional family values!” but Jesus’ call, “Come, follow me.”

This Bible-believing family man fears we’re confusing these things, conflating them, and thus badly missing the point of it all.

© Michael W. Pahl

My Journey Toward Being Affirming

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I have been fully affirming of LGBTQ+ folx and supportive of equal marriage for a few years now. This was the culmination of many years of research and reflection and, most importantly, relationship with LGBTQ+ people. Although my story of becoming affirming is not the most important story to be heard in this, my story might be helpful to others. Here it is.

Note that my views do not necessarily reflect those of my current or previous employers.

Some handouts related to this video:

© Michael W. Pahl

The Bible and Same-Sex Relationships

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This was the subtitle of a study conference our denomination had 3.5 years ago, hosted at our church: “The Bible and Same-Sex Relationships.” I was one of the plenary speakers at the conference. Although I would word a few things differently now—I’ve learned much since then, and my own perspective has settled—I feel two of my presentations have some enduring value and so I thought I’d share the videos here.

The first is about how we approach the Bible generally: how we read it as Christians, as Anabaptist Christians in particular, and especially when talking about complicated and controversial topics. While there’s much more that could be said about biblical interpretation than I say here, it’s still a good summary of my thinking on this.

The second is a set of concluding reflections on points of agreement between what we called the “traditional” and the “affirming” views. If there is a practically workable “middle way” or even “third way” for churches on this—even simply a basis for fellowship among individuals or churches who disagree—it will be built around the kinds of things I highlight here. (Note: I’m well aware of the delicious irony of me speaking about Jesus being “clear” on the call to love, in light of my reflections on “the Bible is clear on X” in the previous video!)

You Are Not Alone

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This post in an adapted excerpt from my sermon in the series “Four Things,” preached at Morden Mennonite on January 31, 2016. See others in the series: “Loved,” “Forgiven,” “Needed.” Here is the audio of the full sermon:

It’s one of the most basic needs we have: the need for human connection. It’s one of the most common fears we have: the fear of being alone. They’re two sides of the same coin: fear on the one side, desire on the other.

As soon as our eyes begin to focus as babies, we are looking for faces: eyes and noses and smiles. And, as babies, we need that human touch: loving, gentle, firm, safe.

At the other end of our lives, not much has changed. We still look for kind faces with warm smiles. We still crave that loving human touch. Right to the end.

This desire to be connected to others, and its flip side, the fear of being alone, drives us far more than we realize. All social groupings are at bottom fueled by that need for contact with other persons. We form friendship bonds, and partnership bonds, and permanent pair bonds, because we have a deep need to connect with others, and a deep fear of being isolated from others.

Put another way, there’s a reason why solitary confinement is one of the most horrific punishments that can be inflicted on people. Even the most introverted among us craves social interaction with other persons. The difference among us is only a matter of degree.

We long for meaningful connection; we fear being alone.

There’s an interesting feature of the creation stories in the book of Genesis that many people have noticed.

When you read through the first story in Genesis 1, you hear this repeated refrain: “And God saw that it was good.” God separates the land and the waters, and it is good. The earth brings forth vegetation, and it is good. God separates the light from the darkness, and it is good. God creates every living creature, and it is good.

Seven times in Genesis 1, the Creator God shapes something, forms something, makes something, fills something—and then declares it to be “good.”

But then comes Genesis 2, the second creation story. And smack in the middle of it, you read this: “Then the Lord God said, ‘It is not good.’”

Keep in mind, this is before sin has even entered the picture. This is when everything is supposed to be untainted and unspoiled and perfect in its goodness. And in the middle of this very good creation is something that is “not good.”

Here’s the whole statement: “The Lord God said, ‘It is not good that the Human should be alone.’”

The very first thing in the Bible noted as “not good,” even in the pristine paradise of Eden, is human isolation, a lack of meaningful connection with others—being all alone in a big wide world.

We long for meaningful connection; we fear being alone. This parallel desire and fear is not only built into our DNA; it’s built into our most primal stories, our first Scriptures.

And to each of us, God speaks these words of good news: “You are not alone.”

You are not alone. Others are with you: companions on the journey of life, partners in the purpose of life. And God is with you: even if all others fail, God will never leave you or forsake you. You are not alone.

Right from the very beginning of the human story, then, the Bible highlights our need for connection with others, that it is “not good” for us to be alone. But as interesting as that is, what’s even more interesting is what God does about it.

We typically think of the story this way: God says, “It’s not good for the Man to be alone,” and then we jump immediately to the end of the story, where there is a Man and a Woman who come together to be “one flesh” in marriage.

But that’s not actually the way the story is told. The Hebrew word for “Man” here is adam, which can mean “man” or “male human.” But it can also mean “human” or “human being” generally, and in the context it’s clear that’s what it means here.

Because right after God says, “It’s not good for the adam to be alone,” God doesn’t immediately make a woman—God makes the animals. You see, the distinction is not between the Man and the Woman, but between the Human and the Animals.

All the Animals are paraded before the Human, and none of them is the “suitable companion” that God says the Human needs. And so God makes another Human, “bone of bone and flesh of flesh”—exactly the same, a fully human counterpart—to be the first Human’s “suitable companion.”

In other words, the problem is not that a man needs a wife, or that a woman needs a husband. The problem is that a human needs another human—we need meaningful human connection, human companionship. And God has provided for that need by creating other humans, other people around us, to give us the connection and companionship that we require. Marriage, then, is one specific and important way in which this basic need for human relationship is fulfilled—but it is not the only way.

I know, that way of reading the story goes against the grain of our received interpretations of Genesis 2. But it’s really the best way to understand the story. After all, if that need for companionship is only satisfied through marriage, then there have been a lot of single people through history who have not fulfilled God’s purpose for relationships—including Jesus.

So here’s the important takeaway from all this: We are not all mandated to get married, but we are all created for human companionship—and God provides us with human companions on the journey of life, human partners in the purpose of life.

You are not alone. Others are with you: companions on the journey of life, partners in the purpose of life. You are not alone.

Rubens - Jesus on CrossBut there’s more. God is with you: even if all others fail, God will never leave you or forsake you.

This can be hard for us to believe, to really believe. We can at times feel abandoned by God—usually when we also feel abandoned by others. We can, in other words, feel like Jesus on the cross, crying out in our hearts, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”

Yet, as Jesus himself would have known, God never really abandons us, God is always with us. Even that Psalm that Jesus quotes—his words on the cross are the opening words of Psalm 22—that Psalm goes on to say, “God did not hide his face from me, but heard when I cried to him” (22:24).

So even in our loneliest moments, those times when we feel most isolated from others, most disconnected, even completely abandoned—God is with us.

If you feel like this—lonely, isolated, disconnected, abandoned—listen to these words from Scripture; let them wash over you:

From Isaiah 43:5: [God says,] “You are precious in my sight, and honored, and I love you…Do not fear, for I am with you.”

From Hebrews 13:5: God has said, “I will never leave you or forsake you.”

You are precious in God’s sight, and honoured, and God loves you. Do not be anxious or afraid, for God is with you. Indeed, God will never leave you or forsake you.

You are not alone. Others are with you: companions on the journey of life, partners in the purpose of life. And God is with you: even if all others fail, God will never leave you or forsake you. You are not alone.

Cross-posted from http://www.mordenmennonitechurch.wordpress.com. © Michael W. Pahl.