The devil's marriage advocate

The man is to lay down his life for the woman. This means that all his life decisions are framed with her safety and wellbeing in mind as matters of highest priority.



I was called to task for something I wrote lately. The charge against me was that I had taken too high a view of Christian marriage. The particulars of the charge were as follows. Surely, with all the dysfunction and divorce going on, I was too idealistic about marriage and the good it can, and should, produce. I was thus too negative toward those who opt for alternatives to marriage, such as living together or having a long term affair. I deny the charge. The divorces that I see involve violations, whether by one spouse or both, of the way marriage is intended to work.

I heard of a case where a husband divorced his wife because of her mental health issues. Whither, then, "in sickness or in health"? The only way such a divorce could at all be conceived of as a loving act is if he were the cause of her mental problems. Otherwise it is simply abandonment of someone in trouble.

Lots of divorces happen after career setbacks: The man loses his job, has trouble getting another, or another that is as good. What then shall we say of "for richer or poorer"?

"Forsaking all others, be faithful to her " and "to him" state an obvious requirement, not a pious suggestion, and failure to do what was pledged results in many divorces.

Of course a wife beater or other abuser has utterly turned from "love her, comfort her, honor and protect her." There is godliness and goodness in the words but none in the man who promised them and did not deliver. I would say he never intended to have a wife, but a victim instead.

The vows include a big catch-all clause, "for better or for worse." "I didn't expect things to be like this" is a sentiment often voiced by people divorcing their spouses. But when you hear that, it is never a matter of things going better than expected. Life with Joe or Jane turned out somehow to be disappointing. So Jane or Joe got the "worse" in life's lottery and so they want another ticket so they can play again. The other thing that they might do, of course, is to stick around and hope, pray and work for things to get better.

Nothing can be judged by poor examples of the thing being judged. It's rather like this. There are many automobiles that run badly or not at all. That is the fault of the automobiles being out of repair, not a just condemnation of the concept of automobiles. A marriage is like that: it must be functioning properly to be counted as a clear example of the thing it is meant to be. That is my answer to those who say that the prevalence of divorce and dysfunction is somehow a reason not to talk about how good it is when marriage is running properly.

There is no reason to downplay the wondrous thing that happens when Christian marriage is hitting on all cylinders and has air in the tires. Neither is there any reason to agree with those who downplay the importance of marriage, who say that some "cozy arrangement" such as living together is okay, claiming that marriage is no better. (That was the thrust of the criticism this article answers.) There are lots of marriages in some or other state of disrepair. It is because the owners of those marriages have not read the owner's manual, or have chosen to ignore what it says.

As to that owner's manual, the Bible, I think the obvious place to begin is St. Paul's lessons on the matter. The man is to lay down his life for the woman. This means that all his life decisions are framed with her safety and wellbeing in mind as matters of highest priority. That may sometimes mean fighting a dragon to save your lady fair, but dragons are in short supply. The grind and troubles of everyday life are ever upon us, though, and the man ought make sure the woman is not the one who bears the brunt of them. Her good is foremost--his own preferences are secondary, if they are even that important.

His responsibility extends to his choices great and small--how he spends his money, how much time he sets aside for wife and children, how diligent or not he is in his career and even whether he has that third glass of beer. He should consider the risks he takes. Should he smoke? Get rid of his motorcycle? Quit skydiving?

The woman is to play follow the leader with the man. Paul's use of the words "submit yourselves to your husbands" unfortunately strikes modern sensitivities in the wrong way, but his use of the word has nothing to do with Fifty Shades of Paul, or with any sort of unjust dominance. Feminists may stand down. This is not their fight. The man has framed his life around the woman's good, and to take full advantage of that, she needs to back his play. She needs to cooperate in what he is trying to do, otherwise he may fail to really serve her. That is the sense in which she needs to submit to his leadership. To put it another way, the reason that a knight stands between his lady and the dragon is not because her place is behind his as a sexist matter, but because of where the dragon is. A sensible princess will not stand out in front just to make a point; that only makes her knight's job harder.

Of course there are some women (and, indeed, some men) who do not want marriage on such a basis. They will reimagine and reinvent marriage to suit themselves. They ought not be surprised when things do not work right, because the design for marriage that they are rejecting comes from God, who created us male and female.