Seminary Husbands: Give Her Children Lest She Cries, Honoring Your Wife In Love

“Husbands, love your wives, as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her, that he might sanctify her, having cleansed her by the washing of water with the word, so that he might present the church to himself in splendor, without spot or wrinkle or any such thing, that she might be holy and without blemish.” - (Eph 5:25-27)

This post is written with fellow seminarians in mind. If you are a young married man, soon-to-be, or hope-to-be; lend me your ears. When I was a boy, occasionally my father would sit me down for man-to-man conversations, and it usually meant that I needed a supreme reality check. For those of you who get convicted about what I’m about to write, that’s exactly what you need. A big, heaping dose of reality.

Here is the bottom line: On the campus of a Southern Baptist Seminary (one of the elite evangelical institutions in the world), we should not hear stories of wives who long to have children but instead are being pressured into contracepting by their husbands. Perhaps what is even more troubling are the reasons given for such decisions on the part of husbands. “Stewardship” is set up upon some golden pedestal and is then assumed to be unquestionable – and those who do question it are assumed to be incorrigible. Such arguments are built upon some contemporary ideal of a greater “love” for the family, or the future, or even worse “the ministry” — but consistently leave one aspect of it all strikingly absent: love for their wives.

Our libraries are replete with books on how to love your wife, our classes are filled with complementarian doctrines that give honor to the specific, God ordained roles of men and women, and our pulpits are echoing with exhortations to “Love your wives as Christ loved the Church”. And yet, in far too many of our bedrooms are found wives who feel they are being put on a “wait-list”, behind school, work, and ministerial success. They feel and know the God-instilled, Kingdom-inspired urge to become a mother to your children, and you slight them. Oh, you may be quite technical about. You may hash out an argument that you must lead her in this childlessness, at least for a time and a season, until the “finances are in order” and “the degree is in my pocket”. You may very well convince yourself that you are stewarding your resources for the greater glory of God. But the truth of the matter is that you are taking the love and respect due to your wife and turning it in on yourself — on your goals, your time-lines, and your desires to do things your way. You have told everyone “Yes”, except for the wife of your youth; and have used theology to sheild you from rebuke.

The issues that need to be addressed here are clear. First, there is no such thing as “greater love for the family” when there is no active love for you wife. A husband who tells his wife he loves her while disregarding her pleadings for children, is like a person telling a poor man “be warmed and filled, without giving them the things needed for the body (James 2:16).” Such confessions are dead. How can you claim to love in the abstract what you consistently lay aside in reality?Secondly, your calling to husbandry is preeminent to anything you think you have to do here at seminary. While the leadings and callings of God can be diverse and varied at times, he has revealed his stance on the marital relationship quite poignantly – “…Husbands should love their wives as their own bodies. He who loves his wife loves himself. For no one ever hated his own flesh, but nourishes and cherishes it, just as Christ does the church… (Eph 5:28-29).”  This statement is unqualified, meaning your excuse for disregarding the burden that your wife has for children because “you just have to graduate in 3 years” is outside the bounds of Christian husbandhood. No matter where God has called you to go, or how he has called you to get there; one thing is certain — He has called you to be a husband to your wife, and you need to act like it. Finally, you must recognize that a contemporary redefinition of “stewardship” is by no means an ethical opportunity to excuse yourself from the God created responsibilities of marriage and sex. This ironic ideal of procreative stewardship that you have bought into is a sham. Stewardship, by its very definition (both Biblical and secular) is the “receiving of a good” and “proper management of it”. It is not, however, a “rejecting of a good” and the presumptuous expectation of it at a later time and date to be decided upon by you.

We do not have the luxury, men of God, of slapping a half-baked theological addendum to the true ideas of love and stewardship. The explanation of G.K. Chesterton fits powerfully here when he wrote, “In short, unless pilots are to be permitted to ram ships on to the rocks and then say that heaven is the only true harbor; unless judges are to be allowed to let murders loose, and explain afterwards that the murder had done good on the whole; unless soldiers are to be allowed to lose battles and then point out that true glory is to be found in the valley of humiliation; unless cashiers are to rob a bank in order to give it an advertisement; or dentists torture people to give them a contrast to their comforts” — then it is certain that no man has the right to meddle with the plain and honest definitions of “love”, “calling”, and “stewardship”. Whether it is on the basis of incorrect theology, oversight, or just plain self-centeredness; if you are loving anything more than you are loving God’s purposes in love towards your wife, you need to repent. When you married, you became one-flesh and placed yourselves in convenant with the God of the Universe. If this seminary or your job has you more enamored with them than what that God has called his “reward” and “heritage”, you need to sit down and have a Man-to-man talk with the One who fashioned you in your mother’s womb.

‘BH

“Love is patient and kind; love does not envy or boast; it is not arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice at wrongdoing, but rejoices with the truth.” - (1Co 13:4-6)

Happy Fourth of July from Ron Paul

Praying for Hospital Babies

I work in the surgical instruments department at a local hospital to support my seminary education and miscellaneous forays into ethical inquiry. If it has to do with instruments, we do it; from cleaning, organizing, fixing, sterilizing, packing, dispatching, etc. If a surgery happens in the hospital (as many do every day), we see the instruments.

This evening as I was working on a couple of sets from our Labor and Delivery department, it occurred to me that I could be praying for the children  (and their family) who were delivered with these instruments. Every day we have a good number of babies delivered at the hospital, so it would be a great way to make my job a bit more “worshipful”, and pray for the glory of God to be displayed in their lives and the lives of their families. I had the opportunity to pray for a couple of babies this evening and it was a great experience.  Whether their parents are saved or unsaved, whether the newborns are healthy or struggling to survive; regardless of the circumstances, there are plenty of opportunities for the Lord’s hand to be shown in their lives.

Wherever you work or whatever places you frequent, consider how the Lord is calling you to pray for his kingdom right there. Join me if you think about it, and let the name of the Lord be praised in your house today.

For the glory of our King,

‘BH

“By the Babe Unborn”: Poem by G.K. Chesterton

                        by G.K. Chesterton

                If trees were tall and grasses short,
                  As in some crazy tale,
                If here and there a sea were blue
                  Beyond the breaking pale,

                If a fixed fire hung in the air
                  To warm me one day through,
                If deep green hair grew on great hills,
                  I know what I should do.

                In dark I lie; dreaming that there
                  Are great eyes cold or kind,
                And twisted streets and silent doors,
                  And living men behind.

                Let storm clouds come: better an hour,
                  And leave to weep and fight,
                Than all the ages I have ruled
                  The empires of the night.

                I think that if they gave me leave
                  Within the world to stand,
                I would be good through all the day
                  I spent in fairyland.

                They should not hear a word from me
                  Of selfishness or scorn,
                If only I could find the door,
                  If only I were born.

What the Doctrine of Creation Tells us about Contraception

As Charles Spurgeon once noted, “The best way to defend a lion is to let it out of its cage.” And so it is. One such doctrinal-lion that far too many of us leave caged is the truth of Genesis 1 and 2. In asking how things “should” be, we rarely take a closer look at how things “were”, and therefore we miss the truth of their created “good(ness)”.  Like children looking at a broken computer, we know something is wrong, but we’re not even sure what “right” would look like.

Unfortunately for our generation, the temptation to turn first to science for these answers is almost automatic. All our “problems”, from depression to anxiety to sickness and health are given “scientific explanations”, and therefore are forcibly placed under the authority of secular science.  But, as a G.K. Chesterton scholar explains,

“[T]he problem with the man of modern science is not that he is trying to know what he does not know, but that he is pretending not to know what he does know. And what is it that he pretends not to know? Well, it has something to do with those three words, “In the beginning…” “

Though science may claim the luxury of rejecting the truth of Creation, Christians can make no such claim and have no such luxury. All that we are stands and falls with God’s creative work “in the beginning”. If it is true that God created, and that “by [Christ] all things were created, in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities–all things were created through him and for him (Col 1:16)”, then we have a stake in such truths that cannot not be overstated. If God created things “good”, it behooves us to figure out what, why, and how. And such a search is particularly important in the presently controversial doctrine of procreation.

Anyone claiming to have an opinion, or more precisely a “biblical” opinion, on the contraception issue cannot but wrestle with the looming truths of the first chapters of Genesis. There we see a handful of conscience shattering demonstrations of God’s created intentions towards men, women, and the marital union — and we see it all in the absence of sin.

We read in Genesis 1:26-28,

“Then God said, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness. And let them have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over the livestock and over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.” So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them. And God blessed them. And God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth.” “

Clearly we see that God made mankind “in his image”, he made them “male and female”, and he said to them “be fruitful, multiply, subdue the earth, and have dominion”.  What were his purposes for the distinctions in the sexes? Well, we get a glaring clue in Genesis 2:24 when God says that “a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and they shall become one flesh.” Take a good historical and chronological note here: neither Adam nor Eve had a mother or father. Interesting, don’t you think? God was speaking to them and instructing them in family affairs when as yet they had not experienced them. God does something like that again in Genesis 3 when he curses Eve with “pain in childbirth”, when as yet, no woman (of which Eve was the sole example) had ever experienced childbirth. Either God forgot that procreation wasn’t integral to the “one flesh union” or He didn’t — and he was teaching his children from the very beginning that love is, by its very nature, a fruit bearing and pro-creative act.

Few theologians (if any) deny the fact that God created man and woman to be able to procreate. And Scripture doesn’t allow for anyone to say He didn’t bless his image-bearers with the mandate to “be fruitful and multiply” (and Martin Luther goes ever farther, calling Genesis 1:28 the first command of the Bible!).  But the contemporary debate tends to center around the issue of “totality” — asking, does it follow then that we must be “totally” open to having children, or can we be cognitively open towards procreation, while actively pursuing means to prohibit it? at least for a time or a season?

Well, given what we’ve just read from the context of Genesis 1 and 2 let’s ask a couple of similar questions. Must we “always” seek to subdue the earth and have dominion over it? Is it ever wrong for a husband to leave his mother and father and cleave to his husband? Is it really that important for husband and wife to have a one-flesh union, if they could be as fulfilled just being intellectually united? Is being “fruitful” and “multipl[ing]” always “very good” in the sight of God?

The point is this: what God has brought together, let no man put asunder. It was God, the Creator God, the Alpha and Omega of our salvation, the Author and Finisher of our faith — it was this God who created sex and the sexes to be procreative. He is the One who looked upon it and called it “very good”. Not only that, the very mode in which this God chose to save his fallen creation was through the “seed of the woman” that  would crush the serpent’s head. Now isn’t that a testimony to the grace of God in children? And yet, the modern man of science has convinced us that the procreative purposes of sex are merely secondary, and optional; while he exalts the relational aspect of sex as the crowning jewel of the one-flesh union. That my friends is neither logical, nor biblical. Apart from procreation, no scientist would be around to convince you that procreation is a hindrance and a burden — and no preacher would be around to convince you otherwise.

Let this be recorded for a generation to come, so that a people yet to be created may praise the LORD:

(Psa 102:18)

“Let this be recorded for a generation to come, so that a people yet to be created may praise the LORD...” - (Psa 102:18)

‘BH

Women and the Home: Keeping the Main thing, the Main thing

I’m in the midst of a G.K. Chesterton kick in my person reading, so I hope to share a couple of the gems I come across with you here at the blog. One issue in particular where his commentary is much needed today is on the centrality of the home, and a woman’s awesome responisiblity and honor that she is given there — at least by those who know the Word of the Lord. He writes:

“The place where babies are born, where men die, where the daily drama of mortal life is acted, is not an office or shop or a bureau. It is something much smaller in size, yet much larger in scope. And while nobody would be such a fool as to pretend that the home is the only place where people should work, or even the only place where women should work, it has a character of unity and universiality that is not found in any of the fragmentary experiences of the office or the shop or the bureau.”

In commenting on this issue, Dale Ahlquist, an author on Chesterton’s writings adds,

“In our society, we hear endless talk about the importance of education. But we somehow manage to forget that the primary place of education is the home. Chesterton says, “If education is the largest thing in the world, what is the sense of talking about a woman being liberated from the largest thing in the world?” In other words, if education is really as important as we say it is, then certainly domestic life is more important than we currently make it out to be, and everything else, especially public life and commercial life, is less important than we hold it up to be.”

And how true it is. In a day and age where education said to be the answer to every social ill, wouldn’t you think we’d be more intentional about encouraging women to recognize the blessed vocation of motherhood — over and above any commercial success the world says is worthy. In fact, as Chesterton goes on to note, there is a freedom in the sphere of the home that women alone can enjoy:

“[T]he ordinary man who typifies and constitutes the millions that make up our civilization is no more free for the higher culture than his wife is.

Indeed, he is not so free. Of the two sexes the woman is in the more powerful position… He has to put one dull brick on another dull brick, and do nothing else; he has to add one dull figure to another dull figure, and do nothing else. The woman’s world is a small one perhaps, but she can alter it. The woman can tell the tradesman with whom she deals some realistic things about himself. The clerk who does this to the manager generally gets the sack, or shall we say (to avoid the vulgarism), finds himself free for higher culture. Above all…the woman does work which is in some small degree creative and individual. She can put flowers or the furniture in fancy arrangments of her own. I fear the bricklayer cannot put the bricks in fancy arrangements of his own, without disaster to himself and others. If the woman is only putting a patch into a carpet, she can choose the thing with regard to color. I fear it would not do for the office boy dispatching a parcel to choose his stamps with a view to color; to prefer the tender mauve of the sixpenny to the crude scarlet of the penny stamp. A woman cooking may not always cook artistically; still she can cook artistically. She can introduce a personal and imperceptible alteration into the composition of a soup. The clerk is not encouraged to introduce a personal and imperceptible alteration into the figures in a ledger…”

All that seems so obvious, and yet we have obviously forgotten the truth of it. Could it be that God — the same God who Created and is creating — ordained a role for women that would fulfill and suit their gifts and personalities infinitely more than some secularized concept of “true freedom” or “true equality”? Could it be that God knows his creatures better and purer than they could ever know themselves, and that the only true freedom that a man or woman needs is that freedom found in the redemption of Jesus Christ? Could it be that women were made for such a time and place as this?

If you believe it, let the redeemed of the Lord say so.

‘BH

“Can I Live?” : Pro-Life Music Video, and Abortion as Racism

“Abortion, by the numbers, is a racist institution. That’s not to say that all or even most of those who support abortion are racists. Nor does it imply that there are no racists among those who oppose abortion. This statement has nothing to do with agendas or intent. It has everything to do with the simple, undeniable reality that in the United States, abortion kills minority children at more than 3 times the rate of non-Hispanic, white children. The rate is even worse for black children. The ReverendClenard H. Childress calls this phenomenon “black genocide”, and has built a national ministry around the exposure of what he calls “the greatest deception [to] plague the black church since Lucifer himself”. Alveda C. King, daughter of slain civil-rights leader A.D. King and niece of Martin Luther King, Jr., quotes her uncle often when outlining her opposition of abortion. She writes:

[Martin Luther King, Jr.] once said, “The Negro cannot win as long as he is willing to sacrifice the lives of his children for comfort and safety.” How can the “Dream” survive if we murder the children? Every aborted baby is like a slave in the womb of his or her mother. The mother decides his or her fate.

Lest you feel these claims are an exaggeration, consider the numbers. According to the most recent census data, black women make up 12.3% of the female population in America, but account for 35% of all U.S. abortions – that according to the Centers for Disease Control (CDC). The Guttmacher Institute (AGI) puts the percentage of black abortions at 37% of the U.S. total. Similarly, AGI tells us that Hispanic women account for22% of all U.S. abortions, though they make up just 12.5% of the female population. Compare those numbers to non-Hispanic, white women, who make up 62.6% of America’s female population(1), but account for only34% of all U.S. abortions…”

(HT: Abort73.com)

Life Worth Living and Death Worth Dying: Book Review of Paul Ramsey’s “The Patient as Person”

“Life in the first of it and life in the last of it are both prismatic cases of human helplessness.” – Paul Ramsey, “The Patient as Person”

When there is talk about the premiere Christian ethicists of the 20th century, the name Paul Ramsey consistently rises to the top of the list. Few ethicist-theologians were as clear, consistent and (perhaps more importantly) as prophetic as Paul Ramsey. His ability to peel back cultural norms and societal trends to reveal the philosophical core of the issues was unparalleled by his contemporaries. In particular, his work among medical ethics set the standard of scholarship for Christian ethicist for the rest of the century on into the new millennium. But if you’re like me, you’ve probably never heard of him, his work, or his countless contributions to contemporary Protestant ethics. As usual, this time, ignorance is not bliss.

While preparing for a bioethics course that I am enrolled in this fall, I came across a couple of references to Paul Ramsey’s book “The Patient as Person” in Gilbert Meilaender’s ethics primer entitled “Bioethics“. Having encountered Ramsey in a previous course on the ethics of invitro fertilization in his book “Fabricated Man“, I was interested to read his handling of issues such as organ donation, human experimentation, and euthanasia. Though I am a pro-life activist, I have never been captured with the ethical weight of “end of life” questions in the way that I have with “beginning of life” issues. Ramsey remedied that apathy extremely well.

Like most texts that are converted from a lecture series, the material is quite specific and technical at times, but in typical fashion Ramsey elucidates the ethical points of a myriad of issues connected with the ends and means of medicine and medical ethics — and does it in a way that hits home (reminding his readers that physicians are to “cure sometimes, to relieve often, and to comfort always”).  For instance, in commenting on the theo-philosophical aspects of death, Ramsey makes a bold claim:

” “The process of dying” needs to be got out of the hospitals and back into the home and in the midst of family, neighborhood, and friends. This would be a “systemic change” in our present institutions for caring for the dying as difficult to bring about as some fundamental change in foreign policy or the nation-state system. Still, any doctor will tell you that by no means does everyone need to die in a hospital who today does so. They are there because families want them there, or because neighbors might think not everything was done in efforts to save them. They are there because hospitals are well equipped to “manage death,” and families are ill equipped to do so.

If the “systemic change” here proposed in caring for the dying were actually brought about, ministers, priests, and rabbis would have on their hands a great many shattered families and relatives. But for once they would be shattered by confrontation with reality, by the claims of the dying not to be deserted, not to be pushed from the circle that specially owes them love and care, not to be denied human presence with them. Then God might not be as dead as lately He is supposed to be. The “sealing up of metaphysical concerns,” Peter Berger recently pointed out, is one of the baneful results of a “happy” childhood — a childhood unhappily sheltered from the dying in all our advanced societies.”

I could write more and explain more, but you get the drift, now get the book.

‘BH

Step into the Abortion Forest: Seeing the Human in Humanity

It is said that you can get so far from the forest that you can no longer see the trees. You can become so acquainted with the ‘big picture’ that you forget that the grand painting has a definite subject. You can come to miss the human in humanity.

That temptation is a clear and present danger among evangelicals in the pro-life movement. Having fought “abortion” (in the abstract) on the political field for 25+ years, many of us have been lulled into acting like abortion is a mere philosophical construct. We see and speak out against the abortion forest, while being content to remain far away from the trees, anything remotely near or human about it.

But as Paul Ramsey so powerfully reminds us, “A child is not a piece of childhood.” We are not called to stand against abortion on behalf of childhood. Rather we are called to see the child being taken away to death. We must learn to see the abortion fight as patently personal, emotionally intimate, and ethically imminent. We can rage against the machine and shout against the system for a political lifetime (as we should), but if we fail to step into the real flesh and blood of the matter, we become  noisy gongs and clanging cymbals (1 Cor 13). We say to our neighbors “be warmed and filled,” but refuse to give them the actual help they need (James 2). Let there be no doubt: the unborn children in your community need you to hate abortion in the abstract. That much is morally required of you. But make no mistake, a mere hatred of evil is not all they need. They need you to step into the forest, and rescue them -with words, with prayers, and ultimately with the initiating and effecting power of the Holy Spirit – from the sure destruction that awaits them within the walls of your local abortion clinic. There are not just children dying in your community. This morning, there is death coming to a child. It is his voice and his silent scream that crys out to the Father for deliverance. It is his death that makes abortion inhumane.

May we all learn how to shudder at that fact.

In the name of Jesus Christ, the Victor over death,

‘BH

The Man You’ve Probably Never Heard Of But Need To: Anthony Comstock

He was a giant of reform. He beat his drum and he beat it loudly and often — and perhaps most importanly, he beat it unrelentingly. If you overheard his story in a modern context, many of you would assume he was a convicted Catholic. But you would be mistaken.

Anthony Comstock was, what some have called, “the fine flower of Puritanism” that blossomed in New England in the late 19th century. In those days, he was known as an anti-vice crusader. Today, publications like Touchstone Magazine call him a “pure visionary” in their cover stories. Read the article here (quoted below) and get introduced to the man that made the protection of women and children his life’s work.  Here’s author Allan Carlson’s introduction:

The foes of nineteenth-century purity crusader Anthony Comstock commonly spoke in fulminations. His “free love” contemporary D. M. Bennett called Comstock “a first-class Torquemada” who had shown “the same energy, the same cruelty, [and] the same intolerance” as “the envenomed persecutors of the past centuries.” Bennett continued: “It is seriously doubted whether the church has ever had a cruel zealot in its employ who has labored with more resolution and zest than this active agent of the Young Men’s Christian Association.” Another “free love” advocate, Ezra Hervey Heywood, called Comstock “a religio-monomaniac” whom the United States Congress and “the lascivious fanaticism of the Young Men’s Christian Association” had empowered to suppress free thought.

Even Comstock’s political “descendants” in contemporary America, the socially conservative Religious Right, are largely oblivious of his legacy. My informal survey of a dozen contemporary American pro-family leaders found only one who had even heard of him; this despite the fact that Comstock succeeded in almost every aspect of his purity campaign: from crushing the pornography industry to suppressing abortion and contraception. Indeed, under any fair comparison, the current pro-family and pro-life movements have been failures.

Carlson closes with some powerful assertions:

“If it were possible to whisk the aging Anthony Comstock forward to the year 2009, what would he think? Most likely, he would find both his own worst fears and his own opinions fully confirmed:

He would note, I think, that allowing married couples to gain legal access to birth control had inevitably resulted in the same access being extended to unmarried adults, then to youth, and finally to children.

He would point out that legalizing birth control would never have been enough for the sexual modernists; they must also have, and so did gain, legalized abortion.

He would show how deliberately separating sexuality from procreation, through birth control and intentionally childless marriages, had cleared the path to a normalization of homosexuality, bisexuality, transexuality, and so on.

He would explain that “modern” marriage, focused on sexual companionship rather than procreation, must have resulted in the effective abolition of true marriage, through easy divorce, the rough equation of cohabitation with marriage, and an end to the legal concept of “illegitimacy.”

He would show that by allowing “free speech” and a “free press” in sexual matters, pornography of the worst sort had quickly found its way into most households, most recently—and effectively—through the Internet.

He would identify a strange new sentimentality among twenty-first-century Americans, which made it impossible for them to comprehend, let alone enforce, the historic Christian sexual code.

He would blast twentieth-century Evangelical leaders for spinelessness in their legitimizing of birth control, rather than holding firm to the ancient Christian consensus regarding the practice as immoral and a danger to society. [emphasis mine]

He might be grimly amused to see twenty-first-century social conservatives making their last stand over the odd issue of “same-sex marriage.”

And he would certainly conclude that he now stood in a very different country.”

Oh Lord, send us another Anthony Comstock and wake up Christians from our sleep…

‘BH