Posts tagged “Marriage

Why Christians should care about homosexual “marriage”

Posted on April 5th, 2013

George Neumayr at the American Spectator argues that there is a major consideration being overlooked in the homosexual “marriage” debate. Many Christians would like to retreat, under the supposition that it won’t affect them. In “Religious freedom’s Drip-by-Drip Death,” Neumayr contends this is wrong: The end point of liberalism is a coercive secular state in which the religious have no meaningful rights. American church leaders are kidding themselves if they think the gay-marriage juggernaut is going to stop at civil marriage. It won’t. It will quickly travel past court houses to churches, demanding that all religions bless gay marriages. He cites examples of European state churches compelling their ministers to bless homosexual unions. It’s tempting to imagine that cannot happen here, since we have…

Is marriage just a piece of paper?

Posted on December 19th, 2012

Why must we first get an official license to go to bed together? Is it really that piece of paper which brings marriage into being? Of course, it isn’t any more than a birth certificate brings a baby into being. Still, it’s more than just a piece of paper. It protects human life legally. The same is true about the marriage license. It protects marriage legally. Walter Trobisch, I Married You

The beleaguered pastor and the lighthouse keeper

Posted on November 29th, 2012

Walter Trobisch was visiting a pastor in Africa whose marriage and health was suffering because of the incessant demands of parishioners. Here is the dialogue between Trobisch and Pastor Daniel, as recounted inI Married You: “It’s not only the telephone. The visitors and callers, too, are a problem. They come at any time.” “I can see no other solution. You must decide on certain hours when you are available, and then post these times on the door.” Daniel said, “Africans wouldn’t understand it. They would think it is very impolite. It is against their traditions.” “Listen, my brother, if you would come to Germany, and I would take you to any local parish, I can promise you that the pastor there has the same…

Mussolini and monotheism

Posted on November 9th, 2012

Here’s an interesting passage on Mussolini (the Italian fascist) and Christianity from Jonah Goldberg’s Liberal Fascism: Mussolini’s Nietzschean contempt for the “slave morality” of Christianity was sufficiently passionate that he’d sought to purge Christians of all kinds from the ranks of Italian Socialism. in 1910, for example, at a socialist congress in Forlì, he introduced and carried a resolution which held that the Catholic faith—or any other mainstream monotheism—was inconsistent with socialism and that any socialists who practiced religion or even tolerated it in their children should be expelled from the party. Mussolini demanded that party members renounce religious marriage, baptism, and all other Christian rituals.

Sermo Dei: The Marriage of Jena Pasko and Jeffrey Mammen

Posted on September 1st, 2012

My friends Jeffrey and Jena, I have waited eagerly for this day. The Lord Jesus said, “No servant can serve two masters; for either he will hate the one and love the other, or else he will be loyal to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and mammon.” That’s ‘mammon’ with an ‘o’, meaning money, wealth, property. Jesus says you cannot serve God and mammon (money, property); but I say unto you that in your marriage, you serve God by serving Mammen (with an ‘e’), your new last name, Jena. I know you’ve been anxiously awaiting this new name. As Baptism washed away sin and stamped a new name, God’s name, on you, so this marriage stamps a new name…

The impossibility of a trial marriage

Posted on August 30th, 2012

Walter Trobisch, in his book I Married You, sees marriage as having three aspects: Love, one flesh (sex), and wedlock. The problem with a “trial marriage” is that it isn’t really a trial, since it is undertaken outside of one of the key aspects of marriage, the permanent bond. [It] is one of the greatest temptations of our time: to consider the legal act of the wedding as a mere formality, as an unimportant piece of paper which one can get someday, or maybe not at all. One pretends that the two angles of love and sex represent the whole of marriage. “Some people, in all seriousness, propose trial marriages. They suggest that a couple live together for awhile in order to see whether…

Sermo Dei: The Marriage of Leslie Bolz and Rev’d Braun Campbell

Posted on August 29th, 2012

Braun and I were sitting at Malek’s Pizza for lunch one day, and after our usual discussion on deep, weighty topics such as specs on the next iPhone and coming video game releases, Braun said, “So I’ve been seeing somebody; her name is Leslie.” And I don’t remember his exact words after that, but the gist of it was, How do you know if you should get married? Not wanting to scare him off, I didn’t share with him what I was thinking, but I will now. It’s the answer of Socrates on whether or not a man should marry. He said: “By all means marry. If you get a good wife, you’ll become happy. If you get a bad one, you’ll become a…

The trial of infertility

Posted on August 9th, 2012

In the Genesis lectures, Luther discusses the trial Isaac and Rebekah endured in their infertility. This is another trial. After the flame of lust has ceased and Isaac has become a husband and has had Rebecca as his wife for 20 years (for so long does God delay the promise in which He had promised his father Abraham: “Through Isaac shall your descendants be named”), another affliction now follows, and indeed one that is far more burdensome than the previous trial. The victor over lust overcame the devil by his chastity up to the time of his marriage. In the marriage state he longs for offspring, in accordance with the promise; and he certainly has no slight hope, since he knows that his wife…