So You Want To Uphold Biblical Marriage?
When news of the Nashville Statement hit the stands at the end of August 2017, I was not entirely sure how to feel about it. I knew how a lot of my friends felt about it, though; people on both sides made sure to be very vocal about their opinions one way or the other, snap judgments being made left and right about the other side’s credibility to the title of “Christian”.
Unable to know quite what my opinion was, I took the sentiments of my peers as they came up, and added them to my slow cooker of thoughts. The beeper was going to go off when it was going to go off. And as things tend to happen, the beeper went off at about 5 o’clock this morning during an unusual period of sleepless reverie.
With the core piece of evidence on both sides being the Nashville Statement itself, I decided to get out of bed and dive into the document. Presented on a slickly designed website prominently featuring the American bathroom symbols for Men and Women, the Nashville Statement is a concisely written, legally-formulated document with a preamble and 14 articles stating its purpose; to deny that homosexuality is appropriate behavior in the context of Christianity.
The thing that caught my eye the most were not the articles, but the preamble, seen on the second page of the website. In the preamble, many theological buzzphrases are used, sentiments I hear all the time as a current attendee of a conservative Christian college; “Western culture is Post-Christian”; the Church must hold fast against “the spirit of our age”; “our true identity, as male and female individuals, is given by God”; and that we must “[witness] publicly to the good purposes of God for human sexuality”.
It was in exploring the preamble that some words from the Bible floated to the front of my mind;
“Why do you look at the speck of sawdust in your brother’s eye and pay no attention to the plank in your own eye? How can you say to your brother, ‘Let me take the speck out of your eye,’ when all the time there is a plank in your own eye?
“You hypocrite, first take the plank out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to remove the speck from your brother’s eye.” — Matthew 7:3–5
Let us presume, for the sake of the rest of this article, that the Nashville Statement is fully correct in its statement about the necessity of manhood and womanhood, and the wrongfulness of homosexuality, transgenderism, polygamy, and polyamory. Even if you, the reader, do not believe this yourself, it is necessary to enter into the logic of the Nashville Statement in order to see my problem with it.
So the Nashville Statement has made rightful claims about today’s modern society. They are working hard to stand strong upon the Bible, and using this firmly founded soapbox in order to declare the truth to those they know desperately need it. And as a Christian, it is good to stand strongly upon the teachings of God! It is good to affirm that God has specific thoughts about human sexuality, and it is good to show truth to those that need to hear it. It is true that there are specific verses penned in the Bible that talk about God’s creation of Male and Female, what He expects from their sexual interactions, and the wrongfulness and further consequences of going against those truths.
But if we’re going to stand strong upon the Bible in order to make these claims, we have to take a look at what the Bible says. The Bible explicitly mentions homosexual activity about 5 times, and some Bible scholars would say that there are over 30 verses that can be indirectly applied to the lifestyle. All of them convey negative sentiments, and these sentiments make up for about 0.096% of all Bible verses. The numbers are not meant to take away from the seriousness of these statements, and all Christians should be diligent in considering how all Biblical statements can and should affect their lives.
If the way the Nashville Statement interprets these verses are correct, then it is right to assume that this is an affront to God’s plan for one man and one woman to be brought together in a committed marriage. God intended the sexual experience to be kept to this context, and scriptures make that clear. The Bible talks about the goodness and importance of marital union over and over again in its pages, in Genesis, Deuteronomy, Proverbs, and all over the New Testament. There’s even an entire book of the Bible dedicated to the joy of sexual union between one man and one woman. Without much of a close look, I can safely say that at least 172 verses in the Bible talk explicitly about marriage, which make up 0.553% of the Bible. That does not count the verses that can be construed to implicitly talk about marriage, of which I was too lazy to include at this time.
On top of this, the Bible continually mentions all of the negative things that happen when this intended union is broken. To continue the theme of percentages, the number of times the Bible refers explicitly to the negative consequences of breaking God’s intended purpose for sexual union totals at least 236 verses, from what I could find in my lazy, barely-scratching-the-surface searching. And considering that’s more verses than any one of the Twelve Books of the Minor Prophets contain, that’s saying something. That’s about 0.759% of the Bible dedicated to talking about the importance of not going against God’s design for marriage. If you put all of that together, that makes the amount of time the Bible spends talking about marriage period a whopping 408 verses, or 1.312% of the Bible. That’s bigger than the entire book of Hebrews, whose 303 verses make up only 0.974% of the Bible.
The funny thing about all the verses I found describing all of the affronts to God’s plan for sexuality is that one particular topic is breached far more than the others. Yes, some verses talk about lust and prostitutes and the whole gambit of sexual sin, but an extremely large chunk of these verses have to do with the destructiveness of affairs. In the story of Abram and Sarai (what Abraham and Sarah were called before God renamed them), God caused a famine to waste all of Egypt because Abram let Sarai sleep with the Pharaoh. In the story of David and Bathsheba, God kills the child produced by the affair that the King of Israel had with the wife of Uriah because of how sinful the affair was. Throughout the prophetic books of the Old Testament, most notably in Ezekiel and Hosea, God consistently uses the analogy of an affair-hungry wife to describe the pain of Israel’s unfaithfulness to Him. And we haven’t even discussed the New Testament yet.
It would seem that this problem of extramarital affairs is not only limited to ancient times. There are statistics that run the whole gambit, but even the most conservative estimates of married people who cheat on their spouses hover at around 22–44%. And no, the numbers do not go down in the context of Christian relationships. Fallen Pastor Ministries, a Christian organization dedicated to helping Pastors recover from affairs, estimates that around 33% of conservative Pastors have admitted that they “crossed the line with a woman not their spouse” at some point in their careers. And that’s just the people who are willing to admit.
All this in the face of not just Biblical denouncement, but public denouncement. According to a Huffington Post survey that asked people what actions they considered to be morally wrong, cheating on a partner was far and away the thing that people agreed on, with 91% of the adults surveyed placing that action on their lists of affronts.
Compare those numbers to these numbers; 3.5% of adults in the United States identify as gay. 0.3% of them identify as transgender. And 8.2% of adults report that they have engaged in some form of homosexual activity at some point in their lives. Which, in light of the Nashville Statement, is still quite a problem. But not nearly as big of a problem as the one in their own Christian backyard.
This is the problem I have with the Nashville Statement. It goes on and on about how the non-Christian world and Christians who affirm homosexuality are an affront to God’s plan for sexuality with their actions. And entering into the logic of the Nashville Statement, that is definitely true. Just as true as the fact that cheating on your spouse is just as strong, if not even stronger, of an affront.
The very first article of the Nashville Statement says the following;
WE AFFIRM that God has designed marriage to be a covenantal, sexual, procreative, lifelong union of one man and one woman, as husband and wife, and is meant to signify the covenant love between Christ and his bride the church.
That’s a reasonable thing to say in light of the Biblical text. And that’s a reasonable thing to want to defend in light of the Biblical text. But why did there have to be a public petition, a flashy statement, a pseudo-legal, contractual obligation to defend Christian marriage from one of its tiniest sort-of threats? Why isn’t there another petition on another hip, tricked out website affirming that Christians will stand by their own Pastors and married friends, declaring their dedication to help fight off any temptation and threat that seeks to tear apart their relationship?
My point is this: Christians cannot pretend to defend the concept of Biblical marriage and sexuality when married Pastors and laymen alike are actively struggling right in their own circles. There are so many more practical, hands-on ways that Christians can uphold the doctrine of marriage and God-ordained sexual interaction that would be far more helpful than arbitrarily signing a brash online document.
If you are friends with a married person, why don’t you ask them how their relationship with their spouse is going? Ask them what they struggle with. If you are a married person, remember to be open about how your relationship is going with people who care. Don’t let temptation fester behind closed doors. If you go to church regularly, get to know your Pastor and Elders better, and see them not just as leaders, but as fellow Siblings in Christ. If you truly believe in upholding Biblical marriage and sexuality, be just as vocal about helping aid the marriages in your own friend group before you denounce the sexuality of others.
“Do not judge, or you too will be judged. For in the same way you judge others, you will be judged, and with the measure you use, it will be measured to you.
— Matthew 7:1–2
If the Nashville Statement is going to create a Biblical measure by which one can judge the sinfulness of others, they need to be even quicker to use that measure on themselves.
“Why do you look at the speck of sawdust in your brother’s eye and pay no attention to the plank in your own eye? How can you say to your brother, ‘Let me take the speck out of your eye,’ when all the time there is a plank in your own eye? You hypocrite, first take the plank out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to remove the speck from your brother’s eye.” — Matthew 7:3–5
Christian. Do not miss what is already in front of you to fix. By putting in so much effort to point fingers at the sexual immorality of others, you are actively labeling the failing marriages in your community as “not your problem”.
Stop pointing to action outside of yourself. Work to uphold those already living in the reality of Biblical sexual expression. Let your own actions be the witness to “the good purposes of God for human sexuality”. Help the Church get the plank out of its own eye. And then maybe The Body can help get that speck out of the eye of “the spirit of the age”.
