Michael Craven

As discussed last week, the noted anthropologist, J. D. Unwin conducted what is arguably the most exhaustive examination of sexual ethics and their affect upon society. In brief, Unwin discovered that throughout history, the state of a given society was directly related to its sexual ethic. Monogamous cultures prosper and those disinclined to restrain sex to monogamous marriage remain primitive or, if once successful, they decline. Unwin also observed that legally recognized and socially reinforced marriage was the only effective means for regulating sexual behavior. Where marriage is strictly defined and reinforced, monogamy rules.

This assertion led many proponents of same-sex marriage (SSM) to argue that since monogamy is—according to Unwin—central to the health and prosperity of a given society, we should offer “marriage” to same-sex couples for the purpose of promoting monogamy among gays. So it seems I must address this charge before continuing in our defense of marriage.

Attempting to promote monogamy among homosexual couples by rearranging marriage ignores the fact that homosexual acts are patently obvious distortions of the human biological design. We are born biologically male or female and as such we are sexually dissimilar but in complimentary ways. The male/female sexual union works, in other words. This is true of every species on earth. Every living organism has a particular way of reproducing and rearing offspring; its anatomy is biologically designed to support that way. If one believes we are products of an evolutionary process, then homosexual acts are a deviation from the procreative design and homosexuality is therefore a genetic defect because it fails to propagate the species. If one holds to the belief that we are created, then it defies the design and intent of the Creator. Either way homosexuality violates the given design.

Gay advocates argue that homosexuality occurs throughout the animal kingdom and therefore this somehow validates or normalizes homosexual acts. While there is evidence that some animals (usually males) will, on occasion, attempt intercourse with another of the same sex, this remains an aberration, as it still fails to achieve the procreative principles inherent in that creature’s biological design. On its surface, this is a ridiculous defense. Sexual acts beyond the biological design are a perversion of human sexuality and therefore contrary to the maintenance of sexual morality.

We are reluctant to say this today because our culture has been inundated with gay-rights propaganda that carefully avoids the sexual reality of homosexual behavior. Instead the emphasis is on the so-called emotional and romantic aspects. As a result, we feel sympathetic; we may feel like we should capitulate to their demand for marriage in the name of equal treatment. However, equal treatment of persons living the homosexual lifestyle is a completely different issue than redefining marriage. No thinking Christian opposes the equal treatment of homosexuals, because they are fully human persons made in the image of God. Furthermore, gay men and women are free to have sex, experience romantic relationships, and live in whatever arrangement they choose. (Of course, there are consequences to these choices.) What is not their choice is to redefine an institution essential to the social welfare and common good such that these benefits are nullified. The demand for SSM is not about equal dignity and treatment but rather social affirmation of a particular lifestyle.

Any given thing is what it is based on its possessing certain essential characteristics, features, or qualities. For example, water is what it is by virtue of it possessing a particular chemical structure (two atoms of hydrogen combined with one of oxygen). The possession of these essential characteristics is what defines and distinguishes water from every other liquid. You might attempt to define water by some other characteristic, i.e., fluidity. However, while fluidity is certainly a characteristic of water, it is not essential to defining water. If we were to exchange the essential feature—chemical structure—for the nonessential feature, you can imagine the problems that would result. You might receive a glass of gasoline in response to a request for water!

This is analogous to redefining marriage apart from its essential characteristics. Human procreation is essential to marriage. Procreative acts are biologically exclusive to male and female conjugation. In the event children are realized, marriage represents and reinforces society’s expectation that the mother and father will remain committed to the rearing and care of those children. This also represents the natural family structure for human beings.  Suffice it to say, marriage, strictly defined, serves a vital social interest that rests ultimately on the welfare of children and not the self interests of adults. Thus marriage cannot be redefined apart from its essential role in regulating human procreative potential.

I received a rebuttal from one SSM advocate that “the procreative argument is easily dismissed based on the fact that many heterosexual married couples are unable to procreate due to infertility or other physical or medical issues. They have a sexual relationship … but they have to rely on other mechanisms i.e., in vitro fertilization, surrogates, to have children. Homosexual couples are likewise biologically disadvantaged and rely on the same above mentioned methods to have children and build their families.”

Homosexual couples are not biologically disadvantaged—they are biologically incapable. No matter how homosexual couples may acquire children, they still rely on a process that is heterosexual (male sperm and female egg) and beyond their own biology. Regardless, even if children are not realized in marriage or a married couple chooses not to have children, they nonetheless participate in the same procreative acts essential to defining human sexuality; these acts are essential to what is marriage and vice versa.

SSM advocates want to redefine marriage apart from these essential characteristics by appealing to the nonessential characteristic of erotic love, arguing that because they love one another they should be allowed to participate in marriage. However, as our analogy of water demonstrates, defining water apart from its essential characteristics renders the definition of water meaningless. One could then argue that because he loves his dog, he should be able to marry his dog, etc. The possibilities become ridiculous and marriage becomes meaningless.  

Unwin’s research and human history confirms that acceptance of sexual perversion always follows the modification of heterosexual monogamy within marriage. In other words, once a society begins to extend sexual opportunities beyond the exclusive relationship of marriage between a man and woman, the society’s sexual ethic begins to descend. Sexual profligacy ensues, perversions increase, marriage and the natural family erode, and birth rates decline until the society is unable to sustain itself—all in the name of serving our own selfish desires.

© 2008 by S. Michael Craven

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S. Michael Craven is the founder and President of the Center for Christ & Culture. Michael is the author of the groundbreaking book, Uncompromised Faith: Overcoming Our Culturalized Christianity, published by Navpress and scheduled for release January 2009. Michael's ministry is dedicated to renewal within the Church and works to equip Christians with an intelligent and thoroughly Christian approach to matters of culture in order to demonstrate the relevance of Christianity to all of life. For more information on the Center for Christ & Culture, the teaching ministry of S. Michael Craven, visit: www.battlefortruth.org

Michael lives in the Dallas area with his wife Carol and their three children.

In the wake of the California Supreme Court’s audacious decision to legitimize marriage between people of the same sex, media outlets have been dominated by discussions on the topic. Frustrated by the lack of any cogent arguments defending the Judeo-Christian conception of marriage, a friend challenged me to pen a more thorough apologetic so that Christians might be better equipped to offer an articulate and rational defense of this essential institution.

Over the course of the next four to six weeks, that is precisely what I will attempt to do. The battle to define marriage is not over; the church must be able to speak in more convincing terms than simply “because the Bible says …” As we proceed, I would encourage you to thoroughly process the information and arguments presented here, and even consider integrating this material into your adult Sunday school and Bible study classes. If this is not practical, you might consider hosting a “Dessert and Discussion” at your home, in which you invite members from your church to gather for the purpose of reasoning together through the nature and definition of marriage as defined by the Christian worldview, and why this definition matters.

As I have said before, the Bible is true because it is the word of God and by that authority alone, it is so. However, that is not its only evidence for being the truth. All truth claims are subject to their correspondence with reality. For example, the law of gravity issues an absolute claim to a truism. One can either accept or reject this claim, but upon testing this claim in the real world—say, by inviting the skeptic to jump off the roof—all will come face to face with the absolute truth of gravity. The same is true relative to the Judeo-Christian definition of marriage. It is what it is and when you attempt to redefine it into something it is not, there will follow the predictable splat—somewhat like the skeptic who launches himself off your roof!
 
Marriage is far more profound than our contemporary culture would lead us to believe. It is a lifelong commitment that restrains self-centeredness, self-indulgence, and self-gratification. It is the one relationship that effectively prepares and conditions us for living in community with others. By restraining self-centeredness and promoting love of another, marriage then becomes the foundation for social order. When this commitment labeled marriage is reduced to nothing more than a mere contract between two consenting persons, one option among many, or redefined to accommodate any type of participants [or number], it ceases to provide the same societal benefits.

Marriage is Unique
The Judeo-Christian concept of marriage is as old as mankind. It serves as the very foundation of civilization itself. The marriage covenant is singularly unique in civilization; it is not simply a civil or romantic union between two people. Rather, it is an emotional, physical, and spiritual union between one man and one woman. It is emotional in the sense that two people, male and female, each with different (complementary) attributes, join together in life, assisting one another, nurturing and caring for one another, and affirming and guiding one another—in essence, completing the other. It is physical in the sense that marriage is procreative. Two separate biological beings blend together to create what neither can create on their own: children. And lastly, marriage is spiritual in the sense that we are made for this partnership that places the interest of the other (or others, in the case of children) above self—a relationship that ultimately mirrors God’s sacrificial love toward each of us and His bride: the church.

Augustine wrote in the fourth century, “peace is the tranquility that is produced by order” (tranquillitas ordinis). Marriage is the very cornerstone of moral and social order. History has proven time and again that no community can enjoy peace and harmony without following the true moral order, and marriage provides the only effective institution for perpetuating this order.

There is irrefutable evidence to support this statement relative to marriage and its role in producing not only social order but cultural prosperity as well. In 1934, the noted British anthropologist Joseph Daniel Unwin’s research demonstrated that those cultures that held to a strong sexual ethic—in which sex was strictly constrained to the marriage relationship—were as a result more productive and therefore prospered in contrast to cultures that were “sexually free” (Unwin, Sex and Culture, London: Oxford University Press, l934, 411–12, 431–32).

Unwin studied eighty primitive and sixteen civilized cultures spanning more than five thousand years of history and found this principle to be an indisputable fact (Sex and Culture, 324–326). He observed that the cultural condition of any society depends upon its “social energy, which is of two kinds, mental energy and creative energy” (Unwin, “Sexual Regulations and Cultural Behavior,” address given on 27 March 1935 to the medical section of the British Psychological Society, later printed by Oxford University Press). Unwin added, “In human records there is no case of an absolutely monogamous society failing to display great energy.” He further observed that “expansive energy has never been displayed by a generation that inherited a modified monogamy, modified polygamy, or an absolute polygamy.”

Social energy, Unwin argued, is the collective social effort that is directed toward the betterment of society and the common good. Societies with high levels of social energy were inherently more expansive, which gave rise to exploration, discovery, and progress in every category of creative growth. This would include those areas of culture such as economics, science, justice, education, arts, and so on. This social energy, he concluded, was greater within those cultures that held strong marital restraints on sex and greatly diminished in cultures with more liberal sexual ethics. More specifically, “Those cultures which allowed sexual freedom do not display a high level of social energy—their energy is consumed with meeting their physical appetites—they do not think large thoughts about the physical world—they are not interested in metaphysical questions regarding life and its meaning. In these cultures, life is for now” (Sexual Regulations). In essence, Unwin discovered that throughout history, a sexually hedonistic society is inherently less productive and lacking in social vision. Thus it fails to achieve what we would define as a civilized status.

Next week we will examine Unwin’s findings relative to those cultures that once held to a strong marital ethic (like ours) but later compromised, as we are now attempting to do.

© 2008 by S. Michael Craven

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S. Michael Craven is the founder and President of the Center for Christ & Culture. The Center for Christ & Culture is dedicated to renewal within the Church and works to equip Christians with an intelligent and thoroughly Christian approach to matters of culture in order to recapture and demonstrate the relevance of Christianity to all of life. For more information on the Center for Christ & Culture, the teaching ministry of S. Michael Craven, visit: www.battlefortruth.org

Michael lives in the Dallas area with his wife Carol and their three children.

Reading the news, I can see how one might be overcome with a sense of hopelessness and despair. Everywhere you look it seems the news is bad, prompting one Associated Press writer to ask “Is Everything spinning out of control?” He writes, “Midwestern levees are bursting. Polar bears are adrift. Gas prices are skyrocketing. Home values are abysmal. Air fares, college tuition and health care border on unaffordable. Wars without end rage in Iraq, Afghanistan and against terrorism … Food is becoming scarcer and more expensive on a worldwide scale … In California, leaders warn people to use less water in the unrelenting drought …” On and on it goes.

In the last national opinion poll, carried out by ABC News and the Washington Post two weeks ago, only 29 percent approved of the way Mr. Bush was handling the job as president—it’s even worse for the Democratic-led Congress—and a whopping 84 percent of voters think the country is going in the wrong direction. (Among those surveyed making less than $25,000 annually, the figure tops 90 percent!) Finally, the percentage of those who think the country is going in the right direction is the lowest it has been since Jimmy Carter was in office. In all, Americans are suffering a hypersense of pessimism.

Of course the “news of the day,” as Neil Postman observed, is a “figment of our technological imagination media. It is … a media event” (Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death, p. 8). It is a concentrated compilation of the most distressing, sordid, and scandalous events that appeal to our voyeuristic tendencies and heighten our sense that “everything is spinning out of control.”

For many Christians, this sense of frustration with the country’s direction is not all that new and recent events, as well as the news, have only exacerbated their concerns. However, I am amazed at the level of pessimism among so many Christians that I encounter. I think this may also be a product of too much reliance on politics. This is, after all, the pressing concern of the population whose frustrations center mostly on the failed expectations of their political leaders and government: the economy, the war, fuel prices, and so on. Add to that concerns over the moral direction of the nation, and the church often appears indifferent or defeated.

This is puzzling to me. How can Christians be pessimistic about the future when they serve the risen King whose kingdom has no end? Do so many fail to realize that our God reigns? Do so many fail to understand that God is sovereign over all things and that His redemptive work in the world is and will be carried to its full completion? There is nothing in the world that can stop the redemptive mission of God as Daniel reminds us:


God and His purpose in the world transcend all powers, events, and people. There is no one and no situation able to overcome or disrupt His redemptive plan. Politicians, economies, and circumstances are merely temporal events; they are bound to a time and place … as in “these too shall pass.” God is transcendent—being outside and apart from His creation—but still exercising dominion, even to the ordination of worldly powers and events. We may not always know to what end, but we can trust in the character and nature of God that whatever end, it will be to His glory and that makes it a true good. Granted, this is sometimes difficult for us to understand but it is here we trust, by faith, in the God who “demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us” (Romans 5:8, NIV).

There is a cure for this pessimism that dominates so much of the population and the church: seek first the kingdom of God, which is also the “good news.” As I shared in my last commentary, I spend each Tuesday in a Texas state prison leading a discipleship group for men, and every week I come face to face with the redemptive power of the Living God. I have come to know and love these truly wonderful brothers in whom sin has tried to do its worst; former criminals, addicts, and gang members and yet today—while they remain behind bars—they have indeed been set free! They are living testimonies to the fact that our God reigns and He has come to seek and save the lost. You cannot spend time with such people and not be encouraged by the overpowering good news that Jesus is bringing into the world each and every day!

What hinders our grasp of the good news is revealed in the parable of the sower, specifically the seed that falls among the thorns, in which the kingdom message is obscured by “the worries of this life and the deceitfulness of wealth choke it, making it unfruitful” (Matthew 13:22, NIV). We progress to a point in the Christian life only to become diverted by the worries of this life; we become “unfruitful” and we compound this when we look to political schemes for solutions, which only hasten our gloom. Again, the political implications of Christianity flow from the conversion of lost souls and teaching converts to be disciples.

However, if we seek first the kingdom and turn ourselves over to God for participation in His redemptive work in the world, not only will we bear fruit, we will be overcome with the hope that flows from seeing Christ’s victory over sin played out in real human terms. By participating in the proclamation and demonstration of the gospel, we are less likely to succumb to the bad news that surrounds us. We become more than conquerors, who wade into the muck that is the fallen world with the real and good news. The light of Christ shines forth and the darkness flees!

In other words, we give ourselves unreservedly to God. We seek after Christ and keep seeking until we are conformed to Him. We deny the flesh and crucify the old self and sin. We go where He wants us to go and not where we are comfortable. We go to those unlike us. We go to the widow, the orphan, and to all who are oppressed, and we go with the same anger toward sin and its effects that Jesus manifested in His compassion toward those so affected. We serve and share the love of Christ with our neighbors, the lonely and brokenhearted. It is here that we will witness the redemptive power of God overcome all that is broken—and when you see the redeeming grace of God fall on the lost you simply cannot be pessimistic anymore! Pessimism is replaced with optimism, frustration gives way to expectation, and despair turns to hope. How on earth can those who have known God be pessimistic?

This, of course, is foolishness to the world … but how much more foolish is it to continue to trust in things that perish, things that change, and things never have and never will change the culture, much less a human soul?

© 2008 by S. Michael Craven

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S. Michael Craven is the founder and President of the Center for Christ & Culture. The Center for Christ & Culture is dedicated to renewal within the Church and works to equip Christians with an intelligent and thoroughly Christian approach to matters of culture in order to recapture and demonstrate the relevance of Christianity to all of life. For more information on the Center for Christ & Culture, additional resources and other works by S. Michael Craven visit: www.battlefortruth.org

Michael lives in the Dallas area with his wife Carol and their three children.

In this heightened political season, there are many, including some Christians, who believe the fate of the nation rises and falls on the outcome of November’s presidential election. That is not to say that politics and elections are inconsequential—the nation prospers from good leaders and suffers from the inept—but are government and political leaders really the hope or ruin of a nation?

Regarding politicians and their influence upon the nation, consider two examples. Abraham Kuyper was a prominent Dutch theologian and journalist who served as prime minster of the Netherlands from 1901 to 1905. Kuyper was arguably one of the greatest Christian thinkers of the twentieth century. His dissertations on the application of Christian thought to the whole of life and culture are among the greatest expressions of the Christian worldview; yet despite being one of the most notable Christian political figures in history, his administration was unable to halt the spiritual and moral decline of the Netherlands.

The other example in our survey is Adolf Hitler, who was arguably the most evil political tyrant ever. In less than six years, Hitler would lead the German people into a vision that would force the whole world into an apocalyptic conflagration, killing more than 50 million human beings. Here again, politics are not inconsequential. However, despite such a wicked ruler, Germany survived and quickly returned to being a major economic power.

So what are we to make of these two comparisons, one godly, the other evil? Both seem to have had little long-term effect on the course of their respective nations. Perhaps politicians and political parties are not the saviors we perceive them to be. Driven by concerns over that which plagues our culture, I think we often live and think as if the right political arrangement will “heal” the nation.  However, Jacques Ellul, the twentieth-century Christian philosopher and theologian—himself involved in French politics—rightly points out that politics can at most put “bandages on the wound; it cannot eradicate the source of man’s affliction” (Jacques Ellul, The Political Illusion, p. 234).

If you know anything about me, you know that I am an ardent advocate of cultural and social engagement. I am socially and fiscally conservative; I’m a veteran and patriot and I believe we have a civic duty to participate in the democratic process. So I am not calling for a withdrawal from politics. I am merely suggesting that we have come to rely almost exclusively on political means rather than spiritual means to reform the culture.

I think this is due, in large part, to the fact that politics provides a significant object of interest, able to occupy our thoughts and discussions while really requiring very little of us. We watch the news, read the blogs, listen to the various pundits, wring our hands and fret—but to what end? I know right now who I will vote for in November and I suspect most of you do as well. That process will take me approximately 30 minutes of one day and yet it is possible to spend nearly every waking hour obsessing over the issues and the candidates. My inbox is filled daily with such fascinations. Unless we are actually working in the political realm, why should we spend any time lamenting the issues when doing so does not produce one iota of substantive effect? In this sense, politics can become a major distraction from the Christian’s true purpose and calling. Ironically, it is the liberal who believes in the primacy of politics as the instrument of cultural and social change. For the Christian, it is the gospel! Ellul reminds us that “an unbiased and unprejudiced reading of the Bible shows that converting men to their Lord is the work Christians are called to do” (Ellul, 234).

In Paul’s letter to Timothy, he encourages the young preacher to “endure hardship … like a good soldier of Christ Jesus,” pointing out that “no one serving as a soldier gets involved in civilian affairs…” (2 Tim. 2:3–4, NIV). Matthew Henry’s commentary on this passage makes the point that all Christians are soldiers in the Lord’s army and as such, we “must not entangle ourselves with those affairs, so as by them to be diverted and drawn aside from our duty to God and the great concerns of our Christianity.”

Again, I am not saying that being a Christian and having political interest or activity is incompatible; I’m not saying that Christians have no place in politics. I think theologian Donald Bloesch correctly delineates the “great concern[s] of our Christianity” when he writes, “The apostolic mandate is to preach the Gospel, not a political program, but this Gospel has tremendous social and political repercussions” (Bloesch, Essentials of Evangelical Theology, Vol. 2, p. 167). Bloesch is stressing that the political implications of Christianity are indeed important; however, they follow the gospel and the conversion of lost souls. The church must always remain focused on the latter, teaching converts to be disciples, with one dimension of discipleship being social service, which includes politics.

It may be that we are attracted to and over-reliant on politics because it offers a means of cultural engagement without hardship. It’s engagement in the world with ease and without personal cost. We can occupy ourselves so much so that we feel like we’re doing something; we convince ourselves that through this activity we are defending God’s honor and standing for truth. But it’s often just a diversion. In reality, we are standing at a distance from the battle. We’re not actually in it; we’re merely observing while others wade into the muck that is the fallen world. I spend almost every Tuesday in prison where I disciple men whose lives have been nearly ruined by sin and neither politician nor any political scheme can heal their affliction. It is here that light conquers the darkness—in the mud and blood and suffering that sin has wrought—and it is there that we bear witness to God’s amazing grace that transforms people and nations.  

It is the Lord who determines the fate of the nations and it is in Him that we trust. Jesus is the Savior of the world, not any politician or political program. And our calling is to love the Lord, our God with all of our heart, mind, soul, and strength, to love our neighbors as ourselves and to make disciples of all nations. It is nothing less than the pursuit of that which Jacques Ellul says “seems impossible to us: the conversion of an entire population and its government” (Ellul, The Meaning of the City, p. 69).

So we will cast our votes this coming November. But in the meantime, let us not be diverted from our duty to God by an unholy reliance upon politics and politicians.

© 2008 by S. Michael Craven

Comment on this article here

Subscribe to Michael's weekly commentary here

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S. Michael Craven is the founder and President of the Center for Christ & Culture. The Center for Christ & Culture is dedicated to renewal within the Church and works to equip Christians with an intelligent and thoroughly Christian approach to matters of culture in order to recapture and demonstrate the relevance of Christianity to all of life. For more information on the Center for Christ & Culture, additional resources and other works by S. Michael Craven visit: www.battlefortruth.org

Michael lives in the Dallas area with his wife Carol and their three children.