Posted on 05/28/2015 5:51:04 PM PDT by Mrs. Don-o
What does the rising generation of young evangelicals think about marriage? [Catholics too!] Here's the troubling truth.
For five years, Dr. Abigail Rine has been teaching a course on gender theory at George Fox University, an evangelical school in the Quaker tradition.
At the beginning of the semester, she tells her students that “they are guaranteed to read something they will find disagreeable, probably even offensive.”
Writing at FirstThings.com recently, she related how five years ago it was easy to find readings that challenged and even offended the evangelical college students “considering the secular bent of contemporary gender studies.”
But today, things are different. “Students now,” she says, “arrive in my class thoroughly versed in the language and categories of identity politics; they are reticent to disagree with anything for fear of seeming intolerant—except, of course, what they perceive to be intolerant.”daily_commentary_05_28_15
And what do they find “intolerant”? Well, in her class, an essay entitled “What is Marriage?” by Sherif Girgis, Robert George, and Ryan Anderson, which was the beginning of the book “What Is Marriage?: Man and Woman: A Defense.”
In their article, Girgis, George, and Anderson defend what they call the conjugal view of marriage. “Marriage,” they write, “is the union of a man and a woman who make a permanent and exclusive commitment to each other … that is naturally fulfilled by bearing and rearing children together.” They defend this view against what they call the “revisionist view” of marriage, which redefines marriage to include, among other things, same-sex couples.
“My students hate it,” Dr. Rine wrote. They “lambast the article.” “They also,” she adds, “seem unable to fully understand the argument.” And again, these are evangelical students at an evangelical school.
The only argument for conjugal marriage they’ve ever encountered has been the wooden proof-texting from the Bible. And besides, wrote Rine, “What the article names as a ‘revisionist’ idea of marriage—marriage as an emotional, romantic, sexual bond between two people—does not seem ‘new’ to my students at all, because this is the view of marriage they were raised with, albeit with a scriptural, heterosexual gloss.”
As Rine points out “the redefinition of marriage began decades ago” when “the link between sexuality and procreation was severed in our cultural imagination.”
And if marriage “has only an arbitrary relationship to reproduction,” then it seems mean-spirited to Rine’s students to argue that marriage by its very nature excludes same-sex couples.
And where do students get the idea that marriage “has only an arbitrary relationship to reproduction”? Well, everywhere—television, church, school, their homes, in youth groups.
Rine writes, “As I consider my own upbringing and the various ‘sex talks’ I encountered in evangelical church settings over the past twenty years, I realize that the view of marital sex presented there was primarily revisionist.”
In other words, once you say, “I do,” you get “the gift” of sex which is presented as “a ‘gift’ largely due to its [erotic], unitive properties, rather than its intrinsic capacity to create life.” Even in the Church, children have become an optional add-on to married life rather than its primary purpose.
What can we do to win back our children, our churches, and the culture? In our recent book “Same Sex Marriage,” Sean McDowell and I lay out a game plan. We offer strategies for the short-term and the long-term, with the ultimate goal: re-shaping the cultural imagination towards what God intended marriage to be, starting with the church. Come to BreakPoint.org to pick up your copy.
As Chuck Colson once said in a BreakPoint commentary about marriage, “We Christians are very good at saying ‘No.’ But we’ve got to get better at saying ‘Yes’: showing how God’s plan for humanity is a blessing. That His ways, including faithful, life-giving marriage between one man and one woman, lead to human flourishing physically, emotionally, and spiritually.”
I couldn’t agree more.
Root cause of the collapse of the marriage culture: the severance of the unitive and procreative meanings of marital sexual union.
Quakers are not evangelicals.
I am not even sure they are Christians
Listen... do you hear it?
There's a million Leftists laughing at your post - it's so incredibly perfect!
Keep up the good work - strict religious purity for conservative votes is the only way to make sure freedom will be properly limited to the right kind of godliness.
Why attack that poster? You didn’t even post anything challenging his statement, which sounded sincere.
I’ve never heard that Quakers are Evangelical Christians either.
“Are the Quakers Going Pagan?
The liberal end of the Society of Friends has long had members who denied God’s existence or Jesus’ divinity. Now hundreds of pagans call Quakerism home.”
http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2008/aprilweb-only/118-11.0.html
Marriage has been marriage since ‘way before Christ’s appearance to form His Bride, the True Church of regenerated believer-disciples.
[[[Colson: “We Christians are very good at saying No.” We must be more positive about God’s blessings and sex for procreation, blah, blah.]]]
I liked Colson’s preaching overall. He was a great Christian leader and powerful evangelist.
But he is dead wrong about Christians saying “no” too much. Most American Christians, pastors,ministers and priests stopped saying no a long time ago. They stopped reciting the Ten Commandments. They took up prosperity gospel and praise band happy talk like “you are so beautiful God” and “I run into your arms, God” (God is my girlfriend?).
Most of all Christians stopped going to confession, teaching their children about sin, or mentioning sin from he pulpit except in the most general namby-pamby terms (forgive us our sins (which ones?), amen, goodbye).
No Christians don’t say no too much. They rarely say it at all.
it would be significant to find out what the religious composition (as contrasted to the religious "label") of this college actually is.
The Quakers I have met were almost Unitarian/Universalist.
They didn’t believe in a Hell but, everyone goes to Heaven. They held to sort of a fuzzy social gospel and had no problem with supporting all sorts of un-Biblical positions.
If that is not representative of them as a group then I apologise but the ones I have met practiced a theology that was so extremely non-biblical that I couldn’t see how they thought they were Christian.
I know several couples(including my husband and me) who realized this truth several years into our marriage, specifically the procreation aspect. We viewed it much as the current students, but God removed the scales from our eyes. At 41, I am so grateful for the bonus children He gave us. Right now I am outside listening to my 4 and 2 year olds sing “I have the Joy, Joy,Joy Down in my Heart” while they climb and play. Had we stopped at the four children we decided we would have, we’d be missing out on so much happiness.
To be fair, even my grandparents’ generation viewed having children as an optional choice in marriage. We are just now extending the unbiblical view to include all kinds of depravity.
What difference does it make? Nobody’s buying the, “You made a commitment, now suffer through making a life, model anymore.
Are we actually arguing over whether input related to the Quakers is relevant? Talk about missing the point, welcome to extinction!!!
Quakers, interestingly, are specifically named in Indiana state law as not requiring a marriage license.
>> Root cause of the collapse of the marriage culture: the severance of the unitive and procreative meanings of marital sexual union.
Not to argue your valid point, but that’s actually the *proximal* cause.
The *root* cause is satan, himself.
This nameless, faceless, insidious, ruthless, all-pervasive push to destroy the institution of marriage as GOD defined it is a textbook example of “...the rulers of the darkness of this world... spiritual wickedness in high places...” against whom we Christians must wrestle. (Eph. 6:12)
The main battle is taking place in the heavenlies; we are merely proxies here on earth.
The situation is serious but not dismal. [SPOILER: I peeked at the ending — we win. :-) ]
Not many churches are teaching the biblical foundations as a result people at “christian” in church only but live like a sinner the other 6 days.
This caught my eye. People forget what the onus was for the publication of Humanae Vitae : the original proposition of the public to say, "no" to the unitive and procreative aspects of martial life. The Church's "no" was to their proposition which was, in fact, a yes to life.
It's the same with homosexual whatever-you-want-to-call-it. The Church didn't go looking for this issue. This is coming from the people.
That was an odd post to make about the 100,000 Quakers, many who do not even believe in Jesus, and a denomination that is counting on Pagans to increase it’s numbers, being pointed out as not being Evangelical Christians.
Was that a post related to Mormonism somehow?
(I understand there are a lot of Quakers in Africa who are Evangelicals, though, and generally much more conservative n a variety of issues: against abortion and homosexuality, in favor of a "high" view of Scripture --- unlike many Friends in the US and the UK.)
There IS a body known as Evangelical Friends Church International unites evangelical Christian Friends, but I understand that is less than half of Friends. Then there's the Friends General Conference, which is largely Christian-Humanist and Liberal, with also an agnostic/non-theistic faction. Liberal Friends, Conservative Friends, and Pastoral Friends would call themselves followers of Jesus as a spiritual teacher but do not practice baptism or consider the Bible authoritative --- not as authoritative as the "Inner Light."
My Quaker friends over the years ---honorable people--- would be the first to tell you they are not Evangelical.
There was an East vs. West/Humanistic vs. Orthodox split among Quakers (in 1827), so when George Fox College began in Oregon in 1885, it was founded by the more evangelical Northwest Yearly Meeting of Friends.
I think its great you made your choices.
I think others can make their own choices too.
Not everyone should have kids. If they arent going to do it right and recognize the commitment and need to do it right, they arent resdy for it and shouldnt have them just because others say they should, or whatever other reasons they tell them.
Some Quakers streams are very evangelical and conservative in their beliefs, and others are very liberal.
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