Marriage and family life may be the arenas of human life where the ongoing work of sanctification plays out most vividly. They cannot make human beings holy, but they open the human heart to accept God’s grace and to understand it.  

Men despise religion…The cure for this is first to show that religion is not contrary to reason, but worthy of reverence and respect. Next make it attractive, make good men wish it were true, and then show that it is.
~Blaise Pascal

Can Christian sexual ethics survive the sexual revolution? Churches everywhere trim in the face of the popularity of modern sexual mores. Most Protestant churches long ago abandoned proscriptions on contraception and divorce. Many have on abortion. They wink at cohabitation. They rarely complain that the state has usurped familial obligations like teaching about sexuality and caring for children or warn parishioners that public schools see themselves as ersatz parents instead of in loco parentis.

Into the breach steps John W. Kleinig, a Lutheran minister in Australia, theologian, and author of Wonderfully Made: A Protestant Theology of the Body, which accentuates the positive about Christian marriage. Christians, Kleinig worries “will not be heard and heeded by our critics” unless we lead with “a positive, rightly ordered vision of it in its beauty” rather than adopting a “self-righteous, censorious stance.” The Ten Commandment’s Thou-Shalt-Nots point to Shalls: leading with Shalls instead of Shall-Nots puts Christian marriage in the best light. We have reason to hope that the attractiveness of the family will reinforce the attractiveness of Christianity. Thus will good men wish Christianity to be true from the attractiveness of Christian marriage.

Equally important, the Shalls will explain to Christians themselves what they are doing and why. Modern ideologies leak into Christian churches in a thousand ways. One of them is through shaping how people understand family life. Believers get light from the “Modern American Sun” and the Light of the World. If believers follow the American Sun, they will think marriage is a prison, motherhood and fatherhood are limits on freedom, their body is their choice, or sex is merely a vehicle for personal pleasure. How should Christians think about these things?

Making Marriage Attractive Again

Neither marriage nor family life can really proceed without sacrificial love, so they provide a glimpse of heavenly love in a fallen world. To make marriage attractive again churches should emphasize making its attributes attractive. Protestant churches either misunderstand and misapply these attributes, or downplay them because of the power of the Modern American Sun. Kleinig highlights those unseen attributes.

Chastity

Sexual desire is especially corrupted. The who, how many, how, how often and with whom of sex are all subject to temptation. Against this, Kleinig preaches the “beauty of chastity.” Chastity does not simply mean “no sex” or “no sex before marriage.” It means the right ordering of sexual desire. Assume that a husband buys his wife sexy lingerie and orders her to put it on and act like a prostitute before sex. That is not chastity, though it respects, in sense, the bond between sex and marriage. Real chastity involves a man and a woman entering into an exclusive enduring sexual commitment to one another, where they love and serve one another instead of giving way to their lusts. Chastity means that sex finds a subordinate place within a larger communal relationship where husbands and wives share lives. That communal relationship is beautiful—it’s a “house of marriage,” as Kleinig sees it.

Fruitfulness

Marriage is transformative. It is not an alliance between separate individuals. It makes a community. Husbands are less apt to look at wives as sexual objects, as happens with fornicators. Wives are more likely to be satisfied with the man they have, instead of filing for divorce at the first whiff of marital conflict. Husbands and wives joined in communal marriage are more likely to be open to bringing new life into the world. Men and women stick it out not for fear of the consequences of not sticking it out, but rather because not sticking it out is unthinkable. The two have become one. Sex creates children and responsibilities for parents. This is when the two really become one. This leads Kleinig to a deep worry about contraception. “A married couple,” Kleinig writes, “who can have children but deliberately refuses to do so commits an unnatural, life-denying act of defiance that rejects the blessings God wishes to bestow on them and the whole human race.”

Enduring

The vision for marriage is one man, one woman, one time. What God has united let man not put asunder. In God’s eyes, the man and the woman of marriage are not separated. Re-marriage from the perspective of the church is not an option. This creates the proper disposition to the inevitable conflicts and rough-patches of married life. When marriage is enduring, the petty troubles appear petty. When endurance is optional, every breeze can blow it down. Built on God, marriage cannot be built on sand. And how beautiful it is to keep the main thing the main thing, as opposed to having an itchy trigger finger for divorce. Kleinig goes as far in the direction of demanding permanent marriage as any non-Catholic thinker I have seen.

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