Intimacy without obedience is promiscuous and pathetic. As it turns out, authority and obedience are erotic necessities. But you can’t have either without a covenant — and covenant vows, of necessity, obligate the husband to take responsibility and require the wife to render honor and obedience.
This is why the common practice of removing “to obey” from a bride’s wedding vows represents a sad petty rebellion on the couple’s part, and a mega-rebellion on the part of the minister who administers those vows. As a representative of the Church, he is saying that the bride of which he is a representative has no intention of rendering honor and obedience to her husband. And so he doesn’t make the individual type of the Church make that vow, because to hear things like that unsettles an already unsettled conscience. This is just like modern educrats, for example, who hate the idea of red ink, indicating which are the right and wrong answers on spelling tests, and they hate it because wrong answers marked as such always remind them of the great white throne judgment. Such reminders are obviously a source of unease.
I was talking about these things yesterday with Tim Bayly, who is one of the few in the Church today who understands what is actually at stake in the sexuality debates, and so we got each other going on this subject. We agreed that there is a desperate need to explain these principles to the Church at large, and so here I am doing my bit. I hope he writes soon with his take. He goaded me, and so if he doesn’t produce soon, you all can goad him.
We have two problems. The first is obviously egalitarianism. But the second is deracinated complementarianism. On these issues, it is not enough to say that “this rule” ought not to be broken, because God wrote it, and so we just have to do it, no telling why. In Scripture, there are rules and there are rules. There is the tree in the middle of the garden, concerning which an act of disobedience caused all human woe, and there is the showbread that David and his men ate, which the Lord held up as an example for us to follow. We want to flatten everything because we don’t want to think. We hate wisdom. Wisdom makes distinctions, and wisdom is thereby most unfair to us. But not to put too fine a point on it, sexuality is not showbread.
Modern evangelicals are either egalitarians, or are flirting with them, and so everybody treats the Bible’s teaching on sex and gender, office and obedience, planting seed and receiving seed, as matters “about which we may have our disagreements.” This is why, for example, the PCA won’t ordain women here, while at the same time establishing ties with European churches which do. The fact that they won’t ordain women here is therefore obviously a matter of politics and expedience, and not the result of a scriptural understanding of what is actually going on. The disobedience may not have been rolled out here yet, but we have it in the warehouse. This is not an instance of Americans and Europeans publishing different books. It is the same book with different release dates.
But there is more. When a man assumes responsibility with authority in a wedding ceremony, and when a woman promises honor and obedience, it remains a fact that many of their subsequent days will not manifest these realities with equal clarity. When he is at work in his cubicle and she is in the produce section of the grocery store, authority and submission are not immediately obvious. In a healthy marriage, authority and submission do come up from time to time in patterns of behavior, conversations and decisions. But where is the heart of it? These realities become stark and undeniable every time they make love.
This is a great mystery, Paul says, but he speaks of Christ and the Church. And this is where evangelicals recoil, either because if residual Victorianism, incipient feminism, or most likely both, and they begin to protest. But the fact remains that human sexual intercourse is given to us as a glorious type, the antitype being what? Christ and the church, right, but what answers to the covenantal renewal of the marriage bed? The Latin word for the Greek musterion, mystery, is sacramentum.
The sacraments are the trysting point. And the sacraments are also a point of stumbling for gnostics everywhere because the place where Christ meets with His people is a material place — bread and wine, and they are administered in the visible church. Now, with the Reformers, we insist on the absolute necessity of faith, and faith brings obedience, and there is that word again.
The modern evangelical generic invitation to nonbelievers to develop “a personal relationship with Jesus” is therefore more like a suggestion for shacking up than it is a proposal of marriage. A proposal of marriage involves a church, vows, commitments, authority, and submission. Hooking up does not.
Corporately, the Church is the bride of Christ, and we all together constitute that bride (Eph. 5:23). Individually, the Church is our mother (Gal. 4:26) and Christ our Father (Is. 9:6). We learn to call God the Father “our Father” because we have been brought into the body of the redeemed. It is “our Father,” not “my Father.” And so if we would learn the right kind of marital obedience, we must do it in the Church. Obey the law of your mother (Prov. 1:8; Prov. 6:20).
Of course for every pastoral problem there is an opposite and equal pastoral problem. If evangelicals want intimacy without commitment, the sacramentards want commitment without intimacy. More about that some other time. Throughout His Word, the Lord shows us a better way.