It has been 35 years now, and when Nancy and I were first together we decided that if we had anything to work through, we would do it together. We determined that we would not ever share any problem with outsiders unless it was by mutual consent, and it was for the purpose of getting actual help and counsel. In other words, we each married our only confidant, and we did not want to deal with random extras, volunteering for that position. And that is the way it has been, many thanks to God.
This was coupled with another standard we set, which was that of keeping short accounts with one another. If we had not been keeping short accounts, then at some point the problems would have piled up to a point of visibility to others, whether we said anything or not. There is more than one way to communicate to the outside world. So there are two elements to this. You must deal with it, and you must guard against others dealing with it unnecessarily.
And, let it be said, I am talking here about “sharing,” and not talking about situations where the wife is obligated to call the elders, or the cops, or both.
This standard could be called an intimacy hedge. Outsiders are not privileged to share in certain things that do not belong to them. The same standard, adjusted in accordance with the situation, applied to our kids growing up. Outside the family, you just don’t talk about certain things. I am not talking about a hypocrisy wall; I am talking about an intimacy hedge. A family full of sin that “keeps up appearances” is no good either. This realm of intimacy means that you protect something in order to give to your wife and family, and it is known by them to be precious because you refuse to share it with anybody else. When the walls of the vineyard are broken down, the wild boars cannot be wished away (Ps. 80:12-13). If you lament the state of your vineyard, one thing to check would be the fences.
Interestingly, the first theological controversy I was ever involved with (I am afraid they started early) centered on this issue. I was working with a man who believed that my preaching needed to be far “more transparent.” By this, he meant that he thought that that little tiff with the wife in the car ought to show up in the sermons. It would help make me more “open,” more “approachable.” The pulpit becomes a confessional, built to accommodate lots of people. I refused because the herald’s job is to deliver a message, and that message is not his personal troubles (2 Cor. 4:5). Call me old-fashioned, but I don’t think it is a preacher’s job to wash his skivvies in the pulpit.
But I confess that the current of our times is against me in this. In the secular world, the Oprahfication of our culture proceeds apace, and everybody thinks that complete ventilation of everything is therapeutic. Reality shows everywhere think that squabbles are interesting, and moreover we tend to assume that they are any of our business. But if a man disrespects his wife by insulting her cooking, say, he magnifies it a thousand times over by doing so with cameras around. A tiff, properly contained, is what it is. But a tiff performed on stage is a species of high contempt for the other person.
In Christian circles, we have modified all this with spiritual words, and the nature of the stage, but we are driven by the same cultural forces. We use words like “share,” and “honesty,” and “transparency,” but this is just the same therapeutic lust. Non-Christians like this kinky little business dressed up in a nurse’s uniform. Christians want the kinky outfit to be that of father confessor, the kind that gives the Vatican fits.
So who could be against that? Well, me. Sign me up. As Eliza Bennett says in one of the film versions of Pride and Prejudice, “Honesty is a greatly overrated virtue.”
Husbands and wives who talk a lot about their relationships to others, and parents who talk a lot about their relationships with their kids to others, need to ask themselves this question. How much does the Bible warn us about the dangers of sharing too little? How much are we commanded to speak a little more voluminously? You have concordances and Bible search programs on your computer. Go. Check it out. Now, how much does God tell us to guard our tongues? James does not call the tongue a cosmos of iniquity because the tongue hardly says anything (Jas. 3:6). Where words are many, sin is not absent (Prov. 10:19).
When it comes to driving lessons for the tongue, the Holy Spirit teaches us repeatedly about the brake pedal. I am simply pointing out that there is a likely reason for this. He expects we already know about the accelerator.
Defenders of this transparency appoach will say that they are trying to facilitate open communication. But what they are doing is destroying open communication. Imagine a teenaged boy who tells his mom something about the struggles in his thought life. And imagine his mortification a couple days later, when he hears her talking to some of her friends about it. Think he is going to say anything to her about that, ever again? Her verbal intimacy with friends is the principal threat to true intimacy. The same goes for married couples. Talking to the wrong people disrupts your ability to talk with the right people. Intimacy with everybody is simply intimacy inflation, and makes true intimacy impossible.
I have catalogued this under “Sex and Culture” because the center of all intimacy is sexual intimacy, and all intimacy begins with words. In order to protect and preserve a culture of sexual integrity, every godly family has to have a structured series of fences, concentrically arranged. As you proceed outward, it is appropriate for the fences to get lower, but near the center, it should be like the Holy of Holies, guarded jealously. If someone gets too close the center of our lives, he should encounter priests with spears.
But our pornified culture insists on battering down all such fences. Christians cannot grant the legitimacy of this verbal voyeurism and faux-intimacy, and then arbitrarily draw a line when it comes to actually walking across one of the places where the hedges should have been, and used to be. My son’s apt phrase for this problem in Christian circles is “spiritual nudist,” and one of the things that spiritual nudists don’t do very well is put on the full armor of God. This is not an isolated problem, and it is not a small one. This is one of those places where purported “virtues” inside the Church are helping to further rampant vices outside the Church.