Reviews, Interviews, News, Commentaries, Excerpts, My Top 5 Books, Wilson's Bookmarks, Book AwardsWhy C.S. Lewis Was Wrong on Marriage (and J.R.R. Tolkien Was Right)
However, it is important to understand that evangelical commitments to both the pro-life cause and the preservation of traditional marriage are not contrary to those broader counter-cultural concerns. Rather, they fit into that social agenda quite neatly. More than that, if Lewis and Tolkien are correct, the heart of that social vision is not an ethic of the land or economics or sustainability. It's marriage, understood as both the private union of a man and woman and the larger social vision implied by the imagery of marriage; of a community united together in formally-recognized union and relating to one another in an affectionate, fertile way. Such an ethic is good for all areas of life, but it is premised on a certain understanding of marriage. And if we move away from that, we're moving away from far more than sexual norms.
Jake Meador blogs at Notes From a Small Place. This article first appeared at Mere Orthodoxyand is reprinted with permission of the author.
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Jon Trott
Lewis was far too liberal to be tolerated. (Wink.) In fact I think his one-paragraph argument completely convincing, regardless of all the words that followed it in this article or from J. R. R. Tolkien. The Church should uphold biblical marriage. The Church should *not* dictate biblical marriage to the state, just as it should not dictate other articles of faith to the state (such as the Trinity or Salvation via Christ alone). We have a tightrope to walk, and only via the Holy Spirit can we walk it. But insisting upon Christian marriage for non-christian people is both absurd and an act of anti-evangelism.
Hugh Wetmore
Defining Marriage has proved difficult for many. There is Social Marriage which has been practiced in every society long before Legal marriage was developed. But it is God's definition that Marriage happens whenever a man and a woman leave their parents (or previous ties) to form a new family unit, and join in sexual intimacy, that God joins them as one. The Public and the Private events constitute Marriage. This applies to every culture, ethic group, religion ~ from the beginning of Human History (Gen 2:24), and was affirmed by Jesus as a Creation mandate (Matt 19:4-6). It is heterosexual by definition. This is not an exclusively "Christian" institution. Is it permanent? Ideally, yes. But Jesus was realistic enough to say that "hard heart(s)" can lead to divorce. Most of his strong teaching seems directed against Remarriage, rather than Divorce. In our fallen world, we must often choose between the lesser of two evils: (Re)Marriage or Cohabitation.
Derek Atkins
Defending traditional marriage and traditional sexual morality is simply a matter of upholding the common good--every child benefits from having a stable, traditional marriage, and society as a whole benefits tremendously from upholding traditional moral behavior. I'm presently reading a book entitled Adam and Eve After the Pill, which is a devastating critique of the sexual revolution, and one of the key points the author of this book makes is that there are mountains of empirical evidence that demonstrate the awful consequences of the sexual revolution.