Book Briefs: October 3, 1986

Re-Bonding: Preventing and Restoring Damaged Relationships, by Donald M. Joy (Word, 1986, 167 pp.; $11.95, hardcover). Reviewed by John K. Testerman, a physician who practices family medicine in Glendale Heights, Illinois.

When he was the young father of two sons, Donald Joy asked himself whether he would rather have a son who was sexually promiscuous or one who would arrive at the church with a pregnant bride. Joy’s answer: he “would rather have to deal with a monogamous impulse that jumped the gun” than to have a son who was an irresponsible playboy.

(Joy does not consider premarital sex in a bonded relationship to be promiscuity—“fornication” in the biblical sense. He considers such behavior to be poorly timed bonding behavior.)

At that time he reacted out of instinct, but now the Asbury Theological Seminary professor believes he has come to an understanding of biblical teaching and human nature that justifies his choice.

In Re-Bonding, Joy applies to broken human relationships the ideas he developed in his previous work, Bonding: Relationships in the Image of God (Word, 1985). In that book, he drew on the work of anthropologist Desmond Morris, developing the theory that human pair bonding, as seen in courtship and marriage, is an almost instinctive process established by the Creator, analogous to birth bonding between infant and mother or pair bonding in animals. According to Joy, human pair bonding occurs as the courting couple passes through 12 successive stages of increasingly intimate behavior, beginning with the “Where have you been all my life?” discovery and culminating in sexual intercourse.

According to bonding theory, if bonding steps are skipped or rushed through, an unstable pair bond will be formed. Indulging in sexual intercourse prematurely, says Joy, short-circuits the bonding process, resulting in neglect of earlier bonding steps and a weak pair bond. Could this be one cause of the high divorce rate?

In Re-Bonding, Joy discusses biblical teachings on marriage, divorce, promiscuity, pornography, adultery, and premarital sex in the framework of his bonding theory. Promiscuity—sex as commodity (what the Bible calls “fornication”)—damages the capacity of the person to form healthy pair bonds. (Joy cites one popular study of 100,000 women that correlates early sexual experience with “(1) dissatisfaction with their present marriages, (2) unhappiness with the level of sexual intimacy, and (3) low self-esteem.”) Unfortunately, both the sexual predator and his victim may become impaired in their ability to form intimate relationships.

Joy points the way for hope and healing for those so scarred, for couples seeking to strengthen a weak bond, and for those grieving over broken relationships.

CHRISTIANITY TODAY TALKS TO Donald M. Joy

If an engaged couple is involved sexually, would you advise them to stop their sexual involvement until the wedding?

I find they want to stop it, and I affirm that. My prediction is they cannot stop unless they are separated.

I’m amazed at the deep spiritual sensitivity wired into human sexuality. It’s pretty universal. Even among the heathen, there’s reverence for their sexual feelings and the attachment they feel for someone else.

After a bonded relationship splits up, how long a recovery period do you advise before a person begins to form another bonding relationship?

I don’t think I’ve seen anybody ready to begin another relationship in less than six months. More often, it’s about three years. There’s a withdrawal time after the death of a bond. It has to be looked at as a grieving process.

Most people in our culture feel obligated to get people hooked up again with somebody else after a major loss. This is something that the Christian community ought to confront. We need to create islands of recovery for people coming off a relationship.

How can a person in a relationship assess whether a marital bond is irreparably broken?

I’m increasingly attentive to the Greek word for “hardheartedness.” In Matthew 19, that is the only justifying condition under which divorce is inevitable.

If, instead of condemning people who have been damaged, we put our energy into identifying what leads to hardness of heart and learning to measure it, then we would make a really positive contribution to healing in our faith community.

What advice do you give a person with a promiscuous past who has now been converted?

Most of these people have early patterns of trouble or abuse. They have early roots of low self-esteem. The only cure that I have seen work is what can be called “reparenting.”

“Reparenting” simply means that some people recognize some deficits in their past. They have grown up with some “skin hunger.” They were not affirmed. They were not touched, and they’re on the make to try to compensate. Now these people contract with me to be their father and their mother and to walk with them while they own these feelings.

A Matter Of Definition

The biblical terms translated “adultery” and “fornication” need to be distinguished, says Joy. In contrast to fornication, which is sex without bonding, adultery is double bonding, the formation of bonded sexual relationships in addition to the marital bond.

With these definitions applied to a careful study of the New Testament texts on divorce and remarriage, Joy criticizes the interpretations popular in many conservative churches as well as the rules derived from them. He points out, for example, that the Bible never speaks of adultery as “grounds” for divorce, but instead as a result of divorce. The popular understanding of the texts results in arbitrary regulations.

Joy is correct in his criticisms and his call for reassessment of our handling of divorce and remarriage. However, some of his novel reinterpretations of the so-called divorce texts are unconvincing—although they will intrigue readers interested in this subject.

Joy’s proposals have already had a major impact on at least one denomination. At the June 1985 Free Methodist General Conference, the Book of Discipline references to divorce and remarriage were completely rewritten along lines proposed by Joy.

God created man for intimate relationships, Joy believes, with sexual intimacy functioning best in an exclusive, monogamous, bonded relationship. He sees the biblical teachings on sexual morality not as arbitrary proscriptions to test our obedience or will power, but as descriptive law—a sort of owner’s manual on the proper care and maintenance of the human machine, graciously provided by the Creator for our happiness and fulfillment. This view of God’s law underlies the whole book.

Many Christians have suspected that there are “reasons behind the rules.” Now Joy has placed the biblical teachings on sexual morality into a comprehensive theoretical framework that appeals both to the conscience and to common sense.

The Good News of the Kingdom Coming: The Marriage of Evangelism and Social Responsibility, by Andrew Kirk (InterVarsity Press, 1985, 164 pp.; $5.95, paper). Reviewed by Doug Bandow, a senior fellow of the Cato Bandow, a senior fellow of the Cato Institute, a public-policy think tank based in Washington, D. C.

Andrew Kirk, associate director of the London Institute for Contemporary Christianity, wants to develop “a new consensus about the scope and meaning of the gospel.” What kind of faith, Kirk asks, both reflects the God illuminated by Christ and relates to the real lives of everyday people?

Kirk is critical of the theologies dominant among church leaders today, liberals and radicals included. However, he focuses his attack on Western evangelicals, charging them with “perpetrating an unbiblical divorce between ‘spiritual’ salvation and liberation from evil structures and systems in the world.”

The at-times exasperating analysis that follows is sure to disquiet the complacent. For example, asks Kirk, has “mass-evangelism”—the Western-style crusade—“let Christians off the hook of building costly bridges to modern people”? The answer is not clear, but the question is serious. Individualized discipling relationships, particularly between middle-class churchgoers and the underprivileged, are probably embarrassingly scarce.

Moreover, what is the true role of the church? For many members it is “little more than a special kind of voluntary association to which one pays a subscription fee for the right of participating when one feels like it,” worries Kirk. Such a church, he says, “is not compatible with a community called by Jesus to serve the good news of the kingdom for the poor.” And he’s right.

Finally, contends Kirk, social action is “an integral part of” evangelism. In one sense he is absolutely correct; we are not to “love with words or tongue but with actions and in truth” (1 John 3:18). However, Kirk then links the message of salvation through the risen Savior to the economic doctrines of the buried Karl Marx, an analysis that is flawed in three important respects.

Not Of This World

First, he seems to think that because Christians are to express God’s love in practical ways, that the “new created order” of God’s kingdom applies as much to the world today as it does to heaven tomorrow. Although Kirk ingeniously tries to explain away the plain meaning of Jesus’ statement that his kingdom is not of this world, Christ’s ministry was devoted to meeting spiritual needs. He never tried to reform worldly institutions and never appealed to secular authorities to help implement God’s kingdom. As important as our work on earth may be, “our citizenship is in heaven” (Phil. 3:18–20).

Second, Kirk wrongly claims that “there is a biblical imperative to redistribute wealth” and proposes a program of income redistribution, wage controls, and state ownership of “the means of production.” Yet if the acquisition of wealth is itself wrong, why does God promise that “your barns will be filled to overflowing” when you “honor the Lord with your wealth” (Prov. 3:10)? A Christian is to be generous with the less fortunate and is not to trust in earthly goods, but this neither requires believers to live below the poverty line nor authorizes them to forcibly redistribute money from non-Christians.

Third, Kirk completely misunderstands the nature of both capitalism and socialism. Neither system “has begun to achieve what it has promised,” he says, but at least “Marxism has exalted collective freedom—the freedom to enjoy a basically dignified life.”

In fact, socialism yields neither dignity, nor freedom, nor prosperity; in statist systems the gulf between working and ruling classes is particularly great because political power determines economic status. In contrast, free market societies not only deliver an unprecedented degree of material wealth to their peoples, but also provide individuals with the widest opportunity to pursue their chosen goals, spiritual as well as economic.

Although Kirk has written an interesting and provocative book, challenging Western Christians to eschew consumerism and revitalize their churches, he spends far too little time on these themes. Unfortunately, he devotes too much time to doing what he criticizes Western evangelicals for doing: confusing a “culture-bound expression of the gospel with the unchanging message found in the New Testament.”

Gods and the One God by Robert M. Grant (Westminster, 1986, 216 pp.; $18.95, cloth). Reviewed by Robert E. Webber, associate professor of theology at Wheaton College (Ill.) and author of The Church in the World: Opposition, Tension, or Transformation (Zondervan).

Throughout history Christian scholars have been interested in probing the origins of the Christian faith. Luke, the author of Acts and the gospel that bears his name, tells us, “I myself have investigated everything from the beginning” (Luke 1:3).

Today, nearly 20 centuries after Luke’s investigative reporting, a new group of scholars has emerged to write a social history of early Christianity. Robert Grant’s Gods and the One God is first in a series of nine new books that will probe early Christianity from a sociological perspective. This ambitious project by Westminster Press includes such titles as The Moral World of the First Christians and The New Testament and Its Social Environment.

What makes this new series significant is not only its emphasis on social history, but the collaboration of scholars across disciplines. These books represent the results of literary studies and of historical scholarship of Rome, Christianity, and Judaism.

The purpose of this series is to study early Christianity as living Christian communities. The question is not just what Paul or John or Justin or Irenaeus said, but to ask how the Christians of the various communities of faith lived, believed, and behaved.

Life Among The Polytheists

Robert Grant’s contribution is to try to understand the formation of the Christian concept of God amid the polytheism of the first several centuries.

In reading the New Testament, especially the Book of Acts, we cannot escape the numerous references to various gods and goddesses. The infant church was surrounded by such influences as the cult of Aphrodite at Corinth, Zeus and Hermes at Lystra, Athena and the unknown God at Athens, Artemis at Ephesus, and the Baal of Sarepta.

The special question of Gods and the One God is how the Christian doctrine of the Trinity came about. Grant explores the origin of the Christian concept of God, the early Christologies, and the ancient pneumatologies.

He then concludes with an exploration of the unique concept of Trinitarianism.

Grant has a remarkable grasp of both Christian and non-Christian sources of the first five centuries of the Christian era. He is at home with the Fathers, the philosophers, pagan religions, emperors, and the social and cultural milieu of the time.

However, not all scholars will agree with Grant’s interpretation of the data. He argues cogently for a distinction between the raw underdeveloped ideas of the faith and the later, more sophisticated theological doctrines. Thus, for example, he finds a concept of divine triad in the primitive faith that, through debates and interaction with philosophies of the time, became a fullblown doctrine of the Trinity.

The book is worth reading simply for its scholarship. But there is another reason to read this book: Many Christians’ comprehension of the faith will benefit greatly by understanding the early church. Scholars are gradually recognizing that Christianity as a historical and social movement can be best understood when the first-century literature is studied in the context of the Jewish background and the early Christian developments of the first five centuries.

Gods and the One God, as well as the eight other books in this series, opens a new arena of engagement. I fully expect conservative scholars to accept the challenge. The nine books of this series are a good place to start.

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