See also the preview for this
review.
Like with the other reviews released around this time, I don't have
much to add to this right now other than the notes I wrote.
--
[Notes:]
The Meaning of Marriage notes
p. 21
--Marriage is glorious but hard. It's a burning joy and strength, and
yet it is also blood, sweat, and tears, humbling defeats and exhausting
victories. No marriage I know more than a few weeks old could be
described as a fairy tale come true. Therefore it is not surprising
that the only phrase in Ephesians 5 that many couples can relate to is
verse 32, printed above. Sometimes you fall into bed, after a long,
hard day of trying to understand each other, and you can only sigh:
"This is all a profound mystery!" At times, your marriage seems to be
an unsolvable puzzle, a maze in which you feel lost.--
Keller's description of marriage sounds analogous in some ways to what
it's like trying to do something hard for God, hard ministry. (A
prophet's role, a missionary's, or perhaps many other roles, although
those come to mind as two that are inherently hard, and not just
sometimes hard). Certainly hard ministry (pursuing the cross) seems to
have the same or higher magnitude of difficulty as what Keller describes
of marriage, although the quality of difficulty might be different.
I wonder if, for many people, the most difficult thing they ever do is
stay married to someone, and this is because their ministry (or other
work) is too easy to be harder than that.
People need some difficulty in their lives, and if you live life on
"easy" mode, doing normal, default things, you'll end up in a marriage,
which "tastes" easy as you get into it, but gives you more than you
bargained for. If you are weird, then your dedication to something
other than a spouse may take the place of a marriage in giving you
difficulty. Or perhaps your mental or physical illness, or your bad
luck with friendship will give you the difficulty that marriage would
have. The desert fathers found in their semi-familial lives the
difficulty of living with each other.
In Timothy Ware's The Orthodox Church, it says (p. 301 /
Sacraments chapter, Marriage section)
--The second part of the [Orthodox marriage] service culminates in the
ceremony of coronation: on the heads of the bridegroom and bride the
priest places crowns, made among the Greeks of leaves and flowers, but
among the Russians of silver or gold. This, outward and visible sign of
the sacrament, signifies the special grace which the couple receive from
the Holy Spirit, before they set out to found a new family or domestic
Church. The crowns are crowns of joy, but they are also crowns of
martyrdom, since every true marriage involves an immeasurable
self-sacrifice on both sides.--
Monasticism could be seen as a flight from the fakeness of
dominant-Christian Rome, and from a church that no longer had
persecution purifying it. It could be seen as a way to be as true to
Jesus as someone being forced to choose between their life and their
faith in him. But the Orthodox ceremony says that the death of
something, other than physical death (the ego?) is a form of martyrdom.
Is marriage, or monasticism, really the same as being burned at the
stake, or being forced to choose whether to be burned or to recant?
Perhaps the intensity is the same, but the quality (I would guess), is
not. The monks emphasized more of the physical self-risking, and
spiritual self-risking (exposing themselves to demonic attack), but they
didn't bring themselves to exactly the same point as the (literal)
martyrs, of facing life and death and thus having to have faith that
either something was better than life, or that there was a better world
than this life, or both. Likewise, in a marriage, no matter how hard
things are, what you experience is generally going to be stress and
ego-death, and not a facing of physical death.
Martyrdom is a very egotistical act, in a way. You say "I scorn the
claims of life on me, and thus claim that I know better than ordinary
people who, as simple humans, are afraid of death". Whatever humility
leads you to the cross, you made a decision to set yourself apart from
the political and/or social order, a decision which with respect to them
is galvanizingly arrogant. Perhaps monasticism preserves much of this
seeming arrogance, and this self-assertion against the default. But
marriage, not so much. That is, if marriage is the default for most
adults, and an eminently human thing, then it is less of a
stick-in-the-eye to the social order, and if the martyrdom of marriage
is ego-death (which is my first guess as to how it is a form of death),
then it is about making people humble. Humble, but attached to this
life, still, perhaps.
Martyrdom serves multiple purposes, one of which is to defy the
political and social order, basically just in that they are the
political and social order, and fail to be 100% in tune with God.
Another is to set people apart from this life, by enabling them to
decisively affirm their faith in God apart from the claims of biological
self-preservation, their valuing of doing what is right over all else
including their own existence, and/or their trust in God to provide a
life other than this life, that God exists and will do this.
Monasticism partially satisfies these, but marriage less so. What the
two have in common with literal martyrdom is stress, difficulty, and
maybe other things.
Because monasticism and marriage don't provide what martyrdom provides
(not exactly), they don't (or at least shouldn't) produce the same
results in people. So a church that uses monasticism, and, especially,
marriage as substitutes or whatever literal martyrdom provided the early
church, will be biased a certain way, and will probably lack some of the
strength of the early church, because of that bias.
Thinking less diagnostically and more pragmatically, I think that while
real literal martyrdom is hard to come by, and actually dying young is
very costly and that cost weighs heavily against experiencing martyrdom,
"pursuing the cross" will bias your life in that direction, and perhaps
put you in a place where you come closer to making the martyr's choice,
in the course of being as effective as you can in serving God. In a
world where there is no opportunity for literal martyrdom, if such a
world exists, we can lament that it is gone and that we are cut off from
its access to the moral and metaphysical truth.
Maybe facing literal martyrdom is required of all of us, and will be
something we experience in the Millennium if we have not in this life.
If God is the good, then to place him first is required. So then, we
must be willing to forsake everything for him, including our physical
lives (any life at all, for that matter). Perhaps some people can come
to that point of forsaking without an experience of literal martyrdom.
Maybe they don't have to go through with it. But to go through with it
finishes the decision-making process for those who weren't completely
sure they wanted to put God first.
Ego-death does help a person forsake things in order to put God first,
so it helps in this "crucial" task. But it doesn't substitute for the
cross.
--
p. 24
--Nothing can mature character like marriage.--
How literally does Keller mean this? The immediately preceding
sentences:
--Studies show that spouses hold one another to greater levels of
personal responsibility and self-discipline than friends or other family
members can. Just to give one example, single people can spend money
unwisely and self-indulgently without anyone to hold them accountable.
But married people make each other practice saving, investment, and
delayed gratification.--
Does Keller think of "character" in terms of "functional behavior"? Or
does he mean it in a broader sense, that includes whether someone is
true to God? In this context, the former is a better reading than the
latter. But, the latter is an interesting possibility. If it's true
that marriage is the best way to build character, then perhaps for many
people, the only way to overcome their sinful habits is through
marriage. Overcoming your sinful habits is behavioral, but it is linked
to whether you are against sin and for God in your heart. Maybe the
best way to choose to not behave the wrong way is through being married,
and the unmarried are unable to access it.
For Keller, this might not sound like too big a deal, because (I assume)
as a Calvinist, he thinks character is not what saves a person from
hell. Character is like a very nice thing that we all like and should
consider important and our duty to pursue, but ultimately, it has
nothing to do with whether we spend eternity with God. But as a New
Wine Christian, I am concerned about whether or not people can become
completely saved without being married.
I think that if the Bible is authoritative, then it would be weird if
marriage was required to complete the process of becoming holy, because
in the Resurrection (in the Millennium), there is no marriage or giving
in marriage. This life lasts a few decades for us, and if we take
Revelation literally, the Millennium lasts 1,000 years. So it would be
weird to expect God to only give us this amazing way to become mature,
only to some, and only for a few decades. There is probably some other
way to mature, which is sufficiently effective.
p. 36
Keller talks about the possibility that young adults are afraid of
marriage.
--Tierney believes, at least among his New York friends, that there are
even more people in this category. Those dreaming of the perfect match
are outnumbered by those who don't really want it at all, though perhaps
they can't admit it. After all, our culture makes individual freedom,
autonomy, and fulfillment the very highest values, and thoughtful people
know deep down that any love relationship at all means the loss of all
three.--
I think it's reasonable to be afraid of being abused, and individual
freedom, autonomy, and fulfillment are things which abusers deny us. To
make a god out of freedom, autonomy, and fulfillment is obviously
dangerous, but to be controlled by a Satanic torturer and imprisoner
(perhaps in extreme cases, a dark human being, or in less extreme cases,
a dark relationship dynamic) is not something that God wants us to go
through. From a biblical perspective, he led his people out of slavery.
And, a bad marriage can be slavery, inhibiting a person's ability to
follow God.
For all that Keller talks up marriage as a good thing, I wonder if he
will address the possibility of how marriage partners and/or
relationship dynamics can be abusive / Satanic, using the institution of
marriage.
Does Keller think that the average person need not worry about Satanic
relationships? I would guess that many young people have experienced
these, whether friends or friendships, romantic partners or
relationships, people at work or work environments, similarly with
religion and family of origin, and don't feel confident that they can
handle those situations. A marriage is a situation which is supposedly
"for life", potentially a life sentence to being with a moral monster.
Perhaps wise young people (helped by wise older people, perhaps) can
tell where the really abusive people are and avoid them. And if you
have a sense of flourishing and personal strength, you can face the
possibilities of a marriage to someone who can't be considered an
obvious abuser evolving into something hellish. But young people have
to grow or be strengthened to be able to have the confidence to face the
experience which helps them grow and be strengthened to deal with these
possibilities. Maybe people delay marriage because it takes many years
to develop these capacities of reading people and effectively taking
control of relationships so that they do not become Satanic.
"Satanic" is a strong word, and maybe given the way it's loaded, it's
the wrong one to use. But I think that it's normal for Satan to deceive
us and tempt us, and not unlikely for him to blatantly oppress and
torment us. Perhaps Keller's intended audience are people who aren't
experiencing the worst of Satanic attack, but only "50% Satanic"
situations or "25%" or "10%". There's a spectrum of nightmare, and if
you're stuck with a nightmare for years and years, you might quit that
job or get a divorce, burned out from the nightmare.
Who would want to get married, if they were afraid of these things? The
person you love (do you really love them? or are you faking it? how do
you know?) is the person who will turn out to be a monster to you, and
you will be a monster to them, and one or both of you won't be able to
take it, and you'll have to break the contract, betraying your wedding
day and your past selves who got married, and likely betraying someone in
the present, whom you still love on some level, or at least are
viscerally bound to -- breaking up is bad enough, but divorce is even
worse. It may be true that marriage is not always this grim, but there
is a decent chance of this happening to you, and do you have a solid
reason to think you're in the set of people who make it through to
whatever "glorious, hard-fought joy" Keller promises? Do you want to
take this horrible risk? Or maybe you would prefer to wait to see how
well you can take it when you're a little older.
I'm caught between different intuitions here. My sympathies for
civilization say "long-delayed marriage is bad for fertility rates". My
sympathies for being a young person, and for personal risk-aversion, say
"marriage and romance are not necessarily worth it for everyone". My
sense of what is deep down most important spiritually says "No one has
to get married, this is not necessary for salvation, don't get too
caught up in this life". I guess to avoid the danger of depopulation, I
would say "if you want to have a lot of kids, go ahead -- this allows
some people to never have kids". I don't see there being any real
benefit to not building up young people to deal with Satanic influences,
so, however that can be done, that should allow people to develop the
confidence to take on marriage.
--
p. 36, further down
Keller quotes C. S. Lewis to the effect that you could lose your
salvation if you don't open your heart to someone. Keller says, right
before the quote:
--But if you avoid marriage simply because you don't want to lose your
freedom, that is one of the worst things you can do to your heart. C. S.
Lewis put it vividly:[...]--
Giving up your freedom to God is one thing, and giving it up to the
institution of marriage, or to a marriage, or perhaps a marriage
partner, are different things. Giving up your freedom to God should
never shame you or oppress you, and it isn't God at work if you feel
some pressure to give up freedom to God that does that. But, any human
relationship or institution can abuse you and none of them are worthy of
your allegiance, except in a way derivative of God's legitimate claim on
you. So Lewis has a point, if what we are really urging is that people
love God. But if we use the idea that a closed heart leads to hell to
say "so you should get married even if you don't quite feel like it,
have reservations/excuses against it" is a subtly dangerous one. There
are different instruments for becoming holy, but they are not God, and
when we urge them on people as though they are necessary for salvation,
we can deceive ourselves and others into thinking that they are the
things that save us, rather than it being God who saves us, and that
they are the things we need to love and trust, when it is really God
whom we must love and trust.
--
p. 45
--In short, the "secret" is not simply the fact of marriage per se. It
is the message that what husbands should do for their wives is what
Jesus did to bring us into union with himself. And what was that?
Jesus gave himself up for us.--
I like that Keller makes this point. I think that if I were a husband,
I would chafe at the thought of my wife nagging me until I "changed" so
that I could be a responsible grown-up adult and she could be happy with
me for once. That sounds terrible, like being stuck in a fishbowl with
another fish who is stuck in the same fishbowl for 40 years. But, if I
am Jesus Christ in the fishbowl, and the other fish is Jesus Christ,
too, then the fishbowl is fine. To be Jesus is not petty, but to be
nagged is petty. A man can aspire to greatness by being Jesus, but not
to bowing to pettiness. Even if the self-sacrifice is externally the
same, like the man makes the same adjustments to his wife's desires,
there is a difference of identity. I gender-type this, but I suppose
men can be petty in their own ways and women can be imposed upon in
petty ways through men.
I wonder how much of Keller's book would be necessary for young adults
who had learned to become like Jesus. I don't mean in the sense of
being 100% morally pure, but just having set their aspirations for who
to be higher than merely a "Christian", "spouse", "employee", "parent",
"regular person in modern society", or whatever, but higher, to "Jesus,
the son of God". Not Jesus as "moral paragon" but as "a specific person
with his ways of relating to people and God and his own personality, who
is a moral paragon". And then to have significantly walked in that
aspiration, having received Jesus' spirit. And, as Christians, why are
we trying to invest in institutions like marriage, when we should first
invest in following our master (that is, becoming like him), which would
solve many of our problems with institutions (and with living life in
general)?
Maybe my mention of "greatness" above will seem prideful, or connected
to pride. I think that children of God should be aware of the danger of
pride, and the danger of the word "great", since it has connotations
that connect to pride, but also should aspire to greatness, in the sense
that we are the children of God, generally the adult children of God,
and there is a kind of highbornness to us because of that.
[I'm not sure I like that word "highbornness". Jesus wasn't "great"
in the way that Napoleon was great, not exactly. But he wasn't "ungreat"
either. He wasn't a "small" person, but some kind of "large" person. As
we follow Jesus, we become like him, and become his kind of "large"
people.]
Satan wants us to think small, so that we don't dare to fight him.
While we are sometimes "our own worst enemies", our real enemy is Satan,
and not ourselves. So pride is dangerous, and many attempts to avoid or
suppress pride are also dangerous.
--
p. 48
--Marriage is a major vehicle for the gospel's remaking of your heart
from the inside out and your life from the ground up.--
Keller allows that there might be other ways with this statement.
--
p. 48
Somewhat incidental to this review, I come upon Keller's signature
definition of the Gospel, as I read this book. Here it is:
--The gospel is this: We are more sinful and flawed in ourselves than we
ever dared believe, yet at the same time we are more loved and accepted
in Jesus Christ than we ever dared hope.--
What would I say the gospel is? I could say "what it is according to
the New Wine System", but I can't claim to speak for everyone who
believes it -- notably, maybe Philip Brown, the developer of it, would
disagree with my wording. So I will say, what is the gospel from an
MSLN perspective (notably, including the Bible as well
as MSL, as can be the case with MSLN). I would say
something like: "You are not 100% in tune with God, or at least that's
very unlikely and you can't know that you are. You have to be 100% in
tune with God someday. And, if you really want to be, you will be. You
have a long way to go to being 100% holy, to fully repenting, and you can
make it as long as you don't give up. God will help you. If you, in
some sense, live the life and death of Jesus, you will make it. There is
enough time for you to live that life, but don't take your salvation for
granted."
Would people take that as good news? Maybe some would. I did, when I
first understood it.
Keller goes on immediately following to say:
--This is the only kind of relationship that will really transform us.
Love without truth is sentimentality; it supports and affirms us but
keeps us in denial about our flaws. Truth without love is harshness; it
gives us information but in such a way that we cannot really hear it.
God's saving love in Christ, however, is marked by both radical
truthfulness about who we are and yet also radical, unconditional
commitment to us. The merciful commitment strengthens us to see the
truth about ourselves and repent. The conviction and repentance moves
us to cling to and rest in God's mercy and grace.--
Is it true that Keller's gospel is the only kind of relationship that
will really transform us? I can see it kind of like, "Truth gives us
information about how to change ourselves, and you need to not have a
block to it. Feeling like you are not loved can make you resist the
truth. So you need to not feel like you are not loved. Thus, we need
to convince people who are afraid that they are not loved or are not
lovable, that in fact there is no possible way that God cannot love
them, because he loves unconditionally." That is probably a somewhat
unfaithful rendition of Keller's thinking, but it's a way to import it
into my own.
For me, truth comes first and in the end can't be adulterated at all.
It's true that God loves you and always will, except if you pledge
yourself to being his enemy irrevocably. He will mourn you, then, for
all time, after you are destroyed for not being someone he can live
with. But there is a sense in which God does not love you
unconditionally. He can't, if you are the irrevocable enemy of
legitimacy, which is him.
This last paragraph is a terrifying thing, or it could be, to some.
Perhaps it is useful to God to say "look, for our purposes, just between
you and me, as your pastor / teacher, I'm going to tell you something
that isn't literally true, through my servant Tim Keller, which is that
I love you literally 100% unconditionally, and this will really help you
develop and it will be more effective than telling you the harsh or
frightening truth of your ability to turn away from me. Someday you're
going to have to face that, but not yet."
If you find that idea unsatisfying, then I could use Philip Brown's
saying that things can generally be true even if there are exceptions.
God loves everyone, generally. But you might be uncertain whether you
fit in the category of those whom God will always love. And to be fair,
we all should question that, but also proceed with confidence
on the path toward holiness, so as to be more likely to arrive.
If none of that is acceptable, then I guess you can just not believe
what I say, and you'll do relatively well with some "relaxation" of the
truth, like, perhaps, Keller's gospel. But, if I know the truth, I feel
a responsibility to say it -- maybe I could be wrong about what is true,
could believe something falsely, but I still have a responsibility to
say that thing, because that's how I am.
I do think it's fair to say that if you have not made yourself an
irrevocable enemy of God (and this is something you would know if you
had done), then it's true that God still loves you. And God's love is
something more intense, but more importantly, more real and true, than
any other possible love. So hopefully you have experienced love that
has made you feel secure in its trueness, even a little bit, and you can
multiply that greatly to imagine God's love. At least hopefully that
image is good enough to help you to hear and respond to the truth that
you need.
--
Finished Chapter 1.
Started ch. 2
--
Sidebar: I remember Paul saying that to be single was good because you
could focus on pleasing God, while when married you had to focus on
pleasing your spouse. ESV says (1 Corinthians 7:32-34):
--I want you to be free from anxieties. The unmarried man is anxious
about the things of the Lord, how to please the Lord. But the married
man is anxious about worldly things, how to please his wife, and his
interests are divided. And the unmarried or betrothed woman is anxious
about the things of the Lord, how to be holy in body and spirit. But
the married woman is anxious about worldly things, how to please her
husband.--
Would it be possible for a marriage to exist that was "anxious to please
the Lord"? Perhaps each spouse, and the union of the two, only exists
to further God's interests, and to take care of your spouse is only care
for one of God's instruments. Your marriage is only valuable as one of
God's instruments.
Do marriages start with "I want to help God take care of his
instruments." Or rather with "I'm lonely, hungry, weak and need help"
or "I have an appealing feeling in me when I think about So-and-so" or
something like that?
--
pp. 57 - 58
Keller talks about how if you rely on God to fulfill your emotional
needs, then you don't have to rely on your spouse as much, and can be
more patient, kind, etc. when they aren't.
This sounds like a basically good way of looking at things to me.
However, one potential problem could be that one spouse is not
emotionally reliant on the other, or significantly less so, but the
other's "everything" is the first spouse. This disparity could create a
power dynamic, where the less-reliant person doesn't "need" the
more-reliant person, but the more-reliant does "need" the less-reliant
(a felt need which psychologically is a need even if strictly speaking
each partner could survive without each other). The one who needs more
might feel vulnerable, having given themselves over to someone who is
not vulnerable to them in return.
I guess one way around this is to make sure both partners are more or
less equally secure in themselves (i.e. relying primarily on God for
their emotional needs) before marrying. But what if one partner takes
the lead in becoming reliant on God after a marriage? I wonder if
Keller ever addresses this issue.
--
p. 59
--Seek to serve one another rather than to be happy, and you will find a
deeper happiness. Many couples have discovered this wonderful,
unlooked-for reality. Why would this be true? It is because marriage
is "instituted of God." It was established by the God for whom
self-giving love is an essential attribute, and therefore it reflects
his nature, particularly as it is revealed in the person and work of
Jesus Christ.--
However, I think you can be a self-giving person in orientation and
still find yourself harmed by the other person in a relationship. For a
toy example, consider a case where a self-giving person gets woken up
night after night by an inconsiderate partner. The lack of sleep takes
its toll, and even if the self-giving person is not offended, is not
impatient, or somehow even not irritable, they will have to say
something, and if that doesn't work, leave the relationship. I think
it's the same way with God, and this explains why we have to overcome
all of our sinful habits, sin being that which is like "nails on a
chalkboard" to God.
--
pp. 59 - 60
--The word "submit" that Paul uses has its origin in the military, and
in Greek it denoted a soldier submitting to an officer. Why? Because
when you join the military you lose control over your schedule, over
when you can take a holiday, over when you're going to eat, and even
over what you eat. To be part of a whole, to become part of a greater
unity, you have to surrender your independence.--
You could literally starve to death if you have a bad commanding
officer, then. This points to the idea that being part of a whole can
sometimes not be worth it.
I feel like my life is largely dictated by something outside my control.
It looks like it is in line with God's will, so I tend to assume that it
is God. For a person in that situation, is it possible that the normal
"become one with your spouse, put yourself second (be flexible)" leading
is not reliable? Or maybe it only works if you and your spouse equally
obey these dictates from the invisible world. But, perhaps, the
dictates only come through you. How can your spouse trust that these
really come from God? Again, is there a power dynamic here that is hard
to handle?
Is there a way for a marriage to maximize its partners' independence?
Or at least to allow for a lot of independence?
--
pp. 60 - 62
Keller talks about woundedness, about how when people come to a
marriage, they come from somewhere, which can be abusive. So he (I
guess) implicitly affirms that relationships can be abusive.
--
p. 63
--There is the essence of sin, according to the Bible -- living for
ourselves, rather than for God and the people around us. This is why
Jesus can sum up the entire law -- the entire will of God for our lives
-- in two great commands: to love and live for God rather than ourselves
and to love and put the needs of others ahead of our own (Matthew
22:37-40).--
This sounds odd to me. Doesn't the Bible say to "love others as
yourself"? It doesn't exactly sound altruistic, but rather as though
you are one with the other person. Both your needs and theirs are
yours. (Well, "love your neighbor as yourself" is ambiguous in English,
maybe also in Greek and Hebrew, and has been interpreted in different
ways by different people).
Matthew 22:37-40 says (ESV):
--And he said to him, "You shall love the Lord your God with all your
heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the great
and first commandment. And a second is like it: You shall love your
neighbor as yourself. On these two commandments depend all the Law and
the Prophets."--
Maybe my objection ends up being academic (Keller never really wants the
reader to not care for themselves, nor to always place others'
well-being over their own in every circumstance), but it seems like
something he could be missing, given what he wrote right there.
If it is the case that we are commanded to love "our neighbor" as
ourselves, and this means to love them as though they are part of us,
and "neighbor" includes anyone we come in contact with, then there's
something like marriage that we enter into (or should?) with all kinds
of people. A marriage (the romantic kind) is a bit less special if a
major component of it is something we should extend to everyone (and an
overemphasis on marriage or "on our marriage" with all of its
intense and worked-for love could take away from the "mini-marriages"
we're called to have with each person).
--
Finished ch. 2
Is self the enemy, or is Satan the enemy? Is Satan just another word
for self? (No, there are supernatural evil beings who are our enemies,
or perhaps one chief among them, named Satan.) Is it possible for
self-centeredness to be a problem? Yes, that makes sense. A person
could do wrong. But they could also be deceived by Satan. Maybe
someone else has written a book about "The Deceiver Versus Your
Marriage" and how to avoid believing lies about your spouse, yourself,
and your marriage. Maybe Keller, with his Calvinist background, is
biased away from the supernatural, out of a kind of cessationism? (I
seem to remember that Calvinists tend to be cessationists.)
A lot of relationship difficulties come from seeing a human as your
enemy. You might move away from seeing your spouse as your enemy by
seeing yourself as your enemy. But then there might be collateral
damage to seeing yourself as the enemy. For instance, you get in the
habit of not being critical ("who am I to judge?") and this keeps you
away from being perceptive and ambitious in changing the status quo for
the better. But, neither you nor your spouse may be the enemy, rather,
the Enemy may be your enemy.
--
pp. 98 - 100
Keller talks about how some people think that helping people out of
duty, without affection, is inauthentic, but he thinks that if you can't
help people out of duty, you "cripple your ability to maintain and grow
strong love relationships" (p. 100).
I think that there are dangers to doing things out of duty, without
affection. If your emotions are contrary to your actions, you will have
to pay a cost. It can be depleting. Once depleted, you "crash out" of
the relationship, or become resentful. Or you simply lose interest,
like Tom Bombadil with the Ring -- you're not the right kind of person
to be entrusted with that relationship. People have good reason to be
concerned when people help them contrary to the helper's feelings or lack of
feelings.
This doesn't take away from Keller's point, but just says that there are
dangers both ways, and reasons why people should sometimes not trust
people who "inauthentically" help despite their feelings or lack of
feelings.
--
Through page 105.
Keller mentions that people can act lovingly, and this can produce
feelings of love. So maybe he would say "A danger of being emotionally
depleted by feelingless acted love, which leads to burnout and
abandonment or some other failure to relate properly? Nonsense." I do
appreciate that people manage to be more or less successfully married
for a long time and they all have to practice this "act before feeling"
thing, and very often it leads to "feelings", but I wonder if there is
some kind of survivorship bias, where Keller does know what it takes to
produce successful marriages, when success is possible, but gives advice
that won't work for everyone. He is a cheerleader for marriage, and
it's true that on the whole, marriage is a good thing for society and
those who "succeed" at it. But is there any way to get rid of the risk
of some people getting trapped in situations where they get burned out
emotionally while trying to be married? (Or as mentioned before, get
trapped in a really abusive relationship, or one with a really abusive
partner?)
I have been the kind of person who is unable to pay the emotional cost
of being in abusive and/or sterile relationships. Not that I am
unwilling to be in such relationships, but that my body gives out and I
have to leave, and seemingly can never go back. Maybe I'm just not cut
out to be married? Or I would be at high risk of either divorce or
going crazy? Maybe this "marriage" thing as Keller presents it makes
more sense for "normal" people, healthy and with "healthy" egos. But
mentally ill people are a different class?
Mental illness affects many people, but not the majority (I should check
this, but a statistic I remember is, 20% of some population (US?) is
mentally ill.)
Maybe there are books like "Marriage for Schizophrenics" or "Marriage
for Bipolar People" -- sounds like such things should exist by now. Is
there a thoughtful Christian version of them?
--
p. 107
--We tend to size up potential partners as to their assets and
deficits.--
This makes a lot of sense if we are exhausted and don't have the energy
to pull other people's weight. Maybe God gives us the energy to not be
exhausted? I think sometimes he does. But sometimes he doesn't and we
are just not high-energy people.
A pastor concerned about marriage in his or her church might try to find
ways to deal with people's exhaustion.
--
Finished ch. 3
--
p. 110 - 111
--How could Adam be in a "not good" condition when he was in a perfect
world and had, evidently, a perfect relationship with God?--
This in reference to Adam, whose aloneness was said to be "not good" by
God in Genesis 2:18).
The MSLN perspective on this is that Adam and God did not have a perfect
relationship. Adam had not fully matured to be in tune with God's
heart, so while he may have felt good about God, God had painfully mixed
feelings about him, and this was not something that God could sustain
forever, so something had to change. Based on that, I could go on to
speculate that perhaps humans tend to have an inborn difficulty in
relating to God, which spiritual maturity ameliorates. So, when we are
immature, we need people to perform the roles that God does -- often,
God works directly through them as puppets or pawns, but we can trust
those faces rather than God's. Therefore Adam needed another human, I
guess, a wife.
Keller goes on to say that humans are made for relationship because they
are images of the triune God, who always interrelates. But why get
married? What about celibate people? Maybe celibate people need other
humans? What about hermits? It seems like humans can be satisfied with
their "vertical" relationship with God, despite what Keller says (p.
111):
--The Genesis narrative is implying that our intense relational
capacity, created and given to us by God, was not fulfilled completely
by our "vertical" relationship with him. God designed us to need
"horizontal" relationships with other human beings.--
The clearest case of humans needing "horizontal" relationships is with
small children. So maybe they are necessary when we are immature, and
this is by God's design. But it's unfortunate that we can't relate to
God directly when we are young, sufficient to not feel like, or really,
need the people around us, who can become competitors to God in our
hearts, or abuse us.
--
p. 120
Keller says that the purpose of marriage is to help the spouses become
their "future glory-selves". This makes a lot of sense from a MSLN
perspective, and perhaps we could extend this mission to everything in
life. (Brushing your teeth helps you overcome your sinful habits and
love God with everything? Maybe -- it's easier to see the mission of
holiness in "bigger" things, like friendship, marriage, political
structures, education, and so on). I don't know how Keller can make
sense of holiness without either God zapping us to become holy (which is
impossible on the level of us repenting) or there being time to finish
the process after this life. If he thinks us becoming holy is
unnecessary for salvation, then probably whatever is necessary for
salvation should take its place for the purpose of marriage -- perhaps,
helping spouses be more effective evangelists, or keeping each other
from falling away, should take precedence.
--
How should spiritual friendship work in MSLN? I don't really know, and
I think this is an area where people should adopt the truth of MSLN,
think it through themselves, and try to apply those truths in their
lives. Maybe if enough people are into MSLN, some sense of what works
and what doesn't over many different relationships will emerge.
Naively, I don't see why Keller's approach, which is something like
(paraphrased from p. 122) "be a fan of how your spouse [or you could
apply this to non-spouses] is developing a morally beautiful personality
through God's work, and accept them for their flaws" is bad, although
the tone with which he writes about it does not reflect the sense of
sobriety I would feel (or ought to feel), contemplating the possibility
of people turning against God someday (of myself turning against God
someday), despite how we are making progress currently.
But maybe I would approach the problem from a different angle and come
up with something somewhat different.
If you have a religion that teaches holiness as a life or death thing
that is every person's responsibility, then naturally it is tempting for
any church built around that to want to control its members so that they
are holy. Moral urgency is a temptation to control. Good behavior is
valuable, and people should use self-control to "fake it" (to "act
before feeling") sometimes. An emphasis on self-control naturally leads
to a group that tries to control its members. Serious religion tends to
be controlling religion. The more a group wants to be socially
enmeshed, the more dangerous seriousness becomes (by this logic, at
least). So, perhaps, the way to be serious, to increase seriousness, is
to have "libertarian holiness", where a norm of interpersonal
libertarianism is enforced. People leave other people in the hands of
God, and urge each other to develop "thick" relationships with God, as
their relationships with humans "thin" out somewhat. They attempt to
respect each other and not do things that will enable Satan to enter
into each other's minds (through disrespect, temptation, etc.) They try
to be true to God themselves, and by doing so anti-tempt each other,
validate each other's love of God.
At the same time, the more serious, the higher the gap between what is
socially/officially aspired to, and what many individuals can attain,
and thus a greater potential for vulnerability to shame. Thin
interpersonal bonds are not always good for keeping people from shame,
but redirecting people toward relating to God (who does not shame --
whatever you experience that shames you is not from God), helps with
this. People should not feel that they are socially obligated to pursue
holiness, they only do so out of love of God, or perhaps because
they feel that it in itself saves them from hell -- something they would
care about if they were not part of a group that was into it. I think
MSLN erases inequality on many levels because no one is really safe --
the people who seem great may actually have lost their "velocity" or
have begun to harden over some tiny sin, and the "apparent moral
failure" in behavioral terms may have a more trustworthy "velocity".
This is a quick sketch, and as far as I'm able to do right now -- very
provisional.
--
Another image of marriage and friendship: two people are committed to
relating to God first, and second to working for him. They are held in
common by having the same God, and on some level the same work (maybe
this works best if they work on the same long-term project or on the
same team). Their commitment to the same God reassures them that they
will be friends, and so does their commitment to the same work, as it is
said that the commitment between two spouses reassures their children.
This seems like a way for monk-like people to become friends, or to
have a substitute for a spouse. It could (maybe?) be a model for
spiritual friendship within a marriage.
--
pp. 139 - 140
Keller likens marriage to a heavy truck that reveals a bridge's flaws.
Then he talks about how when he had thyroid cancer, he was glad the
doctor found the tiny lump rather than wishing he hadn't to spare him
the trouble of the treatment. p. 140:
--That was because the consequences of being "spared all the trouble"
would have been, in the end, far more deadly, far more trouble, than
finding and treating the cancer while it was small and confined.--
This makes a fair amount of sense from a New Wine (or at least MSLN)
perspective -- you risk being destroyed in hell by your sinful habits.
But I assume Keller is not a New Wine believer, so why does he think not
dealing with character flaws matters? Does he believe it will hurt in
the Resurrection for "oblivious, abrasive, independent" people (three of
the traits he singles out on p. 138 as things marriage will force you to
confront), but that these people will go to heaven anyway? So that
means you don't have to do anything about those traits, if you're
willing to take your punishment and get through whatever God wants to do
to you. You are not required to repent, only to endure.
Is marriage something that is really good in weeding out the little
things? When you're stuck with someone, the petty things can come out.
Tiny sins are dangerous. Is it better to take out all the tiny sins, or
focus more on developing something big, a love of God? I think that the
comparative advantage of marriage may be (may sound like, given what
I've read in this book far) be an institution that forces you to deal
with whatever small sins come out in behavior. But it comes at the cost
of forcing you to attend to another human being, possibly (likely) in
competition with attending to God. The comparative advantage of
celibacy is that it leaves you alone with God more rigorously, and can
help you develop a closer reliance on God and love of God. So both
celibacy and marriage are dangerous, for different reasons, celibacy by
leaving you with your petty character flaws, and marriage by keeping you
from fully giving your heart, soul, mind, and strength to God. It's not
that marriage has to do this, or celibacy has to keep you from
overcoming your petty sins. Keller makes it sound like you should get
married so that you can deal with your petty sins, lest you be left
"unbeautiful" or whatever he thinks is your bad fate for being sinful.
But celibate people are not kept out of the kingdom of heaven, or else
Jesus and Paul wouldn't have recommended celibacy. Likewise married
people can put God first. But the two life paths are biased the way
they are biased.
--
Somehow Keller's presentation of marriage in this chapter so far reminds
me of Sartre's No Exit. I think part of it is the idea of being
locked in a room with nothing to do except relate. The marriage
becoming its own separate universe. Ordinarily, I would tell someone
who was stuck in a terrible petty inner world to go find something
useful to do. Do marriages do anything useful? Or, since they are
entered into to seek personal happiness for the spouses, do they then
have to become a personal hell to punish them for that egocentrism and
love of ease? That kind of sounds like what Keller's talking about.
And Keller seems to think that's fine, part of the process, part of
what's so great about marriage. But I wonder, could it be better for
married partners to look together outside their marriages? A marriage
is a terrible place to confine married people -- this is why divorce and
adultery are appealing. But maybe married people can escape being
married without any divorce or adultery, but instead by having something
more important than them to focus on.
Civilization is increasingly making human labor superfluous. We will
(perhaps) solve our problems. Then what? Just the little problems will
remain. We will live petty lives, petty sniping, winning petty
victories over our flaws. We will perfect prosociality, since the
feedback we have to pay attention to will be other humans. The Bible
will only exist insofar as it's applied by other humans according to
human agendas.
But there is another dimension to life, the "non-petty" one. What would
it take to literally die on a cross for the sins of the world? That is
what is expected of disciples of Jesus. Can we access that if there's
nothing left to do?
[Die on a cross? I think risking your life is more realistic, not
necessarily losing it. But there's something in literal death as the
thing required, even if we only risk it, that is not there if it's only
"dying to self".]
I feel like Keller's program of marriage could turn out very
well-rounded, socially acceptable, beautiful people who fail to be able
to literally get nailed to a cross and die in anguish, or anything of
the same intensity and level of self-giving, commitment, and thinking
big. Can a person be saved without losing their life? What kind of
spouse would care about such petty things as "obliviousness,
independence", or even "abrasiveness" if they had gone through the cross
themselves? Two people who have gone through the cross don't need to
pick fights with each other. The edge is taken off the sting of their
bad habits (whatever practical consequences may still follow).
[I think that obliviousness, independence, and abrasiveness are the
sorts of things I wouldn't be worried about in a spouse, but there are
things, really evil spirits, that come over people, or which they choose
in a childish way, which are worth worrying about and responding to.
These things are small, but not petty at all. In Nietzschean terms
(putting it in a slogan form): what is evil is beyond good and bad.
So a tiny drop of evil is not trifling.]
I guess the awful truth is that we withhold the cross from young people,
or even middle-aged people. So they (we) hold onto our fear of death
and our lack of commitment to God, and our fruitless taste for happiness
apart from God. So then we have to go to hell in our marriages.
Marriage doesn't need to be hell, but perhaps it's all we have left in a
safe environment, to make us suffer and die -- yet I think that the
suffering and dying in a petty marriage might not even really be the
same as going to the cross, because to become like Jesus in his life and
death is to not be petty, and ego-death (what petty personality
reconstruction can offer) and physical death are not the same thing.
--
From an MSLN perspective, one thing to remember in a petty-hell marriage
is that as much as you might feel like your partner is your enemy and is
the seat of their flaws, and as appealing as it may seem to take
responsibility for your flaws when confronted for them, you have to be
careful not to take responsibility for things you never chose to have in
the first place. And, to remember that Satan is your real enemy, and
slanders people. What you have not consciously chosen is not you, and
the same goes for your spouse. People are possessed by spirits and
tormented by demons. While it is possible for a person to choose to be
bad, often bad behavior is not intended.
What are some ways that Satan can benefit from the ways marriage can go?
A divorce is a good outcome from his perspective. Adultery is good.
Also, getting people to stop loving God and to accept a small-minded
view of themselves and life, so that they don't try to change things,
they lose their passion, is also a good outcome from his perspective.
That way they won't fight him. For people to deeply feel in their bones
that they are the problem is a good outcome from Satan's
perspective. These aren't really in your best interest, or in your
spouse's.
--
What is the New Wine System about? It's about overcoming your sinful
habits. But, it's also about overcoming all of your sinful
habits. Which is a better predictor of 100% compliance with God, where
you are, or where you are headed? Where you are headed, and, that which
keeps you headed that way. Does the process of dealing with the
annoying flaws and sins of a spouse give them a good "velocity" or
"acceleration" (an inborn tendency to move toward God) or does it just
move their position one sanded-down flaw or sin at a time? I could see
a "Kellerian" marriage going either way. Maybe worked into the process
of dealing with sins and flaws is something that is radically theistic,
like praying for God to help with the flaws. Do those prayers really
lead you to a passionate love of God, and a loyalty to God above all
competitors? I suppose they could.
A lack of love for God is as dangerous as the presence of sin. The New
Wine System says that there is time for overcoming sinful habits. While
that time shouldn't be taken for granted, it's more important to develop
the love of God that motivates people to repent, and which is needed in
itself, rather than to reshape behavior.
Another New Wine / MSLN note: people's behavior can be driven by their
brains, which can be replaced by God in the resurrection which begins
the Millennium. Brain work might be useful if a person's behavior is a
problem, but doesn't need to be the first priority if you're worried
about their soul.
--
Maybe this is unfair of me to expect of Keller, but I wish that his book
had been (so far) more about how to love God, and only incidentally
about marriage.
--
p. 140
--Marriage by its very nature has the "power of truth" -- the power to
show you the truth about who you are.--
I suspect a lot of the time what we think is "who we are" or "who they
are" is really more like "what we are" or "what they are". Kellerian
marriage could overemphasize "what", claiming it is really "who", and
neglect the real "who" issues. I don't think it's good to accept
responsibility for problems that don't really come from you -- in some
cases that would be to believe Satan.
(Keller may address this on p. 143 when he talks about the distinction
between Paul's "I do the things I hate" and "it's not really me doing
this, it's sin in me, but rather in my innermost being I delight in the
law of God".)
--
Now Keller talks about the power of love in marriage. p. 147:
--If all the world says you are ugly, but your spouse says you are
beautiful, you feel beautiful. To paraphrase a passage of Scripture,
your heart may condemn you, but your spouse's opinion is greater than
your heart.--
It's unfortunate that we need spouses to do that and can't get it
directly from God. Or maybe we can get it directly from God.
--
pp. 148 - 149
--As Faramir says to Sam Gamgee in The Lord of the Rings: The Two
Towers, "The praise of the praiseworthy is above all rewards." To
be highly esteemed by someone you highly esteem is the greatest thing in
the world.
This principle explains why, ultimately, to know that the Lord of the
universe loves you is the strongest foundation that any human being can
have. A growing awareness of God's love in Christ is the greatest
reward. And yet we must not forget Adam in the garden. Though he had a
perfect relationship with God, his humanity's relational nature was
designed also for human love. Your spouse's love for you and Christ's
love work together in your life with powerful interaction.--
This seems wrong on different levels. One is, why are we looking for
healing and power? That seems to be what Keller is saying is so great
about marriage, and God's love in Christ. Shouldn't we rather ought to
be looking to love? Why are we so keen on success and being loved? If
that's part of our culture (normalized sense that it's right to want
success and love), might this explain how we fail as a culture, because
we don't seek to love first, before being loved or winning?
Secondly, if you're going to rely on someone (and you should and have
to), on whom should you seek to rely? As a celibate person, I think
"no, you don't need a spouse's love for you, God is sufficient". It's
probably better to rely on God alone as much as you can. Then he
becomes a bigger part of your life.
I believe that many beliefsets are both truths and lies (or deceptive
truths), in the sense that for one person to believe them, moves that
person closer to the overall truth, but for another person to believe
them, they move them away from the overall truth. So perhaps Keller's
paragraph (or his whole book) is truth for some, but not for everyone.
--
pp. 160 - 161
--Praying daily with and for each other is a love language that in many
ways brings the other love languages together. It means being tenderly
affectionate and transparent with each other. And you hear your spouse
lifting you up to God for blessing. If you do that every day, or most
days, it seasons your entire relationship with the love of God and of
one another.--
I like this, insofar as it's a way for spouses to take a backseat to
each other as they relate to God, but to still be present as fellows
relating to God.
--
p. 166
--How do you get the power of grace? You can't create this power; you
can only reflect it to others if you have received it. If you see Jesus
dying on the cross for others, forgiving the people who killed him, that
can be just a crushing example of forgiving love that you will never be
able to live up to. But if instead you see Jesus dying on the cross for
you, forgiving you, putting away your sin, that changes
everything. He saw your heart to the bottom but loved you to the
skies.--
Can't grace just be some kind of spiritual strengthening from God?
(This is sort of a Reformed vs. Catholic debate over words.) Then maybe
forgiving people on your own cross isn't unattainable at all. Someday
you may get to do that yourself. Maybe God wants you to be a moral
hero. Do you need to go through the process of receiving forgiveness
for your sins in a conscious and emotionally salient way? Or is it fine
to just assume that your sins are forgiven, like you assume that there
is enough oxygen in the room when you take a breath? Protestantism
(esp. some strains that try hard not to be Catholic) problematize or
thematize unmerited forgiveness of sins. But from another perspective
(somewhat that of existing Christian denominations, maybe, and certainly
New Wine / MSLN) forgiveness takes less of a prominent role and what's
more important is that you get on the path toward 100% holiness and stay
true to it to the end. You're forgiven -- though that wasn't totally
easy for God, he could do that unilaterally. The difficult part for
him, which goes beyond his power, is watching you, seeing you reject
him, perhaps move off the path to holiness, risking your life, perhaps
spit in his face and reject him permanently.
Perhaps there are people who need to hear a message of "your problems
are solved by meditating on how God unilaterally forgave you". There
are many different kinds of people, and some may implicitly get on the
path to being 100% and stay on it, or be the kind of people, who, when
asked by God, will get on it, simply by the power of their gratitude or
encouragement due to the forgiving of their sins. So it doesn't matter
in the end for them.
But, for other people, it is not good to only be presented with
unilateral forgiveness, perhaps because they want to know the truth
(which indicates that overall, salvation is a bilateral process), or
because they simply don't get that much out of meditating on God's
unilateral forgiveness of them. Maybe they don't truly understand how
guilty they are? Well, maybe some preacher can instill in them a sense
of guilt. But maybe that's unnecessary. Religions offer a fix to
life's fundamental problems, so those problems have to stick around, and
maybe religion has to keep making them be a problem to justify itself.
I would rather there be a way for people to want to seek God that does
not rely on people having to feel inadequate and guilty, whether because
the Christianity that results is poisoned with a sense of inadequacy and
guilt or the aftereffects of those personality traits, or because there
are people who just don't have inadequacy and guilt centers in their
brains who can't be Christians if that's the only way to be a Christian.
Is there an MSLN way to forgive your spouse, though? Or is it the case
that the best way to forgive your spouse is through the route of
inadequacy, guilt, forgiveness, gratitude? I find myself able to
forgive people -- not always to trust them, but I don't really want
anything bad to happen to the people who have hurt me on account of what
they have done. My mind replays old traumas sometimes, but I don't
think we should take every instinct of our minds as being reflective of
what we really want. Maybe by not trusting them, I am not speaking
their love language, and they don't feel loved, and then they think that
means I don't forgive them. I have a life to live, in its limitations,
and there is work for me to do, and people I need to interact with.
It's okay to end relationships and get out of abusive ones and move on.
Perhaps in a future life, I will have to confront them. But, it would
be for their sake, not for my own, and if they are mature, they don't
need my love. I may never need to trust them or interact with them
again. And that's okay.
I think I forgive people -- maybe I don't even get offended at people in
the first place, but just become traumatized by them and afraid of them.
At least once, I've defended myself somewhat desperately from people
from the past, but not out of any real concern for what they did in the
past. And I'm not really a guilt or inadequacy type of person -- I don't
feel those feelings much. So it looks like you don't have to go through
the route of inadequacy, guilt, forgiveness, gratitude in order to
forgive people who have hurt you. But, since I've never been married,
maybe I don't know how hard it really is to forgive a spouse, harder
than forgiving seemingly worse people. I would guess, though, that for
some people, forgiveness in any context does not require a strong sense
of being forgiven.
I think a doctrinal reason to forgive is simply that if you don't, you
won't be forgiven. (That comes from Jesus.)
If we want a non-biblical but theistic explanation for why we must
forgive people, we could say "If you don't forgive someone, you want
them to be utterly not accepted because of what they did, so you call
justice on them. The problem is that justice requires you to not be
accepted either. Justice is not your servant or friend and will turn on
you once you invoke it. Unless you want to use pseudo-justice on the
people you don't want to forgive, like pretending it's about justice
when you just want revenge or a payout. Pseudo-justice is much less
demanding than justice but it's a lie, and you're using a lie to justify
them being utterly not accepted, which with God in the room means,
destroyed in hell. That lie itself merits destruction in hell. So
either way, it is dangerous to not forgive." I don't know if there is a
more New Wine-specific reason to forgive, but maybe one could say
something like "You have to forgive everyone, someday out of your own
free will you will forgive everyone, or else you will go to hell, and
you don't want to do that, so you'll make it, don't take this process
for granted, you have a lot of time but get on it sooner rather than
later."
How different is this from Keller's approach? It's certainly different
in tone. I feel like moving on from this question right now (just to
wrap up this chapter tonight), but maybe I'll catch it again when I
review these notes.
--
Finished Chapter 5.
--
Ch. 6
Kathy Keller (main writer of this chapter) notes the possibility of
abuse in marriage (p. 190):
--Agreeing on gender roles as a foundational part of your marriage takes
two people, but what if your spouse persists in a wrong interpretation
of his or her role? Wouldn't it just be better to assume the
egalitarian, unisex roles that we use in the world as a protection
against misuse and outright abuse?--
Her response to that question seems to be something like: "be a servant,
because both husbands and wives are called to be servants, just
different kinds. Try this unilaterally." I suppose this could be a
good response to some abusive marriages, but perhaps not others.
--
Finished ch. 6.
--
Finished ch. 7
--
Finished ch. 8.
--
Finished Epilogue.
--
In the Appendix, Kathy Keller makes another reference to abuse (p. 242)
--A wife is not to give her husband unconditional obedience. [her
emphasis, used as a header] No human being should give any other human
being unconditional obedience. As Peter said, "We must obey God rather
than men" (Acts 5:29). In other words, a wife should not obey or aid a
husband in doing things that God forbids, such as selling drugs or
physically abusing her. If, for example, he beats her, the "strong
help" that a wife should exercise is to love and forgive him in her
heart but have him arrested. It is never kind or loving to anyone to
make it easy for him or her to do wrong.--
--
Finished Appendix. (Finished the book, except I didn't read most of the
notes.)
