Defining or Re-defining Marriage

What is marriage?

It’s a question we thought we’d never have to ask less than a generation ago.  But, now, here we are, discussing, debating, asserting, and pontificating on the meaning and definition of marriage.

Part of the problem is our tendency toward “reductionism” = explaining something in its most basic and simplest terms, resulting in a distorted understanding of its true and perhaps more complicated nature.  This tendency perhaps comes from our modern-day requirement to reduce everything to a catchy sound bite, twitter feed, or text comment, as if one, two, or a few words can say all that needs to be said on a matter.

For example, here is a sound-bite definition of marriage: “Marriage is a sacred institution, established by God.”  And, as a Christian, a definition I happen to agree with.  However, it’s not complete.  Marriage is also a social institution, a social contract, if you will.  And by that I mean that it involves the state (government), economics, the law, and therefore politics as well.

Our government is not a Theocracy.  A Theocracy is a form of government in which God’s law is supreme and God has direct rule over the people.  According to the New Testament, this kind of direct rule by God, where God’s law reigns supreme, will not happen until Christ’s second coming, at which time He will then usher in the Kingdom of God/Heaven.  This is why, in my humble opinion, Christians ought to drop their anti-gay marriage agenda.

Conservative right-wing Evangelical Christians are sending the wrong message and are exerting time, energy, and resources toward the wrong ends.  It’s as if they are trying to force God’s Kingdom Rule upon humanity, or at least upon U.S. Citizens, here and now, regardless of heart, soul, and spirit transformation.  Such efforts neither help in the spreading of the Gospel nor in the establishment of God’s Kingdom here on earth.  In fact, if anything, it does the opposite by hardening people’s hearts against Christ’s message of hope, love, and salvation in Him.  Whatever happened to the traditional Biblical principle that we are in the world but not of the world, as intimated by Jesus Himself (see John 17)?

How is it that Evangelical Christians have become the Pharisees of the 21st century?  When the average person on the street thinks of a Christian they do not think, “Someone who is peaceful, kind, generous, loving, forgiving, and merciful.”  Rather, they think, “A Christian is an angry, self-righteous, mean-spirited bigot who wants to force everyone to conform to their idea of right and wrong.”  Today’s Christians seem to be more concerned with outward conformity to their idea of right and wrong than with a message of hope, love and salvation, justice, mercy, and grace for their fellow human beings, which was the same problem that the Pharisees had when Jesus walked on earth.

Back to the definition of marriage: Marriage is both a divine AND human institution—yes it is more complex than a reductionist sound-bite definition might care to admit.  Let God worry about the divine part.  As for the human side of it, the social contract aspect, we Christians need to remember that it is not our job to become judge, jury, and executioner over all whom we believe (rightly or wrongly) are in moral error: “For God did not send His Son into the world to condemn the world, but to save the world through Him.” [John 3:17]  Let us quit condemning gays to an eternal hell (or a hell on earth for that matter), and begin to love them into heaven, regardless of their marital desires or status.