Mohler on marriage and not giving up

Albert Mohler is president of The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. The June 13 issue of WORLD Magazine includes an interview with him, but today and tomorrow we are running some additional comments for which we did not have room in the print edition.

Why is the government involved in marriage at all? In Western history, a marriage has always been a function of the state, even when it wasn’t a function of the church. In the Puritan settlements, marriage was only a civic reality. The idea of a church wedding was something they wrote off to Anglican pomp and Catholic circumstance. They considered marriage to be a civil right that the church respected and a matter of biblical law that was to be honored.

Could government back out of this question? In the history of Western law, one of the issues most crucial in defining marriage has been determining to whom children belong, especially with the breakdown of a marriage or the death of a parent. The government will never back out of the marriage business because even now, with this moral revolution and the redefinition of marriage, the state will be involved in inheritance law and child custody cases.

But our definition of marriage and the state’s definition will differ. We are in the awkward position of saying we believe that ontologically some are not married, but legally they may be. Theologically serious-minded people who are committed to marriage will debate whether it is allowable theologically for a Christian pastor to say in the name of the state, I hereby marry. That debate that will not remain confined to the pages of a theological journal. It is going to be at elders’ meetings and deacons’ meeting and congregational meetings in short order.

I understand that the great theologian/journalist Carl Henry helped set you straight on aspects of biblical manhood and womanhood. In college and in seminary, all I had been taught were egalitarian arguments. They made sense to me because I hadn’t considered any other arguments. When I was 24, I was walking with Dr. Henry and he asked me—he was always interrogating—what was my position on this. I told him. He just stopped, looked at me, and said, one day you will be very embarrassed to hold that position.

I suspect you felt embarrassed that day. I realized instantly that I had really not been a good thinker on this. That night, after I had taken Dr. Henry to the hotel, I went straight to the library to find every single book I could find on that. I found no evangelical complementarian arguments but read one written by a charismatic Catholic. Even that book had enough argument to make me realize the egalitarian position was not consistent with what I believed. The next morning, with fear and trepidation, I brought it up and said, “I want you to know I am working on this.” He said, “I knew you would.”

The success of the gay lobby has led some evangelicals to emphasize the biblical understanding that we are aliens who know this is not our home. And yet, we also know that this is God’s world. Are those views contradictory, or will different groups hold them depending on their views of dispensationalism? Both of those views—that we are exiles and that this is God’s world—are true. I don’t think the Christian cultural tradition has improved upon Augustine’s understanding of the two cities, the City of God and the City of Man. God resides in both and His glory is in both, temporarily in the City of Man and permanently, infinitely in the City of God. The church exists in both of these cities to make a difference. The people of God can be defeated in the short term for centuries and even chased out of territory in the City of Man, but not in the City of God. That is why the exile language isn’t a call for retreat or something that means we don’t try to make a difference. Real cultural gains can be made, but we alone have a theology for how those gains can be wiped out for a time, yet that’s not the end.