Culture Friday: A wedding dilemma

NICK EICHER, HOST: It’s the 23rd day of December, 2022.

Glad to have you along for today’s edition of The World and Everything in It. Good morning, I’m Nick Eicher.

MYRNA BROWN, HOST: And I’m Myrna Brown. It’s Culture Friday!

Joining us now is John Stonestreet, president of the Colson Center and host of the Breakpoint podcast.

Morning, John!

JOHN STONESTREET, GUEST: Morning.

BROWN: Couple of weeks ago, John, we were listening to lawyers for Lorie Smith defend her rights before the Supreme Court.

She’s trying to operate her website business consistent with her faith as it relates to same-sex marriage.

Of course, that’s a big platform for that kind of battle.

Now, most of us will not likely have to fight a battle of that magnitude or at least a public fight.

But I’m thinking of this with the recent news about Contemporary Christian artist Amy Grant saying she and her husband will host her niece’s bride and bride ceremony at their farm. The rationale came down to this, and I’ll quote:

“Honestly, from a faith perspective, I do always say, ‘Jesus, you just narrowed it down to two things: Love God and love each other.’

“I mean, hey—that’s pretty simple.”

And with that, she’s said loving one another means supporting something the Bible clearly condemns.

But I want to bring this to the personal level. It’s rare to be on the stage of the Supreme Court or be a well-known Christian artist. But we’re not immune to faith-testing dilemmas. Say we receive an invitation to a friend’s or family member’s same-sex ceremony. I’m thinking of this because I’ve been there.

I’d like to know, John, how you’d recommend responding. Because I think it’ll help to have thought this through in advance, to be ready with the right thing to say and do.

STONESTREET: I think the very first thing we have to do is to find what the word love means. It's the most used and least defined word in the Christian lexicon, as demonstrated by the quote that you read earlier. Amy Grant's not wrong. Jesus did narrow down the law to love God and love others. The challenge is that he thought that that was a way of summarizing the law, not replacing the law. He thought that was a way of fulfilling the law, not coming up with a new one, not negating all the things that had been clearly said. And, in other words, to understand what it means to love God and to love each other, we need to understand what God has revealed about himself, what God has revealed about human beings, what God has revealed about human relationships, what God has revealed about each other, and none of that is present in something that just quickly dismisses the controversy and embraces something that confuses niceness with love. The word love has just been defined down, and it's not helpful at all. So without that level of theological catechism, without some sort of ground about what is true, and what is good, and what is real, and all of those things, we're not going to be able to fulfill those commandments. Jesus did not intend to give us this commandment to love God and love one another as if nothing else said in Holy Scripture mattered. And that's oftentimes the way Jesus is misquoted here and I think Amy Grant is misquoting Jesus here.

Now, your specific example about receiving an invitation to a same sex ceremony, I think it's very helpful to know what the truth is and then make a commitment to not say what's not true and not endorse what's not true. This is the Life Not By Lies approach to this. I don't think that every same sex marriage that we get invited to is necessarily our place to make a big deal about and to protest publicly or anything like that. But when you go to a wedding, you're going to a wedding as a witness. There's a line in there, which is if anyone knows why this couple should not be wed, and there's a number of times throughout most wedding ceremonies where people are referred to as being a part of it, and joining in that day and supporting and that's all stuff that someone who has a clear definition of marriage simply cannot do. Now, hopefully, there's a level of understanding, especially if you're talking about family, there's a level of understanding about where somebody is that precedes this. So I think there's a lot of things that we can do to preempt these sorts of awkward situations, but I don't think it is an okay thing to actually go and celebrate a same sex wedding. I don't know that you can actually go without celebrating it, without lending some level of endorsement. And that's actually what the ceremony is.

And of course, wedding ceremonies today are heresies from the Christian church. I mean, they're actually ways of applying things that go back to something that God made, something that the church has figured out how it should be done. And so unless you go to something that's just completely off the wall, this is a reflection of something that clearly is attributed to God. I can't ask God to bless something that's sinful. I can't ask God to change the definition of something that he put into the creation itself. Is there a way to hold onto that relationship? Is there a way to celebrate what is good without celebrating what is not good? I think that's maybe when we can be more creative. And hopefully there's enough relational capital involved that the entire thing doesn't rest on whether or not I accept an invitation.

EICHER: OK, John, this year marks the 50th anniversary of publication of Francis Schaeffer’s influential book He Is There and He Is Not Silent. Albert Mohler at WORLD Opinions brought this to our attention with a tribute to the Schaeffer book. And he wrote this:

At the center of the spiritual crisis half a century ago, he wrote, “is a denial of God, and that denial of God produces an intellectual crisis that quickly translates into a cultural and moral catastrophe. The one central point that Schaeffer drove home was that the existence of the God of the Bible changes everything.”

He quoted Schaeffer that only one truth, one worldview “fills the philosophical need of existence, of being, and it is the Judeo-Christian God—not just an abstract concept, but rather that this God is really there. He really exists. There is no other answer, and orthodox Christians ought to be ashamed of having been defensive for so long. It is not a time to be defensive. There is no other answer.”

Fifty years later, is there a better summary of the current crisis than this?

STONESTREET: I don't think there's a better summary of the origin of the current crisis than this. I think the best summary of the current crisis, ironically, goes to someone who offered his analysis even earlier, made some predictions about what a world without God, it's interesting, very close to the same thesis of Schaefer—and when I say his name, everyone's going to be shocked—but Frederick Nietzsche. Nietzsche actually pointed to what the world without God would look like. And he was looking at the early part of the 20th century and saying, Look, you're not ready for the implications of the 19th century. The dismissal of God intellectually was going to work its way out in culture.

Now, of course, Schaefer is talking about this, that it's working its way out in academic culture. And there was this real attempt to build a way of thinking about all of these different aspects of academic disciplines or way of building government, way of building culture and civilization without God. Well, you fast-forward another 50 years, and what began as a philosophically failed project has now emerged as an existentially untethered existence. In other words, the dramatic increase in suicidal ideation, the dramatic increase in people admitting that there's just not meaning, the dramatic increase in seeking out various forms of distraction. And when you add them all up, it's just really an amazing sort of untethered existence. And it looks a lot like what Nietzsche wrote about in The Parable of the Madman. So what Schaefer is talking about is, look, this philosophical project, this God-shaped hole in our academic and intellectual understanding of the world can't be filled by anything else. It's going to fail. Well, 50 years later we see that it has failed. And not only has it failed to ground our understanding of the world, it's also failed to ground our sense of meaning, our sense of purpose, our deepest and most core and fundamental relationships. And so now, it's like everything is up for grabs, including reality itself that we think of as being up to our own recreation. And so, yeah, Schafer is always relevant. And it is interesting when you line him up with one of the most famous atheists in history, Frederick Nietzsche, and see that they kind of pointed in the same direction.

EICHER: OK, John, last question. Today is December 23rd which means Sunday is December 25th which means we have the big controversy about whether we ought to have regular Sunday worship on Christmas morning. Just to be provocative, I guess, the gang over at WORLD Opinions published a piece by the Lutheran pastor Hans Fiene saying not only should we have worship this Christmas morning but every Christmas morning. Do you want to weigh in on this one?

STONESTREET: Absolutely. Everyone should go to church. That’s what this day is all about.

EICHER: All right. 11 years before that particular question comes up again. Sunday, December 25th, 2033. Until then, peace on earth!

John Stonestreet is president of the Colson Center and host of the Breakpoint podcast. Thanks, John, and Merry Christmas!

STONESTREET: Absolutely. Merry Christmas to both of you as well.

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