Weekend Reads: Contrasting marriage advice

Douglas Wilson’s How to Exasperate Your Wife: And Other Short Essays for Men (Canon Press, 2015), with its 20 essays on marriage topics, makes a fascinating companion volume to Eleven Cardinals Speak on Marriage and the Family: Essays from a Pastoral Viewpoint (Ignatius Press, 2015), edited by Winfried Aymans. If you’re actually leading a family, the first of these books is far more valuable than the second. It may be related to the fact that all 11 cardinals are unmarried, while Wilson, a Protestant pastor, has been married for 40 years and has 17 grandchildren. Or it could simply be because the cardinals’ essays are for other Roman Catholic clergy, while Wilson’s essays are for Christian husbands.

Claiming dependence on the Word of God, both books take their point of departure from Ephesians 5, where Paul says that marriage is a great “mystery” because it pictures Christ and the church. For the cardinals, the key point of similarity here is the indissolubility of the marital union. Almost all of them harp on this theme, noting that the Roman Catholic doctrine of marriage is much misunderstood. Their doctrine is a deduction from the nature of the thing. Briefly, it is this: Christ will never divorce the church, and therefore divorce is impossible. If marriage is to be like Christ and the church, then it cannot be sundered by human agency. Divorce is not a thing, but a deception. Two people actually married in the church cannot be separated by anything but death. Therefore, anyone apparently divorced and remarried is actually living in adultery. Period. End of discussion. The system is logically watertight, no matter how many exegetical holes it may have (see Matthew 19:9), and all 11 essays explain various facets of it.

Wilson doesn’t mention divorce. Instead, he sets Ephesians 5 in the context of the whole letter, which is about how the church manifests on earth the wisdom and glory of God and Christ. How do husbands manifest the glory of Christ’s bride? “Show what kind of crown the Church is to Christ by making your own wife your glory, your honor, and your crown.” In a decent marriage, your wife is your best friend. In a biblical marriage, she is your glory.

“What is biblical masculinity?” Wilson asks. “It is the glad assumption of sacrificial responsibility.” He adds, “All men who want to the boss in their home without an ethos of self-sacrifice driving their daily decisions are men who secretly want to be Muslims.” For him, the key point of comparison between the marriage of Christ and the marriage of a Christian lies in the doctrine of limited atonement. A Christian man gives himself completely to one chosen woman, and to no one else. Wilson says, “He should treat her like the elect, because typologically that is what she is.” Christ died only for His people; it is the adulterous husband who gives himself to all and sundry. Further, the faithful husband loves his wife like Christ did—i.e., by dying for her. “An immense array of sacrificial options present themselves to a man who would love his wife in a fallen world,” Wilson writes.

Wilson has no footnotes. His work was not published simultaneously in German, English, French, Italian, and Spanish (as Eleven Cardinals Speak was). He pastors a few hundred people, not hundreds of thousands like the cardinal archbishops. But his parting advice is more helpful than the ruminations of the cardinals. In response to the husband who asks, “What do I do if I don’t understand my wife?” Wilson says, “God didn’t tell you to understand her. He said to love her. Try starting with that.”