“Love is love, and family is family”

Last night I saw a TV preview for a new show by the producers of Glee. The show, The New Normal, features a grandmother, mother and daughter, and a gay couple. The mother needs money to support her daughter’s future, and the men, who want a family of their own, are paying to have her be their surrogate. The grandmother seems more morally traditional and has problems with the gay couple, which are ridiculed as outdated and “racist” by a woman in the preview. One pivotal line of the preview is when the gay men ask the mother if she’s really okay with having the baby for them. She responds with a smile, “Love is love, and family is family.”

Let’s unpack that statement. It’s a tautology, a statement that is circular in reasoning and is thus always true under any possible circumstances. Often, tautologies are simply meaningless. For example, Polonious’ line in Hamlet, “Mad call I it; for, to define true madness, What is’t but to be nothing else but mad?” Another fun example is the following limerick:

There once was a fellow from Perth
Who was born on the day of his birth.
He got married, they say,
On his wife’s wedding day,
And he died when he quitted the earth.

Although tautologies are often quite uninformative, they can be used to imply another meaning quite effectively. For example, “I’ll get there when I get there,” is used to challenge someone who is hurrying the speaker to arrive somewhere faster. “It is what it is” is used to calm someone who is unhappy with the way things are going. And “I am who I am” communicates that I cannot change, usually when a change in my behavior has been suggested. Therefore, tautology can be a rhetorical device that defuses expectations or outside influences on the meaning of a phrase by defining the phrase with itself.

Now let’s go back to the statement “Love is love” for a moment. What the mother was saying to the gay man is, “I am okay with your homosexual love, because no outside influences have the right to impose their definitions or expectations on what you have with your husband, and belie its being called love. Nothing defines love except love itself.”

Nothing defines love except love. It is self-existent. Is that true? For those that espouse belief in YHWH, the God of the Bible, it is not. Love is defined not as a self-existent phenomenon or experience, but by Him.

God is love. (1 John 4:8)

If God defines love, then what he says about it matters. Suffice it to say, for now, that God’s message throughout the Bible is pretty clear that love, in the romantic (eros) sense, is reserved for the protected santcum of marriage.

Which takes us to the second statement: “Family is family”. Is family as good as it can get in whatever form it may take? Is family a self-existent self-affirming bond that can happen between any people? In a sense of the word, yes, “family” simply means the people you are committed to in phileo love, who you do life with. I think of the 90’s sitcom Full House, where widowed father Danny Tanner enlists his brother-in-law and his best friend to help raise his three daughters. Close, unique family bonds of love existed in that house. But that’s not the sense of “family” that The New Normal means; the show is grasping for more ground with the word. It’s talking about a core family, the kind that blossoms crucially from marriage and eros love. In fact, I believe we could use “marriage” as a synonym for what they mean. The woman says to the gay man, in essence, “I am okay with your homosexual family (marriage), because no outside influences have the right to impose their definitions and expectations on the kind of relationship you have with your partner. Whenever two people decide to be family, they are lawfully family, because nothing defines family except family itself.”

Nothing defines family except the people in the family. “Two mutually consenting adults.” Is this true? Not if you believe in the God of the Bible. The family/marriage was instituted by God and defined by Him.

Then the Lord God said, “It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him a helper fit for him… And the rib that the Lord God had taken from the man he made into a woman and brought her to the man… Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and they shall become one flesh. (Genesis 2:18-24)

When two people enter marriage, they enter a state designed and instituted by God. In the Garden of Eden, God designed woman especially for man. Indeed, God brought the woman to the man Himself. “Therefore a man shall leave…” means that the enduring human institution of marriage is based on this act of God in the Garden. God created family between a man and a woman, for special purposes, not only for compatibility and complementation, but also for reproduction (which cannot be naturally replicated by other adaptations of the family), and beyond even that, for the analogous manifestation of his love-relationship to his people, the Church (Ephesians 5:22-33). God Himself “joins together” what no man can separate (Matthew 19:4-9). God is intimately involved in this union; it does not just have to do with two willing partners.

So, are the ideals of love and family subject to any outside definition? We are faced with a choice: Either we submit our definitions of love and family to God, believing him to be the wellspring of wisdom, whose laws are for our good, or we submit God to our definitions of love and family, making love and family ultimate, making them good and right whenever the heart invokes them. “God [according to concept of him that is compatible with my interests] would never say something like that. He wants us all to be happy.”

What then will reign in our hearts with the self-evident force of tautology? For my part, I prefer to say with joy, “God is God, and his definitions are his definitions.”

Respect, gender roles, and sacrificial love

Love and respect
The Bible does not talk much about marriage relationships and gender roles. There are only a few passages that discuss this in the New Testament. I have tried to catalog most of the important ones here. The fascinating discovery is that women and men in relationships are not told to relate to each other in exactly identical ways. Men are told to “love” women, but women are told to “respect” men. Look at some of the patterns in the table below.

Scripture	Husbands	Wives
Colossians 3:18	Love your wives, and do not be harsh with them	Submit to your husbands, as is fitting in the Lord
Ephesians 5:22-33	Love your wives, as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her, that he might sanctify her…to present her to himself in splendor, holy and without blemish	Submit to your own husbands, as to the Lord. For the husband is head of the wife even as Christ is the head of the church, his body, and is himself its savior
	Love your wife as your own body	As the church submits to Christ, so also wives should submit in everything to their husbands
	Love your wife as yourself	Respect your husband
Matthew 19:6	So they are no longer two but one flesh. What therefore God has joined together, let no man separate
Titus 2:5		Working at home, submissive to their own husbands
1 Peter 3:1-7	Live with your wives in an understanding way, showing honor to the woman as the weaker vessel, since they are heirs with you of the grace of life, so that your prayers will not be hindered	Be subject to your own husbands. …your respectful and pure conduct… but let your adorning be the hidden person of the heart with the imperishable beauty of a gentle and quiet spirit …submitting to their own husbands
1 Corinthians 7	Give to his wife her conjugal rights…for the wife has authority over his body	Give to her husband his conjugal rights…for the husband has authority over her body
1 Corinthians 11:3	The head of every man is Christ, the head of a wife is her husband, and the head of Christ is God.

This is a key distinction that is overlooked by many in our culture. For men, the equivalent of what love does for a woman is a kind of love that is best called “respect.” Notice that most deep man-to-man friendships are built on this kind of love—gruff, unspoken, yet real and strong. Men are giving each other this respect-ish love.

This is important because husbands (or boyfriends) in our culture are often expected to accept from their women the exact same kind of love that women receive best. Asking a woman to respect a man is not cool—it sounds chauvinistic and archaic. But I suggest from personal experience (if sola scriptura were insufficient) that the Bible described things correctly. It is immensely empowering, refreshing and delightful when my lady honors me in public, defers the final call on a decision to me, or trusts my judgment. It makes me love her so much when I sense supportiveness, not competition, from her. Although submission has unfortunately been coerced out of women in former eras, the proper manifestation does wonders to the masculine psyche. We are missing some major aspects of how men are wired that I think are necessary for cultivating the healthiest relationships between men and women.

Equal value, albeit unequal roles
The first objection to the idea of submission is always that it makes women inferior. I suggest that, according to the Bible, women are not at all ontologically subordinate, yet they are at the same time functionally subordinate. In other words, women and men have equal value, but not identical roles. Women are not less important because they are under men in “rank”. We can see this for at least two reasons. First, the top of the hierarchy chain that establishes this functional subordination are God the Father and Jesus (1 Corinthians 11:3), who, although distinctly different in subordination, are nevertheless entirely co-equal. Second, in God’s economy it is not leaders, but servants, who are “the greatest among you” (Matthew 23:11-12); in this sense, the woman’s position is the one of greater honor.

Who has the harder role?
It is harder to do the man’s part of loving or the woman’s part of respecting? The answer is, “Yes.” Because both actions are nuanced by the tendencies of manhood and womanhood, this is really comparing apples and oranges. I can only assume that, in some ultimate sense, they are exactly equal in difficulty. But this is really outside the scope of human evaluation.

It will take sacrifice, not just compromise
When the system of love and respect is broken, one side must go out on a limb to give love that is not guaranteed to return. The simple application for a man is, “love her regardless of whether she respects you, and trust that God will (perhaps gradually) change her heart as you do so.” The application for women is the same. “Respect him regardless of whether he loves you, and trust that God will cause his love for you to grow.” This does not mean that we should perpetually cast ourselves as martyrs into dysfunctional relationships. That is not healthy or helpful. A long period of unreciprocated reaching out might be a red flag to run deeper diagnostics on the relationship. (“Okay, something is broken deep here.”) But we cannot always be waiting for the other person to “come half way” and “meet us in the middle.” No, I suggest that Christ does not model that. He initiated. “We love because he first loved us,” and paid us the intolerable complement of allowing us to never love him back. So, I cannot tap my fingers and wait for my partner to reciprocate. I must give freely. Even if they are in the wrong. (We were in the wrong, not Christ.) This is the difference between simple compromise, which works for most circumstances, and sacrifice, which is the apex and glory of love.

You can only give that kind of love if you have received it
This kind of love can only be motivated and sustained by someone who has a very deep reservoir of love. The natural heart is incapable; it will run out. But if we have the holy spirit of God as the “fountain of living water” in our hearts, by which we continually receive the incomprehensibly sweet love of God, which he showed us on the cross, then we too can love selflessly. If the Lord is my strength, if I commune with him and confide in him and drink strength from him deep in my heart, then I will be empowered to love my significant other with a wild, dangerous, foolish self-sacrifice. And God will thus be glorified in my heart and in my actions.

Gender roles extend into the community
Two passages of scripture, 1 Corinthians 11:1-16 and 1 Timothy 2:1-15, seem to extend these roles to the corporate gathering of believers. As women are to submit to their husbands within the family sphere, so they ought to submit to their husbands in the church sphere, but moreover, women, considered as a group, should corporately submit to men, considered as a group. As a husband leads a wife, so the churchmen lead the churchwomen. Thus, women should not teach the collected church, and when they pray or prophecy, they should do so with a mark of submission. What counts as “teaching” and a “mark of submission” in today’s church is a very difficult question, which I will not attempt to answer here. But the point is clear that the gender roles extend corporately. This is not a popular idea at all, because our culture hates “traditional” gender roles in public even more vehemently than it hates them in the home; but believers today must wrestle with these scriptures and to seek to respect them in contextualized methods.

**Note: read my subsequent post for part two, the role of a man who is to receive submission.**

Staying in love

I’ve listened to a great series of podcasts this week. From North Point Ministries’ Andy Stanley.

Some notes:

Love is a verb that you do, not a noun that you feel. If that’s true then “I don’t love her anymore” has a drastically different meaning!

I am supposed to model Jesus’ love to her. That means really considering/treating Beth as more important than me, even if she’s not necessarily objectively more important.

When I bump against Beth and bad “beads” tumble out, it may be partly because of her behavior, but it’s also because there were bad beads in me all along! There are two parts to a negative emotion: what she’s doing and what’s in me. She’s not producing them; she’s not responsible – she’s just eliciting the depravity of my heart. I need to understand what’s in me, the junk I’ve brought into the relationship.

“Above all else, guard your heart” – pay attention, ward off bad guys. Name the emotions I’m feeling. “I’m frustrated” doesn’t cut it. If I name a negative emotion it loses its power. Then, when appropriate, tell my spouse. “When you do this, it makes me feel like this.”

The proper response to someone sharing their emotions is “Thank you for telling me!” followed by [ …silence… ]. Do not retaliate with indignation. No one wants to make their loved one experience negative emotions.

The secret to a healthy marriage is not sharing realistic expectations of each other. In fact, there will always be gaps between our expectations and the reality of what Beth lives up to. The key is what we put in those gaps. We can believe the best or assume the worst. Believing the best says “Oh, they must be really tied up today”; assuming the worst says, “They don’t care about me, they never initiate communication.” People in healthy marriages have unrealistically good “illusions” of each other, they rank their spouse as being better in areas that that person himself/herself ranks lower. I must believe the best about Beth. That’s not irresponsible. Four words go together to communicate this point in 1 Corinthians 13:7: “love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things”