Redemption of Love

A. Miles Carrie

Description

Competing answers to dilemmas involving love, sex, marriage, and family scream to us from nearly everywhere. The Redemption of Love reveals what the Bible has to say about these issues by applying the growing economic study of religion. Using Genesis, Jesus, Paul, and the Song of Songs, Carrie Miles outlines a consistent description of biblical love throughout Scripture, asserting that it is the only effective solution in today's battle to save marriage and family. This book is a valuable tool for clergy and laypeople.

Sujets

• Theology

Informations

• Publié par: Baker Publishing Group
• Date de parution: 01 avril 2006
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781441234803
• Langue: English

Extrait

© 2006 by Carrie A. Miles
Published by Brazos Press a division of Baker Publishing Group P.O. Box 6287, Grand Rapids, MI 49516-6287 www.brazospress.com
Ebook edition created 2012
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior written permission of the publisher and copyright owners. The only exception is brief quotations in printed reviews.
ISBN 978-1-4412-3480-3
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is on file at the Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.
Scripture marked TNIV is taken from the HOLY BIBLE, TODAY’S NEW INTERNATIONAL VERSION®. TNIV®. Copyright ©2001, 2005 by International Bible Society. Used by permission of Zondervan. All rights reserved. www.zondervan.com
Scripture marked KJV is taken from the King James Version of the Bible.
Scripture marked NRSV is taken from the New Revised Standard Version of the Bible, copyright 1989 by the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the USA. Used by permission.
Scripture marked RSV is taken from the Revised Standard Version of the Bible, copyright 1946, 1952, 1971 by the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the USA. Used by permission.
For Nicole and for the future
Contents
Cover
Title page
Copyright page
Dedication
Introduction

1. Love and Sex as God Created Them
2. The Economics of the Fall and the Subordination of Women
3. Jesus, Power, and Marriage
4. The Mystery of Marriage in Everyday Life
5. Love in an Age of Wealth
6. Reclaiming the Garden in the World of Thorns
7. Christian Marriage and Family in the Twenty-first Century
8. The Christian Family and the Limits of Politics

Acknowledgments
Notes
Index
Introduction
S ex is a difficult word. In the early 1960s, my teacher introduced it to my fifth-grade class as referring to “male” or “female.” Jokingly, she warned us to be careful about using the word around our parents, to whom it meant something else, about which she did not tell us. We knew what that something was, of course, although we didn’t know much.
A few decades later, sex and its derivatives mean many things, and even very young children know a lot about them. In rap music, the multipurpose noun has even become a verb. Moreover, in this more complicated world, my teacher’s simple definition of sex as referring to male versus female is considered incomplete, even controversial. Now we make a linguistic distinction between sex and gender sex referring to whether one has the physical organs of a man or a woman, gender to one’s social behavior but an ongoing controversy over whether sex/gender differences are innate or learned implies that they might be the same thing after all. Then there are additional categories that sex modifies, categories to which my fifth-grade teacher paid little attention, assuming that she had even heard of them: sexual politics, sexual prerogatives, sexual identity, sexual preference, and all their subgroups: transsexual, bisexual, homosexual, heterosexual, etc.
Fortunately for me as writer and for you as reader, I am not going to drag you through a linguistic analysis. The problems of the meaning of sex today are not linguistic but social and spiritual. These problems of meaning now expand to include definitions of family, marriage , and morality as well. Moreover, these controversies contain in them the implicit redefinition of yet another word, one that is even more important than the others love .
The past one hundred years have brought massive change in the hard-to-define but vital human institutions of love, sex, marriage, and family, particularly in the developed Western world. Some of these changes have been positive, but many others are proving destructive of marriage, the well-being of children, and the happiness of individuals. “Love” as caring concern for another person is being swamped by more self-centered attachments. Although early Christianity effectively reformed ancient marriage and household patterns, the contemporary church has not yet found a way to stave off the decadence of today.
As an organizational psychologist, I work as a consultant to troubled workplaces. I have found that when confronted with a problem, clients are eager to rush in with solutions. Unfortunately, often they lack a clear understanding of what the problems really are, and so their solutions prove to be worthless or to make matters worse. My most important task is often not to provide solutions but to help my clients slow down and accurately define the problem and its causes. Once they have a clear grasp of those, the correct solutions are often obvious.
In an analogous way, our culture is full of problem solvers who have jumped too soon to solutions to dilemmas that fall under the general category of love: sex, relationships, marriage, gender norms, and family, including women’s employment outside the home and questions of how to balance parenting with career. On the liberal side, these solutions almost always prescribe more freedom for some categories of people, often at the expense of the freedom of other kinds of people. On the conservative side the solutions include attempts to shore up the old sexual morality and gender norms. Such solutions have done little to slow the tide of change, and some have made the problems worse while damaging the credibility and authority of those proposing them. As normative institutions, churches face the greatest loss of credibility and authority and frustratingly so, since social change puts them in a classic double bind: liberal churches lose authority because they accommodate social change, and conservative churches lose credibility because they resist it.
This book takes a novel approach: looking to the Bible not just for solutions to today’s problems but, first, for a clear understanding of their causes. Looking for these causes, I apply to scripture the relatively new tools of socioeconomics or economic sociology an interdisciplinary approach that has been hailed as “the new paradigm” for the social-scientific study of religion. By economics I do not mean things like stock prices, interest rates, or inflation. Rather, the insights and tools of the academic field of economics defined as the study of how we “allocate scarce resources among competing ends” can be applied to broader material constraints and incentives, recognizing that these forces influence our behavior not just in the marketplace but also in the home, church, and society. Extending an economic-type analysis to aspects of life usually considered the province of psychology or sociology enables us to understand the trade-offs people make in spending not just their money, but also their time, effort, and energy; why they behave as they do and how often; why they believe and value the things they do; how they interact with other people around these values; and how these choices shape identity. Only when we understand these material forces influencing our behaviors, beliefs, and identities can we rid ourselves, our families, and our churches of those that are worldly and destructive.
A socioeconomic analysis of what the Bible says about marriage, gender, and family works because its central story of creation, fall, and redemption asks whether we as individuals and as a society will live only by bread (materially) or by the Word of God (spiritually). Human love and relationships are inextricably woven throughout that story. Significantly, the Bible tells us that God originally intended that decisions about how to “allocate scare resources among competing ends” should have nothing to say about human love and our interactions with each other. Bountifully provided for, man and woman in creation know nothing about scarcity. One flesh, man and woman had no competing agendas. God intended that his human creation should always share this abundance in unity and joy.
In eventually choosing to turn away from God, however, man and woman suffered the physical consequences of living outside of God’s abundant provision. After the fall, these tough decisions became the driving force of human life, a force that corrupted sexuality and destroyed the oneness for which man and woman were created. Socially, the fall resulted in patriarchy the subordination of women, children, and most men to the service of the powerful few. Although contemporary critics charge religion with being the source and supporter of patriarchy, the Bible teaches exactly the opposite: patriarchy and its abuses, including the alienation of woman and man from each other, resulted from the material demands of life outside of the Creator’s abundance, a state God never intended human beings to experience in the first place.
God’s intent to redeem us and return us to abundance is seen in the teachings of Jesus and Paul, both of whom challenged the economic and patriarchal order of the fall. As the Christian movement transformed the economically based family, it eventually reined in the practices of polygamy, slavery, and sexual decadence and elevated the status of women. Although the “traditional” family that resulted defined as a married couple with an employed, dominant father, a homemaking mother, and their obedient children was strongly decried by activists in the 1960s and 1970s as patriarchal, it was a far cry from either traditional or patriarchal when contrasted with the pre-Christian family. [1]
By the late twentieth century, however, marriage and family faced a different set of challenges. As William J. Bennett writes, “Promiscuity, adultery, cohabitation, divorce and out-of-wedlock births have severely damaged the institution of marriage.” [2] Peter Spring of the Family Research Council similarly notes:

The divorce revolution has