Dear en,
Thanks for providing us with the Nashville Statement. It strikes so many notes that need striking today, and seems to have the potential to become an essential tool for churches seeking to guard and uphold the truth.
What follows is far less an assertion than a query. I’m a bit confused by the last sentence of Article 1: ‘We also deny that marriage is a mere human contract rather than a covenant made before God.’ I’m guessing this has theological targets that I’m unaware of, but I’m slightly worried by what it might seem to imply. Perhaps it simply means that every marriage is made before God in the same sense as everything else happens before God – the Hebrews 4.13 sense – but that would hardly seem worth saying in an explicitly Christian Statement. Is it stating the desirability, ideally, of every marriage being made with explicit acknowledgement of God? Presumably we’d all agree. Or is it going further and implying that there’s something illegitimate about marriages made either without such acknowledgement, or with explicit acknowledgement of other gods? That’s where my worry starts. Or perhaps I’m barking up the wrong tree and it’s targeted at the idea that marriages can be blamelessly ended, as at least some human contracts can. If so, amen, but couldn’t that be made a bit clearer, to avoid wrong trees being barked up? Another possibility may be that it’s targeted at the idea that humans get to set the terms of this ‘contract’, rather than accepting God’s design for marriage – again, amen if so, but I don’t think it’s clear that it is so. All this is not intended as a criticism so much as to highlight the extent of my confusion – and if mine, then perhaps others’.
If I were in a position to do so, I’d also be inclined to suggest a small expansion to Article 4 to include the fact that some differences between male and female are not divinely ordained but purely cultural, and that failure to appreciate this distinction contributes to many people’s confusion over their sexuality and/or gender. But that’s a mere quibble; what matters is that the Statement is one of agreed essentials, a purpose it achieves admirably.
With many thanks and warm regards,
