Tag: procreation
The Church is Partially to Blame for Efforts to Redefine Marriage
Posted on May 20, 2015 in Marriage, Sexuality by Nathan Cherry
Abigail Rine is a professor of English at George Fox University. Each year she hands out a reading assignment to her gender theory students designed to provoke them. She recently decided to assign the book “What Is Marriage” by noted Princeton professor Robert P. George, Ryan T. Anderson, and Sherif Girgis. The book is a simple explanation of the conjugal view of traditional marriage.
Rine reports that the book, which is a manual of sorts on the traditional view of marriage as it relates to procreation, was offensive to her evangelical students at her evangelical university. Let that sink in for a moment.
But Rine said something that needs to be admitted: the church helped create the effort to redefine marriage.
I don’t mean that the church altered biblical teaching or even advocated marriage redefinition. Certainly some churches have done this but the vast majority of churches today continue to adhere to traditional biblical teaching of marriage as the union of one man and one woman. What I mean is that how the church handled the issue of marriage and sexuality in past decades aided the rise of marriage redefinition efforts.
Rine writes: