Marriage is God's Good Gift: A Commentary on the Family Ammendment to The Baptist Faith and Message

The SBC Amendment on the Family, adopted at the annual meetings of the Southern Baptist Convention in the summer of 1998, offers a clear, carefully constructed, and faithful representation of scriptural teaching. While admittedly the amendment is a theological summary, its statements reflect over and over again fundamental teachings of the Scriptures themselves. Consider its four main components.

Commitment of One Man and Woman

First, "marriage," the statement reminds us, "is the uniting of one man and one woman in covenant commitment for a lifetime." Genesis 2:24 ("For this reason a man shall leave his father and his mother, and be joined to his wife; and they shall become one flesh") establishes, from the very beginning of biblical revelation, these various elements of the amendment's declaration on marriage. Marriage is between a man and woman only. Clearly, homosexual union is here specifically and intentionally excluded, as it is elsewhere in Scripture denounced (e.g., Lev. 18:22; 20:13; Rom. 1:27). But marriage of a man and woman is designed, blessed, and sanctioned by God himself. Furthermore, the "leaving and cleaving" of Gen. 2:24 indicates both the covenant commitment of marriage (i.e., the man leaves parents to take the woman to himself and to be joined to her alone) and its lifelong nature (i.e., the joining of two into "one flesh" indicates a new and indissoluble union).

Purposes of Marriage

Second, marriage does serve the God-ordained purposes of providing wondrous fellowship and lifelong companionship (Gen. 2:18-20 with 22-24), the proper and blessed context for holy sexual expression (1 Tim. 4:3-5; Heb. 13:4), and God's appointed means for "filling the earth" with his human images (Gen. 1:27-28; 9:1; Ps. 127:3; Mal. 2:15). These purposes stand at the very center of stable civilization, without which perversion, abuse, alienation, and anarchy would prevail.

Balance of Biblical Teaching

Third, the amendment clearly sets forth an important balance in biblical teaching on the nature of manhood and womanhood. ‘Male' and ‘female' represent simultaneously equality and distinction, sameness and difference. As image of God, a husband and wife are fully and unqualifiedly equal. The theology of Genesis 1:27 (both male and female are created in "the image of God") no doubt stands behind Peter's stern warning in 1 Peter 3:7b. If husbands are to have their prayers heard, he says, they are to treat their wives with due honor and respect. What reason is given for this admonition? Their wives, he declares, just as fully as themselves, are "coheirs" of the fullness of the grace of Christ. And Paul in Galatians 3:28 declares that male and female, no less than Jew and Greek or slave and free, are equal partakers of the fullness of Christ.

Many critics of the amendment have failed to notice or mention its clear and unambiguous declaration of the full equality of women with men. The amendment forthrightly declares, "The husband and wife are of equal worth before God, since both are created in God's image." And again, in the context of urging wives' submission to their husbands, the amendment reminds us that "she, being in the image of God as is her husband" is "thus equal to him." This echoes just what the Bible itself says. Both the Bible and this amendment affirm the essential equality and common image of God nature of women and men.

Complementary Roles

But the Bible has more to say about men and women than their equality. Husbands and wives have different, yet complementary, God-ordained roles. The amendment is right to call husbands to embrace and exercise "God-given responsibility" in the leadership of their homes. Many cultural observers have noted as one of our most severe and pervasive societal problems the passive and/or absentee husband and father. Secular feminism has convinced men, wrongly, that they are not to lead. Surely they are not to abuse their leadership (see 1 Peter 3:7a where husbands are to treat their wives in understanding ways, and Eph. 5:23-25 where his headship is exercised in the context of love). But they are to lead! The amendment is right to call husbands to take up afresh this responsibility.

Correspondingly, wives are commanded in Scripture to submit to their husbands. Literally, this calls wives to "place themselves in support of " the leadership and direction their husbands are providing. Wives are to assist and encourage their husbands while husbands are commanded to love and care for their wives. All attempts to deny this teaching in Ephesians 5:22-33 have one stubborn fact to contend with: the husband/wife relationship is likened to the relationship between Christ and the Church. As the amendment declares and Scripture fully supports, the husband-wife relationship "is God's unique gift to reveal the union between Christ and His Church." Ephesians 5:23-24 envisions, by analogy, wives in the place of the church before Christ ("as the Church is subject to Christ, so also the wives ought to be to their husbands in everything"), while 5:25 sees husbands, also by analogy, in the place of Christ ("husbands love your wives just as Christ also love the Church"). While Christ serves the Church, loves the Church, humbles himself for the Church, He certainly does not follow the leadership of the Church! And while the church labors and strives, at times with great innovation, creativity and ingenuity, in all of this she seeks, always and only, to bow to the Lordship of Christ and to do what is pleasing in his sight (2 Cor. 5:9; Col. 1:10).

Paul's analogy here shows how right it is for the SBC amendment to affirm the goodness and wisdom of its call for husbands to exercise loving leadership while wives exert gracious and submissive support. Both the Bible (Eph. 5:22-33; Col. 3:18-19; 1 Pet. 3:1-7) and this amendment affirm this as God's wise design and good command.

The Blessing of Children

Fourth, as Psalm 127:3 so beautifully says, children are a gift and blessing from God. Amazingly, God gives to human parents the privilege to bring forth, by their sexual union, new and unique image bearers (Gen. 1:26-28). Genesis 5:1-3 is instructive here. Adam, who with his wife were created in the image of God, now has a son who is born in his (i.e., Adam's) likeness and image. Parents, then, produce by their union, children who bear both the image of their parents and, through them, the image of their creator God. What awesome privilege! What sobering responsibility! Parents, by this role of "co-creator" of human images, stand in God's place before their children.

The fifth commandment ("Honor your father and mother . . ." Exod. 20:12) stands between the first four, directed at our vertical relationship with God, and the final five, directed at our horizontal relationship with others. Parents stand as God's representative authorities to their children. Honor of parents represents honor of God. Hence, parents ought to seek to raise their children to respect their God-given authority, yet as always, the Bible warns against abuse. "Fathers," writes the apostle Paul, "do not provoke your children to anger, but bring them up in the discipline and instruction of the Lord" (Eph. 6:4). And children are to honor their parents by showing respect and obedience "in the Lord" (Eph. 6:1). Such wisdom, such balance, and such wholeness.

Conclusion

The SBC amendment has stated in summary form the very teaching of Scripture-marital union of one man and one woman in a lifelong covenant commitment; the purposes of marriage of fulfilling companionship, holy sexual expression, and the joy and responsibility of procreation; the husband's Godgiven responsibility to lead in love, and the wife's God-ordained duty to support her husband with respect; and the place of parents to train their children in the Lord and of children to honor and obey their parents-and these are given for the wholeness and holiness of God's people.

May God grant us eyes to see, minds to comprehend, hearts to embrace, and wills to implement these wise, good, and liberating biblical admonitions. And may this Southern Baptist statement be used by God to urge upon the church, in all its varied expressions, the wisdom of God's purposes for husbands, wives and families, to be lived out in obedience to his word and to the glory of his name.