RamistThomist
Puritanboard Clerk
Piper, John. Chan, Francis., et al. Happily Ever After: Finding Grace in the Messes of Marriage. Desiring God: Minneapolis, MN. 2017.
This was better than I expected it to be. Some of the authors listed made me nervous. Even better, I didn’t see any manipulating of the Trinity to justify certain views on marriage. Not a bad start. The chapters by Piper, Segal, and the Reoaches were generally good. I skipped the ones by Doug Wilson, as no one has any business reading anything by him (unless you are refuting his theology). The chapters by Francis Chan were uniformly terrible. Let’s start there.
Chan begins well by saying “The goal of marriage is not marriage” (Chan 1). That’s true. It’s a mystery revealing Christ and His Bride. That is not what Chan is getting at. He doesn’t mention Ephesians 5 at all. Rather, he berates couples for being self-centered rather than being radical on the mission field. Seriously. Such couples who are improving their marriage “become virtually worthless for kingdom purposes.” Side note: there really isn’t much difference between Roman Catholic monasticism and Francis Chan’s anabaptist worldview on this point, save that Rome is more theologically robust.
Nancy Demoss Woglemuth has some good meditations on how the serpent makes us selfish towards our spouse (Woglemuth 10).
Piper’s chapters on sex are good for the most part, if prone to overstatement (which might be a summary of Piper’s whole ministry). He says “Sex belongs to Christians” (Piper 17). Well, only if the pleasures of sex were meant in the garden for covenant believers and that’s true by extension today. Otherwise, Piper is very close to saying the only legitimate marriages are Christian marriages.
Josh Squires chapter on intimacy being more than just sex is good, but reads like a manual: First, I engage in spiritual intimacy, then recreational intimacy, eventually to sexual intimacy. I understand the different love languages thing, but it comes off as wooden.
The chapters on submission (Tate 35 passim) were good if only in that they didn’t involve the Trinity.
Chan’s other chapter is as bad as his first one, if not worse. He tells believers not to get entangled in civilian pursuits (Chan 59). He butchers that verse since it is talking about the pastorate, not the laity. He mocks the “happy family lounging inside” while a “full-scale war” unfolds a few blocks away. He fails to understand that we can “work quietly with our hands and live a quiet life” while praying for those under attack. The two aren’t mutually exclusive. This is the danger to which Anabaptist Evangelicalism leads. It’s legalism.
This is a decent book for married couples. Ignore the chapters by Chan and Wilson and this book moves from 3 stars to 4 stars.
This was better than I expected it to be. Some of the authors listed made me nervous. Even better, I didn’t see any manipulating of the Trinity to justify certain views on marriage. Not a bad start. The chapters by Piper, Segal, and the Reoaches were generally good. I skipped the ones by Doug Wilson, as no one has any business reading anything by him (unless you are refuting his theology). The chapters by Francis Chan were uniformly terrible. Let’s start there.
Chan begins well by saying “The goal of marriage is not marriage” (Chan 1). That’s true. It’s a mystery revealing Christ and His Bride. That is not what Chan is getting at. He doesn’t mention Ephesians 5 at all. Rather, he berates couples for being self-centered rather than being radical on the mission field. Seriously. Such couples who are improving their marriage “become virtually worthless for kingdom purposes.” Side note: there really isn’t much difference between Roman Catholic monasticism and Francis Chan’s anabaptist worldview on this point, save that Rome is more theologically robust.
Nancy Demoss Woglemuth has some good meditations on how the serpent makes us selfish towards our spouse (Woglemuth 10).
Piper’s chapters on sex are good for the most part, if prone to overstatement (which might be a summary of Piper’s whole ministry). He says “Sex belongs to Christians” (Piper 17). Well, only if the pleasures of sex were meant in the garden for covenant believers and that’s true by extension today. Otherwise, Piper is very close to saying the only legitimate marriages are Christian marriages.
Josh Squires chapter on intimacy being more than just sex is good, but reads like a manual: First, I engage in spiritual intimacy, then recreational intimacy, eventually to sexual intimacy. I understand the different love languages thing, but it comes off as wooden.
The chapters on submission (Tate 35 passim) were good if only in that they didn’t involve the Trinity.
Chan’s other chapter is as bad as his first one, if not worse. He tells believers not to get entangled in civilian pursuits (Chan 59). He butchers that verse since it is talking about the pastorate, not the laity. He mocks the “happy family lounging inside” while a “full-scale war” unfolds a few blocks away. He fails to understand that we can “work quietly with our hands and live a quiet life” while praying for those under attack. The two aren’t mutually exclusive. This is the danger to which Anabaptist Evangelicalism leads. It’s legalism.
This is a decent book for married couples. Ignore the chapters by Chan and Wilson and this book moves from 3 stars to 4 stars.
