Marriage and the Family

Jones’ eighth chapter is concerned with “Marriage and Family” but not in the strictly individual sense, but rather in the family as a social structure.

Jones establishes that the entirety of Scripture and even throughout all cultures and times, the family is understood to be the basic social structure. It is through this basic social structure that Jones believes Christians can be both a witness and an agent of transformation towards the culture. Because of this, Jones sets out some basic Christian understandings of the family.

In doing this, Jones decides to first look at the Christian marriage as a covenant. He claims that the bond of male and female into a marriage is the creational mandate for marriage. As in other ancient covenants, the man and woman bind themselves to one another and even take on specific blessings and curses to an extent (i.e. for better or for worse). The covenant of marriage is an unconditional “royal grant” covenant in the sense that each person is giving themselves to the other and promising to never leave or forsake the other, “until death.”

He also takes a great deal of time discussing the roles within marriage, explaining that men and women have different but complimentary roles that are ordained by God. This of course is coming at things from a complimentarian viewpoint but I found this section to be very well written explaining that for men and women to have different God-ordained roles does not mean that in order for Christians to have a biblical marriage, they must be hardworking men and housekeeping women. This is not the point of complimentarianism in the eyes of Jones. To say that men and women have different roles is simply to point out the differences in genetics and function that a husband and wife have together.

Ultimately what Jones calls Christian couples to is a loving and life-long marriage in which they love each other well, have children who they love and raise in the Lord. By doing this, Jones’ argues that Christians will be able to transform and witness to the fallenness of the world at its very fundamental social level. To say that I enjoyed this chapter would be an understatement. In reality, this chapter actually made me think about what type of husband and father I would like to be someday.