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Credible Marriages
Louis R. Tarsitano on the Christian Destruction of Marriage
Devoted readers of Touchstone may recall that in 1998 I wrote a longish piece on “plausible people”: the replacement of traditional argumentation based in facts, ideas, and reason by people who serve as living images of various sorts of sentiments and emotions. Thus, the more compelling the image, the more likely that members of the general public, indoctrinated by the movies, television, and the Internet to believe that images are the reality, would be to find the sentiments and emotions being represented “plausible”—that is, as likely and desirable models for their own sentiments and emotions.
My original interest in plausible people grew from what many people might consider a prejudice. I firmly believe that the Holy Scriptures are not merely a set of images, impressions, or emotions, but God’s Word Written. Divine Revelation is a matter of objective divine content, inspired and preserved by God the Holy Ghost, rather than a collection of subjective, human religious emotions.
Human emotions, of course, are not evil in themselves, but they are fallen and fallible. When, for example, my emotions tell me that my neighbor’s wife is greatly to be desired, the objective commandment, “Thou shalt not commit adultery,” interposes itself, with the help of God’s grace, to redirect my emotions to a disciplined, sinless end. I can, after all, love God more than I cherish my immediate emotions and appetites, and I can love my neighbor’s wife without adultery if I follow God’s explicit directions as to how I may love honorably and unselfishly in imitation of my Lord Jesus Christ.
Credible Christians
As Christ teaches, I must love all, including my enemies, but I may love only one in all the world as a husband loves a wife, as one created a man is called to love one created a woman, being one flesh with her by the grace of God. Of course, achieving such singularity and particularity of love is not easy. Otherwise, marriage vows would not stipulate “for better for worse, for richer for poorer, in sickness and in health, to love and to cherish, till death do us part.” In marriage, especially in a long marriage, it becomes clearer day by day that “love” is not a set of transient emotions, but rather a commitment to act a certain way, in Christ’s way, towards one other and then towards all others.
Images, sentiments, and dramatic emotions, the whole machinery of plausibility, are useless in maintaining a Christian marriage. Self-dramatization and sentimentality always work to convince us that we are entitled to receive “true love” in some self-fulfilling way, rather than obligated to give love as well as we can. A plausible adulterer or fornicator may elude discovery or public scandal, but he is no one’s lover until he repents.
I had originally applied the concept of plausible people, as a source of distraction, weakness, and confusion, to the topic of evangelism in general, and many of my fellow pastors were kind enough to let me know that they had found something useful for their work in my discussion. I had also suggested that while faithful Christians could not become plausible and remain faithful, they could in a legitimate way respond to the popular hunger that made plausible people such a force in contemporary life, by being “credible.”
Credible missionaries for Jesus Christ will provide visible images of faithfulness and divine love, what used to be called “good examples,” as part of their witness, but the images they present will not be a Potemkin village of facades with no reality behind them. Behind the appearance of sincerity will be a genuine sincerity: a life-defining commitment to the objective truth of the gospel of Jesus Christ, received through the grace of God by a complete human being, possessed of a body, a soul, and a mind. The credible missionary’s greatest strength will be his ability to assimilate into his own life the thought and worship, the faith and practice of two millennia of his fellow Christians, all of whom he takes seriously as persons known, loved, and saved by God, and not just as the shadows of his own imagination or reflections of his own ego.
A credible missionary, certainly, must seek the perfection of his Father in Heaven, but he cannot, as the plausible person does, live and die by his image. A plausible person caught in a contradiction will deny that contradiction with his final breath. A credible missionary, however, must be prepared to admit that he has violated an objective moral code given by God—that he is a sinner, and that he has sinned.
In the short term, the plausible person will seem to have the advantage with his denials, as opposed to the credible missionary’s admission of guilt, but reality functions with or without human permission, and ultimately the plausible person’s denials will be revealed as the empty defense of an empty image. On the other hand, the confessions of a credible missionary will finally be seen as a principled consistency. St. Augustine’s Confessions remains part of the bedrock of Western literature, while the press releases of emperors, kings, and rock stars go unread after a brief flurry of interest.
Louis R. Tarsitano (d. 2005), a former associate editor of Touchstone, was a priest of the Anglican Church in America and rector of St. Andrew?s Church in Savannah, Georgia. He also was the co-author, with Peter Toon, of Neither Archaic Nor Obsolete: The Language of Common Prayer & Public Worship (Brynmill Press, Ltd., 2003).
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