A Terrifying Grace: Sexuality, Romance and Marriage in Christian History

By Rob Yule

Romance and sexual intimacy are among lifes highest joys. How we handle our sexuality is an ultimate challenge, particularly in todays sexualised global culture.

Rob Yule looks at a fascinating selection of romantic relationships from throughout Christian history, from Augustine, Abelard and Helose, and the Luthers to Billy and Ruth Graham and Pope Saint John Paul II. Illustrating how challenging and far-from-straightforward the relationship of men and women is in real life, he draws many insights for relationships and marriage today.

A Terrifying Grace explores the romantic relationships of leading Christians throughout history and how they handled sex and marriage.

What were their relationships and marriages like?

What did they believe or teach about sexuality and marriage?

Did their marriages or celibate lives live up to their professed beliefs?

How did they handle the joys, pains, temptations, and responsibilities of their intimate relationships, alongside their public life and witness?

Even great Christians have struggled to handle their intimate relationships. We can learn much from them how to live with integrity in todays hypersexualised culture.

• Language: English
• Publisher: WestBow Press
• Release date: Apr 28, 2017
• ISBN: 9781512780888

Rob Yule

Rob Yule is a retired New Zealand Presbyterian minister and a former Moderator of the Presbyterian Church of Aotearoa New Zealand. He was chaplain at Victoria University of Wellington in the 1970s, a leader in charismatic renewal, and pastored churches in Christchurch, Palmerston North, and Auckland. He lectured in the Manawatu Branch of the Bible College of New Zealand and on mission trips to the Czech Republic. He and his wife Christene have been married nearly fifty years and have five children and fifteen grandchildren

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Copyright © 2017 Robert M. Yule.

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Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

Scripture quotations in chapters 2 through 6 or marked (KJV) are taken from the King James Version.

Unless otherwise indicated, Scripture quotations in chapters 7 through 12 are taken from the Holy Bible, New International Version®, NIV®. Copyright ©1973, 1978, 1984, 2011 by Biblica, Inc.™ Used by permission of Zondervan. All rights reserved worldwide. www.zondervan.com The NIV and New International Version are trademarks registered in the United States Patent and Trademark Office by Biblica, Inc.™

The cover picture is The Jewish Bride by Rembrandt van Rijn.

ISBN: 978-1-5127-8089-5 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-5127-8090-1 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-5127-8088-8 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2017904248

WestBow Press rev. date: 4/27/2017

To my wife, Christene.

What was purposed

when by grace we vowed to enter marriage

was quite beyond us: we shone undiverted

into the way of things, not alone

ever again, profoundly moved towards home.

—John Dennison, Promissory

Contents

Foreword

Acknowledgments

Introduction

Chapter 1: Continence but Not Yet

Augustine on Sexuality and Marriage

Chapter 2: The Pleasures of Lovers

The Romance of Héloïse and Abelard

Chapter 3: The Marriage of a Monk and a Nun

Martin and Katie Luther

Chapter 4: Paradise Lost

John Milton on Marriage and Divorce

Chapter 5: A Fit Similitude

The Legacy of Jonathan and Sarah Edwards

Chapter 6: Intimate Disconnections

John Wesley’s Relationships with Women

Chapter 7: A Cooperative Aid Association

Karl Barth and his Muse

Chapter 8: A Legal Formality

The Unusual Marriage of C. S. Lewis and Joy Davidman

Chapter 9: A Shelter from the Storm

Francis and Edith Schaeffer’s Christian Community

Chapter 10: God Is a Matchmaker

Derek, Lydia, and Ruth Prince

Chapter 11: Absolute Integrity and Purity

Billy and Ruth Graham v. the Televangelists

Chapter 12: The Language of the Body

Saint John Paul II on Love, Celibacy, and Marriage

Timeline

Glossary

Bibliography

Text Permissions

Illustration Credits

Foreword

It has been said that the deepest questions every human being has are Can I love? and Will I be loved?

Down through the ages, the love of man for a woman and woman for a man has reflected the best of humankind. Beauty and goodness, faithfulness and honor have been idealized and lived out in as many different partnerships within marriage as there are personalities. For some marriage has been a source of constant joy, and for others a journey of stoicism and courage.

In this book tracing the marriages of well-known and loved Christian leaders, Rob Yule has profiled their characters with honesty and humanity, giving us an overview of theological thought and Christian practice in their lives and relationships. He has been candid about blind spots, driven personality types, unempathetic spouses, and unusual couplings. Yet throughout the book there is comfort in reading about men and women displaying in their marriage relationships and sexual attitudes both greatness and human failings, big hearts yet the imperfections used by God for his purposes.

Today, like never before, the form and even the very existence of marriage is being questioned. With it, many solid realities we have taken for granted are changing. Being no longer anchored through fear of God and his laws, marriage ceremonies often look like cut-and-paste jobs whereby couples choose, like downloads from their iPods, which bits they will take into their marriages. The certainties that once built educational, economic, and spiritual capital for their children, the church community, and society are shakier than they once were.

The shining light in this book is how, in every single one of these stories, there is real testimony to the quality of faithfulness. Not the idea of perfection in relationships or endless romantic dates, but the idea of two people called to a purpose and together fulfilling that calling, often working it out on the way.

We found this book hard to put down. Other people’s lives, especially public figures, are a source of fascination. The brilliance of this format is that the lives of a group of historically influential Christian thinkers and leaders are made available through concise biographies with a focus on their personal relationships. We catch a glimpse of what formed them into the men and women they became. This book is not afraid to critique a wrong attitude or behavior.

God used these men and women to influence the course of history and be carriers of the gospel, many in unique ways. It is comforting to recognize that we are all on a journey, products of our upbringing and misbeliefs, and that marriage may be one of the most challenging of all human endeavors for all of us, famous or not.

By candidly sharing the struggles and triumphs of highly respected leaders as well as the oddness of some of their partnerships, this book is a gift. In many ways, it is a lesson in humanity as well as in theology.

Today we so easily decide that we have married the wrong person. We think that if only we could get someone else, the right person, our marriage would be successful. However, these stories tell us that marriage is way more than that. Marriage is a gift of stability and joy designed, upheld and provided for by our heavenly Father, our Creator and the one who knows us best.

Whether our marriage began as a wildly romantic affair, an arranged partnership, or a pragmatic agreement, God has promised to back up our commitment and faithfulness with his resources. As Greg Smalley said recently, When couples fall out of love, ‘love’ is not the issue; we have access to that in abundance from God. The real issue is a closed, hardened heart. God in his mercy wraps around our human drives and desires with a moral code. He knows this will test our character but has given us the promise of the love of another whom he knows will, in the end, fulfill our deepest needs.

These stories tell us that marriage is both temporal and eternal. Our faithful commitment to it will shape our lives for eternity.

We are confident that the next generation will treasure this book for its inspiration to make history in their partnerships in the way that the best of God’s servants have faithfully done in the past.

Ian and Mary Grant

Cofounders

The Parenting Place

Auckland

New Zealand

Acknowledgments

Eight of this book’s chapters originated in a course that I taught at Emmaus College, Palmerston North, New Zealand, during term two in 2014. I thank the Dean, Pauline Simonsen, for her invitation to give the original lectures and for the stimulation their preparation involved, and I thank my students for their engagement and interaction throughout the course. The chapters on John Milton; Derek, Lydia, and Ruth Prince; Billy and Ruth Graham; and Saint John Paul II have been written specially for the book, together with the timeline, glossary, and bibliography.

The title, A Terrifying Grace, was suggested to me by my sister and brother-in-law, Natalie and Selwyn Yeoman. It echoes a line from Milton (though terror be in love/And beauty¹) and captures exactly the tension inherent in our sexuality—its multifaceted character as divine gift, mysterious power, and fraught encounter. Nothing in life brings us nearer heaven’s joy. Nothing more powerfully draws human beings together. Nothing makes us more aware of the need for God’s mercy.

A number of friends, including Felicia and Ken Edgecombe, Ron Hay, Marj and Murray Robertson, Phillipa Robertson, and Natalie and Selwyn Yeoman, have read parts of my manuscript and made helpful suggestions that have improved the finished product. But I accept responsibility for its final form.

I am grateful to Ian and Mary Grant, well-known throughout New Zealand for their marriage and parenting seminars, for their foreword.

I dedicate the work to my wife, Christene. She has been my best friend, lover, and unwavering companion in a marriage of nearly fifty years. We overcame some rocky moments during my years of postgraduate study in Edinburgh. We worked together in the earlier years of our family, in the busyness of university chaplaincy, and in local church ministry. As the children grew older and our finances more constrained, she returned to her professional career, first as a secondary school teacher of English, later as a teacher of international students who were learning English as a second language.

In preparing the manuscript, I often found myself recalling the joy of the many weddings I have celebrated throughout my career and of the marriage preparation with couples beforehand. I will no longer have this pleasure, not because of growing old but because I withdrew my name from the gazetted list of marriage celebrants on the day after the New Zealand parliament enacted the same-sex marriage act in 2013.

Like a growing number of secular Western nations, my country no longer recognizes what marriage intrinsically and uniquely is—the conjugal union of a man and a woman. I cannot, in conscience, be part of this. There is nothing wrong with same-sex friendship. There is everything wrong with same-sex copulation. The supposedly benevolent extension of marriage to include genital relations with a member of the same sex is a blasphemy against marriage, a denial of its complementary essence.²

As our leading authority on such matters ruled, what God has constituted, let no one overthrow.

Rob Yule

Palmerston North

New Zealand

Feast of Saint Francis

October 4, 2016

Introduction

Romance and sexual intimacy are among the highest joys of life. Romantic love catches us by surprise. It disrupts our selfish or complacent lives and engages us in the life of another. Fraught with pain and pleasure, love awakens in us the mystery, wonder, and longing for intimacy with another human being.

That intimacy, when realized in sexual union, brings inexpressible comfort, tenderness, and self-transcendence. Sexual love is not only the forge of life. It is the engine of creativity, the inspiration for love songs, poetry, art, music, and opera. Romance makes the world go round.

In the Christian view, sexuality is the gift of the Creator, something noble and beautiful. Designed for the context of covenantal marriage as the hearth of family life, its evident power has a transcendent quality that prefigures our ultimate destiny as the bride of Christ himself. Unhinged from its purpose and outside that context, sex may become a demonic and destructive force, leading many astray and causing untold grief.

Sex grabs everyone’s attention. Such a powerful force is not easily handled. It makes rational people do foolish things. It is easy to be glib or dismissive of its power, but sexuality is an ultimate challenge to how well we live our lives, particularly in today’s hypersexualized global culture.

This book explores the romantic relationships of a representative selection of leading Christians. What were their relationships and marriages like? What did they believe or teach about sexuality and marriage? Did their marriages—or in two cases, celibate lives—live up to their professed beliefs? How did they handle the joys, pains, temptations, and responsibilities of their sexuality and most intimate relationships, particularly in the context of their public lives and witness?

The book deals with twelve romantic relationships from throughout Christian history and from widely different cultural contexts. The stories show how varied marriages can be and how challenging are the most intimate relationships of men and women. In the only full-length book that I have found that treats this subject, William Petersen writes,

You might think that Christian leaders would have exemplary marriages … The fact is, they struggle to make their marriages what they should be … This is not surprising. Greatness, like genius, places unusual stress on a marriage … Leaders are in the spotlight … The very gifts and character traits that make a person stand out as a leader may make him or her a challenge as a marriage partner.³

We begin with a great Christian thinker and leader who had difficulty controlling his sexual urges. He cohabited with a woman for more than thirteen years, repudiated her, briefly considered marriage for social advancement to another woman, and then chose celibacy. His thinking profoundly influenced subsequent Christian attitudes toward marriage and sexuality.

Next is one of the greatest romances in history. Pursued clandestinely at a time when celibacy was idealized, it ended brutally and tragically in a marriage that was more like a divorce. The woman and man, still in love with each other, spent the rest of their days living a celibate existence neither of them initially wanted but creatively accepted.

After a millennium when celibacy was the highest ideal, an unlikely relationship between a monk and a nun issued in the best-documented marriage in Christian history, the first family of a manse or parsonage.

We turn next to an aspiring poet who married a teenager half his age in payment of a family debt. Humiliated when she left him after just one month of marriage, he wrote not one but four pleas for divorce on grounds of incompatibility. She later returned to him and died after giving birth to their fourth child. The poet would marry twice more and go on to write the greatest heroic poem in the English language, telling the story of the fall of the first human couple.

We come then to what is arguably a model Christian marriage—both in the theological convictions that lay at its heart and in the astonishing fruitfulness of its legacy. This large family of a genuinely loving couple, whose lives were prematurely cut short, is a lasting tribute to the biblical ideals of Puritan family life.

By contrast, the next chapter tells a tragic story of marital estrangement and strife. This was strange for a man known for his affection for women, an unusual blemish in the ministry of one of history’s greatest evangelists. It reminds us that though we may preach with the tongues of angels, we gain nothing if we have not love.

Entering modern times, we encounter the unusual and tortured domestic situation of perhaps the greatest theologian of the twentieth century. The story is eloquent in its testimony to the role of love in creative endeavor but also tragic in its cost for all involved.

Then we come to a scholar and confirmed bachelor who never expected to experience the joys of married love in his sixties. He did so only after his partner in what he considered to be a mere marriage of convenience—though who may, in fact, have set out to seduce him—began to demand her marital entitlements.

Next, we look at the marriage of a couple who at great cost to themselves opened their home to hundreds of seekers during the turbulent years of the counterculture. What was a shelter of meaning for many participants and a role model for the wider evangelical world was in reality a deeply testing experience for the couple and family at its heart.

Then we turn to a lonely intellectual who might have been expected to spend his days as a scholarly recluse. Yet he married in succession two single women and took responsibility for twelve adopted daughters. Ultimately, he would develop a phenomenal global Bible teaching ministry.

The penultimate chapter considers the consistency of the personal values and public life of the first couple of American Christianity in the second half of the twentieth century. Their personal integrity throughout an evangelistic career of more than sixty years contrasts dramatically with the spectacular falls from grace of several television evangelists in the late 1980s. Their example has much to teach us about how to live amid the vulnerabilities and temptations of today’s highly sexualized celebrity culture.

Finally, we explore the life and teaching of a pastor celebrated for his exemplary global leadership, but much less known for his profound reflections on human sexuality and embodiment. His theology of the body reverses centuries of negative Catholic teaching about marriage and sexuality. As it becomes more widely known and appreciated, it may yet bring about a counter sexual revolution.

These stories bring home how complex and challenging our most intimate relationships can be. They range from celibacy to marriage, from fidelity to frigidity, from conflict to complementarity, from cohabitation, romance, seduction, and even a love triangle to profound marital bliss and fruitfulness. They are inspiring, humbling, cautionary tales, the more so when today’s culture of instant satisfaction impatiently trivializes what it takes to make intimate relationships work and last.

Sexual attraction is a powerful force, one not easily handled, a source of grief for many as well as joy. Controlling our sexuality and living in close relationship with another person tests every fiber of our character. It is even more challenging when our marriage partner has a demanding job, holds high ideals, or is a driven leader. Deciding whether to marry, choosing the right life partner, keeping lifelong intimacy in marriage, and maintaining consistency between our public and private lives are matters that are far from straightforward.

Sexuality touches the core of what it is to be a human being. Indeed, the Bible describes our very nature as male and female as the divine image in our humanity (Genesis 1:26–27). Our sexual makeup is indeed a terrifying grace. In the gift of sexuality, in creating us sexual beings, the Creator has set us a stunning challenge. How we express our sexuality constitutes an ultimate test of how we live our lives.

As a Russian proverb says, To live your life is not as easy as to cross a field.

CHAPTER 1

Continence but Not Yet

Augustine on Sexuality and Marriage

No individual has influenced Christian views of sex and marriage more than Augustine (AD 354–430). His colorful career—from profligate to celibate—contributed to a denigration of marriage that was not corrected till the Protestant Reformation eleven hundred years later. His views still shape Roman Catholic teaching.

Augustine’s influence was extraordinary. He influenced people as diverse as the theologian Thomas Aquinas and the mystic Thomas à Kempis, theocratic popes as well as those who would reform the church, masters of the Renaissance like Petrarch, and pioneers of the Reformation like Luther and Calvin. The extent and variety of his influence is astonishing.

The great Christian writer, theologian, and leader was born in Tagaste, North Africa, in 354. All but five years of his life were lived in Roman North Africa, and he spent the last thirty-four years of his life as bishop of the busy seaport of Hippo Regius, now Annaba in Algeria. During his lifetime the barbarians were pouring into the Roman Empire. He died in 430 as the Vandals laid siege to Hippo.⁴

Augustine came to Christian faith after a long and tortuous search for God through religion, philosophy, rhetoric, and sexual indulgence. He had a profound effect on the medieval church’s attitude toward marriage and sexuality—and indeed, on the outlook of the Catholic church to this day. A writer of enormous psychological insight, he pioneered our modern use of the heart to represent feelings. In this, he anticipates modern evangelicalism. In many ways he writes like one of our contemporaries.

The Confessions is Augustine’s most famous book. He wrote it in his early forties.⁵ It is sometimes called the world’s first autobiography, but it is better viewed as a theological reflection on experience. Augustine wrote it in the form of a sustained prayer, and it is written with great literary skill and some embellishment. His account of drinking from his mother’s breasts is hardly infant memory. Likewise, when he recalls his turbulent teenage years, it is to instruct the reader as much as it is to remember his early life. One of his aims in writing the Confessions was to encourage people to adopt a life of sexual and worldly renunciation as he had done.

Farewell, My Concubine

In the Confessions, Augustine describes how his youthful sex drive led him astray. From the age of fifteen, he tells us, he confused the search for love and friendship, the desire to love and be loved, with the satisfaction of his sexual impulses. At one time in adolescence … I ran wild in the shadowy jungle of erotic adventures …, pleasing myself and being ambitious to win human approval (2.1.1). He says that the bubbling impulses of puberty, like a misty swamp, obscured his heart’s vision so that it could not see the difference between love’s serenity and lust’s darkness (2.2.2). He gave himself totally to sensual folly in shameful acts condoned by society but against God’s laws (2.2.4).

In his new biography, Robin Fox discusses Augustine’s early sexual experiences. He concludes that the fifteen-year-old Augustine went beyond ‘impure thoughts’ … actually did things, and was as ‘wicked’ as possible.⁶ Henry Chadwick compares Augustine’s description of his wild adolescent years with a pagan historian’s portrayal of the riffraff of Rome. Ammianus Marcellinus spoke of people spending their entire lives on alcohol, gambling, brothels, and public shows.⁷

Augustine’s parents were aware that he was floundering in a whirlpool of vice (2.2.2). But they responded in different ways. His father, Patrick, may have been entangled in extramarital affairs himself. He was amused at his son’s sexual stirrings and reported the prospect of grandchildren to his wife, Monica (2.3.6). She was ambitious for her son and caught in a dilemma. She was reluctant to suggest marriage to channel her son’s sexual desires. She feared it might hinder his career opportunities. But she did speak to him about his lack of sexual restraint. Above all, she warned him that he should not commit adultery with someone else’s wife (2.3.7).

Augustine’s father, Patrick, did not become a Christian till he was baptized on his deathbed in 372. His mother, Monica, was a devout believer from a Christian Berber family. She was ambitious for her gifted son to succeed in a secular career. But she was also the voice of God in his early life and longed for him to become an orthodox Christian. It grieved her when her seventeen-year-old son, soon after the death of his father, began cohabiting with a girl of low social status from Carthage.

Taking a concubine was a socially acceptable thing to do at the time. It was not unlike unmarried couples living together today. Living with her, Augustine tells us, I learnt by direct experience how wide a difference there is between the partnership of marriage entered into for the sake of having a family and the mutual consent of those whose love is a matter of physical sex (4.2.2). In the first year of their relationship, they had a son who was initially unwanted but then dearly loved. Named Adeodatus, meaning God’s gift, he became a clever boy and a source of pride to his father, but he died at the age of sixteen.⁸

Image01StAugustinehismotherMonicaScheffer.jpg

St. Augustine and His Mother Monica

Ary Scheffer (1854)

Augustine’s earlier biographer Peter Brown does not view him as a libertine who converted at the age of thirty-two from a life of unbridled sensuality. On the contrary, he thinks that Augustine was a young man who had cut the ebullience of his adolescence dangerously short.⁹ By taking a nameless woman as his concubine, he had, in effect, been washed up on the shore of marriage (2.2.3). It was a de facto arrangement, to be sure, but it had all the responsibilities of marriage, especially after the birth of his son.

At this stage of his life, Augustine was a follower of Manicheism, a dualistic religious movement that regarded matter and the body as evil—a product of the prince of darkness. The Manichees practiced contraceptive sex and condemned procreation because it brought physical beings into existence.

But the Manichean community had two grades of affiliation. Only the higher one, the elect, required celibacy. As a hearer or initiate, Augustine was permitted to have a concubine and be sexually active, provided he and his partner took steps to avoid conceiving a child. This would involve limiting sexual relations to safe periods of her menstrual cycle. Since Augustine and his partner were together for more than thirteen years without having another child, they must have followed this expectation.¹⁰

Augustine had studied rhetoric at Carthage with the goal of becoming a lawyer. But soon he decided to pursue his interest in literary endeavors. For ten years he taught in Tagaste and Carthage in North Africa. Then in 384 after an unsatisfactory year in Rome, he moved to the North Italian city of Milan, where he was the public orator. There he became friendly with a group of Neoplatonists. He grew increasingly torn between sexual activity and this philosophy that drew him to higher things. Sexual appetite kept him from embracing Christianity. His inner turmoil is epitomized in his double-minded prayer, Grant me chastity and continence, but not yet (8.7.17).¹¹

Augustine was ambitious for a career in the imperial government, which had its western headquarters in Milan. He was still living with his Carthaginian partner, whom he deeply loved. But intellectually, she was no companion for him, and she was a social liability if he was to get a job in the Roman public service. Roman law defined a concubine’s inheritance rights in the very year Augustine began his liaison with her. A concubine would receive a quarter of an inheritance if her partner had no children by marriage, but only a twelfth of an inheritance if her partner was married and had children.¹²

Most government offices at the time were for sale. But Augustine, coming from a family of modest means, did not have the money to advance himself. Having to call on men of influence to