Timothy Keller - The Meaning of Marriage: Facing the Complexities of Commitment with the Wisdom of God

A LSO BY T IMOTHY K ELLER

THE REASON FOR GOD: Belief in an Age of Skepticism

THE PRODIGAL GOD: Recovering the Heart of the Christian Faith

COUNTERFEIT GODS: The Empty Promises of Money, Sex, and Power, and the Only Hope That Matters

GENEROUS JUSTICE: How Gods Grace Makes Us Just

KINGS CROSS: The Story of the World in the Life of Jesus

THE
MEANING of MARRIAGE

Facing the Complexities of Commitment with the Wisdom of God

TIMOTHY KELLER

WITH KATHY KELLER

DUTTON

DUTTON

Published by Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A.

Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario M4P 2Y3, Canada (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.); Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England; Penguin Ireland, 25 St Stephens Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd); Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd); Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi110 017, India; Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, Auckland 0632, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd); Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa

Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

Published by Dutton, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

First printing, November 2011

Copyright 2011 by Timothy Keller and Kathy Keller

All rights reserved

REGISTERED TRADEMARKMARCA REGISTRADA

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

Keller, Timothy J., 1950

The meaning of marriage : facing the complexities of commitment with the wisdom
of God / Timothy Keller with Kathy Keller.1st ed.

p. cm

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-1-101-54804-2

1. MarriageReligious aspectsChristianity. I. Keller, Kathy (Kathy Louise)
II. Title III. Title: Facing the complexities of commitment with the wisdom of God.

BV835. K455 2011

248.8' 44dc23

2011032434

Designed by Leonard Telesca

Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the authors rights is appreciated.

While the author has made every effort to provide accurate telephone numbers and Internet addresses at the time of publication, neither the publisher nor the author assumes any responsibility for errors, or for changes that occur after publication. Further, the publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author
or third-party websites or their content.

To Our Friends for Four Decades

Our journeys have taken us to different places
but never away from one another,
or from each other,
or from our First Love

Adele and Doug Calhoun

Jane and Wayne Frazier

Louise and David Midwood

Gayle and Gary Somers

Cindy and Jim Widmer

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

God, the best maker of all marriages,

Combine your hearts in one.

William Shakespeare, Henry V

A Book for Married People

Think of this book as a tree supplied by three deep roots. The first is my thirty-seven-year marriage to my wife, Kathy. She urged Susan to recommend them to me. I read and was moved by the books and by other Lewis volumes that I subsequently studied. In 1972, we both enrolled at the same school, Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary on Bostons North Shore, and there we quickly came to see that we shared the secret thread that Lewis says is the thing that turns people into close friendsor more.

You may have noticed that the books you really love are bound together by a secret thread. You know very well what is the common quality that makes you love them, though you cannot put it into words:.... Are not all lifelong friendships born at the moment when at last you meet another human being who has some inkling... of that something which you were born desiring... ?

Our friendship grew into romance and engagement, and then from a fragile new marriage into a tested and durable one. But this only happened through the pearls before swine speech, the Great Dirty Diaper Conflict, the smashing the wedding china affair, and other infamous events in our family history that will be described in this bookall mileposts on the very bumpy road to marital joy. Like most young modern couples, we found that marriage was much harder than we expected it to be. At the conclusion of our wedding ceremony, we marched out singing to the hymn How Firm a Foundation. Little did we know how relevant some of the lines would be to the arduous and painful work of developing a strong marriage.

When through fiery trials, thy pathway shall lie,

My grace all-sufficient will be thy supply.

For I will be with thee, thy troubles to bless

And sanctify to thee thy deepest distress.

This book, therefore, is for those spouses who have discovered how challenging day-to-day marriage is and who are searching for practical resources to survive the sometimes overwhelming fiery trials of matrimony and to grow through them. Our societys experience with marriage has given us the metaphor the honeymoon is over. This is a book for those who have experienced this as a literal truth and may have fallen back to earth with a thud.

A Book for Unmarried People

The second source for this book is a long pastoral ministry in a city with millions (and a church with thousands) of single adults. Our congregation, Redeemer Presbyterian Church in Manhattan, is a raritya very large church that has been for years composed predominantly of singles. Several years ago, when we had about four thousand people in attendance, I asked a very prominent church consultant, How many churches do you know of our size with three thousand singles? He answered, Your church is unique, as far as I know.

Ministering in the center of New York City in the late 1980s, Kathy and I were constantly struck by the deep ambivalence with which Western culture views marriage. It was then we began to hear all the now society-wide objectionsmarriage was originally about property and is now in flux, marriage crushes individual identity and has been oppressive for women, marriage stifles passion and is ill-fitted to psychological reality, marriage is just a piece of paper that only serves to complicate love, and so on. But beneath these philosophical objections lies a snarl of conflicted personal emotions, born out of many negative experiences with marriage and family life.