Singleness

      A while back I read a piece by well-known blogger called “Singleness as Affliction.” I don’t remember the content in much detail, but I generally agreed with it, and the nice thing about catchy titles is that they help you retain the general point.  The basic point of that post was to yank the pendulum of how we treat and view “Christian Singleness” back in the opposite direction from where it has been leaning in the current culture of Christians in their 20s and 30s.

    Just to summarize the popular view of the 21st century thus far: it is essentially the message that “singleness is a gift that should be prized” — this entails the strong message to not waste your singleness, to be totally content, and to remember that you're uniquely useful to the Kingdom as a single person.  But along with the truth contained in those messages has come (sometimes explicitly, many times implicitly) the message that there’s something wrong with “craving” that relationship…that marriage.  Then we have these warnings against “idolatry:” the “idol” of marriage, the idolizing of relationships.  And finally, smuggled into the message of "your unique usefulness as a single person" is the idea that you will be essentially less useful for the Kingdom once you have a spouse and kids to care for.  To parody an infamous and unrelated quote, Big Eva appears more to whisper about the virtues of marriage and seeking marriage compared to its shouts about feeling good and satisfied with your singleness.

    The popular American evangelical voices and "thought-leaders" (a big exception being Kevin DeYoung, God bless him) have - perhaps unintentionally - lulled many a young adult into this awkward state of trying to "put off" something that God put there to begin with.  While "Singleness as Affliction" was meant to be a splash of cold water to the face, snapping people out of this pietistic trance they may have fallen into, I want to distill it and very briefly repackage it in my own words.  The key thing to remember in all this ("this" being the Christian blogosphere and all its internal debates) is balance.  And in order to shift the balance back to wherever the Bible has determined is the center, we need to lay the weight of the virtues and normativity of marriage back on the scale.

So, to let the Bible speak:

Genesis 1:18 Then the Lord God said, “It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him a helper fit for him.”

Proverbs 18:22 He who finds a wife finds a good thing and obtains favor from the Lord.

Proverbs 31:10 An excellent wife who can find? She is far more precious than jewels.

Titus 2:3-5 Older women likewise are to be reverent in behavior, not slanderers or slaves to much wine. They are to teach what is good, 4 and so train the young women to love their husbands and children, 5 to be self-controlled, pure, working at home, kind, and submissive to their own husbands, that the word of God may not be reviled.

1 Peter 3:5 For this is how the holy women who hoped in God used to adorn themselves, by submitting to their own husbands,

1 Corinthians 7:1-2  Now concerning the matters about which you wrote: “It is good for a man not to have sexual relations with a woman.” 2 But because of the temptation to sexual immorality, each man should have his own wife and each woman her own husband.

1 Corinthians 7:9b For it is better to marry than to burn with passion.

1 Timothy 5:14 So I would have younger widows marry, bear children, manage their households, and give the adversary no occasion for slander.

I would argue that the only one of these that we NEED is Genesis 1:18 in tandem with the whole Bible's assumption of the normativity of marriage.

    Now I want to quickly shift to the idea of singleness as "affliction."  In the aforementioned article, some fun is poked at the notion of singleness being a "gift," as it is a "gift" that frankly almost nobody wants.  Here's what we need to remember: everything comes to us by God's hand, and that includes affliction.  We do not have to adopt these labels of "gift" and "prize" and "treasure" simply in order to preserve God's sovereignty over our situation.  We can call it what it is -- hard, painful, suffering, affliction -- without giving into sins of anxiety, discontentment, distrust, hopelessness, and faithlessness.

    Hunger, illness, and loss are afflictions.  A mature Christian will learn to find contentment in Jesus and peace with God in the midst of these afflictions, but Christians are never told to enjoy or even to ignore them.  We do have to be just a little careful here.  Paul speaks much of "afflictions" in the New Testament, and he rejoices in them, seeing their ultimate purpose.  But there is a difference between a) learning to kiss the wave that tosses us against the Rock of Ages and b) being guilted into thinking we must actually enjoy the situation or to pretend that the pain doesn't exist.  We mustn't think ourselves less holy for feeling the pain and praying God comes to our aid (even in the form of sending us a spouse).  We aren't to enjoy hunger.  We aren't to enjoy illness.  Likewise, while we find contentment in our Creator (and, in the case of food, are taught that man does not live by bread alone), unfulfilled longing is unpleasant.  We want something that we don't have, and that is not fun.  We need not pretend that it is fun, and we need not feel guilty for feeling that we are missing out on something.

I don't think I need to belabor this point any further.

    What are we not-so-happy single people to do then?  First, we give thanks.  We live a life of thankfulness to God for what He has given us and for what He is doing with us.  We rejoice in our salvation and live joyful lives in Christian community.  Second, we allow ourselves to feel the loneliness and pain without losing complete trust in God.  Third, we pray for and seek a spouse.  We also ought to allow our close friends to tell us if we are obsessing over our desire for marriage to the point of neglecting the tasks God has put before us.  But let's not kid ourselves anymore with language that suggests that God will surely use you more mightily in your single years than in your married years.  Nor should we allow our thinking to be influenced by the current culture's obsession with "identity" and, as a result, obsess over language of "completeness" or "wholeness."  You are in Christ.  HE is complete, and you are in HIM.  Who YOU are is not relevant in the common sense of what it means to "be."