BlueCollarTheologian

“I suspect that we might best de-idolize romantic love by giving more attention to friendship in the context of koinonia, or churchly community. I have in mind Aristotle’s highest form of friendship–the friendship of those devoted to a common cause. Christians are those people caught up in an adventure nothing less than the destiny of the world. As such, we hardly need the comparatively puny and petty adventure of romantic love. Christians do not get married because monogamy is an aphrodisiac; they get married because this is the key way they participate as sexual beings in an adventure far surpassing the potentials of any aphrodisiac, the adventure of witnessing to and building up God’s kingdom on earth.

“The important question for Christians, then, after five, ten, fifty years of marriage, is not, ‘Am I still in love with my spouse?’ The better question is, ‘Are we stronger, deeper, continuing Christian friends?’ That is to say, are we supporting and challenging each other in the faith, in service to one another, to our children, to our church, to our neighbors? In the words of Diogenes Allen, when Christian marriage is friendship rather than romance, ‘We do not fight dragons or villains, as in “love stories,” but fight with ourselves, as more and more of our self and our partner is revealed with time and through the ups and downs of life. We face an inward struggle with what we are [and…a political struggle with what world wants us to be]. What is won is oneself and the other. Married people become people who love each other.’ In short, the sex lives of Christians can improve. But they can only improve once we learn to make love after we have fallen out of love.”

Rodney Clapp “From Family Values to Family Virtues”