Leland Ryken, in his book, The Puritans:  Worldly Saints says, “The Puritan doctrine of sex was a watershed in the cultural history of the West. The Puritans devalued celibacy, glorified companionate marriage, affirmed married sex as both necessary and pure, established the ideal of wedded romantic love, and exalted the role of the wife.”

As with most other things good in the world today, I want to ask the question whether we have put a twist on this that, in effect, perverts it, and in a typically 20^th-21^st century way. The Westminster Confession says, “Marriage was ordained for the mutual help of the husband and wife, for the increase of mankind with legitimate issue and of the church with a holy seed and for the preventing of uncleanness.” I have to confess that it does seem to me, in a principial statement, that the mention of preventing uncleanness is a little odd. It is true, of course, that Paul tells us that we should all have our own husband and wife, if God gives us such, and so enjoy sex in the biblical way. But God created marriage before sin so that at that point there was no question of uncleanness. That leaves us then with the mutual help, the increase of mankind and the increase of the Church as the purposes for which God gave us marriage.

The Mutual Help⤒🔗

There is something very important in this business of mutual help. The marriage form in the back of our present Psalter-Hymnal has the words, “enrichment of the lives” of the couple. And some would say today, Christians too I mean, that that is the most important purpose of marriage (it is listed third in the Psalter-Hymnal). Some even marry with the express intention of not having children but just for that companionship, that relationship and the fulfilment of that relationship in sexual oneness. And I have heard that from Christians too.

But is that right? The marriage form speaks about “the enrichment of the lives” of the couple. The Confession speaks about “mutual help.” They are not necessarily synonymous and it would be good for us to examine them for a moment. There was Adam, naming the animals and, we read, “No helper suitable for him was found.” You see, Eve was not just a companion, she was a helper. And a helper in what? In his task as a man, his kingdom work.

And God created man in His own image, in the image of God He created him, male and female He created them. And God blessed them and God said to them, ‘Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it and rule over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the sky and over every living thing that moves on the earth.’Genesis 1:27-28

Nothing in Life is for its Own Sake←⤒🔗

Certainly, one purpose of marriage is companionship. But that, like everything else in life, is to be taken up and offered to the service of God. For the Christian, nothing in life is for its own sake. “Seek ye first the kingdom of God and all these things will be added unto you.” Since this serving God is kingdom work in terms of Genesis 1:27-28, and since it involves having children, filling the earth, and subduing it and ruling over it, this raises the question of children and how many. And that raises the question of contraception – because Paul says we are not allowed to deny ourselves to each other.

This has become a sensitive subject and therefore it is not often talked about openly. There may be all sorts of reasons for that and, in the end, it is for each couple to make decisions about before the Lord. But the Bible talks about having children and it talks about it as a specific purpose of marriage. Therefore the Church must say what the Bible says about it and apply it in the context of our day.

First of all, the Bible teaches us that children are a blessing from the Lord (Psalm 128). Furthermore, as Jacob had to remind Rachel, “It is God who opens the womb and it is God who closes it.”

There are Christians who believe any form of contraception to be wrong. I am not able to say that. The texts I have heard used to support it are, I believe, being misused. On the other hand, we Protestants have simply accepted contraception without thinking much about it. I have checked all my ethics textbooks, including material of some men I know personally and who usually have scriptural backing for everything they say, men I have a high regard for. But none of them asked the question the Roman Catholic Church has asked: is contraception right? They all simply assume its rightness and discuss its use.

I doubt there is a direct answer to the question. The proper way to get guidance here is to work from these larger principles I have been discussing. And the first of these is the cultural mandate; multiply, fill the earth and subdue it and rule it.

To which, many people say, But the earth is full and God said, Fill it; not overfill it! It certainly seems full in some parts. But is that because it is empty in others? And that because of great sin – of all sorts? I would like to put two questions to this objection.

1. Is the idea that the earth is overpopulated simply another example of our intellectual arrogance? And intellectual arrogance is a big problem for us.

• For example, it was only 30 to 35 years ago that we were told in all seriousness to prepare for another ice-age. Today it is a melt-down!
   
• For example, 35-40 years ago, we were told the earth was overpopulated and there would soon be a great famine. But then there was the Green Revolution! It kicked back on us, of course, as GM food may very likely do also. But still, the world­wide famine still hasn’t come. And where there is famine, it is demonstrably the result of sin and the rest of the world is still easily able to feed the refugees by the million! That has not always been so in history, even with far smaller populations.

This intellectual arrogance shows itself in many ways, but with our modern technology, much of which is right, the result of fulfilling the cultural mandate in other respects, are we simply climbing the tower of Babel all over again and playing God? We are not humble under the Word of God anymore. We are not content to live under the providence of God anymore. Is this playing its part in our thinking about family life and children as well?

For more than 30 years now, many western European nations have been very worried about the decline in their growth rates and doing the best they can to increase it. Italy is down to about 1.2 children per woman. The one-time presidential hopeful, Pat Buchanan, has stated that by 2050, less than 50% of the population of the USA will be of European stock. London will, reportedly, be less than 50% Anglo-Saxon by 2010. This is not racism; it will bring enormous cultural and religious changes.

But the interesting thing is, this does not only apply to the West. I quote from an article in the Herald of 14^th March, 2002.

In a major shift that has stunned demographers, fertility rates in much of Asia, Africa and Latin America have begun dropping, easing fears of a future global population explosion ...  Demographers now “see fertility coming down to lower levels than we have ever anticipated,” said John Caldwell, a professor at the Australian National University in Canberra. “For the first time, we think it possible that within a hundred years or so, we will have a world population declining from, say, 10 billion people. We may some day pass our present level on the way down again,” Caldwell said ... Caldwell identified 13 countries in the category he said now appeared likely to slip soon below the replacement level. They were Argentina, Brazil, Colombia and Mexico, in Latin America; Algeria, Egypt, Morocco and South Africa, on the African continent; and Indonesia, Iran, the Philippines, Turkey and Vietnam, in Asia. He said that two other huge countries in the group, India and Bangladesh, might also slip below replacement fertility levels.

I am not saying this is what is going to happen. These are human projections as much as the alarm bells in the past were! But that is exactly my point! We think, with our human knowledge, that we can manage this world and plan for the future and save the planet and all the rest of it. It is sheer arrogance.

But as Christians we believe God has a plan for history. We are simply under orders to fill the earth. Can we really tell when it is full? And what if it were? Perhaps God will then bring history to its close? That fits much better with the idea of the purposeful, planning God we find in the Scriptures.

2. The other question I want to ask is this. With greater education, which is right for both men and women (I have encouraged all my daughters to get a tertiary education), and the possibilities that education opens, it has become more difficult for women to be content to be mothers – and see that as a rewarding career. (On the other hand, please do not think I believe all young people should get a tertiary education; we can make that an idol too. It depends entirely on gift and calling.) We ought not forget that the most famous of women is famous precisely for motherhood! And the most blessed of women is so because of a simple, humble servant attitude. She accepted the will of God for her life; “I am thy handmaid; be it to me according to thy word.”

Or, if being content themselves is not the problem, women are greatly pressured by the world to be out at work, pursuing a career. (Ha! Many men don’t have a career! Just a job.) Yet, even so, very few women don’t want to have one or two children. Only now, many demand the right to have them while others pay for them, with paid parental leave and so forth. But what absolutely must not be sacrificed is their outside-home career. There is little or no sense of having received a gift from God that is well worth the sacrifice of perhaps a lower standard of living to enjoy them and bring them up to serve God. Or they want to have them, but very quickly get back to their real career, so they put them in day-care at the very most important time in their lives when they need their mother; at barely a few months old. No wonder the world is full of emotionally insecure young people who don’t know who they are.

Transformed or Conformed?←⤒🔗

The question we Christians need to ask ourselves is: are we, instead of being transformed in our minds to the will of God (Romans 12:1), being conformed to the thinking and values of the world? I understand the temptations – they’re only one brand of the temptation we all face: to want more of so many of the world’s good things. But we need to ask: are motives of selfishness, and worldly ideas of self-fulfilment, which we all admit form the spirit of our age, also shaping our motives as well?

Maybe we need to ask just how we view our children. They are a gift. Many couples are not blessed with them – or not many of them; and if you want to know just how much a blessing they are, get to know a childless couple well. The world is inclined to view them as a burden, a bother, rather a hindrance to getting on with real life, a bit of a nuisance side-show to the main plot. The biblical view is that for a woman, they are the main plot – if the Lord blesses her with the circumstances and the ability.

No Room for Judgment←⤒🔗

Whatever we believe about this matter of family size and contraception, we need to watch our thoughts very carefully. There is no place for large families to look down on small families. We will all know families the Lord has not given many children. Who is to know that the same may not be true of other small families? Maybe there are some not so small, even large families, to whom the Lord may have given more? – although it is far from me to say they should have had more. All I am saying is: this is a matter in which it would be easy to look at others and judge. We may not do that, unless we can prove that Scripture says something very clearly about limiting the size of our families. At present all I can say is that the command to increase still stands. So Scripture does speak against severe limitation and since replacement is 2.3 children per woman, we are not adding until we have a third, unless God, in his providence prevents us.

The gift of marriage is that the woman help the man in his cultural work in the world. Within that command is the command to multiply and increase, and it is for that that woman is particularly equipped – and not just to fill the earth; but to increase the Church – to bear children of the covenant that they in turn, by God’s grace, work to bring God’s kingdom.

We should receive marriage for both these purposes: companionship and pleasure; and the natural fruit of that companionship and pleasure, children. And receive them as an equal pleasure; and seek, before our own pleasure and convenience, to serve God in them both.