Seminary Viewpoints

Promoting God’s Plan for Marriage and Families is Missional for the Church

This Viewpoint blog post is a companion to the April 14 episode of the Theologically Speaking podcast featuring BJU Seminary Adjunct Professor Dr. Andreas Köstenberger and is adapted from his remarks at the 2025 Seminary CoRE Conference.

Takeaways:

1. The Bible’s teaching on marriage and the family is foundational but also missional. Living it out is perhaps the only way to counter two prevailing trains of thought in today’s culture: “expressivist individualism,” which prioritizes individual self-expression, and “experiential revisionism,” which subverts and replaces Scripture with moral convictions based on individual experience.
2. Yet leaders in evangelical churches have not prioritized the “win-win” of strengthening marriage and families.
3. The author proposes a comprehensive ministry strategy supporting marriage and families as an integral part of the church’s witness.

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The Bible’s teaching on marriage and the family is foundational. Scripture’s first two chapters set forth God’s creational design: He made man male and female, with marriage between one man and one woman who become one flesh.

Obedience to this teaching is also missional. Recognizing why—and developing a realistic strategy on restoring the church’s authority and mission in this foundational area—starts with understanding today’s cultural environment and the dominance of two trains of thought.

The first, “expressivist individualism,” prioritizes individual freedom and self-expression apart from any abiding moral norms. Grove City College professor Carl Trueman credits this near-obsession with human self-expression to three atheist thinkers:

1. Karl Marx viewed history as a class struggle. Dividing humanity into haves and have-nots, he called on the workers of the world to unite against oppressive capitalists and famously called religion the “opium of the people,” a crutch for the feeble-minded.
2. Sigmund Freud pioneered psychoanalysis, which focused on sexual urges and repressed desires he believed are hidden in our subconscious, and from which we can be freed to express our true inner selves.
3. Friedrich Nietzsche, based on his premise that “God is dead,” called on individuals to reject Christian morality and create their own values. Nietzsche never married and ended up in insanity.

A culture inspired by thinkers who disdained God and the Bible has sunk into the moral degeneracy described in Judges, where “everyone did what was right in his own eyes.” Specifically, God’s design for men and women is seen as an unnecessary obstacle to self-fulfillment and self-realization. We are who we want to be and feel like being, even where this is contrary to hard, objective realities such as biological birth sex.

A second steam, “experiential revisionism,” engages Scripture and its moral authority but subtly subverts and replaces it with preferred moral convictions based on individual experience. The province of those ideologically committed to “isms” including feminism, humanism or liberalism, expressionism’s citation and interpretation of the Bible makes it even more treacherous and deceptive.

An influential example: Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s 1895 Woman’s Bible. A methodical effort to reinterpret the Bible through the lens of feminist experience, its authors recast women such as Eve or Jezebel as heroines for acting independently of their husbands and standing up to male oppression.

Visiting a used bookstore recently, I discovered in a copy of the volume a handwritten note written by Stanton herself: “We much read the Bible as we do all other books that have emanated from the brain of man with no special divine authority.”

Harvard professor Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza continued Stanton’s legacy: viewing all men as inherently abusive and oppressive, practicing a “hermeneutic of suspicion” that substitutes women-affirming material for Biblical truth, and promoting “her-story” (vs. history) in which the validating norm for feminist authority, unlike Biblical Christianity, is internal: individual experiences and preferences.

Daphne Hampson, a self-described post-Christian feminist, goes one step further. Candidly rejecting service to others as commanded by Jesus, she urges fellow feminists to pursue a radical, self-focused “gender struggle” in which expressivist individualism and experiential revisionism converge: feminism applies Marx’s pitting of workers against capitalists to gender.

Scholars such as Virginia Ramey Mollencott (Omnigender) and the father-son team of Richard and Christopher Hays (The Widening of God’s Mercy) also seek to revise biblical teachings in keeping with one’s own preferences, with the Hayses going so far as to maintain that God has “changed his mind” on homosexuality. Meanwhile, other revisionists reinterpret Scriptures condemning homosexuality to legitimize same-sex sexual conduct.

Trueman rightly asserts that meaningfully engaging such expressionist and revisionist thinkers who outright reject the authority of God’s Word is doomed to fail. The better approach:

1. Accept that our culture rejects biblical teaching on marriage and the family yet continually teach biblical truth anyway.
2. Live out God’s design for marriages and families well before our neighbors and communities.
3. Pray that God will open eyes through this life-witness.

That strategy begins with leadership recognizing a true win-win: strengthening marriage and families strengthens the church. Yet statistics indicate a lack of commitment to that priority. Among evangelical churches:

1. 71% have no paid staff ministering to marriages and families, compared to 73% with youth ministers.
2. 54% of all churches offer either none or only one of marriage and family ministries or events (including retreats, workshops or date nights), training and equipping mentors, and support groups
3. 67% have no ongoing ministries supporting newlyweds
4. 58% of pastors feel unqualified to counsel couples considering divorce
5. Only 10% of churches have a ministry to singles promoting healthy relationships with an eye to marriage.

Meanwhile, just 2% of young people meet their spouses at church, versus 61% online.

Granted, churches have other important priorities: worship, Bible teaching, and missions and evangelism. But rightly understood, marriage and family are profoundly missional. In many cases, they represent the only way people in the culture will see God’s creational design.

I propose a comprehensive ministry strategy supporting marriage and families, including:

• dedicated staff or trained, mature believers to help singles establish healthy relationship habits and discernment
• ministries to teach couples relationship-building skills and help save troubled marriages, including dealing with domestic violence and abuse
• small groups offering couples accountability in an atmosphere of trust and confidentiality
• instruction and modeling of biblical manhood and womanhood: mentoring husbands to assume responsibility for nurturing their wives and children not only physically, but also spiritually and encouraging wives in their roles as helpmeets and mothers
• workshops, conferences and other special events aimed at keeping marriages from falling into “maintenance mode” due to complacency or neglect
• more substantive Christian literature on strengthening and encouraging marriages and families
• seminary classes nurturing those preparing for ministry to assume their biblical roles in marriage.

The bottom line: the church must see marriage and the family not as optional add-ons to the gospel, but rather as an integral part of the church’s witness to a world without moral compass and direction, especially in the area of human gender identity and relationships.

Resources:

1. Andreas Köstenberger and David Jones, God, Marriage, and Family: Rebuilding the Biblical Foundation
2. Biblical Foundations Blog, A Biblical Theology of Family, with Dr. Köstenberger, hosted by
3. https://biblicalfoundations.org/a-biblical-theology-of-family/
4. Justin Buzzard, Date Your Wife
5. Stuart Scott – Biblical Parenting: But Bring Them Up
6. Carl Trueman, The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self: Cultural Amnesia, Expressive Individualism, and the Road to Sexual Revolution and Strange New World: How Thinkers and Activists Redefined Identity and Sparked the Sexual Revolution