World View And Marriage -- By: Michael D. Dean

Journal: Maranatha Baptist Theological Journal
Volume: MBTJ 02:2 (Fall 2012)
Article: World View And Marriage
Author: Michael D. Dean


World View And Marriage

Michael Dean1

Marriage, as a legal and cultural institution and as it has historically been known, is under attack in America. The purpose of this article is to address the legal definition of marriage and draw conclusions concerning how the Christian should respond to the attempts to modify the traditional and biblical definitions of this institution.

Law And Culture

I will begin with several general observations about law and culture.

First, every relatively coherent society reflects some belief system or world view which a critical mass of its individual members (or at least of its influential members) holds generally in common. Not everyone engages in systematic reflection on reality, life, and meaning, of course, but most still hold more or less similar conceptions about the nature of things upon which they base their thought and conduct: what is “true,” how to tell right from wrong, how things “ought” to be, and so on.

Second, such conceptions are matters of quasi-religious faith, adopted and held for reasons beyond strict logic and

experience, the customary modes of legal proof. For example, even though no propositions are more fundamental to American law and culture than the notions that all men are created equal and have inalienable rights, some of the most brilliant minds in history never attempted to “prove” natural rights or the equality of man, much less define them with legal precision. The Founders simply asserted that they were “self-evident.”

Third, though such conceptions are not susceptible to legal “proof” in the ordinary sense, they nevertheless govern, or at least guide or inform, the approaches our legal system takes and the conclusions it reaches when confronted with broad social issues.

Fourth, societies change over time, more or less in concert with changes in the fundamental cultural conceptions that cohere and guide them. Competing perspectives emerge to challenge the dominant world views, and because law is a function of culture, as world views change, legal perspectives change with them, sometimes as effect, sometimes as cause.

Finally, I am not attempting a technical, academic exercise in either philosophy or jurisprudence. Instead, this is a general overview about Christian world view, how it was incorporated in early American judicial decisions about marriage, how that world view was replaced over time by a radically secular vision, and how legal perspectives on marriage changed accordingly.

Battle For The Mind

War Of World Views

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