Rome Sweet Home

by Kimberly Hahn

  Kimberly:

  Our first year in seminary Scott began his Master’s degree studying the fine points of theology with professors who had been teaching theology for ten to forty years. Meanwhile, I was a secretary for a program funded by a Harvard research grant, working with people who were every kind of religion but Christian, many of whom had never heard the gospel and had never read the Bible at all. They challenged me almost daily as to whether or not God even existed. It was quite a contrast.

  After the first year, we decided to get on the same track and grow together. So, with Scott’s blessing and my parents’ assistance, I began my Master’s studies during Scott’s second year. It was a rich experience to study theology side by side.

  One of the first issues I tackled in a course on Christian ethics was contraception. I had not thought it was an issue to be studied until I became involved in pro-life work. For some reason, birth control kept creeping in as an issue. Being a Protestant, I did not know any friends who did not practice birth control. I’d been counseled to practice birth control as reasonable, responsible Christian behavior. In premarital counseling, we had been asked what kind of birth control we were going to use, not whether or not we were going to use it.

  The small group focusing on “contraception” met in the back of the class briefly the first day. A self-appointed leader spoke up. “We don’t have to consider the Catholic position because there are only two reasons Catholics oppose contraception. Number one, the Pope isn’t married, so he doesn’t have to live with the consequences. And number two, they just want all the Catholics they can have in the world.”

  “Are those the reasons the Catholic Church gives?” I interrupted. “I don’t think so.”

  “Then why don’t you study it?”

  “I will.” And I did.

  First, I looked at the nature of God and how we as marriage partners are called to image him. God—Father, Son and Holy Spirit—made man and woman in his image and blessed them in the covenant of marriage with the command to be fruitful and multiply, filling the earth and having dominion over all of creation, to the glory of God (Gen 1:26-28). The very image in which man and woman were created was the unity of the three Persons of the Godhead, pouring themselves out in total self-donating love to each other. God restated this creation mandate in his covenant with Noah and his family with the same command to be fruitful and multiply (Gen 9:1ff.). So the existence of sin did not change the call of married couples to image God through procreation.

  Saint Paul clarified that, in the New Covenant, marriage was elevated to the status of imaging the relationship between Christ and the Church. (At this point I had no idea that marriage was actually a sacrament.) And by the very life-giving power of love, God enabled a couple to reflect the image of God as the unity of the two became three. The question I asked myself was, Does our use of birth control—intentionally blocking the life-giving power of love while enjoying the unity and pleasure that the act of marriage gives us—enable my spouse and me to reflect the image of God in total self-donating love?

  Second, I examined what Scripture had to say about children. The witness of the Word was overwhelming! Every verse that spoke about children spoke of them as only and always a blessing (Ps 127; 128). There was no proverb that cautioned about the expenses of a child outweighing his worth. There was no blessing pronounced over the man or woman who had perfect spacing between children, or the couple who had the right number of childless years before shouldering the burden of children, or the husband and wife who had planned each conception. These were thoughts I had learned from the media, my public school and my neighborhood, but they bad no foundation in the Word of God.

  Fertility, in Scripture, was presented as something to be prized and celebrated rather than as a disease to be avoided at all costs. And though I could find no verse speaking negatively about people with small families, there was no question that larger families showed an outpouring of greater favor from God, according to a variety of passages. God was the One who opened and closed the womb, and, when he gave life, it was seen only as a blessing. After all, God’s desire from faithful marriages was “godly offspring” (Mal 2:15). Children were described as “arrows in the hand of a warrior. . . blessed is the man whose quiver is full.” Who would go into battle with only two or three arrows when he could go with a whole quiver-full?! The question I asked myself was, Did our use of birth control reflect how God saw children or how the world saw children?

  Third was the issue of the lordship of Jesus Christ. As evangelical Protestants, Scott and I took Christ’s lordship over our lives very seriously. In terms of money, we tithed regularly no matter how tight funds were because we wanted to be good stewards of the money he had put in our care. Over and over we had seen the Lord meet our needs beyond what we had given to him. In terms of time, we honored the Lord’s Day, setting aside our studies, which were our work, even if we had exams on Monday. Many times over, the Lord blessed us with that day off, and we aced every exam we took on Mondays. In terms of talents, we assumed that we should always be available to serve the Lord in ministry and added service to our study workload gladly. To see lives blessed as a result of that ministry strengthened our faith and our marriage greatly.

  But our bodies? Our fertility? Did Christ’s lordship extend that far? Then I read 1 Corinthians 6:19-20: “You are not your own. You were bought with a price. So glorify God in your bodies.” Perhaps it was more of an American attitude than a godly one to think of our fertility as something for us to control as we deemed best. The question I asked myself was, Did our use of birth control demonstrate faithfully living out the lordship of Jesus Christ?

  Fourth, what was the will of God for Scott and me? We wanted to know and to follow the will of God for our lives. One Scripture passage that provided helpful food for thought was Romans 12:1-2:

  I appeal to you, therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God which is your spiritual worship. Do not be conformed to this world but be transformed by the renewal of your minds, that you may prove what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect.

  Paul pointed out that a sacrificial life required the mercy of God—we were not asked to live this kind of life in our own strength. We could offer our own bodies as a sacrifice in worship—there was a physical side to being spiritual. One of the keys to knowing how to sacrifice in a way that proved the will of God was to differentiate properly between the messages of the world and the truths of God. That meant we had to renew our minds actively in God’s Word. And so much of my study in the area of contraception had led me to do just that—meditate on Scriptures that presented a different picture from what the world seemed to shout.

  Scott and I were already committed to each other and to the Lord. The question was, Could God be trusted to plan the size of our family? the spacing of children? Would he know what we could handle financially, emotionally and spiritually? Did he have the resources to enable us to handle more children than we thought we could?

  At root I knew what I was wrestling with—the very sovereignty of God. God alone knew the future and what would be the best way for us to build our family with the godly offspring that he so desired for us to have. He certainly had proven himself trustworthy in countless other ways. I knew we could trust him to provide the faith we needed to entrust this area of our lives to him, to give us the hope that this vision was a part of his plan for our lives and to pour out his love in and through us to whatever precious souls he would place in our care. And, after all, I knew many couples at our seminary who “planned” when babies were to come, only to find God’s timing different from their own. We needed to trust in him in the area of our fertility in a radical way—without the use of birth control. Needless to say, I was convinced; but there were two people in our marriage, and I needed to raise these concerns and questions with Scott.

  When Scott asked at supper one evening how my study
on contraception was going, I shared as much as I could. Then I asked him to read the book by John Kippley entitled Birth Control and the Marriage Covenant. Scott saw the substance of my arguments in this book; but even more, he saw how Kippley applied the idea of covenant in marriage to explain why contraception was immoral.

  Kippley gave the following comparison, just as in ancient Rome, when people would feast and then excuse themselves to vomit the food they had just consumed (to avoid the consequences of their actions), so it is with spouses who feast in the act of marriage only to thwart the life-giving power of their act of covenant renewal. Both actions are contrary to natural law and the marital covenant.

  From Kippley’s perspective, representing the Catholic Church, the primary end or purpose of the marriage act is the procreation of children. When a couple intentionally thwarts that end, they are acting contrary to natural law.

  They are subverting the renewal of their own marriage covenant, making a lie out of their commitment to give themselves totally to each other.

  Now I understood why the Roman Catholic Church opposed contraception, but what about Natural Family Planning (NFP)? Wasn’t this just Catholic birth control?

  First Corinthians 7:4-5, speaks of periods of time in which spouses could abstain from sexual relations for reasons of prayer and then resume relations to keep Satan from getting a foothold in their marriage. In reading Humanae Vitae, I came to appreciate the balance of the Church in her understanding about contraception. There was a godly way to experience the act of marriage and to be prudent in serious circumstances by practicing continence during times of mutual fertility.

  Just as with food, there could be times when fasting was helpful; so there could be times when fasting from the act of marriage for prayerfully considered reasons could be helpful. Yet, apart from a miracle, one could barely survive while fasting most of the rime. So, likewise, NFP was presented as a prescription for difficulty rather than as a daily vitamin for general health.

  One day in the library, after I had explained all of this to a fellow seminarian who was still single, he challenged me. “So, Kimberly, have you and Scott stopped using birth control?”

  “No, not yet.”

  “You sure sound like you are convinced that it’s wrong.”

  I responded with this story.

  “Have you ever heard about the time Farmer Brown’s chicken and pig were discussing how blessed they were with such a wonderful master?

  “’I think we should do something special for Farmer Brown’, said the chicken.

  “’What do you have in mind?’ asked the pig.

  “‘Let’s give him a ham-and-eggs breakfast’, quipped the chicken.

  “’Well,’ retorted the pig, ‘that’s fine for you. For you that’s a donation. For me that’s total commitment.’

  “Terry, I’ll take your challenge to heart, but it’s a lot harder for me to risk obedience in this area than for you as a single man.”

  After he agreed to pray for Scott and me, we went our separate ways home. When Scott and I discussed it, he agreed that he, too, was convicted against contraception; however, he suggested that perhaps we could just put the contraceptive on the shelf, just in case we changed our minds. 1 felt that would be too much of a temptation to go back on our convictions. So together we threw the birth control out and began a new level of trusting God with our lives and our fertility.

  During our years in seminary, Scott and I had many opportunities to study theology side by side, encouraging, exhorting and challenging each other as well as our friends. Small group Bible studies as couples were a great source of blessing. Church ministry involvement gave us a challenge to apply what we were learning. And lots of theological discussions with fellow classmates over meals in our apartment kept life lively.

  When I was with other women seminarians, the discussion would often turn to what job each hoped to get following graduation. Not too many were very affirming when I explained what I wanted to do with my degree: If I did not become pregnant, I would be open to taking a position teaching theology and doing ministry alongside Scott; if I did become pregnant, which I hoped would happen soon, I would use the knowledge I had gained to be more of a help to Scott, to teach our children and to lead women’s Bible studies.

  My parents (who were footing the bill for my tuition) understood this as my goal and were very supportive. They didn’t care if I ever drew a paycheck from my Master’s degree. They saw it as an opportunity to develop my gifts for the Lord and trusted that the Lord would show us how they were to be used.

  For the most part, the theological study was not so much a challenge to what we believed (such as in the case of contraception) as much as it was a deepening in our understanding of and appreciation for the foundation that had already been laid in our lives, with one notable exception: whether or not it is valid to assert that we are justified by faith alone.

  We gradually became convinced that Martin Luther let his theological convictions contradict the very Scripture that he supposedly chose to obey rather than the Catholic Church. He declared that a person is not justified by faith working in love, but rather he is justified by faith alone. He even went so far as to add the word “alone” after the word “justified” in his German translation of Romans 3:28 and called Saint James “an epistle of straw” because James 2:24 specifically states, “. . . for we are not justified by faith alone”.

  Again, oddly enough to us, the Catholic Church was in the right on a key point: justification meant being made a child of God and being called to live life as a faithful child of God through faith working in love. Ephesians 2:8-10 clarified that faith—which we must have—was a gift from God, not because of our works, so that no one could boast; and that faith enabled us to do the good works God had planned for us to do. At the same time faith was a gift from God and our obedient response to the mercy of God. Both Protestants and Catholics could agree that salvation was by grace alone.

  At this point, I was not steeped in Reformation theology, so the change in how I viewed justification did not seem momentous. It was important to understand it, but I felt that everybody could agree that we are saved by grace alone through faith working in love. And if I had had enough time to explain why I believed this, none of my friends would have labeled me Catholic at the time. However, for Scott, this theological shift was really a seismic change that later had major implications for our life.

  As we neared the end of our final year at Gordon-Conwell, we discovered that the Lord had (finally) blessed us with a child. Though it altered our plans to go to Scotland to study, we were delighted to know the will of God included this child in our lives. Now I knew that what I had developed in my heart and mind during seminary I could apply and teach to this young one I was carrying under my heart. I had the deepest sense of fulfillment in being able to move on in my marriage vocation into motherhood. Following graduation, Scott and I felt sent forth to do the will of God with the people to whom he had called us in Virginia.

  4

  Teaching and Living the Covenant as Family

  Scott:

  I began a pastorate in Virginia, preaching every Sunday an average of forty-five minutes in addition to leading two weekly Bible studies. That’s what the elders of the church requested. I began preaching through the New Testament Epistle to the Hebrews, for no other New Testament book stresses the idea of the covenant as much. The congregation I was pastoring got very excited about the idea of the covenant as God’s family.

  The more I studied, the more surprised I was with the results, because this epistle was considered by Protestants I knew, and with whom I agreed, to be the most anti-Catholic epistle in the New Testament. “Once and for all sacrifice” and other such terms in Hebrews led us to that conclusion.

  I was steeped in the understanding that “if something is Roman (meaning Roman Catholic), it must be wrong.” But in fact, I began to see how important liturgy was for the covenant, especially in Hebrews. Liturgy r
epresented the way God fathered his covenant family and renewed his covenant on a regular basis. I was eager to share what I thought were novel, innovative insights. I wanted to see people fired up about the Old Testament and its relationship to the New—the Old flowing into the New and the New Testament Church as the fulfillment, rather than the abandonment, of the Old. As I dug deeper in my study, a disturbing pattern began to emerge: the novel ideas I thought I had discovered had actually been anticipated by the early Church Fathers.

  I was shaken up by this same experience over and over again. Was I merely reinventing the wheel? I began to wonder.

  As I shared these “novel finds” about God’s covenant family and the worship of his children, my parishioners grew excited. The elders even asked me to revise our liturgy. Our liturgy? I wondered. Episcopalians were the ones who spoke of “liturgy”; Presbyterians have the “Order of Worship”! But the elders had asked me to revise the liturgy to fit the biblical pattern, so I began to study it.

  I came up with some questions: Why is our church so pastor-centered? Why is our worship service so sermon-centered? And why aren’t my sermons really designed to prepare God’s people to receive communion?