An evening with Christopher Ash

I roped my connect group into going along to a Christopher Ash lecture at the Centre for Christian Living at Moore College lastnight, on God, Sex and Marriage. It was packed, with extra people sitting all over the floor. Whether or not that has to do with the recent hoopla in the newspapers here I don’t know, but it was a helpful night. I had a question I thought about asking (I’ve expressed my views here before so thought it would be good to get his comment on them), but I didn’t. But I got to run it by Tim Adeney, who wrote this, afterwards instead (it was great to catch up, briefly, with Tim and Ally). The question I wanted to ask in my head would have gone something like this:

I agree with what you say about the purpose of marriage (based on how you interpret Genesis 2:15 and 2:18 - that it isn’t just for gazing into each others’ eyes in soft focus but rather to work together for the glory of God), but on a bad day, on occasion, I have said of your book that “single people aren't lonely, they’re just useless”, because isn’t it a better state for single people that without a spouse they might be lonely than that without a spouse they can’t do the task they were created for?

Tim Adeney had helpful things to say, but basically in the end, it’s about humanity as a whole. The “task” for humanity as a whole requires people to get married and reproduce, obviously, but not every individual is going to be involved in that (this is where you can feel a little side-lined as a single person, but, as Tim says, from an Old Testament perspective, there is no reason why you would choose singleness - it’s only in the New Testament that there are reasons why it is a good thing). And while the theology is right from Christopher Ash, it’s not altogether clinical either. When Adam saw Eve he didn’t say “great - an extra pair of hands for the gardening”, he burst into poetry, and clearly it works best if your spouse is well within your subset of friendship. Anyway, in brief that is it. If I get to it, I might write up some of my notes from the actual lecture.

(If this post makes no sense at all, because you are unfamiliar with Chris’s work, let me suggest you read Married for God, or the denser version Marriage: Sex in the Service of God.)