Article XVIII of the BF&M: The Family – The Pathway

Following is another in a series of columns on The Baptist Faith & Message 2000.

Article XVIII of The Baptist Faith & Message 2000 reads:

God has ordained the family as the foundational institution of human society. It is composed of persons related to one another by marriage, blood, or adoption.

Marriage is the uniting of one man and one woman in covenant commitment for a lifetime. It is Gods unique gift to reveal the union between Christ and His church and to provide for the man and the woman in marriage the framework for intimate companionship, the channel of sexual expression according to biblical standards, and the means for procreation of the human race.

The husband and wife are of equal worth before God, since both are created in Gods image. The marriage relationship models the way God relates to His people. A husband is to love his wife as Christ loved the church. He has the God-given responsibility to provide for, to protect, and to lead his family. A wife is to submit herself graciously to the servant leadership of her husband even as the church willingly submits to the headship of Christ. She, being in the image of God as is her husband and thus equal to him, has the God-given responsibility to respect her husband and to serve as his helper in managing the household and nurturing the next generation.

Children, from the moment of conception, are a blessing and heritage from the Lord. Parents are to demonstrate to their children Gods pattern for marriage. Parents are to teach their children spiritual and moral values and to lead them, through consistent lifestyle example and loving discipline, to make choices based on biblical truth. Children are to honor and obey their parents.

Southern Baptists added Article XVIII to the Baptist Faith & Message in 1998, thus making it part of the 1963 confession and carrying it forward into the 2000 edition. Witnessing the erosion of our cultures view of marriage, family, and gender, Southern Baptists boldly reaffirmed Gods unchanging standards as revealed in Scripture and embraced by Christians throughout the centuries.

Today, the prevailing secular view is that marriage is an archaic, man-made institution in need of revision. Further, modern culture views the family as an evolutionary unit that may be restructured to meet changing societal needs, and gender as a subjective personal choice.

But the Bible says otherwise. Marriage, family, and gender are gifts from God. They are established and fixed for the good of all people, who are created in the image of God (Gen. 1:27).

Marriage is the first institution God ordains, and he does so before the Fall (see Gen. 2:18-25). The consistent standard of Scripture is that marriage is the uniting of one man and one woman in covenant commitment for a lifetime. The gift of sexual intimacy is for pleasure and procreation within the confines of monogamous marriage, requiring unselfishness and purity (see Heb. 13:4).

When biblical figures even heroes like King David engage in sexual activity outside the bonds of marriage, it often ends badly. Polygamy proves no less a sin.

Further, marriage should be highly prized, for it is given to us as a metaphor for the relationship between Christ and his church. The Lord Jesus is depicted as the bridegroom, and his church is the bride (see Matt. 9:15; John 3:29; 2 Cor. 11:2; Rev. 19:7; 21:2; 22:17; cf. Matt. 25:1-13).

The apostle Paul develops this concept more fully in his letter to the Ephesians, where he instructs wives to submit to their husbands as to the Lord, because the husband is the head of the wife as Christ is the head of the church. He goes on to say, Husbands, love your wives, just a Christ loved the church and gave himself for her (Eph. 5:22-23, 25).

Paul links marriage and the church back to the garden of Eden and Gods creative intent for fidelity in covenant relationships: For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two will become one flesh. This mystery is profound, but I am talking about Christ and the church (Eph. 5:31-32).

Husbands are to provide for their families and protect them from harm. They also are to be the spiritual leaders in the marriage and family not in a tyrannical sense but on the basis of spiritual authority as demonstrated in the faithfulness of Jesus (see Col. 3:18-21).

Wives are equal partners in marriage, as both are created in the image of God. At the same time, a wife is to receive the God-given responsibility to respect her husband and to serve as his helper in managing the household and nurturing the next generation (BF&M Article XVIII).

Biblically, a family consists of persons related by marriage, blood, or adoption. A family, consisting of a father, a mother, and their children, reflects Gods glory in the right ordering of civilization and society.

This means that family, like marriage, is central to Gods design for humanity. It requires love, order, intimacy, and unity qualities that have existed throughout eternity within the members of the Trinity.

All people, whether married or unmarried, are related to family through various ties of blood, kinship, or adoption. Yahweh is a relational God, and he made us to thrive in relationships, as well.

He even adopts followers of Jesus as his sons and daughters (Rom. 8:14-17; Gal. 3:26; 4:6; Eph. 1:5). This is good for us to remember. In the ancient Near East, a persons family of origin and ancestry formed his or her primary identity. This continued for first-century Christians with an important twist: their identity is now the family of God gathered around Christ.

As Jonathan Pennington notes, The most frequent metaphor used to describe Christians is brother and sister. This family language is very purposeful, teaching Christians to realign their allegiances around their new identity as the children of God.

Modern culture seeks to redefine the family and celebrate alternative expressions of it. Examples include same-sex marriage, cohabitation, polygamy, polyandry, and more. But as Charles Kelley, Richard Land, and Albert Mohler explain, The family is not a laboratory for social experimentation but an arena in which Gods glory is shown to the world in the right ordering of human relationships.

Children are to be welcomed as blessings from God. Parents have a God-ordained responsibility to raise them in the training and instruction of the Lord (Eph. 6:4). In return, children are to honor and obey their parents, which is pleasing to God (Exod. 20:12; Eph. 6:1-3).

Scripture is clear that God created human beings male and female, and he did so that we might be his image bearers (Gen. 1:26-27). This doesnt mean God, who is spirit, has gender, although the eternal Son of God became flesh as a man (John 1:14; 1 Tim. 2:5), and the other members of the Trinity are depicted in masculine terms in Scripture.

It does mean, however, that God created men and women in a complementary way for marriage and procreation. Further, their intimacy as husband and wife reflects the intimacy of the members of the Trinity, as well as the close bond between Christ and his church.

God defines gender. Humans redefine it at their peril. Gender may be confirmed through God-given physical evidence genetic, biological, and anatomical, for example. Humans are to celebrate gender as a gift from God.

At the same time, gender confusion including a condition known as gender dysphoria is nearly as old as the Fall. Because human beings created in the image of God live in a fallen world, the lines between male and female are sometimes blurred for example, in those rare instances when a person is born with both male and female features, and, more commonly, in those who feel intense emotional unease with their birth gender.

In every case, followers of Jesus are to treat those who struggle with gender confusion with compassion and understanding, knowing that we, too, are subject to frailties of our own. At the same time, we should help our friends rediscover Gods gift of gender, sharing a biblical view of what it means to be men and women created in the image of God.

Next: A 2023 amendment to The Baptist Faith & Message.

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Article XVIII of the BF&M: The Family - The Pathway