In 1523, Martin Luther found himself the matchmaker for 12 nuns who had escaped in pickle barrels from a Roman Catholic nunnery near Wittenberg, Germany. He secured husbands for 11, but the 12th, Katharina von Bora, rebuffed two potential husbands. Her heart was set on the great Reformer.<\/p>\n
Finally Luther married her in 1525 for strikingly unromantic reasons: to provide his father with grandchildren and to spite the pope by breaking the vow of celibacy he had taken as a Catholic monk. Though it didn\u2019t seem like the makings of a storybook romance, Luther\u2019s marriage to Katie, as he called her, blossomed into one of church history\u2019s most tender unions.<\/p>\n
Learning about famous Christian marriages, like Martin and Katie Luther\u2019s, can \u201cbreathe life\u201d into the marriages of believers today and \u201cgive some guys and their wives courage to get real and be honest,\u201d radio host and marriage expert Dennis Rainey told Baptist Press.<\/p>\n
Good marriages demonstrate how a spouse\u2019s love can lift a Christian \u201cout of doubt and discouragement and perhaps even losing heart,\u201d Rainey, president and co-founder of Family Life, said. Stories of more challenging marriages can encourage believers to persevere through their own marriage struggles, he said.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere was only one who was perfect, and He wasn\u2019t married,\u201d Rainey said. Being part of God\u2019s Kingdom requires \u201chumbling ourselves and admitting our humanity and sharing the stories of our humanity in some of its stench and … coming clean and getting real — because that\u2019s where everybody is.\u201d<\/p>\n
In contrast with the joyful marriages of Luther, Jonathan Edwards, Charles Spurgeon and others, Methodist movement founder John Wesley and revivalist George Whitefield struggled in their marriages. Wesley made his wife agree that she would not ask him to lighten his schedule of itinerant preaching. The couple eventually separated and she was dead for three days before he found out.<\/p>\n
Whitefield once left his wife Elizabeth in America while he returned to England by boat without telling her. One of Whitefield\u2019s prot\u00e9g\u00e9s said the great revivalist viewed his marriage as a \u201cdistraction\u201d and when Elizabeth died, \u201chis mind was put at great liberty.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cUncommon unions\u201d<\/p>\n
The Luthers\u2019 home was \u201cjoyful\u201d and \u201cplayful,\u201d Michael Haykin, professor of church history and biblical spirituality at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, told Baptist Press.<\/p>\n
\u201cLuther had a deep sense of the joyfulness of the Christian life, and marriage simply exacerbated that,\u201d said Haykin, who has compiled \u201cThe Christian Lover,\u201d a book of love letters written by famous Christians.<\/p>\n
Though Luther refused to back down in arguments with the pope and fellow Protestant Reformer Ulrich Zwingli, he often yielded to Katie\u2019s opinions and preferences, Haykin said. Among the ways he deferred to her was changing his custom of bathing only once a year — a common practice in the 1500s — because \u201cshe would not have it so,\u201d according to one of Luther\u2019s letters.<\/p>\n
Since the Luthers raised pigs, Martin playfully referred to Katie by such titles as \u201chigh mistress of the Wittenberg pig sty,\u201d Haykin said.<\/p>\n
Fellow Reformer John Calvin \u201cepitomizes the Protestant rediscovery of marriage,\u201d Haykin said, referencing the Reformation critique of Roman Catholic celibacy vows.<\/p>\n
At age 29, Calvin was driven out of Geneva, Switzerland, and settled in Strasbourg, on the border of modern-day Germany and France, where Protestant leader Martin Bucer attempted to find a wife for him. Bucer and other early Protestants believed that a pastor like Calvin should be an expert on family, and ideally be married himself.<\/p>\n
The first three or four potential wives proved unsuitable, including one who spoke only German — a poor match for Calvin who spoke French and didn\u2019t know German. Calvin wrote that he would never marry her \u201cunless the Lord had entirely bereft me of my wits.\u201d Eventually he met and married on his own Idelette de Bure, the widow of an Anabaptist he had known in Geneva.<\/p>\n
They were married only eight and a half years before her death; they had experienced two or three pregnancies, though none of their children lived to be more than three days old. Calvin didn\u2019t mention Idelette much in correspondence or sermons, but several surviving letters reveal the depth of their love.<\/p>\n
In 1541 a plague raged through Strasbourg, so Calvin sent his wife away for her safety. He wrote to a friend that \u201cday and night my wife has been constantly in my thoughts, in need of advice now that she is separated from her husband.\u201d<\/p>\n
When Idelette died in 1549, Calvin wrote, \u201cMine is no common source of grief. I have been bereaved of the best companion of my life, of one who, had it been so ordered, would not only have been the willing sharer of my indigence, but even of my death. During her life she was the faithful helper of my ministry. From her I never experienced the slightest hindrance. She was never troublesome to me throughout the entire course of her illness; she was more anxious about her children [from her first marriage] than about herself.\u201d<\/p>\n
The marriage of Jonathan and Sarah Edwards was \u201ca passionate love story,\u201d Haykin said, noting that Edwards was among the Puritans in England and North America who, among other notable practices, broke from the longstanding tradition of arranged marriages. \u201cThe whole idea of falling in love and then getting married is very much rooted in the Puritans,\u201d Haykin said.<\/p>\n
Edwards met Sarah when he was 20 and she was 13. She was six feet tall and \u201cstriking in terms of her physical beauty,\u201d Haykin said, but \u201cwhat caught his eye was her spirituality\u201d and love for God. They married in 1727 with Sarah wearing green, which Edwards believed was God\u2019s favorite color.<\/p>\n
The mother of 11 children, Sarah was a \u201cfabulous home economist\u201d and Edwards \u201crelied upon her enormously,\u201d Haykin said. On one occasion when Sarah was away from home to attend a funeral, Edwards wrote a letter asking her to \u201cplease come home\u201d because \u201cthings are falling apart here.\u201d<\/p>\n
When Whitefield stayed in the Edwards\u2019 home for five days in 1740, he wrote that he had not seen a \u201csweeter couple\u201d and began praying that God would provide him with a wife like Sarah.<\/p>\n
Among Edwards\u2019 last acts before he died was to give his daughter Lucy a message for Sarah: \u201cGive my kindest love to my dear wife, and tell her that the uncommon union, which has so long subsisted between us, has been of such a nature as I trust is spiritual and therefore will continue forever.\u201d<\/p>\n
Charles and Susannah Spurgeon represent another strong marriage from church history, though she had a \u201cvery poor first impression\u201d of the great Baptist preacher, Haykin said. The Spurgeons met when he preached for the first time at the London church that came to be known as the Metropolitan Tabernacle.<\/p>\n
\u201cHe was sweating profusely … and he pulled out this huge handkerchief with polka dots on it,\u201d Haykin said. \u201cAnd she thought, \u2018What kind of country yokel have the deacons brought in to preach?\u2019\u201d But soon they were married.<\/p>\n
Among other strong marriages in church history were Martyn and Bethan Lloyd-Jones, B.B. and Annie Warfield and Francis and Edith Schaeffer.<\/p>\n
Challenging marriages<\/p>\n
Not all famous Christians, however, enjoyed vibrant marriages. C.T. Studd, a legendary missionary and author of the poem \u201cOnly One Life, \u2018Twill Soon Be Past,\u201d went to China for some 15 years without his wife Priscilla, Haykin said. Then he returned home only briefly before going to the Congo without her.<\/p>\n
Studd \u201cis often held up as a model of total commitment to Christ,\u201d Haykin said. \u201cI have problems with him in my mind because of his marriage.\u201d<\/p>\n
Foreshadowing his own marriage troubles, John Wesley once tried to convince his brother Charles that marriage interfered with commitment to Christ. The week before Charles was to be married with John officiating, the brothers began a journey to the wedding site that should have taken two days. But John scheduled so many preaching engagements along the way that they barely arrived in time for the wedding.<\/p>\n
\u201cCharles, in his diary, was absolutely furious at his brother,\u201d Haykin said. John \u201cwas giving his brother an object lesson … that preaching the Gospel is more important than marriage.\u201d<\/p>\n
When John married two years later, he made sure his wife Molly never interfered with his preaching — with disastrous results. Molly traveled with him for a year. But after \u201ctramping around the British countryside, sleeping under hedgerows, eating half-cooked meals, she told him she was settling down in London,\u201d Haykin said. \u201cTheir marriage then began to disintegrate.\u201d<\/p>\n
John and Molly experienced ongoing tension over letters he exchanged with other women. She publicly accused him of infidelity at least once, though no evidence exists to substantiate the charges, and monitored his mail before they separated.<\/p>\n
Although Whitefield prayed for a wife like Sarah Edwards, when he married, he was far less considerate as a husband than Jonathan Edwards. Whitefield once wrote that he was \u201cnot one of those lovers who is swooning for love at his beloved.\u201d<\/p>\n
Haykin said Whitefield demonstrated a consistent \u201clack of husbandly care of his wife.\u201d<\/p>\n
Lessons<\/p>\n
Though some may overlook the marriage difficulties of well-known Christians because of their spiritual impact, Haykin sees the matter differently.<\/p>\n
\u201cIf their marriages would have been solid, I think of how much better their ministries might have been,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
With Wesley, for example, \u201cwe don\u2019t see\u201d the impact of his marriage failures \u201cat this distance, and people may not have seen it even in his own day,\u201d Haykin said. \u201cBut inevitably it would have had a kickback on ministry. How can he go out to preach the love of God to a crowd and he\u2019s just had a row with his wife? Surely it had some sort of spiritual impact.\u201d<\/p>\n
On a positive note, Rainey of Family Life said ministers like Wesley and Whitefield illustrate that God still uses people who don\u2019t \u201chave it all together.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cI think one of the big fallacies of being in ministry is the lie … that you have to have it all together in order to preach the Gospel,\u201d Rainey said. People are \u201cdesperate\u201d for \u201cauthentic human beings who are like them, who fail and then get back up and ask for forgiveness from God and their spouse, or their child, and make things right and keep going.\u201d<\/p>\n
But Rainey and Haykin agreed that preachers must have godly marriages.<\/p>\n
\u201cMarriage is a reflection of the love of God for His people and for His church,\u201d Haykin said. \u201c … Therefore, a Christian pastor who is representing God, speaking God\u2019s Word to His people, if he is married, needs to have a solid marriage.\u201d<\/p>\n
________<\/p>\n
David Roach is chief national correspondent for Baptist Press, the Southern Baptist Convention\u2019s news service.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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