Hope for the Family by Tim Keller

HOPE FOR THE FAMILY

THE GOSPEL, HOPE, AND THE WORLD

[ DR. TIMOTHY KELLER | Sermon transcript, 18 October 2009]

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Ephesians 5:21–33 — Submit to one another out of reverence for Christ.

Wives, submit to your husbands as to the Lord. For the husband is the head of the wife as Christ is the head of the church, his body, of which he is the Savior. Now as the church submits to Christ, so also wives should submit to their husbands in everything.

Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her to make her holy, cleansing her by the washing with water through the word, and to present her to himself as a radiant church, without stain or wrinkle or any other blemish, but holy and blameless. In this same way, husbands ought to love their wives as their own bodies. He who loves his wife loves himself. After all, no one ever hated his own body, but he feeds and cares for it, just as Christ does the church—for we are members of his body. ”For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh.” This is a profound mystery—but I am talking about Christ and the church. However, each one of you also must love his wife as he loves himself, and the wife must respect her husband.

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This fall we are looking at what Redeemer is called to be in the city. One of the texts that is most crucial on this subject is Jeremiah 29.

In Jeremiah 29, God addresses the Israelites, who have been exiled to Babylon. They don’t like the big pagan city; they don’t want to be there. God, however, says, “I want you to stay there,” and, what’s more, “I want you to seek the welfare of the city.” He says in Jeremiah 29:5–7, “Build houses and settle down . . . Marry and have sons and daughters; find wives for your sons and give your daughters in marriage, so that they too may have sons and daughters. Increase in number there...seek the peace and prosperity of the city to which I have carried you into exile. Pray to the Lord for it, because if it prospers, you too will prosper.”

In other words, living out your family life in the city is something that God says is part and parcel of what it means to seek the welfare of the city. If you want to really seek the welfare of the city, then live your lives out here, and have your children, and raise your family here.

Over the years, when I have talked to people about this, I have discovered right away that we have a problem that in those days they probably didn’t have. One of the things we have today in our society, and here in New York, is a deep ambivalence about marriage itself, a lot of confusion about what it is, and a lot of difficulty in even understanding what it means.

We are going to take a look at Ephesians 5:21–33, which is probably the most famous of all the passages in the Bible (but by no means the only one) about marriage.¹ Let’s look at the three top-level things that we learn about Christian marriage: the premise, the purpose, and the penultimacy.

THE PREMISE OF MARRIAGE

Notice that I included in the text verse 21, which says, “Submit to one another out of reverence for Christ.” Even though that is a stand-alone sentence in the English translation, it is actually the last clause of a long sentence that Paul began in verse 18, and it is about the fullness of the Spirit. Let me give you that whole sentence: “Be filled with the Spirit; speaking to one another in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing and making melody in your heart to the Lord; always giving thanks to God the Father for everything in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, and submitting to one another out of reverence for Christ” (vv. 18–21).

Paul is describing a life, a life of the Spirit. If you are filled with the Spirit, you are going to speak to one another in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, making melody in your heart to the Lord, giving thanks to God the Father for everything, and, finally, submitting to one another out of reverence for Christ.

Here is what we need to realize: Paul does not change the subject when he gets to marriage. There is no indication; there is no change. Paul doesn’t say, “That is enough about the Holy Spirit. Now let’s talk about marriage.” No, what he is describing, with regard to the relationship of a husband and a wife, is a subheading under the broader heading: This is what life in the Spirit looks like. And if you are filled with the Spirit, this is what your marriage looks like.

Here is why that is really important. For Paul, being “filled with the Spirit” is to have the gospel driven into the very center of your being so that rather than just abstract doctrines, it becomes a living reality that affects your whole life. That is what it means to be filled with the Spirit.

If you say, “Where do you get that definition?” turn to Colossians 3. In verses 16–17, Paul is again talking about this life. He says, “Speak to one another in songs, make melody in your heart to the Lord. Do everything for the glory of God, always have thanks in your heart toward the Father.” In other words, the same kind of life. In fact, in the same chapter, he even goes on and talks about husbands and wives and parents and children. But the Spirit isn’t even mentioned in Colossians 3. Instead, at the center of it, Paul says, “Let the word of God dwell in you richly” (v. 16). The message of the Word of God, the gospel—have that dwell in you richly, not just understand it or believe it or affirm it. In other words, to be filled with the Spirit and to have the gospel creating enormous joy and awe in the center of your heart is the same thing.

Verse 21 is saying, then, that one of the effects of the gospel is that you serve one another. The gospel erodes the normal self-centeredness of the human heart. For example, one of the things the gospel does is it tells you that you are a lot worse than you think. That is one of the first messages of the gospel. The gospel says you could never clean up your life. There is no way you are going to be saved that way. No amount of self-effort will do it. Nothing less than the death of the Son of God can save you. So you are worse than you think.

The second thing the gospel says is you are much more loved than you think. The Son of God was willing to throw himself into the fiery furnace for you. You are his treasure. And therefore the gospel is more humbling. If you believe the gospel, it is a worldview that humbles you more and affirms you more at the very same time. It removes the self-centeredness because it humbles you, but it also removes the self-neediness because it loves and affirms you.

If the Spirit of God takes that gospel and it is not just abstract doctrine but drives it into the very center of your heart so it is a spiritual reality, do you know what that does? It makes you a person who doesn’t need a lot of thanks, doesn’t need a lot of strokes, and doesn’t need a lot of affirmation. You are so content in who you are in Christ that you become a person who is much more able to give than to receive. You are always putting the needs of other people ahead of your own. You are serving each other.

What does that have to do with marriage? Oh my goodness! It has everything to do with marriage! Here is what Paul is saying (we are very close to the premise). Paul is saying when two people are filled with the Spirit—when two people are filled with the gospel, and the gospel has really reshaped the way in which they think about themselves—and they get married, here is a case study of what it might look like, and then he gives a case study of what a husband and wife do.

Some of you have probably already noticed that it is a controversial case study; in our culture what Paul says is very controversial. He says, first of all, if two Spirit-filled people get married, the wife should grant the husband leadership in the marriage. And then he says that the husband should respond by taking up Jesus’ model of leadership, which is to die for the other person rather than abuse them or exploit them or even displease them.

What does that mean? Do you see what is going on here? Some of you are going to want me to defend that. And do you know what? There is not time. I know somebody is going to say, “What a lame excuse!” but I have other points to make. However, I can tell you this: that when my wife and I entered into marriage in 1975, we looked at this passage, and if you know me or Kathy, you know that neither her temperament nor my temperament is inclined in any way to this model. Neither of us liked or felt temperamentally adapted to what the text was calling us to give. But we submitted to it. And over the years by doing that, and it did take years, we got in touch with things in our character that we never knew were there and never would have found otherwise, which have been incredibly important to our growth.

That is all I am going to say by way of defense. However, I want to point out two things in the text regarding this idea of the wife giving the husband leadership in the marriage that are almost never pointed out, but they are very important.

First, do you see the premise? The premise of the wife giving the husband leadership is that both people are filled with the Spirit and with the gospel. That is why I stuck verse 21 in there. Or, not to put too fine a point on it, Paul is saying, “Women, don’t you dare trust a man with your life. Don’t you dare marry a man and give a man this kind of trust unless his male ego has been permanently reshaped by the gospel of the cross. Don’t trust yourself to a man unless he is filled with the Spirit. Don’t trust a man unless he says to you, ‘I am willing to sacrifice; I am willing to die; I am willing to give anything in order to have you thrive. And I want to hear from you what you think that is.’” Nothing less than that. You know how they used to say constantly to kids on TV, “Boys and girls, don’t do this at home. We are going to do it here in the studio, but don’t do this at home”? When Kathy, my wife, talks about this passage, she says Paul is actually saying, “Only do this at home”—only when you have two Spirit-filled people should you give yourselves to each other like this.

There is a second thing that is not usually pointed out here. What does this leadership actually look like concretely? I want you to know, not only is it not here in this text, but I have looked through the Bible and details are not given. People ask, “What does it mean?” Does it mean the husband makes all the decisions? No, it doesn’t say that in the Bible. Does it mean the husband handles the money? No, it doesn’t say that. Where are the details? The Bible is a book given to us to authoritatively guide us, regardless of what century we live in, regardless of what culture we live in. And therefore, the Bible says two Spirit-filled people entering into marriage—each (because of what the gospel has done) seeking to outdo the other person in service, each one saying “What you need to thrive is more important than my emotional fulfillment”—those two people are going to fight over pleasing the other person, and those two people have to work out for themselves in agreement what that means. The Bible doesn’t say it has got to be like this and this.

By the way, women, if you have a man who says, “This is the way my father and my mother related, and this is the way it is going to be for us,” that is not a man whose male ego has been reshaped by the cross. Do you know why? When the Bible doesn’t give you those details and you say, “The way in which it worked in my family, that is the way it is going to be,” you are lifting your family pattern up to the level of Scripture. That is not honoring biblical authority. Your opinion is negotiable! Scripture is not. The Scripture says this is the principle of leadership, but you have to work it out. That means you work it out together. How do you work it out? By each trying to outdo the other person in serving and pleasing. The premise of Christian marriage is the fullness of the Spirit and the reality of the gospel in the center of your heart.

THE PURPOSE OF MARRIAGE

Second, what is the purpose of marriage? Or another way to put it is a question: Why do people get married? In ancient cultures, and today in traditional cultures, marriage is basically a business proposition. Essentially you did not marry for love; you didn’t marry to have romance and emotional fulfillment. You got married in such a way that it helped your family’s station and security in the world. In fact, that is the way it is today in many parts of the world, because the family is everything—I am going to marry whoever I can to help my family’s status and security.

However, in our Western culture, it is very, very different. You marry for love. You marry for your own individual fulfillment. You marry somebody who is going to make you feel good about yourself, who is going to give you incredible affection and romantic love, and who you find completely fulfills you.

The Bible says both of those approaches are wrong, reductionistic, and probably harmful in many ways. The Bible says that the purpose of marriage is gospel reenactment. It is right here: “Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her to make her holy, cleansing her by the washing with water through the word, and to present her . . . radiant . . . without stain or wrinkle or any other blemish, but holy and blameless.”

What is Paul talking about? Let’s think about the gospel. We sing a hymn that is based on this:

The Church's one foundation

Is Jesus Christ her Lord,

She is His new creation

By water and the Word.

From heaven He came and sought her

To be His holy bride;

With His own blood He bought her

And for her life He died. ²

That is the gospel. Jesus looks down from heaven and sees that we are just shadows of ourselves, of what we are supposed to be. He sees us ruined by the fall, and he sees all our flaws and self-centeredness. But he loves us anyway. He comes and he gives himself to us, and he dies on the cross, taking the punishment for our sins. And when we embrace him, he comes into our lives.

But what does Jesus do? Does he just bring forgiveness? No, no, no. It tells you here. And it tells you in Romans 8:30: “Those he called, he also justified; those he justified, he also glorified.” Jesus is not in any way happy just to pardon you. If you love somebody, you don’t want to see them flawed, broken, doing stupid things all the time, harming themselves and harming the people around them. You want to make them better.

Jesus comes into our lives, and he does what the theologians call sanctification—the gradual perfection, more and more getting us to die unto sin and live unto righteousness (that is the way the Catechism puts it). Jesus comes into your life, and he has a vision for your future glory and your future beauty. He says, “I know what you could be. I was there at your creation. You are just a shadow of what you should be. It is incredible what you are going to be. And through my blood and through my sacrifice and through my service, I am going to get you there.” Anybody who is a Christian knows that when Jesus comes into your life, through the Word and the Spirit and through circumstances of life, he is constantly driving you to change—pushing you to repent and to change and to leave those things behind and to move forward and become more and more like him.

What does that have to do with marriage? That is the model. I don’t know most of you, but the fact is that because you are part of the culture, I can say this with some confidence. If you are looking for a spouse, you are probably looking for a finished product. You are probably looking for someone already (if I put it more superficially) beautiful and pulled together and accomplished and maybe with some money. You are looking for all that.

That is not gospel reenactment—that is the modern Western idea that the purpose of marriage is your individual fulfillment. To fall in love with a vision for gospel reenactment means you look more deeply.

It is when one Spirit-filled person of one sex finds another Spirit-filled person of the other sex and you start to become attracted to what God is doing in that person’s life, the person that God is making that person become. To fall in love with somebody in this Christian understanding of marriage is to imagine yourself on the final day, the day of judgment, in which God destroys all death and all evil and suffering, and there is a new heavens and new earth, and everything wrong with you and everything deformed and distorted about you falls off, and you blossom into what you were created to be, and you become everything you are supposed to be. To fall in love with somebody is to imagine yourself being there on that day, and looking at that person and saying, “I always knew you could be like that. I saw it in you. And through marriage I have been part of what God is doing in you.”

To fall in love with somebody is to see what God is doing in that person and become committed to that person’s future self.

And then what is marriage? It means I am going to do what Jesus did for me. I am going to give my life. I am going to lay myself out. I am going to commit myself to serve this person sacrificially. I am going to put their flourishing and their thriving ahead of my own individual needs, which is what Jesus did. And therefore, I am going to be a vehicle for what God is doing in that person’s life. That is the purpose of marriage.

Now you know how radically countercultural this is. Sociologists talk a lot about something called “commodification.” Here is a definition out of the sociologists’ glossary: “Commodification is a process by which social relationships are reduced to economic exchange relationships.” An “exchange relationship” is what we would call a “consumer relationship.”

If you have a consumer relationship with your grocery store, you say “Hi” to the people at the checkout counter; you feel like “I know this place.” But the fact is your relationship is based on whether they are giving you good products at a good price. And if you find another grocery store, a little closer with better products at better prices, it’s “Bye, old grocery store” and “Hi, new grocery store.” Why? Because your relationship is not as important as the meeting of your individual needs. Your needs are more important than the relationship. If the needs aren’t being met as well, you change relationships. That is a consumer relationship. That is an exchange relationship.

Then there is what is called “covenant relationships,” and the sociologists here are saying that traditionally, relationships between husband and wife, between members of the family, were covenant relationships. A covenant relationship is a relationship in which the relationship is more important than your individual needs.

What the sociologists are saying is that the model of marketplace relationships, consumer relationships, has actually spilled over into modern Western culture so that now our social relationships are essentially consumer relationships. That means you come into marriage like this: “I will be the spouse I ought to be as long as you are being the spouse you ought to be. I will meet your needs as long as you meet my needs, and if you stop meeting my needs, I am not going to meet your needs.”

But the language of a covenant relationship is “I will meet your needs even if you are not meeting my needs.” That is what a covenant relationship is about—I will be the spouse I ought to be even if you are not going to be the spouse that you should be. It is not romantic—it is covenant. It is committed.

Somebody says, “That doesn’t sound very fulfilling.” May I suggest something to you? There is nothing more fulfilling than two people being in a relationship in which each one is not seeking personal fulfillment but rather the thriving of the other. There is nothing more fulfilling than being in a relationship in which you are not putting your own fulfillment first—nothing.

Stanley Hauerwas, social ethicist at Duke University, says that the Christian understanding is neither the traditional understanding that marriage is just basically an economic bargain, nor the modern understanding that you have just got to find Mr. Right or Ms. Right and then everything in your life is going to come out fine. He has this great spot in one of his books, a classic essay, in which he says,

Equally destructive [to marriage] is the self-fulfillment ethic...[that assumes] that marriage and the family are primarily institutions of personal fulfillment.... The assumption is that is someone right for us to marry and that if we look closely enough we will find the right person. This...fails to appreciate the fact that we always marry the wrong person. We may never know whom we marry; we just think we do. Or even if we first marry the right person, just give it a while and he or she will change. For marriage, being what it is, means we are not the same person after we have entered it. The primary [challenge of marriage] is learning how to love and care for this stranger to whom you find yourself married. ³

That is an exaggeration, but not by much. And therefore, the purpose of marriage is gospel reenactment. It is not romantic fulfillment—my needs have to be met. It is not a bargain—so I can get a better status in my life. If you marry for either of those, and people do all the time, you are headed for trouble. Instead, the purpose of marriage is to redo in somebody else’s life what Jesus Christ has done and is doing in your life.

Somebody is going to say, rightly so, “Okay, if both of you are doing it, if both of you are trying to outdo the other in service, okay. But it sounds to me like a covenant relationship could be a recipe for exploitation.” That leads to our third point.

THE PENULTIMACY OF MARRIAGE

One of the most radical things about the Christian doctrine of marriage is it says marriage is not the greatest thing in the world. It is penultimate—it is not ultimate. Paul says in verse 32, “This is a profound mystery—but I am talking about Christ and the church.” He is saying, “You know all this stuff I have been talking about (husband, wife, etc.)? Basically it all points to something else.”

Let me tell you why this is important. If marriage is an ultimate, if it is the ultimate thing in your life, it will be a disaster. In many traditional cultures, even today, family is such an ultimate thing that you have a horrible thing called honor killings. Do you know what an honor killing is? When a young woman or a young man has sex outside of marriage and disgraces the family, some relative kills him or her. Why? Because the honor and the cohesion of the family is everything. It is an ultimate, and look at what that leads to. You say, “We are not like that. We are modern Western people. We don’t do that.” Oh yes, we do. We make marriage an ultimate as well. We think “If I can just find Mr. or Ms. Right,” because of the personal fulfillment ethic that marriage is all about making me as an individual happy.

Ernest Becker was an atheist, a secular thinker (kind of a psychotherapist) in the mid-part of the 20th century. He won the Pulitzer Prize for his book The Denial of Death. He didn’t believe in God and most of his friends didn’t believe in God, but he realized they still needed a sense of transcendence. They still needed a sense of having real meaning in life. The idea that life is random and an accident was very difficult to live with. He realized that people in a more secular society tend to load into romance and into marriage the hopes that in the past they used only to give to God and to religion.

Becker writes in a fascinating passage,

He still needed to feel heroic, to know that his life mattered in the scheme of things...If he no longer had God, how was he to do this? One of the first ways that occurred to him...was the “romantic solution”:... The love partner becomes the divine ideal within which to fulfill one’s life. All spiritual and moral needs [which used to be focused on God] become focused in one individual.... But the failure of romantic love as a solution to human problems is so much a part of modern man’s frustration.... No human relationship can bear the burden of godhood. ⁴

Listen, if God isn’t the most important thing in your life, and the one thing you most need is some beautiful great person to love you, and that person’s love is the most important thing in your life, you will crush that person under the expectations of your heart. Nobody can live up to that. That is what Ernest Becker is saying. He goes on to say,

No human partner can offer this assurance...However much we may idealize and idolize [the love part- ner], he [or she] inevitably reflects earthly decay and imperfection.... After all, what is it that we want when we elevate the love partner to the position of God? We want redemption—nothing less. We want to be rid of our faults, of our feeling of nothingness. We want to be justified, to know that our creation has not been in vain.... Needless to say, human partners can’t do this. ⁵

But we seek it, and if it is an ultimate, it is devastating. Remember that song by the Righteous Brothers, “Without you baby, what good am I”? There are millions of songs like that—“If it wasn’t for you and your love, there is really nothing....” The fact is, we do believe that. If you fall radically in love with somebody, you might even believe in God, but it is an abstraction. That person’s love is what makes you feel good about yourself. And that is an absolute disaster that nobody can possibly fulfill. No human being can be your savior. They are going to let you down.

The Bible says you must understand that marriage—even great marriage, even the very best marriage—is pointing to something beyond itself, to which even the best marriage must be subordinate, and of which even the best marriage is nothing but a foretaste. What is it? It is the spousal love of Jesus Christ.

Let me recapitulate for you. Jesus Christ came to his own but his own received him not (John 1:11). And in the garden of Gethsemane, he had with him a few of his disciples he was about to die for, and he said, “I am just going to ask you one thing: Please stay awake. This is my hour of greatest need—just please stay awake” (Matthew 26:38, paraphrased). And they went to sleep. So he looked into the heart of us—his bride, the people he came to love and to save and to cherish—and he saw self-centeredness and he saw cluelessness. And he died for us anyway. The very people he was dying for and coming to love crucified him.

I don’t know how bad your marriage is—sometimes you feel like your spouse is crucifying you—but in Jesus’ case, it really happened. But what did he do? In the greatest act of spousal love in the history of the world, he stayed! He looked at you and he stayed.

This is why—if you have taken that into your heart—you can do this. When your spouse is not being what a spouse ought to be, you can say, “You are not being the spouse you ought to be, but I am going to be the spouse I should be. I am going to forgive you. Do you know why? I can because my ultimate Spouse, Jesus Christ, whom I wronged, and yet he loved me and he forgave me. And because his love is more important than your love, now I can love you well. If your love was the most important thing in my life and you were letting me down the way you are right now, I would either be scratching your eyes out or I would be out of here. But because he has demoted you, because he has made my marriage penultimate, I can love you really well. I can forgive you, because Jesus forgave me.”

Do you mean you just stay there and let the other person do whatever, no matter what? No! Why not? Is that the loving thing to do? Is it ever loving to let somebody sin against you? Is it the best thing for that person? No! Jesus doesn’t let you go. He sanctifies you. He will never let you go until you become the person you ought to be. And so you do lay down boundaries in a marriage, and you do tell the truth, and you do confront—all that stuff. But now you are able to, because of the spousal love of Jesus Christ. If and only if it is the ultimate thing in your life, then you can speak the truth in love, then you can be in a covenant relationship, then you can be faithful to somebody who is not being good to you, and at the same time not be abused and exploited. You will set down the boundaries. You will still love. You will still forgive. You will do for the person what Jesus did for you.

Some of you are too unhappy about not being married, probably because you think, “If only I was married, then I would be happy.” You are looking right now at probably the most happily married person I know, and let me tell you it is not enough. Being happily married does not help you face things the way you think it will. It is not enough. It doesn’t fill up the deepest part of your heart. It won’t help you face death. It doesn’t really help in the end, as great as it is. The one Spouse whose love can really fill your heart and give you what you really want awaits you, if you believe in him.

Some of you are too afraid of being married. You are afraid of being let down. Only if Jesus isn’t central to your life can marriage be deadly, and if he is central, then give it a shot.

Some of you are in unhappy marriages, and maybe you are thinking, “If only my spouse was everything he or she ought to be, then everything would be fine.” No, no, no; it doesn’t work like that. The one Spouse that you need is available. And if he is central to your life, then you will be able to handle an unhappy marriage a lot better than you are right now.

Lastly, one of the reasons that I think people tend to move out of cities when they start to have children is because of the romantic ideal. They say it has been a lot of fun to be here in the city, but you certainly wouldn’t want to raise a family here. Do you know why? I think a lot of people still have that designer ideal for what marriage and romance and family is about—we are going to have a designer marriage, a perfect marriage. We are going to have perfect children. We are going to have a perfect home. Everything is going to be perfect. And the city is messy.

But once you understand the gospel, you realize you are a mess, and you have a married a mess, and now you are giving birth to little messes. What marriage is about is healing and repair. Marriage is about rehabilitation—that is what the whole text is about—with the resources of Jesus Christ.

And when you realize that, it doesn’t seem so weird to be in a city, because the city is about rehabilitation— helping the schools be better, rehabbing houses for poor people, and healing and redeeming and working on the city the way you are healing and redeeming and working on your family. It doesn’t seem quite as weird then, once you understand the gospel understanding of marriage, to raise your family in the city.

With his own blood he bought you and for your life he died. You are his bride. Now receive his spousal love.

Let’s pray.

Thank you, Father, for giving us what we need in order to deal with this big thing called marriage. We need the gospel to be unmarried well; we need the gospel to be married well; we need the gospel to keep from making our good marriages into idols; we need the gospel to keep us from making our troubled marriages into places where we cannot thrive at all. We need the gospel to deal with being married or being unmarried. And if we do, if we know the spousal love of Jesus Christ, and he is by his Holy Spirit making the gospel real to our heart, then we can handle these things. We can thrive, and we can all be members of the family of God together. Thank you. Thank you, Lord Jesus Christ, for giving yourself to us. Give us all these things. We ask it in Jesus’ name, Amen.

Copyright © 2010 by Timothy Keller, Redeemer Presbyterian Church. This transcript is based on the audio recording and has been lightly edited. The original was part of the Renew Campaign in Fall 2009, and can be found at http://renew.redeemer.com.

We encourage you to use this material for study and ministry purposes. If you would like to use quotes or key concepts in a sermon or other ministry resource, please provide credit to the original.

1. For a more detailed treatment of this passage and topic, see also Timothy Keller, Marriage (1991), Redeemer Sermon Store: http://sermons.redeemer.com/store/index. cfm?product=18279.

2. “The Church’s One Foundation.” Lyrics by Samuel J. Stone. Lyra Fidelium; Twelve Hymns of the Twelve Articles of the Apostle’s Creed (London: Messrs. Parker and Co., 1866).

3. Stanley Hauerwas, A Community of Character: Toward a Constructive Christian Social Ethic (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1981), 172.

4. Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death (New York: The Free Press, 1997), 160, 163, 166. 5. Ibid., 166-167.

5. Ibid., 166-167.