Transcript
Ben Fallon: Today's question, Paul, comes from a parent who is concerned about their adult child being in, I guess, what you would call an “interdenominational dating relationship.” Joe asks:
For the past two years, my twenty-year-old daughter, who attends a Pentecostal church, has been dating a twenty-five-year-old young man from the same church. They both love Jesus and put him at the center of everything they do, especially in their relationship. However, my daughter's boyfriend has been doing some research into different church denominations and is now thinking about attending a Calvinist evangelical church. Can their relationship still work, and what would you recommend to help their relationship move forward together?
So, Paul, I guess more broadly:
How important is it to have the same theological views as your spouse or someone you might want to marry? Should you date or marry someone from a different denomination or with different theological views? What's the most important spiritual bond to have with your future spouse? And then, personally, how compatible or theologically or denominationally compatible are you and Luella?
Paul Tripp: Let me play this out. It's often the case that a young man or a young woman will meet somebody at a work event or a sporting event or online or through friends who they discover is a Christian. They don't know this, but it's from a different spiritual tradition than their own. At first, you just enjoy the fellowship with one another, and you enjoy the way you are able to let down your guard a little bit because you share a life-shaping commitment to Jesus.
But as the relationship grows more serious, the other person invites you to their church. That first Sunday, things are a bit uncomfortable for you. These seem to be fine and sincere Christians, but your experience is like attending somebody else's family reunion–it's familiar, but it's really unfamiliar. After that Sunday, you have a lot of questions, and more questions create more conversation. And the more you talk, the more you're confronted with the fact there are significant differences in the way you understand your faith and what you believe the Bible says. These differences, because they're about who God is, and how he works, and who you are, and what he says, it looks like to worship and serve him, these questions are not incidental.
God meant the teaching of his Word not to be just a set of abstract confessions, but to be something that actually shapes the way I think, desire, speak, act, respond, choose, and decide. So you see that the core doctrines of Scripture really do provide a lens through which I think about, and understand, and interpret everything in my life. Because of this, I want to say, “It's hard to imagine that a couple could live in the kind of harmony and unity that marriage is meant to be if they had foundational differences about the teaching of Scripture and its call on your life.” What we're talking about here is about a depth of spiritual fellowship that is necessary for a healthy, peaceful, and unified marriage. These, what appear to be theological disagreements, would at some point work their way down into practical issues like parenting, like how you make decisions, how you use money, the culture relationship, and things like that. I love Psalm 133:1, it was not only a comfort, but a calling to Luella and me. “Behold how good and pleasant it is for brothers to dwell in unity.”
So let me tell my own experience of this. I met Luella, when the returning students came back to college, in the lunch line. For me, it was love at first sight. For Luella, it was first sight. But I wanted to secure a date with this person, which I finally did. Before long, that became less of a friendship relationship, and it became a serious relationship and that ended in engagement. We didn't rush into marriage because we were, in fact, from two very different lifestyle experiences and theological backgrounds. And we spent three years in very serious discussion with one another. Sometimes I wondered if we'd make it through. But we cared for one another; we believed that what we brought to one another made us better than we would be alone. And so, we had a commitment to work through our issues. By the time we got married, there was foundational theological unity between us, for which I'm incredibly thankful.
We've now been married for lots and lots of years, over fifty, and we can just about finish one another's sentences when it comes to important issues. And we've had to make very hard decisions. We've had to face very hard things in parenting. We've had to face very hard things in our ministry life and church life and in our marriage. And we've been blessed by having, underneath all of that, a theological unity that was a place on which we could stand as we worked through hard things. So, if you're dating with seriousness, if you want to be married, it's not enough just to date ‘a Christian’ because that word is wildly elastic, and it's very important to get to know what that means to that person, and then how they understand the will and the way of God in Scripture because at some point, blessing happens when you “dwell together in unity!”
BF: In Doctrine, that is, what Christians should believe, is covered most extensively by Paul in his book, Do You Believe? Now, he doesn't write about denominational differences, but rather twelve core tenets of the Christian faith, and specifically how they transform the way we ought to live right here, right now. That's available at paultripp.com/doctrine. And then, for resources on marriage or dating or engagement, we would either recommend Paul's book, Marriage: Six Gospel Commitments, or our video series, What Did You Expect? Redeeming the Realities of Marriage. All those are available at paultripp.com.
You have permission to print, repost, share, distribute, and translate this resource as long as you credit Paul Tripp as the teacher, do not charge for this resource, and do not alter the content in any way. If you require an exception or special permission, please email Info@PaulTripp.com.
