An International Journal for Pastors and Students of Theological and Religious Studies
PDF Version
An International Journal for Pastors and Students of Theological and Religious Studies
PDF Version
When asked to review a book with the enticing title The Christian Lover, it is hard to say no, and reading this short book by Michael Haykin (with assistance from his daughter Victoria) was a rewarding experience. Haykin, a professor of church history and biblical spirituality at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky, has assembled personal letters from noted Christian leaders through history with the purpose of illustrating, celebrating, and encouraging the delightful and passionate love that a husband and wife can (and ought to) have toward one another.
The book itself consists of twelve chapters with each focusing on a Christian leader and his wife (or in one case, “romantic interest”). These include two Reformers, one seventeenth-century Puritan, seven eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Evangelicals and two from the twentieth century. A brief biographical sketch of each gives some context for the letters, though more information about their specific setting might have been helpful. Four chapters cite only one letter, two chapters cite as many as six, and in all, thirty-two letters are presented.
These letters intentionally address a wide range of experiences related to marital love — courtship, a hopeful proposal, passionate delight in one’s beloved, the anguish of separation, dealing with disappointment, and the intense pain of grief when death separates spouses. This is the real stuff of life, and these characters from history become very human in the “intimate windows” into their hearts that these letters afford.
We see Martin Luther’s affectionate playfulness in writing to his wife Katharina, whom he addresses as “Most holy Mrs. Doctor” (p. 4). John Calvin writes after his wife’s death, “I have been bereaved of the best companion of my life. . . . I do what I can to keep myself from being overwhelmed with grief” (p. 10). At age forty after twelve years of marriage, Martyn Lloyd-Jones seems almost adolescent in expressing his love to his wife Bethan: “I am quite certain that there is no lover, anywhere, writing to his girl who is quite as mad about her as I am” (p. 88). These spiritual giants experienced the “blazing fire” of romantic love exalted in the Song of Songs (8:6), and they would no doubt agree with the writer that “If one were to give all the wealth of his house for love, it would be utterly scorned” (Song of Songs 8:7).
But because love “burns like a blazing fire,” it can be dangerous, and several writers acknowledge that passions must be guarded. Particularly, the passion of marital love must not be allowed to overwhelm a love for God. Lucy Hutchinson wrote a memoir of her husband John after his death in 1664, exalting his love for her, but she was conscious of putting that love in its proper place: “yet even this, which was the highest love he or any man could have, was yet bounded by a superior; he loved [his wife] in the Lord as his fellow-creature, not his idol . . . . He loved God above her” (p. 18). And after expressing the “extreme tenderness” of her heart for her husband, Philip, Mercy Doddridge confessed that this “sometimes makes me dread lest I should sin you away, by giving you that place in my heart which ought to be sacred to God alone, next to whom I believe I am permitted to love you” (p. 24).
Herein lies a central underlying theme of these letters. Though romantic love is common to human experience, that love is not diminished but deepened when wedded to a love for God. The sharing of our spiritual lives in Christ adds a new and more profound dimension to human love. Henry Venn warns his wife Eling of “an idolatrous love,” adding, “I would always pray that God may be so much dearer to us than we are to each other. . . . By this means shall we love one another in God and for God” (p. 40).
That the marital union is grounded in our union with Christ finds its finest expression in the final letters from the only non-English speaking couple in the book. Helmut von Moltke, though a Christian opposed to violence, was linked to a plot to overthrow Hitler, and in January 1944, he was arrested by the Nazis. In a letter to his wife Freya, written within days of his hanging, he wrote,
You are not one of God’s agents to make me what I am, rather you are myself. . . . I would not think of saying that I love you, that would be quite false. Rather you are the one part of me, which would be lacking if I was alone. . . . It is only in our union—you and I—that we form a complete human being. . . [a union symbolized through] our common participation in the Holy Communion. (p. 96)
In our age of telephone and now email, letter-writing seems a lost art, but it is a medium especially conducive to communicating deep emotional reflection. These letters evidence that, and they set before us a model worth following.