Larry Crabb wrote a book called The Marriage Builder, and this is my review of the underlying theological themes that I think are at the center of his understanding of what builds a happy marriage in one of his chapters. That is not to say that he has not helped a great many people who were in deeper errors than his own, but I think that God can work through erroneous means in His design to sanctify and to cleanse anyone.
My first theological point is that Larry Crabb makes his assessment of the heart of the problem in our marriages at the end of this chapter saying, “But Husbands and wives can help convince their partners of their value and bring them to fuller enjoyment of their riches in Christ.” In other words, he believes that husbands and wives bring each other to appreciate or more fully realize their riches in Christ. While he says this elsewhere, he also believes that when we speak openly about our deepest needs to each other in the marriage relationship and we work to satisfy each other, that we arrive, so to speak, at a fuller enjoyment of Christ.
Paul David Tripp says in his book, What Did You Expect?, that every marriage has to be fixed vertically before it will ever be fixed horizontally. In other words, we need to fix our priority on God and being right before him in order to be right with each other. I believe that Tripp and Crabb have two different approaches on the issue of the satisfaction found in Christ. Tripp argues for a focus that is fixed first on relating right to God, and that’s it. He develops it further but he never departs from that. Actually, Larry Crabb does agree to an extent, but in the previously mentioned references and elsewhere, he moves on to suggest that our happiness and enjoyment of Christ can be uplifted or brought down, in other words, by our relationship to our spouses. The Bible presents a different picture.
The Bible says that our joy should never be diminished. Our hope can never be taken away. These are non-negotiable statements. There are no exceptions. You can’t say that even the worst of life can take away God’s providential care and consequently your joy, and I would even argue that it is God’s sovereignty that is the primary source of our joy. If joy is taken away it is due to a wrong response to life. Romans 8:32-39 says,
“What then shall we say to these things? If God is for us, who is against us? He who did not spare His own Son, but delivered Him over for us all, how will He not also with Him freely give us all things? Who will bring a charge against God’s elect? God is the one who justifies; who is the one who condemns? Christ Jesus is He who died, yes, rather who was raised, who is at the right hand of God, who also intercedes for us. Who will separate us from the love of Christ? Will tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword? Just as it is written,
‘For Your sake we are being put to death all day long;
We were considered as sheep to be slaughtered.’
But in all these things we overwhelmingly conquer through Him who loved us. For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor any other created thing, will be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.”
What are you going to say? Are you going to respond that the woman or man whom you are married to diminishes your experience of the love of Christ in some way when the Bible says famine, death, peril, sword, etc. cannot take it away? If so, then in what sense do you mean that?
At the same time, I think that we have to immediately distinguish between our joy in the Lord, and our joy in our spouse or in the temporal world, whatever may be our lesser source of joy. Some pastors distinguish between “joy” and “happiness.” Joy is the constant attitude that we can have with or without the help of our circumstances, and that is found in God. Happiness could be designated as the passing emotional happy and/or “giddy” emotional feelings that are based on stuff we experience. The former explains the reason why Paul can command us to rejoice always in Philippians 4:4 (“in the Lord”) and in 1 Thessalonians 5:16. Of course there is also an emotional happiness that comes to us in the form of financial success, love, accolades, or the like, but those things could never advance our love of God or our appreciation of Him in a way that the absence of these would necessarily lessen it, and that includes the marital relationship! All the while, I do believe that both temporal success as well as temporal ruin should advance our appreciation of God but for different reasons. If anything, only our own sinful responses are what dampens our relationship with God and our joy.
This leads to my second point, Larry Crabb does good to acknowledge another truth saying essentially that there is a difference between being fully satisfied in Christ and in trying to be fully satisfied in temporal happiness, which we may get from our spouse, and that this will not be the same lasting “joy of the Lord,” as the Bible calls it. He says the following:
“The power of God is indispensable to altering one’s commitments meaningfully. Until I am aware that my needs are already met in Christ, I will be motivated by emptiness to meet my needs. When by simple faith I accept Christ’s shed blood as full payment for my sins, I am brought into a relationship with an infinite Being of love who fully satisfies my deepest needs for love and purpose who fully satisfies my deepest needs for security and significance.”
He follows saying that after being filled with Christ, we can turn to satisfy our spouse. Here’s my personal concern with what Crabb has expressed here. He first fails to distinguish between what we have designated as biblical “joy” and “happiness,” but he also fails to address the whole issue of the difference between psychological, spiritual, and even biological needs in this chapter and their relativity to marriage. This is important. However, even while he writes the above, he says that spouses need to minister to each others’ “deepest needs.” So what does he mean by saying that our needs are met in Christ if he acknowledges that spouses still need to minister to each others’ “deepest needs”?
This question leads me to say that there are, in addition to biological needs, not only the all-important spiritual needs of a given individual, but also “psychological needs.” However, these are really only encapsulated within spiritual needs. We readily acknowledge the biological and the spiritual, but on the other hand, some people refute the existence of psychological needs altogether. An alternative solution is to see psychological needs as held within spiritual needs.
People in the Bible suffered in the midst of these things. When there is hate and threats and antagonisms, we suffer. We see this in the Psalms, and the psalmist does suffer for the sake of psychological affliction as well. That is evidence for psychological needs, yet the bottom line is that The Psalmist looked to God for the solution. Worship was the facet for addressing these things. This makes me believe that even needs we refer to as psychological in nature are best addressed as spiritual in essence (answered in worship).
We suffer for lack of acceptance, love, etc., and I think that Larry Crabb is overemphasizing these as “psychological needs.” Actually, we suffer not so much for the lack thereof, but for the real contempt and neglect we can experience. People do suffer for their needs not being met in marriage more than in anywhere else in life, but learning to live for God as his/her audience of one and pleasing Him in all things accomplishes two things: It makes you satisfied in your walk with God, and it makes you more attentive to your spouse per His instructions.
However, I believe that Crabb, like all integrationists, overvalues and overestimates the need for the satisfaction of our “psychological needs,” which he does not specifically distinguish from our spiritual needs that are met and answered in Christ. Does Christ satisfy our psychological needs? Yes, but definitely not all the time! Sometimes, he lets us suffer for the sake of increasing our joy in Him! Psychological needs being met do not make us as happy as when our joy is found in God who gives us real meaning and purpose in the midst of whatever our pain is. He guides us through the lack of satisfaction we feel through worship. This goes to show that the truth drive is greater than any other drive or need. I believe this. Holiness is what we need at the deepest levels.
This leaves me to my third point. Larry Crab says in the summary at the end of this chapter,
“The route to Soul Oneness is found in helping our mates to appreciate more their fundamental worth as people who bear the image of God and saints who are truly secure and significant in Christ.”
The thing he calls, Soul Oneness, is a type of psychological impression of his that he believes comes from the Bible that contrasts with Spirit Oneness. He gets this from his belief that when the Bible uses “soul,” it refers to our earthly connections somehow, but when the Bible uses “spirit,” it refers to our spiritual connections or aspects (689 and 703). He uses this as a framework for his psychological (not Biblical) solutions to marriage problems. That aside, my issue with the above is not simply that he is not being as biblical as he suggests, but one aspect of the above presents itself as an even greater problem. When is it so important to be emotionally secure and significant in Christ or to somehow realize our worth to Him? Does the Bible really talk about our worth per se? Or is our unworthiness and need to mourn and confess our sins the most central?
The Bible does address our need to trust Him saying that no one is able to snatch us out of His hands (John 10:29). There is a sense of supreme value there. However, no one should comfort you, for example, saying “you are so valuable because you are worth the blood of Christ,” or other psychological pep talk from KLOVE couched in theological themes. The essential diagnosis of the Bible is that we ought to be sorry for our sin even daily as Christians, but then to constantly turn and to pursue repentance. This habit doesn’t decrease our sense of joy in being forgiven. It increases our thankfulness because we appreciate grace all the more! There is nothing in the Bible about the importance of feeling significant or valuable in Christ per se.
If there is anything that we want for our spouse it is for him or her to become more and more like the image of Christ, not to feel so much their “importance” and “self-worth.” We want him or her to be built up in Him not to have a pop-psychology version of “God’s love.” We want him or her to turn and love God rather than themselves and to seek Him not their own satisfaction. All this is so much more meaningful than to feel dependent on receiving positive vibes based on pep talk-level stuff with some scriptural tie-ins. This comes out of our psychologizing of the counsel. I think this concept of “self” is the key to unlocking the root of integrationist error. This is the reason that psychology does not mix with theology. They build everything around “self” because that’s all they have. Larry Crab offers up our need for self-image or self-esteem relative to God’s value of us. All the while, Jesus says to his disciples that they should consider themselves “unprofitable servants,” and that, after they have done all they could to serve Him (Luke 17:10). Where is the need for self-esteem? Jesus said, that “blessed are those who mourn,” and “blessed are the poor in spirit” in Matthew 5.
Marriage should begin and end with a high view of God and an accurate view of ourselves. I think that we need more theological insight and less secular values clothed in theological garb. My goal is to value God so that even my wife sees this and follows my example. Our marriage should feel the effects of God’s infinite grace to each of us based on our love for Him more than even our positive emotional vibes. A God-honoring marriage focuses on God first and each other second.
Bibliography
Crabb, Lawrence J. 1982. The Marriage Builder: Soul Oneness: 1 – Manipulation or Ministry? Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan.
Tripp, Paul David. 2012. What Did You Expect? Reason to Continue. Wheaton, IL: Crossway.
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