Sophie Solomon
No Fear Christian Living with Sophie Solomon: Who’s right about Mr. Wrong?
Dear Sophie Solomon,
I need your help! There’s a guy I really like, but he’s not Christian. He likes me too, we’ve been friends for a while, and I think we are really compatible, but people keep telling me I can’t date a non-Christian. What do I do? The guy even said he would check out Christianity! He really wants to give us a chance. I’m torn.
Ambivalent Amanda
Dear Amanda,
Wow, no wonder you’re torn: on the one hand, you really like this boy and want to be in a romantic relationship with him; on the other hand, your friends and community are telling you that you shouldn’t date him because there’s something about the relationship that they find unacceptable or undesirable. I’m not going to side-step the fact that he’s a non-Christian, but I want you to do me a favor and imagine that this conflict in a couple different ways, first.
Let’s rewrite your letter, okay?
I need your help! There’s a guy I really like, but he’s a pathological liar. He likes me too, we’ve been friends for a while, and I think we are really compatible, but people keep telling me I can’t date a pathological liar. What do I do? The guy even said he would check out therapy! He really wants to give us a chance. I’m torn.
In this case, it seems that your friends and community don’t want you to date him because of a character defect that would greatly impact his ability to be in a healthy relationship with you based on mutual trust and attraction. If you were to become so intimately involved with him, you might become an enabler, and fall into scary-bad habits yourself that would harm you (and him, for that matter). If you were in this situation, what would you do?
Let’s rewrite it again:
I need your help! There’s a guy I really like, but he’s
applying to PhD programs in the humanitiesreally poor. He likes me too, we’ve been friends for a while, and I think we are really compatible, but people keep telling me I can’t date someone who can’t keep up with my lifestyle. What do I do? The guy even said he would check out getting an extra job! He really wants to give us a chance. I’m torn.
In this case, it seems that your friends don’t want you to date someone from a different socioeconomic background, who doesn’t measure up to a subset of assumptions and expectations that you are used to. Furthermore, they have concerns that by being with this guy you will have to compromise those expectations and rethink your assumptions about your life if you were to be in a long-term relationship or marriage with him. Even though this guy is willing to put in the effort (he’s not lazy), he may never reach the level you believe yourself to be at or wish to remain at, or the level of your friends’ romantic partners, and you’ll have to pull twice as much weight at work. You may have to compromise and revision every aspect of your life: how your household will be run, how your children will be raised, your retirement plans, etc. If you were in this situation, what would you do?
And let’s rewrite it one more time:
I need your help! There’s a guy I really like, but he’s white. He likes me too, we’ve been friends for a while, and I think we are really compatible, but people keep telling me I can’t date someone who doesn’t understand what a big part my culture plays in who I am or who would always feel left out in my group of friends. What do I do? The guy even said he would check out my ethnic heritage club, but he felt really unwelcome and uncomfortable at some of the parties I took him too! He really wants to give us a chance. I’m torn.
In this case, it seems that your friends and community see something really fundamental about your identity rooted in your shared culture, history, and language, something that a boy would never fully understand, appreciate, or truly love unless he was a true member of your culture or ethnicity. Furthermore, they think that you would never be able to truly enjoy the relationship because you’d always be anxious about his level of discomfort, what your friends thought, and the hassle of translating everything that feels so natural to you into a language he understood - all within your most intimate relationship! If you were in this situation, what would you do?
These three scenarios are not random: I think they are very useful analogies to describe the major ways people describe or advise Christians about relationships with non-Christians: it’s bad for you, it will impoverish you, and it’s just not your color, babe.
They also resonate with various ideas in Scripture. Going in order…
1) The importance of avoiding behaviors, even behaviors that feel good or are important to who you think you are, that jeopardize your spiritual health: “And if your eye causes you to sin, pluck it out. It is better for you to enter the kingdom of God with one eye than to have two eyes and be thrown into hell.” (Mark 9:47)
(This could include an unhealthy relationship, don’t you think? It’s not that much of a stretch…)
2) The idea that being involved with a nonbeliever is not a deal-breaker so much as a big hassle when it comes to marriage or the eternal fate of your children, because sanctification rests on you alone in your family: “If any brother has a wife who is not a believer and she is willing to live with him, he must not divorce her. And if a woman has a husband who is not a believer and he is willing to live with her, she must not divorce him. For the unbelieving husband has been sanctified through his wife, and the unbelieving wife has been sanctified through her believing husband. Otherwise your children would be unclean, but as it is, they are holy.” (1 Corinthians 7: 12-17)
(You could argue that this refers to couple who married as non-Christians and that one partner has since converted, which makes sense, but isn’t stated explicitly in this passage. You can definitely interpret it that way, but you don’t have to.)
3) Being a Christian is being part of an ethnic minority (according to my friend Alcuin, the Church is referred to as an etnos, the Greek root of our word for ethnicity, at one point: who knew?), and mixing too much with other spiritual “races” is just wrong-headed: “Do not be yoked together with unbelievers. For what do righteousness and wickedness have in common? Or what fellowship can light have with darkness? What harmony is there between Christ and Belial? What does a believer have in common with an unbeliever? What agreement is there between the temple of God and idols? For we are the temple of the living God. As God has said: ‘I will live with them and walk among them, and I will be their God, and they will be my people.’
‘Therefore come out from them
and be separate, says the Lord.
Touch no unclean thing,
and I will receive you.’
‘I will be a Father to you,
and you will be my sons and daughters, says the Lord Almighty.’” (2 Corinthians 6: 14-18)
(Please note, with this passage, that Paul is not talking about marriage or sexual relationships specifically. This isn’t even in a section of 2 Corinthians about Christian households.)
I didn’t invent a scenario in which dating this boy was a clear-cut moral issue because Scripture doesn’t make it one. There is no verse in the Bible that says, “Do not marry nonbelievers, because it is a sin.” There certainly isn’t any verse that says, “Don’t date a nonbeliever, because it is a sin.”
However, the challenges to dating someone from a different religious background, which bears some resemblance to concerns such as having different values, different expectations for one’s life and prospects, and a different cultural heritage, do exist. I don’t think they’re insurmountable, but they’re real: you may experience internal and external conflict by breaking with the norms and expectations of your community. Only you know how you want to negotiate and resolve these issues and be aware of the potential consequences. Your friends’ advice, rave reviews, or horror stories can be helpful or revealing, but ultimately it’s still your decision. My personal opinion/experience? God named me Solomon for a reason: there’s nothing like a cute, irreligious hipster to turn my head.
The only person who can be right about Mr. Wrong is you.
Just remember, Amanda, that there is no fear in love: perfect love casts out fear!
<3
Sophie Solomon
Want Sophie Solomon’s advice and potentially humorous anecdotes? Email her at sophisticalyorkdork@gmail.com, and you too might be featured on our blog! <3
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March 19th, 2010 at 1:29 pm
Hi, my name is clark and I’m just a passerby-er reading christian articles on the web… i’m currently a youth pastor in Anaheim, CA. I’d like to just add a few things to the response to this letter…
first off, good analogies, i highly appreciate them. Although I’d like to go as far and say, No, Christians are not allowed to date and/or marry non-Christians, or at least it’s HIGHLY dangerous. ultimately, yes, we’ve been given freedom in the New Covenant under Christ to live as we please, but remember Paul’s words in Romans
“What shall we say then? Are we to continue in sin that grace may abound? By no means! How can we who died to sin still live in it? We were buried therefore with him by baptism into death, in order that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, we too might walk in newness of life.” (Rom 6:1-4)
And we know that as Christians, Christ has called us out of this old self so that
“Whatever you do, work heartily, as for the Lord and not for me, knowing that from the Lord you will receive the inheritance as your reward. You are serving the Lord Christ.” (Col 3:23-24)
I think it’s safe to say that as Christians who have been called to a new life, our main goal in life is to “Glorify God and enjoy Him forever” (Westminster Confession of Faith), or as John Piper modifies it in his book, Desiring God, “The chief end of man is to glorify God WHILE enjoying HIm forever,” devoting 300 pages to how enjoying God glorifies Him the most.
I could stop right there and ask, will dating this non-Christian, even if he is a seeker, glorify God? or help you enjoy God forever? I know the answer is much harder to come by, and i’ve made many mistakes in my past, which is what led me to comment. We have to ask if Satan is tricking us, the king of liars, if he is giving us a deceitful desire to make us think a decision will glorify God, but really just glorify and satisfy ourselves.
I’d like to continue though and ask the question, in terms of dating, specifically marriage, what glorifies God? or maybe since the Bible isn’t so specific, what doesn’t glorify God?
Consider Exodus 34:10-16 when Moses reads the covenant that God was renewing between Himself and Israel, his chosen people.
10 “Behold, I am making a covenant. Before all your people I will do marvels, such as have not been created in all the earth or in any nation. And all the people among whom you are shall see the work of the LORD, for it is an awesome thing that I will do with you… 12 Take care, lest you make a covenant with the inhabitants of the land to which you go, lest it become a snare in your midst. 13 You shall tear down their altars and break their pillars and cut down their Asherim 14 (for you shall worship no other god, for the LORD, whose name is Jealous, is a jealous God), 15 lest you make a covenant with the inhabitants of the land, and when they whore after their gods and sacrifice to their gods and you are invited, you eat of his sacrifice, 16 and you take of their daughters for your sons, and their daughters whore after their gods and make your sons whore after their gods.
The issue here is with Israel entering the promise land and the surrounding areas. God issued a ban (a total destruction of a nation) on these idol worshipping nations to keep Israel from falling into idolatry and straying away from their covenant with Yahweh. In this case, intermarrying with non-Israelites, i.e. non-chosen people, does not glorify God.
Of similar concern are the words of God through Moses in Deuteronomy 7.
1 “When the LORD your God brings you into the land that you are entering to take possession of it, and clears away many nations before you, the Hittites, the Girgashites, the Amorites, the Canaanites, the Perizzites, the Hivites, and the Jebusites, seven nations more numerous and mightier than yourselves, 2 and when the LORD your God gives them over to you, and you defeat them, then you must devote them to complete destruction. You shall make no covenant with them and show no mercy to them. 3 You shall not intermarry with them, giving your daughters to their sons or taking their daughters for your sons, 4 for they would turn away your sons from following me, to serve other gods. Then the anger of the LORD would be kindled against you, and he would destroy you quickly… 6 “For you are a people holy to the LORD your God. The LORD your God has chosen you to be a people for his treasured possession, out of all the peoples who are on the face of the earth. 7 It was not because you were more in number than any other people that the LORD set his love on you and chose you, for you were the fewest of all peoples, 8 but it is because the LORD loves you and is keeping the oath that he swore to your fathers, that the LORD has brought you out with a mighty hand and redeemed you from the house of slavery, from the hand of Pharaoh king of Egypt.
Those are some pretty strong words… it’s because the Lord LOVES US that he doesn’t want us to make covenant with other idol-worshippers, which would cause us to turn from him and worship other idols.
Even Solomon, whom the response letter is named after, fell into this snare of his heart…
1King 11:1 Now King Solomon loved many foreign women, along with the daughter of Pharaoh: Moabite, Ammonite, Edomite, Sidonian, and Hittite women, 2 from the nations concerning which the LORD had said to the people of Israel, “You shall not enter into marriage with them, neither shall they with you, for surely they will turn away your heart after their gods.” (Exo 34:16, the principle still stands) Solomon clung to these in love. 3 He had 700 wives, princesses, and 300 concubines. And his wives turned away his heart. 4 For when Solomon was old his wives turned away his heart after other gods, and his heart was not wholly true to the LORD his God, as was the heart of David his father….6 So Solomon did what was evil in the sight of the LORD and did not wholly follow the LORD, as David his father had done.
The issue is not that he had simply married a non-Israelite, a non-chosen person of the nation of God’s people, but that they had turned his heart away, even though he loved them, and it was considered evil in the sight of God. Interesting enough, Solomon still served God, and built the new Temple which was the greatest the Temple had been in all of history. Yet it was because his non-Israelite wives had taken part of his heart so that it was not WHOLLY devoted to the Lord.
I could go on about how the OT talks about intermarriage with non-believers and its destructive nature to ones faith. sure you could say, that was the OT, the old covenant, and we’re under the new, but remember even Christ said he didn’t come to abolish the Law but to fulfill it. Just because we’re under the New Covenant doesn’t mean the Old Covenant is obsolete. Paul likewise says in Galatians and Romans that not all of Israel was Israel, for only the true Israel believes in their heart. I’m making the connection that Israel was a microcosm of the Church, and as the continuation of the Church in our modern age, we MUST fight for purity, to be holy because God is holy, and he has chosen us as his “holy priesthood, a holy nation” (1Pet 2).
In answering the question, what glorifies God in relationships? obviously these instances of intermarriage outside of Israelite lines did not glorify God, and as Sophia Solomon mentioned, that we are a different bloodline, a completely different ethnic culture you could say, from this world, then marrying or dating a non-Christian is also going outside of those ethnic cultural lines, which would be seen as evil in the eyes of the Lord.
The main issue was that those marriages had caused the Israelites to whore their hearts out to other idols. and we know from Ezekiel 6:9 how God feels about these idols
“I have been broken over their whoring heart that has departed from me and over their eyes that go whoring after their idols.”
It broke God’s heart so much that he would even kill and mutilate his own Son, breaking fellowship with Christ, a person of the Trinity. Though our idols today are not physical wood carved images as they were back then, relationships can easily become idols, and the person you’re in relationship easily can become your new God. It’s happened to me even with a Christian relationship. Relationships are hard enough, why create even more struggles by entering one that is displeasing to God?
Finally, marriage was meant to model the marriage between Christ and the Church, and in Ephesians 5:22-33 Paul tells us what that marriage should look like, manifested in our physical relationships here on earth
22 Wives, submit to your own husbands, as to the Lord. 23 For the husband is the head of the wife even as Christ is the head of the church, his body, and is himself its Savior. 24 Now as the church submits to Christ, so also wives should submit in everything to their husbands. 25 Husbands, love your wives, as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her, 26 that he might sanctify her, having cleansed her by the washing of water with the word, 27 so that he might present the church to himself in splendor, without spot or wrinkle or any such thing, that she might be holy and without blemish.
How can you experience the full beauty and intent of marriage unless both persons involved are strong, maturing Christians???? if this is what REALLY glorifies God through marriage, learning more about the amazing beauty of the Gospel through this earthly model, then a distortion of any kind of this beautiful model that God has given to us would completely mock God’s design for us, and spit in His face at the Gospel he is portraying to us through marriage!!! Even if one of the two persons are struggling Christians, they will not be able to adequately follow this model. the Wife could easily find it hard to submit to her husband if he is not exemplifying Christ-like headship. And the husband could easily find it hard to give himself up for his wife if she is not receptive to the cleansing through the Word that he is to provide.
Sister, the question is not, “Is this ok? How far can i go? How much of my own desires can i satisfy without hurting God?” but the question rather should be, “How much can i glorify God!? How much more can i honor Him with my body and decisions??”
Though the Bible never talks about dating, ultimately the purpose is to lead to marriage, a covenant between two peoples. How beautiful can that covenant be if carried out under the covenant that God has made with the two? And yet how ugly and distorted can it be if it is in conflict with the covenant with the covenant that God has made with one of the two persons?
March 28th, 2010 at 5:06 pm
i found this helpful:
http://www.rededicate.org/archives/marriage/marriageq8.html
March 28th, 2010 at 5:31 pm
instead of posting the link above, i wish i had said “pray.”
That’s so wonderful that he wants to check out your faith! I’ve found that engaging in conversation and going to church with your close friend is a really awesome experience as it exposes him to your beliefs and also makes you understand and really think through yours!
April 17th, 2010 at 11:10 pm
[...] an older post by “Sophie Solomon” of UC Berkeley on dating outside one’s faith – very [...]