Someone sent me a recent John Piper article and asked for my thoughts. Clearly, they knew me well enough to realise that an article titled ‘The Bondage of Singleness’ was going to grab my attention!
Honestly, the article has left me a bit confused. I'm not entirely sure what he is trying to argue, where he wants us to land, or how he actually answers the specific question he's responding to.
It feels to me like he's talking around the question rather than to it. That he’s using all the 1 Corinthians 7 buzzwords—devotion, freedom, undivided, distractions—while not actually helping me make a fuller sense of how those things all hang together in Paul’s argument about marriage and singleness.
I don’t find myself really disagreeing with much in it. But I also don’t quite grasp what I do agree with and why that matters.
Perhaps rereading it a couple of times may provide me with some clarity. Indeed, I may well be back in a week or two with some further thoughts! And, of course, I’d love to hear any thoughts you have about the article in the comments below.
But for the moment, I want to draw attention to a particular line in the very first paragraph of the article proper:
"But the reality is that pursuing the unfettered autonomy of singleness may be a deeper bondage, and embracing the sorrows of a disappointing marriage may be a more profound freedom."
There is one phrase Piper uses in that one sentence that establishes a clear assumption about singleness that front-loads and so frames the rest of his thoughts. One subtle, perhaps even unintentional, remark that decides the argument in the first sentence.
"But the reality is that pursuing the unfettered autonomy of singleness..."
Notice what Piper did not say. He didn’t say:
"But the reality is that pursuing unfettered autonomy in singleness..."
or something like…
"But the reality is that pursuing the unfettered autonomy that singleness can provide opportunity for..."
or perhaps…
“But the reality is that pursuing the unfettered autonomy that sinful hearts can exploit singleness towards...”
No.
He said:
“But the reality is that pursuing the unfettered autonomy of singleness...”
Unfettered autonomy is "OF" singleness.
Piper (perhaps unwittingly?) presents unfettered autonomy as an inherent, intrinsic, natural, inevitable part of the reality of being unmarried.
And because we all know that unfettered autonomy is another way of describing sin and/or bondage to sin, this means that singleness—that which has unfettered autonomy intrinsic to it—cannot be truly good for Christians. Indeed, according to that phrase, surely it is a life situation that is the complete opposite of how Christians are called to live. We are those who are to exercise our personal agency to love God and others… not ourselves.
And so, the best a single Christian can do—the most a single Christian can hope for—is the ability and dedication to spend their singleness (so long as they are single) resisting the uniquely self-indulgent lure of their life situation. This means they need to live in a constant state of being on guard against their singleness.
Not inhabiting it, but surviving it.
Not embracing it, but enduring it.
Not resting in it, but being vigilant to it.
Now, there are a whole lot of theological problems with this way of thinking about singleness:
both on its own terms,
in comparison to marriage (notice in the comment above, the hard/bad/challenging stuff identified about marriage isn’t intrinsic to marriage itself… but is rather a sad reality of a disappointing/flawed/broken experience of marriage),
and in isolation from the doctrine of human depravity.
But right here, right now, I want to simply encourage you to see how that phrase operates as the frame for everything that follows in the article.
To notice how setting singleness up as inherently oriented towards unfettered autonomy shapes the way we think about the single Christian life, distractions, devotion, freedom and bondage.
To recognise how the answer to the question (if there is indeed one given) has already been shaped in the way singleness is spoken about in the very first line.
To realise that the conclusion is predetermined by the first sentence.
I'm sure some of you who have read this far are thinking:
"She's sure reading a lot into just one short phrase!”
or perhaps,
“She’s putting words into Piper’s mouth”
But it's not just one short phrase. Rather, it’s one short phrase that is part of a decades-long (even centuries-long) narrative portraying the single life as inherently characterised by self-indulgence, selfishness, and obsession with individual autonomy.
And so Piper doesn’t need to specifically say “the single life is inherently characterised by self-indulgence, selfishness and obsession with individual autonomy” for those of us who are reading or listening hear him—whether married or single—to read or hear him saying precisely that when he talks about the “unfettered autonomy of singleness”.
The very reason why those one short phrases pass us by in the way we do—or why we think someone like myself who is pointing them out is an over-reactionary, embittered, marriage-hater—is because we have become so inculcated by the narrative that unfettered autonomy is of singleness that we don't even question it anymore.
Instead, we question the people who question it.
What is also consistently striking is the portrayal of marriage as being intrinsically sanctifying. As if people don’t get married for selfish reasons or use their spouse/children to validate themselves OR dominate their partner for self indulgent reasons (the latter being way more probable in Piper’s authoritarian image of marriage)
Oh my. John Piper has apparently never met any of the legion of unmarried women “of a certain age” who are tacitly assigned parental care responsibilities because, unlike their married sibs, “they have no responsibilities.” I think of Deb (fake name), whose professional career involved supporting our troops on multiple continents, including in war zones. Some of those young men still consider her their “mom.” She is now FT live-in caregiver to her mother, who has dementia, and guardian to her disabled brother. She’s not the only capable member of her generation, but all the heavy lifting is up to her because she’s unmarried. (And yes, she was active in church before caregiving chained her to her mother’s apartment, and no, her “young families”-focused church is not supporting with respite, meals, or even regular pastoral visits.)