Marriage, Children, and the Calling of Parents

A standalone treatise in the series On the Sanctity of Life, Abortifacient Contraception, and the Faithful Care of Christ’s Flock

The central concern of this series is the protection of the conceived child. But that concern does not stand alone in Scripture; it grows out of a fuller vision of what marriage is, what children are, and what parents are for. This treatise sets out that vision on its own terms, because it is the soil in which the whole argument grows, and because it has itself been so widely forgotten that the argument can sound strange without it.

We make one distinction at the outset and hold it throughout. To recover a high view of children and fruitfulness is not to lay a law upon consciences, nor to deny that many godly couples walk long and painful roads of infertility, delay, or loss. It is to recover a posture — one that receives children as God’s good gift rather than treating fertility as a hazard to be neutralised. The tradition we set out below held both truths at once, and so must we. Nothing here should be read as a rule binding the timing or number of a couple’s children upon their conscience; that is a matter for prayerful Christian freedom. What is at stake is the disposition of the heart toward the gift itself.

1. It begins with a blessing tied to fruitfulness

God’s first recorded word to the first married couple was not a prohibition but a blessing, and the blessing was tied to fruitfulness: “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth” (Genesis 1:28). Whatever else marriage is, it is the estate within which God chose to bring human life into the world and to raise it for Himself. Every writer quoted in this treatise is working, in the end, from that verse.

Calvin grounds the whole matter there. Commenting on Genesis 1:28, he writes that “Adam with his wife was formed for the production of offspring, in order that men might replenish the earth,” and adds that “we are fruitful or barren in respect of offspring, as God imparts his power to some and withholds it from others.”[1] Fruitfulness, on this reading, is not an accident of biology to be managed at will. It is a gift dispensed by God — which is exactly why its presence is called a blessing and its absence a trial, never the reverse.

Luther taught the same as a matter of plain faith in God’s word:

“Now the ones who recognize the estate of marriage are those who firmly believe that God himself instituted it, brought husband and wife together, and ordained that they should beget children and care for them. For this they have God’s word, Genesis 1, and they can be certain that God does not lie.” — Martin Luther, The Estate of Marriage (1522)[2]

2. The confessions make it a matter of definition

This was not a private opinion of a few strong-minded Reformers. The Reformed and Baptist confessions wrote the begetting of children into the very definition of marriage. The Westminster Confession of Faith (1646) states that marriage was ordained “for the mutual help of husband and wife; for the increase of mankind with a legitimate issue, and of the Church with an holy seed; and for preventing of uncleanness” (24.2).[3] The Baptists of these islands took the clause over almost word for word in the Second London Confession of 1689 (25.2).[4]

Two things deserve notice. First, this is not a marginal remark buried in the confessions; it is their definition of the institution, subscribed by our own Presbyterian and Baptist forebears. Second, the increase of mankind stands alongside mutual help and the preventing of uncleanness, not above them. The confessions name three ends and rank none as the whole. A tradition that defines marriage partly by “the increase of mankind with a legitimate issue” cannot be squared with the modern assumption that childbearing is incidental to marriage, a private preference of no theological weight. But neither does it reduce marriage to childbearing alone.

William Gouge, a member of the Westminster Assembly, listed among the principal ends of marriage the “increasing the world with a legitimate brood,” setting it beside chastity and the binding together of the couple’s affections (Of Domesticall Duties, 1622).[5] Augustine, long before, had grounded the good of marriage not in “the passion of desire” but in its honourable use, “appropriate to the propagation of children,” calling the orderly renewal of the human race “the good of wedlock.”[6] Chrysostom could take the same purpose so entirely for granted that he used it to rebuke the wedding customs of his city: “You are marrying your wife for the procreation of children and for moderation of life; what is the meaning of these drunken parties?”[7] We should note, for fairness, that Chrysostom also held virginity and continence to be a higher calling than marriage; he named procreation as one true end of marriage, not as its only good.

3. Children are a heritage, and barrenness a grief — never a goal

Scripture never treats the child as an interruption to a couple’s plans. It treats the child as a heritage, a reward, a crown:

“Children stand out among all our possessions with a pre-eminence which cannot be questioned. To have many children is the next blessing to much grace.” — C. H. Spurgeon, The Treasury of David, on Psalm 127:3[8]

The counterpart of that blessing, all through the Bible, is grief at its absence — never contentment engineered by design. Sarah, Rebekah, and Rachel longed for children. Hannah wept for one, and her barrenness was “a source of deep anguish” until God removed it (1 Samuel 1:5–8). When the Lord opened Elizabeth’s womb she rejoiced that He had “taken away my reproach among people” (Luke 1:25). Matthew Henry, commenting on Rachel’s cry in Genesis 30, treats her childlessness as a real sorrow and corrects her only for taking it to Jacob rather than to God, “forgetting that children are a heritage of the Lord.”[9]

We must hold this carefully and pastorally. Barrenness is everywhere in Scripture a grief, and the couple who cannot conceive are objects of the Lord’s tenderness, not of anyone’s reproach. The point is not that a childless marriage is a lesser marriage — it plainly is not (see the following section) — but that Scripture’s whole disposition toward children is to want them, to receive them as gift, and to lament their absence, never to treat their absence as an achievement or their arrival as a threat.

4. Yet a marriage without children is no less a marriage

Precisely because the tradition prized children so highly, it took care not to make them the whole of marriage, and neither must we. Richard Baxter, in A Christian Directory (1673), calls it “no small mercy to be the parents of a godly seed; and this is the end of the institution of marriage,” citing Malachi 2:15.[10] Yet asked in the very same work whether the elderly and infertile may marry, he answered yes without hesitation, “because there are other lawful ends of marriage, as mutual help and comfort.”[11]

Both halves of Baxter must be held together, and they guard against opposite errors. Against the modern reduction of marriage to companionship alone, he insists that the begetting of a godly seed is a true end of the institution. Against any harshness that would make procreation the measure of a marriage’s worth, he insists that a union which cannot bear children is fully a marriage still, with mutual help and comfort as ends sufficient in themselves. The couple who cannot have children have lost nothing of the estate God gave them; the couple who will not, by treating fertility itself as the hazard, have quietly exchanged one of its goods for a fear. The distinction is not between the fertile and the infertile — one is no more holy than the other — but between a heart that receives the gift and a heart that has learned to fear it.

5. Parents are stewards of an eternal soul

The vision reaches its height not in the having of children but in the raising of them. Jonathan Edwards pressed the family’s purpose one step further than mere fruitfulness: “Every Christian family ought to be as it were a little church, consecrated to Christ, and wholly influenced and governed by his rules,” with family education and order among “the chief means of grace.”[12] A household exists to raise worshippers — which presumes there are children in it to raise, and that raising them for God is among the highest works a marriage performs.

Cotton Mather, writing in 1710 a manual for a woman awaiting childbirth, opened not with reassurance but with Paul’s word that the younger women should “marry, bear children” (1 Timothy 5:14), and told her it would be “a very blameable Indecency and Indiscretion” to be dissatisfied with her pregnancy, and “too Unnatural” to complain of a state into which “the Laws of Nature established by God” had brought her.[13] Andrew Murray opened his book on Christian parenthood with Genesis 1:28 and tied the bearing of children directly to inheriting the promise made to Abraham: “the fruit of our body is to be the heir of Your promise.”[14]

At conception God entrusts to a mother and father a human being who will outlive the stars. Parents do not own their children; they are stewards charged to receive them, protect them, provide for them, and raise them in the fear of the Lord (Proverbs 22:6; Ephesians 6:4). That stewardship begins at conception, not at birth. To put the life of a newly conceived child at risk for the sake of comfort or convenience is therefore not a private choice within the parents’ rights. It is a failure of the first and most basic duty God gives to parents — the duty to receive and to guard the very life He has entrusted to them.

6. A positive vision: openness, trust, and life-affirming planning

It is not enough to name what the modern posture gets wrong; the tradition offers something better in its place, and it is worth stating positively. The Christian home is meant to be marked by an openness to life that rests, at bottom, on trust in the sovereignty of a good God — the God who “opens the womb” and “closes the womb” (Genesis 29:31; 1 Samuel 1:5), who numbers our days and knows our children before they are formed (Psalm 139:16; Jeremiah 1:5). To receive children as He gives them is not recklessness; it is faith, the same faith that governs every other area of a Christian’s life, applied here.

This does not mean that a couple may never, in wisdom and prayer, have reason to space the children God gives — through seasons of illness, hardship, or genuine need. Scripture does not lay down a rule of numbers, and this treatise lays down none. But there is a great difference between a couple who, trusting God, order their family prayerfully and by means that do not put a conceived life at risk, and a couple who have absorbed the surrounding creed that fertility is a problem to be switched off for twenty years and children a threat to a chosen life. The former is Christian freedom exercised in faith; the latter is the spirit of the age wearing the language of responsibility. Where there is real cause to wait, methods that work with the body God designed and that carry no risk to a conceived child are available, and they call a husband and wife to the patience, honesty, and self-control that are themselves fruits of the Spirit, not deprivations.

7. What this treatise asks

It asks for the recovery of a posture, not the imposition of a rule. A tradition that defines marriage partly by the increase of mankind, that calls children a heritage and barrenness a trial, that tells a pregnant woman it would be unnatural to resent her condition, and that charges parents with the stewardship of an eternal soul from the moment of conception — such a tradition cannot be squared with treating fertility as a hazard to be neutralised for the whole of one’s childbearing years.

To move from that world to ours is not to grow more compassionate. It is to have quietly accepted a smaller vision of marriage, of children, and of ourselves. The plea of this series about the conceived child is, at bottom, a plea to recover this larger vision — to receive again, as gift, what our fathers in the faith received as gift, and to guard it as they did.

References

1. John Calvin, Commentary on Genesis, Vol. 1, on Genesis 1:28 (1554; trans. John King, 1847). https://www.blueletterbible.org/Comm/calvin_john/Gen/Gen01.cfm
2. Martin Luther, The Estate of Marriage (1522), trans. W. I. Brandt. https://pages.uoregon.edu/dluebke/Reformations441/LutherMarriage.htm
3. Westminster Confession of Faith (1646), ch. 24.2. https://opc.org/wcf.html
4. Second London Baptist Confession (1689), ch. 25.2. https://www.the1689confession.com/1689/chapter-25
5. William Gouge, Of Domesticall Duties (1622), Treatise II. https://quod.lib.umich.edu/e/eebo/A68107.0001.001 ; modernised text at https://www.monergism.com/thethreshold/sdg/gouge/Domestical%20Duties%20-%20William%20Gouge.pdf
6. Augustine, On Marriage and Concupiscence, Book I, ch. 57 (c. AD 419–420), Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Series I, Vol. 5. https://ccel.org/ccel/schaff/npnf105/npnf105.x.iii.lvii.html
7. John Chrysostom, Homily 21 on Ephesians (c. AD 391), trans. Roth & Anderson, On Marriage and Family Life (St Vladimir’s Seminary Press); older translation at https://www.newadvent.org/fathers/230121.htm
8. C. H. Spurgeon, The Treasury of David, on Psalm 127:3. https://www.blueletterbible.org/Comm/spurgeon_charles/tod/ps127.cfm
9. Matthew Henry, Commentary on the Whole Bible, on Genesis 30:1–2 (1706–1710). https://ccel.org/ccel/henry/mhc1.Gen.xxx.html
10. Richard Baxter, A Christian Directory (1673), Part II, “Directions About Marriage.” https://www.gutenberg.org/files/43800/43800-h/43800-h.htm
11. Richard Baxter, A Christian Directory (1673), Part II, question on the marriage of the aged. Same source as ref. 10.
12. Jonathan Edwards, A Farewell Sermon (preached 1750; published 1751). https://www.gutenberg.org/files/34632/34632-h/34632-h.htm
13. Cotton Mather, Elizabeth in Her Holy Retirement (Boston, 1710). https://quod.lib.umich.edu/cgi/t/text/text-idx?cc=evans;c=evans;idno=n01226.0001.001;node=N01226.0001.001:3;seq=32;view=text;rgn=div1
14. Andrew Murray, The Children for Christ (1887), “First Day.” https://www.biblestudytools.com/classics/murray-children-christ/

A note on sources. Every quotation above has been traced to a freely accessible primary text, or, where a modern translation is under copyright (ref. 7), to the primary edition cited alongside a public-domain translation. We have taken particular care to quote Baxter in full on both sides — that children are an end of marriage, and that a marriage without them is a marriage still — because a tradition quoted only on one side is a tradition misrepresented. We have likewise noted Chrysostom’s higher valuation of continence, so that he is not made to say more than he said.