Oliver O’Donovan, Professor of Christian Ethics and Practical Theology at the School of Divinity, New College, University of Edinburgh, is a prominent evangelical ethicist in Britain. In 1977 he penned a discussion paper on marriage and the family for the second National Evangelical Anglican Congress. At a time of falling birth rates, owing to the increased availability of contraception and the impact of feminism, O’Donovan warned against viewing parenthood as an inconvenience. Those who marry should be open to children; closing the door on parenthood implies a selfish view of married love.

If it is a virtue of our contraceptive age that it can free modern couples from the brutally sudden plunge into pregnancy that their predecessors knew, it may be its drawback that the timid can tremble nervously on the brink for too long.1 Without returning to an un-biblical exaltation of parenthood as the primary glory of marriage, we may need to reaffirm the understanding that it is an integral part of that glory. To enter marriage should presuppose an openness to this good, when and as it is safe and wise to accept it. A decision to regard parenthood as an inconvenience to be avoided would close the door, not to an experience incidental to marriage, but to one central aspect of it, and this in turn would have implications for the couple’s openness to the other aspects. What is at stake is not the brute fact of physical procreation itself, but that married love should be outward-looking.2
 
Footnotes:
 
1  See Kairos Journal article, “Contraceptive Culture.”
 
2  Oliver O’Donovan, “Marriage and the Family,” in Obeying Christ in a Changing World, of The Changing World, vol. 3, ed. Bruce Kaye (Glasgow: Fountain Books, 1977): 94-114, quoting at p. 99.
 
adopted from Karios Journal

First Baptist Church of Perryville is located at 4800 W. Pulaski Hwy., 1 and 1/2 miles east of Rt. 222