Love, Marriage, and Family: Learning from the Early Christians

Family planning, sexual relationships, divorce, and remarriage. These are issues that modern Christians navigate within society; they also happen to be issues that the earliest Christians faced.

The Rev. Dr. Erkki Koskenniemi dives into the New Testament world of Christians in non-Christian cultures, showing how early believers were most obviously different from their Gentile neighbors in matters of family and sexuality. He encourages readers to hold fast to biblical truth like the Christians before them, even when they are the odd ones out in society.

Koskenniemi explores the historical context of Christian sexual morality in easily understandable terms. New Testament-era documents and earlier Jewish texts paint a picture of how Christians have persevered amid secular and pagan neighbors. The countercultural morals of Christianity are built upon thousands of years of similar struggles by Jews in Gentile areas, from Joseph fleeing Potiphar's wife in the book of Genesis to the prophet Malachi condemning adultery.

Koskenniemi addresses Christian morality versus Roman/Greek worldviews, which Paul wrote about in letters like 1 and 2 Corinthians. For example, Romans and Greeks permitted men to have premarital and extramarital sex, but Christians confined sex to marriage. Romans and Greeks would kill or abandon their unwanted newborns, but Christians forbade the practice and saved many abandoned children.

Reflection questions after each chapter are great for individual or group use, and a final application chapter draws connections between early Christianity and the modern day. Readers will be encouraged to learn from Christians before them, teach the truth to the next generation, and enlighten their communities.