I think anything that casts marriage in a positive light and gives even the slightest encouragement is to be lauded to the nth degree. After almost a generation of attacks on traditional marriage and family on every front, it is with almost desperate breath that we greet such attempts to resuscitate covenanted love as the movie Fireproof attempts to do.
In watching the movie I certainly found much encouragement for my own journey to grow, deepen, and perhaps even grasp marital love.
However, (unless I fell asleep and missed it) I couldn't help but notice the movie's complete silence about Caleb and Catherine's childlessness.
According to the story line, the couple had been married seven years. A normal couple, Christian or not, would have had at least one child by then. Given the Christian production of the film, it would seem logical that at least either infertility or selfishness would have been addressed. Neither was.
Barrenness due to personal selfishness would have been consistent with the story and could have been easily linked to the devolution of the couple's relationship.
Sure, the movie begins with the marriage already gone bad, and one can easily assume that Caleb and Catherine are no longer having marital relations. But one can also assume that there had to be at least a few years where they were having normal relations, and that barring infertility, the couple was closed to life.
The couple's barrenness would have been totally understandable given the non-covenanted marriage that Caleb and Catherine had. But it is not understandable given the professed Christianity of those who wrote and made the movie.
"Be fruitful and multiply" was not a suggestion. At some point I would have thought that the authors would have worked it in if only to show that the couple's denial of God's will in this regard contributed to the demise of the marriage. But of course this assumes that infertility was not the issue. But now we'll never know.
Oh well.
