A lecturer in Christian ethics, Michael Hill wrote The How and Why of Love in 2002 to explain how God, through his word, explains and changes and lifts our everyday relationships. It’s a book that has formed a kind of common language for ethics among evangelical Christians. Now, he’s done the same for marriage. The Heart of Marriage is a book born of some annoyance with other marriage books. But it’s more: it arises from Michael’s growing conviction that our wider community—and therefore many Christians—no longer understands marriage. We’ve forgotten what it is, what we’re doing, what it’s for, and how to proceed in it.

The book’s antidote to this problem is signaled in its subtitle: loving your spouse with a Christian mind. Hill believes that a mind tutored and shaped by God’s unveiling of who we are, gives us a different way for marriage than the poverty stricken slogans of our culture.

There is no other book on marriage like this one. It is threaded with scholarship: we see moments where the arcane world of biblical scholarship is put to very good use. It gives a basic primer in biblical anthropology—that is, in the Bible’s unexpected way of describing what it is to be human. It uses biblical theology: rather than plucking out isolated texts and pressing them into service, Hill works with the whole counsel of God, the entire story arc of the Bible. It exhibits philosophical nuance, as he makes distinctions that helpfully change our thinking.

But all of those big-sounding things are very readable. He visits them with a light touch, using crisp sentences. And it’s woven with stories and examples. It’s a book that is good for anyone who can read at a senior-high level.

Hill has a very direct writing-style that may at first seem unusual. Nowadays, in most books, it is as if the writer has to seduce you into reading, as if we’re having a chatty conversation in the same room. Hill does that a bit, but on the whole, he simply states what he thinks, then moves on. He parks facts in your mind, makes claims, and is then onto the next bit. I think it is a style that will especially appeal to some men. I’ll be interested to see what women make of it, and many of us might find it a little jarring at first.

But once you are used to his style, the book builds and gathers pace and peaks in the closing chapters. Unlike those books where the writer gets tired and runs out of ideas toward the end, this book ends with a crescendo of what true love looks like.

Throughout, you find how your whole person is a body as well as a soul and a spirit—packaged as an ‘inner’ and an ‘outer’ person—and how marriage is about giving the whole of that self for the good of the other. You’ll find an explanation of ‘headship’ that has a surprising twist. You’ll find what love really is: one of my favourite sections (ch. 10) tours us through the teaching of Paul and James in the Bible. They tutor us in the how to love, by learning several ‘virtues’, that is, a set of tendencies that uphold the good of the other. There’s a great discussion of how it’s important for a spouse to feel love, but how that exercise would be mere deception if not backed by actual love. All of this is a welcome reply to the conceits that we’re only ‘in love’ if we both feel romantic.

The book places sex in its context. Rather than the sad modern obsession with toys and pleasure and aspirations inspired by porn, we learn that married sexuality is the outer person’s expression of the inner person’s love for the other. It’s a self-giving love. There is a short but helpful engagement with the notion of same sex marriage, and you’ll find why Hill thinks another well-known Christian author is quite mistaken in his teaching on sex within marriage.

In short, this is a book by the best kind of expert. Hill is deeply informed, but he also lives what he teaches. He has a pastoral heart, loves his wife, and loves Jesus. I think it’s required reading if you are married, or seek to help the married, or want to be married. Read it even if you are single, as part of your honouring of marriage (Heb. 13:4).

The Heart of Marriage is published by Aquila Press.

Andrew Cameron is Director of the Centre for Christian Living, Moore College, Sydney.