[Concerning Gen. 29:17] “The other concern might come from more conservative and prudish Christians, who are embarrassed that the Bible records the fact that Rachel was built like a brick house. ‘That’s not very . . . well, biblical.’ But actually the Bible sets the standard of what is biblical and what is not. The …
Addiction Is Behavior
“But medical consequences, however terrible, do not make a disease. Many mountaineers break their legs or get frostbite, but mountaineering is not a disease . . . to conceive of opiate addiction as a disease seems, after my experience with thousands of drug addicts, to me to miss the fundamental point about it: that it …
Or Soteriology Perhaps?
“The courting relationship should be handled carefully by Christians because it is a volatile sexual relationship. The fact that it is unconsummated does not keep it from being sexual. When a young many approaches a girl’s father, there is no sense anyone pretending that something platonic or spiritual is happening. ‘Mr. Smith, may I have …
And It Would Be Hard to Find Anything Less Original
“In Europe as well as in North America, art no longer creates beauty but is meant to shock. Horror, violence, sexual behavior of all kinds, and even bowel and bladder functions are presented on stage and screen and hailed by critics as brilliant and original” (Harold O.J. Brown, The Sensate Culture, p. 240-241).
Real Trophy Wives
“In our society, women are repeatedly told ad nauseam, by those periodic packaged lies called women’s magazines, that it is their responsibility to deck themselves out in such a way that they ‘keep’ their man. A woman may be able to do this successfully in her twenties, and then have to work a little harder …
So Preach as Though There Were Men Standing in the Back Waiting to Arrest You
“The hallmark of the apostolic method of preaching was boldness. Again and again as we read Luke’s account we are arrested by the power and boldness that characterized the way in which the gospel was proclaimed by those early preachers . . . This characteristic boldness is all the more striking when we compare it …
But Then It Didn’t
“A variant that was not sent down from the top was ‘the revolution of the sixties,’ a sort of Rousseauist hope that by destroying the ‘hypocrisy’ of petty bourgeois, Christian-tinged morality and conventions, a new ‘Age of Aquarius’ would drop down out of somewhere” (Harold O.J. Brown, The Sensate Culture, p. 229).
In Other Words, No More Than a Quarter Inch Deep
[Speaking of 1 Peter 3:3] “Women in the Roman world used to really ‘crank up the volume’ in their personal appearance. The problem addressed by Peter is not hair-arrangements in themselves, or the perfidy of pony-tails. No, Peter is directing his attention to women who were ostentatious, making a display of themselves. The women of …
Anything Goes But That
“The most eminent American universities have become centers where sexual license and depravity are praised and the only conduct that meets with official rebuke is open disapproval of immorality” (Harold O.J. Brown, The Sensate Culture, p. 207).
Sickly Recluse Is Right
“We were fully in the modern age; the primitiveness and squalor of the Middle Ages had been left behind. The poet Swinburne proclaimed, ‘Glory to man in the highest, for man is the maker of things. Whitman sang of himself, and Nietzsche, a sickly recluse, wrote ecstatically of the Superman” (Harold O.J. Brown, The Sensate …