In order to do a better job defending marriage we have to do a better job defining it. What is marriage anyway? Because false understandings of marriage are common, even among conservative Christians, we are frequently caught flatfooted when it comes to things like the gay marriage debate. A marriage requires two components or elements. …
Even If You Use a Spatula
Lust is a demand for a finite thing to provide what only the infinite can actually provide. God has placed eternity in our hearts (Ecc. 3:11, ESV), and that God-shaped vacuum — to use Pascal’s phrase for it — can only be filled by the infinite torrential waterfall that is the triune God. He is …
And No Potato
In these days of rising pomosexuality, the latest move is to challenge the very idea of a sexual identity in the first place. But this notion does not get laughed to scorn (in the way, say, that a fundamentalist would if he told a homosexual activist that all he needed to do was “find a …
Sexual Sanity
I would like to drive as much traffic as I can to this review of the new IVP book, The End of Sexual Identity. The book is by Jenell Paris, and is reviewed by Peter Jones. The sooner we understand that every worldview has a sexual expression, and that every sexual act is a disrobed …
Sojourning in Hate
Jim Wallis of Sojourners magazine, a leftist evangelical outfit, got into a bit of a spot when the magazine declined to take an ad designed to help churches and clergy become more gay affirming. The pickle is described here, and Wallis explains himself here. The explanation offered by Wallis is a verbal attempt to build …
A Waffle Way Too Big for the Plates at IHOP
The Bayly brothers have helpfully provided a portion of a transcript in which Tim Keller is being interviewed, and is asked about what the church’s approach to homosexuality should be. Presented with this golden opportunity, I am afraid that Keller whiffed it. He says that a truly biblical response is not to be found among …
Networked Cowardice and Corruption
Zondervan is releasing a new edition of the Bible, and what else is new? But as we keep making advances in semiotic contextualizations, we have now learned how to make the Bible even more accessible to middle America, which is of course where all the Bible buyers are. Take, for example, this problem passage: “The …
Grim and Deadly
Some people see the whole chessboard, and some people don’t. Some people want to know what would be so unChristian about moving that pawn right there to that other spot, while others understand what the Scriptures teach (authoritatively) about the whole game. InterVarsity is in the middle of capitulating on the issue of sodomy, which …
Understanding Bad Words
Here are the notes for a talk to the NSA student body . . . “Let all bitterness, and wrath, and anger, and clamour, and evil speaking, be put away from you, with all malice: And be ye kind one to another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, even as God for Christ’s sake hath forgiven you” …
Like Scarsdale
A denial of Hell is the very apex of short term thinking. Living your life here and now as though eternity matters is the epitome of long term thinking. And once these fundamental “mentalities” have set in, it is not long before you start to see other manifestations of them. Deferred gratification is essential to …