“Someone, and it may have been Gibbon, made merry over the fact that the church at the time of Athanasius was all roiled up over one little iota: the difference between homoousion and homoiousion. Of course, this is like saying that the debate between atheism and theism is really a debate over the letter a. …
A Form of Shallowness
“Imagine a competent physician, a general practitioner, well trained in medicine. He does well in his practice, but occasionally he comes up against a patient who knows very little about medicine, but knows an enormous amount about the particular ailment that troubles him. In other words, before coming to see the doctor, the patient has …
Wisdom is not Mechanical
“In other words, when the elders of a church are determining whether or not a new candidate is qualified for the office, they must be the type of men who are mature in judgment. They are discerning character, not counting rocks” (Fidelity, p. 159).
The Horizon is Really Quite Interesting
“If a man can’t go to the beach without sinning, then he should quit going to the beach. But if he has the self-discipline to spend a lot of time looking at the clouds, or gazing out to sea like the ancient mariner, then he can do that” (Fidelity, p. 150).
Striving to Lose
“The harm is that men are not faithful to hookers. Why should a Christian woman want to look like one? Why on earth would she want to resemble the kind of woman who is easy to use and easier to leave?” (Fidelity, pp. 142-143).
More Than Just Male
“In order to be sexually responsive, a wife needs to respect, on a fundamental level, the comprehensive masculinity of her husband. He must be a man, and not just a male. If he is aroused in the bedroom, that arousal must not make her resentment boil over — ‘Why can he not be aroused to …
No Competition
“Clearly a man who enjoys this kind of immense pleasure with his wife will have great difficulty turning elsewhere. A man sitting down to a steak dinner is unlikely to excuse himself in order to go eat some Ding Dongs he has stashed away in the closet. But a man facing yet another dinner of …
Six or Seven Blankets
“The lovemaking of this biblical couple [in the Song of Songs] is clearly not occuring in the dark under six or seven blankets. This couple is very open with one another and take a great sexual delight in their communion. This delight concentrates on specifics and is not just a general approval of sex, whatever …
The Entitlement
“An undisciplined man does not want to be troubled by such labors; he wants simply to follow his testosterone wherever it leads. If thrilling sex is there, he takes it. If it is not, he wonders ‘how come?’ Good sex is assumed to be something guaranteed to him by the Bill of Rights” (Fidelity, p. …
Sexually Marooned
“We have to take care that we do not combine our historical Protestant antipathy for the excesses of ascetic monks with our modernist compromises with every current sexual gospel, and then as a result conclude that the Bible could not possibly commend a life of celibacy. Most modern evangelicals know that the apostle Paul was …