Category Archives: Family & Society

God’s good design for men and woman

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It is sometimes thought that in Genesis chapters 1 and 2 we have two entirely separate and self-contained creation accounts, so different as to be incompatible.

But they are neither contradictory accounts, nor carbon copies of one another.

Claire Smith discusses the similarities and differences most helpfully:

When we look at these two accounts we see there is sameness and difference. They are not conflicting accounts, but they are not carbon copies either. Each makes its own distinctive contribution.…

Toward a biblical theology of sexuality

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Leaving, for the moment, specific issues to one side, what does the big picture of sexuality in the Bible look like?

What follows is based on Ian Paul’s helpful overview (here and here).

1. Sex is God-given

The church has often struggled with this, partly because earlier generations have assumed that 1 Cor 7:1 (‘It is good for a man not to touch a woman’) represented Paul’s own view (rather than that of his correspondents). …

Nine arguments for a ‘non-affirming’ position on same-sex relations

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Preston Sprinkle provides the following summary of his argument in his 2015 book People To Be Loved: Why Homosexuality Is Not Just An Issue:

  1. The Bible talks a lot about marriage yet only affirms heterosexual marriages. This isn’t decisive in itself, but in Genesis 2 Eve’s femaleness seems to be a necessary prerequisite for her marriage to Adam – a marriage that becomes the prototype for all God-sanctioned marriages (Gen 2:24-25).
  2. Jesus highlights sexual difference in marriage, even when he didn’t need to (Mark 10).
…

What is transgender propaganda doing to our children?

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Sometimes, we need to move from the general to the particular, from statistics to personal experience, to really feel the impact of the ‘sexual revolution’.

Denny Burk quotes the heartbreaking words of a mother whose daughter has ‘transitioned’:

Like any parent, I felt betrayed when I found out a pediatric endocrinologist, someone who knows how powerful our bodies’ natural hormones are, would teach my 16-year old daughter to inject herself with testosterone, a primarily male hormone known and documented to have many horrible side effects on young girls including male pattern baldness, vaginal atrophy, infertility, and an increased risk of heart disease and cancer.…

‘The Lost Message of Paul’ – The neuropsychology of sin

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One of the strangest chapters in Steve Chalke’s The Lost Message of Paul is chapter 24 – ‘Wired’.  Strange because it doesn’t really belong in a book about Paul and his theology.  Also strange because one has to wonder how competent Chalke is to deal with some of the subject-matter of this chapter.

Let me see if I can make some sense of what he’s trying to say.

While we all tend excuse our own bad behaviour (we are good people affected by bad circumstances), we are much more ready to attribute others’ bad behaviour as due to failed personal morality (they are bad people). …

May we refer to God as ‘she’?

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Clearly, God is not ‘male’.  So should we not stop referring to God exclusively (or predominantly) as ‘he’?

The argument is that to refer to God with masculine language is to demean the dignity of women, to imply that they are less ‘godlike’ than men, and to perpetuate their subservient positions.

The solutions would be either to refer to God in both masculine and feminine language (in roughly equal proportions), or to use gender-neutral language when referring to the deity. …

‘It’s never going to happen. And when it does…’

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Rod Dreher’s ‘Law Of Merited Impossibility‘ is an epistemological construct governing the paradoxical way overclass opinion makers frame the discourse about the clash between religious liberty and gay civil rights. It is best summed up by the phrase, “It’s a complete absurdity to believe that Christians will suffer a single thing from the expansion of gay rights, and boy, do they deserve what they’re going to get.”’

Or, put more simply: ‘It’s never going to happen. …

A biblical critique of slavery

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It is often supposed that the Bible accepts without question the institution of slavery.  The implication is, of course, that the Bible is wrong, and that we now know better.

But does the Bible itself contain a critique of slavery?  Ian Paul thinks so, and offers the following texts for consideration:

Creation

Genesis 1:26f – God created human beings in his own image.  ‘In contrast to other ANE texts, there is a universality here to the image of God in humanity; it is not confined to one sector or class of humanity…This foundational text…offers a critique of any system which seeks to divide different groups of humanity into fundamentally distinct categories.’…

Don’t overspecify the biblical text!

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Mark Ward comments on the (otherwise excellent) conference speaker who, referring to Titus 2:4, said that because phileo is ‘friendship love’, it’s important for husbands and wives, and parents and children, to be friends.  Although there may well be some truth in this (Ward remarks), as far as the text in Titus is concerned, it is reading too much into the word; it is ‘overspecifying’ the text.  Husbands and wives are to be lovers, and not just friends. …