Tried With Fire

~ Picking up where I left off yesterday in my review of Sex, Dating and Relationships (SDR)... Hiestand and Thomas spend several chapters discussing the current dating paradigm. They argue that the Christian subculture, not the Bible, has invented this new category, the Dating Relationship , in addition to those of Family, Neighbor, and Marriage. There is no ambiguity in Scriptures regarding purity for the previous three. But there is potential for great confusion: for when we invent our own category of male-female relationships, we are forced to invent our own purity guidelines for that category. But inventing our own moral guidelines has never gone well for humanity (think of what happened when Adam and Eve tried it, in Genesis 3, for example). 1 In addition, they discuss several pitfalls of the dating relationship including: ~ A false sense of security and commitment - "In the end, the commitment of a dating relationship is simply the commitment to inform the othe...

I started reading  Sex, Dating, and Relationships: A Fresh Approach   (SDR) by Gerald Hiestand and Jay Thomas on the strength of Kevin DeYoung's reference in Hole in Our Holiness . I was not disappointed. Finally! A book on courtship/dating and relationships that is rooted in the gospel. The authors wrote this book out of concern for the confused views of purity among believers. One attitude can be, "As long as I don't have sex before marriage, I can decide for myself what the boundaries are because the Bible doesn't specify them." On the opposite end of the spectrum are lists of do's and don'ts, heavy on moralistic legalism but short on gospel.  Hiestand and Thomas believe there is a better, biblical, God-glorifying way than either of those camps. In SDR, they begin with what the Bible clearly states: Marriage and the one-flesh union point to a greater reality - Christ's union with His church. This is no less than a picture of the gospel. It i...

Apocalyptic romance, that is. I had never heard of the phrase "apocalyptic romance" until Tim Keller mentioned it in this interview . The term comes from The Denial of Death by Ernest Becker who proposed that "When you take God out of the culture, you have got to put something in His place. Apocalyptic romance was one of the ways people aspire to transcendence. So instead of salvation, romance is going to solve everything." Although I would never have owned that romance was going to solve everything, I believed and practiced it. It's easy to do if you over-romanticize the analogy between Christ's relationship with the church and marriage. Omitting the whole counsel of God on subjects like human depravity and progressive sanctification also helps to foster this pie-in-the-sky view. I would have continued in this vein, until my marriage exploded as a result of this self-fueled time bomb. Initially, it's intoxicating to believe you've found the o...

I've been listening to a great talk from the 2012 Shepherds' Conference : Help! I Can't Find Dating in My Bible - How to guide singles through the fog of romantic relationship by Austin Duncan, pastor of college ministry at Grace Community Church. Although the conference and this talk is geared toward pastors, I've found it very helpful as a parent of a teen. Pastor Duncan concentrated on the bigger picture rather than focusing on the how-to's of dating or courtship,. (In fact, he deliberately steered clear of defining those terms.) A large section of his talk was devoted to distinguishing between principles and practice. There are Biblical principles - purity, purpose, and the people involved. These principles don't change regardless of the time in which we live or the place where we live, but how they are implemented may be different. As an example, the command for a husband to love his wife is non-negotiable, but the practice of this command is not uniform...

UPDATE:  Here's the  followup article  from World.  I like how they stress the importance of the local church as a necessary source of help and counsel on this issue. Has anyone read the World magazine article, Boy Meets Girl ? As a mom of a teen girl, the topics of dating, courtship, and marriage have been the subjects of some very healthy conversations. I do not advocate casual dating that's "I find you attractive with no more thought than the moment, so let's get involved, potentially physically, and put ourselves in the way of sexual temptation."  Neither do I endorse "Everyone else is dating, so I should do it or else I will look like a complete loser." Yet reading the article, it seems that the courtship model has it's own drawbacks particularly the pressure of all or nothing -- going from being completely uninvolved to being virtually engaged.  It makes me wonder how much of this paradigm is based on the myth of The One ? Since  I K...