Tag: marriage
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Biblical Submission vs. Mutual Submission
A note on a wife’s submission to her husband: Egalitarians push the concept of “mutual submission” based on Ephesians 5:21. The grammatical problems with this way of reading that text have been pointed out many times by the better commentators. The egalitarian reading of the text is a novel interpretation. It’s a reading of the…
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Notes on Nature
[This is from an email discussion back in 2018.] In the aftermath of Obergefell, I wrote a paper that deals at least in a cursory way with nature, natural law, and sexual perversion. I also explore why appeals to nature are sometimes effective and sometimes not. See pages 2-16 of this essay:http://trinity-pres.net/essays/obergefellandamericaswarongod.pdf About the same…
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Notes on Family, Men, Women, Marriage, Sex, Feminism, Mothering and Fathering, Inheritance, Etc.
The purpose of marriage according to Ephesians 5 is ultimately gospel symbolism. The husband and wife are icons of Christ the church. But they can only portray the gospel in their marriage if there is role differentiation between them. They each have a script, a part to play, and while there is all kinds of…
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Dabney and Lewis on Feminism
R. L. Dabney slinging red pill insights on intersexual dynamics in 1871: “This suggests a third consequence, which some of the advocates of the movement even already are bold enough to foreshadow. “Women’s Rights” mean the abolition of all permanent marriage ties. We are told that Mrs. Cady Stanton avowed this result, proclaiming it at…
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Sex that Sticks: Fornication, Divorce, and Purity Culture
The purity culture movement of the 1990s was kind of a mess. I was never in church circles where it was popular (I graduated high school in ‘91 right before it became a thing anyway) and by the time I had kids of my own, it had kind of died out in evangelicalism – and…
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1 Corinthians 7:14
How should we understand the holiness of the unbelieving spouse and children in 7:12-16? This is a complex issue on which good Christians can and will continue to disagree. Some commentators assume that the holiness in the two cases has to be precisely analogous. On this reading, the holiness in view is probably best construed…
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Notes on Grounds for Divorce
No-fault divorce is a horrific tragedy that has allowed far too many spouses to destroy their families when they should have been pressured to work things out. We should strive to reform civil laws and family courts to more closely approximate God’s design for marriage, including its permanence. Marriage is entered into with vows, “til…
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The Folk Wisdom of Country Music
I’ve written several posts over the last year or so that invoke country music as a source of folk wisdom. A few examples: — We need more dads like the one Ashley McBryde sings about in her song “Bible and a .44.” Great song, with a great vision of fatherhood. — “Well, you know what’s…
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Notes on Divorce – A Discussion from X
If you are a Christian in an unhappy marriage and you believe you have just and biblical grounds for divorce, you need to seek out your session’s counsel and submit to their judgment in the matter. You cannot grant yourself grounds for divorce. Neither your counselor nor therapist has any authority to grant you grounds…
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Sexual Obligation in Marriage — An Interpretative Paraphrase of 1 Corinthians 7:1-9
This is an interpretive paraphrase/rewriting of 1 Corinthians 7:1-9, a key text on marital sexuality. If Paul had elaborated and explained himself more fully in these verses, I think he would have said something like this: [1] You wrote to me, “It is good for a man to not touch – that is, to not…
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