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21 " The badlands have no positive meaning or place within our culture’s romantic narrative. In this romantic paradigm, we are tempted as modern Christians to irrigate the wilderness out of season with an endless conveyor belt of best-selling Christian books promising a “Better You” or “Your Best Life Now.” Yet the waste places in our lives play a legitimate role in our spiritual, moral, and sexual formation. It is in the badlands where our fantasies die, where our vision is clarified, and where we come to rely on God. "
― Jonathan Grant , Divine Sex: A Compelling Vision for Christian Relationships in a Hypersexualized Age
22 " Story and testimony are critical to human formation because they resonate with our essential nature as desiring creatures.23 In contrast to propositional information, narrative knowledge—that is, the sort of understanding embedded in a story—is a more complex and comprehensive way of encountering truth. By appealing to the imagination, it engages the whole person. "
23 " Sex matters because it involves one’s whole self. It is a uniquely holistic act that provides the closest analogue we have for God’s own intimacy within the Trinity and our spiritual union with God. Sex outside biblical boundaries does not necessarily involve greater guilt than other forms of boundary crossing, but it does involve us more intimately. Sex is unique because it reaches closer to our core than anything else. "
24 " It is ordained as an all-consuming act of union between committed lovers that points toward our bonding with God himself. It is little wonder that our enemy has sought to trivialize and empty sex of its depth and significance. The role of sex both as a bonding agent among lovers and as a sacramental window onto the kingdom of heaven makes it a key battleground for Christian formation. "
25 " The fundamental principle underlying Scripture’s preservation of sex within marriage is that there is no such thing as real sex outside of marriage. Sex is marriage, or else it is self-annihilation. Although sex outside of marriage often feels like a powerful bond, it simply cannot carry the weight of this deeper commitment and is prone to a manipulative dynamic by which it is “traded” rather than “shared. "
26 " Whereas in the Old Testament the primary community was the immediate family, which was based on a sexual bond, in the New Testament the essential community becomes not the genetic family but the spiritual one—the household of God.44 Indeed, the church (rather than marriage) is actually the New Testament’s highest form of community in this age, as well as a foretaste of our future life together—the eschatological wedding feast. "
27 " The telling truth about many Christian seminaries and graduate schools is that when you dig below the surface, you will find a wide range of deep personal issues that are not being addressed as part of preparation for pastoral ministry. The problem is not that these issues exist but that we are doing so little to address them. We offer men’s groups and counseling services, but only as voluntary add-ons rather than as core institutional priorities. Success is ultimately judged by academic precision rather than progress toward Christlikeness, even when we are careful to couch success in terms of the latter. "
28 " Compared with legalism, the Christian vision of sexuality is less like putting out “Do Not Walk on the Grass” signs and more like marking out the boundaries of a field so that the game of life can be played well and with conviction. Staying within the boundaries is not our primary focus, but it makes the game possible. "
29 " The secret of all genuine human desire is that God, not humans, is the source of love. It is he who loves in and through us. "
30 " The fallacy at the heart of the modern world is the conviction that we are free to do whatever we want. The truth is that we are deeply influenced by secular scripts that subtly shape our vision of life and our deepest desires. We are not, it turns out, as free as we think. "
31 " As we spend increasingly more time “connecting” with each other online, it raises the question of whether social media is stimulating genuine relationships or just simulating them. Are we sharing our lives with others, or are we just broadcasting them? Are we learning the rhythms of intimacy, or are we too busy pleasing the adoring crowd? "
32 " The Christian conviction is that in sex we express a desire to join with another person in a deep and complex interweaving as “embodied souls and ensouled bodies,” to borrow Karl Barth’s expression. The complementary nature of male and female sexuality, as a composite image of God, provides both the drive and direction to express our full humanity, meaning that we are drawn beyond ourselves to each other because of our God-ordained differences.6 "
33 " Sexual intimacy engages our whole selves in a complex way that we cannot fully account for. Undermining the gravity of sex trivializes what sex symbolizes and weakens the bond it consummates—the loving, exclusive, and permanent union between a man and woman in marriage. This plays into the contingent nature of many relationships, which are sustained only if they continue to satisfy each party in the narrow terms of emotional, physical, and psychological happiness. "