Why does our doctrine of forgiveness and healing often cause so much pain? We’re told the problem is our hearts, that we’re just bitter. But what if it’s not that? What if our teaching on forgiveness has gotten things all wrong? This week, on the podcast, I introduced...
Forgiveness is a concept that has often been weaponized against victims. Whether it's people married to abusers, or people married to someone who has cheated on them or hurt them in some other way, often in the church as long as that person apologizes, the onus is now...
Separate but equal has been tried and failed. So why is the church still using the same arguments about gender? It's International Women's Day, and I thought I'd sum up some of what we said in a podcast yesterday, combined with some great input you all gave me on...
What if the current Christian sexual ethic isn’t working? One of the big things to come out of our work evaluating the effects of purity culture is that our sexual ethic, the things that we taught teens about sex, is falling short. The way we’re teaching about sex is...
Are we ignoring the Bible when it comes to sex? As Bare Marriage and our books are getting better known, it’s inevitable that pastors and authors who are wedded to the view of sex that centers on male entitlement and female objectification will start to push back....
One of the last places in Western society that is openly and proudly sexist is the conservative Christian church. I find this quite infuriating. Other places may end up acting in a sexist way, but when push comes to shove, they’d have to deny it or make it right, or...
John MacArthur thinks men save women from unfulfilled lives. I recently saw a meme on social media of a terrible take by John MacArthur who was insinuating that just as Christ is our savior, so the husband is the wife’s savior. And that is just a terribly blasphemous...
How do egalitarian and complementarian seminaries differ in how they do gender? Stained Glass Ceilings by Lisa Weaver Swartz is a fascinating book. She interviewed people at two different seminaries--Asbury Seminary and Southern Baptist Theological Seminary--to see...
The ESV is a sexist Bible translation. And they even said that when they were translating it! It was commissioned in order to counteract the TNIV translation, which tried to be gender neutral in all places where the Greek was gender neutral, replacing words like "men"...
What happens to marriage when a couple becomes egalitarian? On our October 5th Bare Marriage podcast episode (episode 208), I had a fascinating conversation with pastor Terran Williams and learned about how he changed his mind on complementarianism. He was working at...
Terran Williams is a pastor whose life was upended when he was assigned a "simple" task. He was working at a large church in South Africa when he was assigned the task of writing up their position paper on complementarianism. They all believed it, but they didn't...
Has sex ever become super disgusting to you? I sure hope not, but as we’ve been talking about obligation sex in our current series, I’ve had several comments along those lines, and I’d like to talk about this one in particular today. A woman wrote:I have no idea how...
Biblical manhood can't be separated from actual biblical men. There's so much talk about "biblical manhood" and "biblical womanhood", and it's all rather crazy. Most of the things that we consider "biblical womanhood" aren't actually demonstrated by any of the...
Do complementarian men make the best husbands? Last June and July I was really burned out. I had been engaging in a Twitter back and forth with Nancy Pearcey, the author of the new book The Toxic War on Masculinity. Her thesis is a simple one: "The happiest of all...
How do you have a Christian marriage? And is a healthy Christian marriage different from a healthy marriage of two non-Christians? I had this comment after our podcast last week looking at the quest for a biblical marriage:You guys do a wonderful job showing what...