The Little Friar

Johann Christoph Arnold's Sex, God & Marriage is a beautiful book, filled with pastoral wisdom for the Church.  As a pastor, I regularly search for those texts that might be used in marriage counseling with couples, in pre-martial counseling, and with teens and pre-teens in the Church.  Sex, God & Marriage meets all those needs, and more. In a world dominated by broken relationships and loneliness, Arnold offers a biblical vision of community, of wholeness, of sexuality, and of marriage.  He provides pastoral insight into biblical traditions of purity and vulnerability.  And his wisdom addresses so many questions -- from sexual temptation to homosexuality, from how to answer the question of whether or not to marry to parenting, from divorce to remarriage. He also has a pastoral wisdom about sensitive issues that often go unaddressed in other texts that I've used in the past -- particularly things like the perverseness of sex even within a marriage....

I've been thinking about this for a long time recently.  Because, to be honest, so few of we pastors ever deal with the real tragedies to our selves and our relationships (and even our marriages) that pornography creates.   So, let me go on the record and be clear:   Porn is bad .   I say this not because I'm a prude or a kill-joy.  I say this because the research backs me up, my counseling experience confirms the research, and I've seen too many wives ask me with tears in their eyes, "Why does he watch this, when I'm just in the next room?  Does this mean he'll be cheating on me now?" This post is my attempt to set out, once and for all, why we Christians don't watch porn.  And some book resources to work toward healing.   What is porn , first? The Greek word  porneia  (πορνεία) means "sexual immorality".  It's the word from which we get our concept of  porn.   Pornography is the depiction of "sexual immorality".  Im...

Quite a bit of my time recently has been spent in a variety of contexts counseling. And one of the most important aspects of counseling -- the process of Christian care -- is to stand with another and simply say, "I love you". It's hard to believe in the love of God unless human beings stand before us as signs, representatives, sacraments and ambassadors of God's love.  When we Christians say "I love you" to another, we're not simply expressing the warmth of an emotion.  We're also demonstrating God's mercy, grace and forgiveness.  It's hard to experience the mercy of God.  It's hard to feel forgiven.  And the church doesn't help much with this.  As Dietrich Bonhoeffer writes in  Life Together  in the church "we are not allowed to be sinners": For the pious community permits no one to be a sinner.  Hence all have to conceal their sins from themselves and from the community.  We are not allowed to be sinners.  Many Christians...