Love Is More Than a Choice

This is a gentle pushback on a popular slogan.

There is truth in saying, “love is a choice” or “love is a decision.” It is true that if you don’t feel like doing good to your neighbor love will incline you to “choose” to do it anyway. If you feel like getting a divorce, love will incline you to “choose” to stay married and work it out.

If you shrink back from the pain of nails being driven through your hands, love will incline you to say, “Not my will but yours be done.” That’s the truth I hear in the statements: “Love is a choice,” or “Love is a decision.”

But I don’t prefer to use these statements. Too many people hear three tendencies in them that those who use the statements may not intend.

1. Saying “love is a choice” sounds like the tendency to believe love is in our power to perform, even when we don’t feel like it.
2. Saying “love is a choice” sounds like the tendency to make the will, with its decisions, the decisive moral agent rather than the heart, with its affections.
3. Saying “love is a choice” sounds like the tendency to set the bar too low: If you can will to treat someone well, you have done all you should.

I disagree with all three of these tendencies.

In their place I would say:   Continue at John Piper

Are We Guilty of Homophobia?

Al Mohler, president of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, KY, recently was quoted as saying the following in an interview about homosexuality.

“We’ve lied about the nature of homosexuality and have practiced what can only be described as a form of homophobia… We’ve used the ‘choice’ language when it is clear that sexual orientation is a deep inner struggle and not merely a matter of choice.”

He was then asked to defend this statement in the recent SBC Annual Convention. The video of the exchange with SBC pastor and blogger, Peter Lumpkins is here.

I happen to agree with Mohler, especially as he clarified his statements. The Associated Baptist Press summarized Mohler’s response to the question by Lumpkins:

Mohler said at the convention “there is no way anyone in fair mindedness can be confused about what I believe about homosexuality,” because he has written more than 200 articles about it, but that “the reality is that we as Christian churches have not done well on this issue.”

“Evangelicals, thankfully, have failed to take the liberal trajectory of lying about homosexuality and its sinfulness,” Mohler said. “We know that the Bible clearly declares – not only in isolated verses but in the totality of its comprehensive presentation – the fact that homosexuality not only is not God’s best for us, as some try to say, but it is sin.”

“But we as evangelicals have a very sad history in dealing with this issue,” he continued. “We have told not the truth, but we have told about half the truth. We’ve told the biblical truth, and that’s important, but we haven’t applied it in the biblical way.”

“We have said to people that homosexuality is just a choice,” Mohler said. “It’s clear that it’s more than a choice. That doesn’t mean it’s any less sinful, but it does mean it’s not something people can just turn on and turn off. We are not a gospel people unless we understand that only the gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ gives a homosexual person any hope of release from homosexuality.” Keep Reading...

The Sex Test, Abortion, and the War Against Girls

It is one of the cruelest ironies of the modern abortion movement that while the movement advanced under the banner of women’s rights, it is unborn girls, in monstrously disproportionate number, who have been aborted.

If you must read only one thing this weekend, it should be Jonathan Last’s book review of “Unnatural Selection” by Mara Hvistendahl in today’s Wall Street Journal.

 Hvistendahl’s book treats the spread of sex-based abortion and the deleterious consequences for societies that systematically abort females.  Read it first for the statistics, which are gobsmacking.  The natural birthrate is 104-106 boys for every 100 girls.  Yet Hvistendahl — who is reflexively pro-choice, by the way — documents the wild disproportions abortion produces around the world:

Yet today in India there are 112 boys born for every 100 girls. In China, the number is 121—though plenty of Chinese towns are over the 150 mark. China’s and India’s populations are mammoth enough that their outlying sex ratios have skewed the global average to a biologically impossible 107. But the imbalance is not only in Asia. Azerbaijan stands at 115, Georgia at 118 and Armenia at 120…By Ms. Hvistendahl’s counting, there have been so many sex-selective abortions in the past three decades that 163 million girls, who by biological averages should have been born, are missing from the world.

What’s perhaps even more astonishing is what happens when parents try for the second, third or fourth time to give birth to a boy.  The increasing desperation of the parents is evident in the numbers: Keep Reading...

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