Tag Archives: Chastity

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William Lane Craig’s secret weapon is his amazing wife Jan

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My favorite painting: "Godspeed" by Edmund Blair Leighton, 1900
My favorite painting: “Godspeed” by Edmund Blair Leighton, 1900

I’m re-posting this classic post because it was mentioned in the latest episode of the Reasonable Faith podcast.

I want to draw your attention to a talk on “Vision in Life” given by Dr. William Lane Craig. Dr. Craig is the ablest defender of the Christian faith operating today. He has done formal academic debates with all of the best known atheists on major university campuses in front of thousands of university students.

It turns out that he owes a lot of his success to his amazing wife Jan.

The MP3 file is here. (32 minutes)

This talk was Dr. Craig’s chapel address to Biola University students.

About 11 minutes into the talk, Bill describes what happened after he finished his Bachelor’s degree at Wheaton:

And so I joined the staff of Campus Crusade for Christ for 2 years, and was assigned to Northern Illinois University. And that was where I met my wife Jan. She was a graduate of the University of North Dakota where she had come to faith in Christ. And she had a similar vision for her life of evangelism and discipleship.

And as we worked at NIU together, she with gals and I with the guys, leading students to Christ and discipling them to walk with the Lord, we fell in love. And we decided that we would be more effective if we joined forces and became a team.

So their reason for getting together was because they thought that they would be more effective in evangelism and discipleship if they worked as a team.

It is at this point in the talk where Bill begins to explain just how Jan molded him into the lean, mean debating machine that travels the world striking terror into the hearts of atheists.

Bill’s first story about Jan occurs early after their marriage while he is working on his first Masters degree at Trinity:

And it was also at that time that I began to see what an invaluable asset the Lord had given me in Jan. I remember I came home from classes one day, and found her at the kitchen table with all the catalogs and schedules and papers spread out in front of her and she said, “look! I’ve figured out how you can get two Masters degrees at the same time that it would normally take to get one! All you have to do is take overloads every semester, go to all full-time summer school and do all these other things, and you can do two MAs in the time it takes to do one!”

And I thought, whoa! Are you sure you really want to make the commitment it takes to do this kind of thing? And she said, “Yeah! Go for it!” And it was then I began to see that God had given me a very special woman who was my supporter – my cheerleader – and who really believed in me. And as long as she believed in me, that gave me the confidence to dream bigger dreams, and to take on challenges that I had never thought of before.

In an article on his web site, he talks about how Jan encouraged him to do his first Ph.D:

As graduation from Trinity neared, Jan and I were sitting one evening at the supper table in our little campus apartment, talking about what to do after graduation. Neither of us had any clear leading or inclination of what we should do next.

So Jan said to me, “Well, if money were no object, what would you really like to do next?”

I replied, “If money were no object, what I’d really like to do is go to England and do a doctorate under John Hick.”

“Who’s he?” she asked.

“Oh, he’s this famous British philosopher who’s written extensively on arguments for the existence of God,” I explained. “If I could study with him, I could develop a cosmological argument for God’s existence.”

But it hardly seemed a realistic idea.

The next evening at supper Jan handed me a slip of paper with John Hick’s address on it. “I went to the library today and found out that he’s at the University of Birmingham in England,” she said. “Why don’t you write him a letter and ask him if you can do a doctoral thesis under him on the cosmological argument?”

What a woman! So I did, and to our amazement and delight Professor Hick wrote back saying he’d be very pleased to supervise my doctoral work on that subject. So it was an open door!

And in the same article, he explains how Jan encouraged him to get his second Ph.D:

As Jan and I neared the completion of my doctoral studies in Birmingham, our future path was again unclear to us. I had sent out a number of applications for teaching positions in philosophy at American universities but had received no bites. We didn’t know what to do.

I remember it like yesterday. We were sitting at the supper table in our little house outside Birmingham, and Jan suddenly said to me, “Well, if money were no object, what would you really like to do next?”

I laughed because I remembered how the Lord had used her question to guide us in the past. I had no trouble answering the question. “If money were no object, what I’d really like to do is go to Germany and study under Wolfhart Pannenberg.”

“Who’s he?”

“Oh, he’s this famous German theologian who’s defended the resurrection of Christ historically,” I explained. “If I could study with him, I could develop a historical apologetic for the resurrection of Jesus.”

Our conversation drifted to other subjects, but Jan later told me that my remark had just lit a fire under her. The next day while I was at the university, she slipped away to the library and began to research grants-in-aid for study at German universities. Most of the leads proved to be defunct or otherwise inapplicable to our situation. But there were two grants she found that were possibilities. You can imagine how surprised I was when she sprung them on me!

Both of these Ph.D experiences are also described in the talk. And the talk concludes as follows:

I am so thankful to be married to a woman who is tremendously resourceful, tremendously talented and energetic, who could have pursued an independent career in any number of areas, but instead, she has chose to wed her aspirations to mine, and to make it her goal to make me the most effective person I can be, for Christ. And she has been like my right arm in ministry over these many years. And it is a tremendous privilege to be a team with a person like that.

And you young men, I would encourage you, if you marry, to find a gal who shares your vision, not some independent vision, but who is interested in aligning herself with you, and pursuing together a common vision and goal that will draw you [together], so that you will avoid the growing separateness that so often creeps into marriages.

And now you know the rest of Bill’s story. The person you marry will have an enormous influence on the impact you will have for Christ and his Kingdom. It is up to you to decide whether that influence is going to be positive or negative, by deciding if you will marry, and if you do marry, by deciding whom you will marry.

You may also be interested in this talk given by William Lane Craig, entitled “Healthy Relationships” (National Faculty Leadership Conf. 2008) (audio here) In that talk, he offers advice to Christians who want to have a marriage that is consistent with their Christian faith.

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Study: couples that delay sexual activity experience higher quality relationships

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Relationship stability, quality, communication, satisfaction
Relationship stability, quality, communication, satisfaction

From Family Studies, news about TWO new studies.

Excerpt: (links removed)

[T]wo recently published studies call into question the validity of testing sexual chemistry early in dating.

My colleagues and I published the first study a few years ago in the American Psychological Association’s Journal of Family Psychology. This study involved a national sample of 2,035 married individuals who participated in the popular online couple assessment survey called “RELATE.” We found that the longer a dating couple waits to have sex, the better their relationship is after marriage. In fact, couples who wait until marriage to have sex report higher relationship satisfaction (20% higher), better communication patterns (12% better), less consideration of divorce (22% lower), and better sexual quality (15% better) than those who started having sex early in their dating (see Figure 2). For couples in between—those that became sexually involved later in their dating, but prior to marriage—the benefits were about half as strong.

[…]These patterns were statistically significant even when controlling for a variety of other variables such as respondents’ number of prior sexual partners, education levels, religiosity, and relationship length.

The second study, by Sharon Sassler and her colleagues at Cornell University, also found that rapid sexual involvement has adverse long-term implications for relationship quality. Using data from the Marital and Relationship Survey, which provides information on nearly 600 low- to moderate-income couples living with minor children, their study examined the tempo of sexual intimacy and subsequent relationship quality in a sample of married and cohabiting men and women. Their analyses also suggest that delaying sexual involvement is associated with higher relationship quality across several dimensions.

They discovered that the negative association between sexual timing and relationship quality is largely driven by a link between early sex and cohabitation. Specifically, sexual involvement early in a romantic relationship is associated with an increased likelihood of moving more quickly into living together, which in turn is associated with lower relationship quality. This finding supports Norval Glenn’s hypothesis that sexual involvement may lead to unhealthy emotional entanglements that make ending a bad relationship difficult. As Sassler and her colleagues concluded, “Adequate time is required for romantic relationships to develop in a healthy way. In contrast, relationships that move too quickly, without adequate discussion of the goals and long-term desires of each partner, may be insufficiently committed and therefore result in relationship distress, especially if one partner is more committed than the other” (p. 710).

The rest of the post talks about two reasons why this works: improved partner selection and prioritizing communication and commitment. Improved partner selection occurs because you haven’t committed too much too soon (sexually) and you have time to let things play out to see if you really fit with the other person. And if you take sex off the table, then you have to use other means in order to build emotional intimacy – communication, service, support, etc.

That’s two studies, and there’s a third. Dina sent me this article from the UK Daily Mail about a new study showing the importance of chastity for relationship quality and stability.

Excerpt:

New couples who jump into bed together on the first date do not last as long in relationships as those who wait a new study has revealed.

Using a sample of almost 11,000 unmarried people, Brigham Young University discovered a direct correlation between the length and strength of a partnership and the amount of time they took to have first have sex.

The study showed that those who waited to initiate sexual intimacy were found to have longer and more positive outcomes in their relationships while those who couldn’t help themselves reported that their dalliances struggled to last more than two years.

‘Results suggested that waiting to initiate sexual intimacy in unmarried relationships was generally associated with positive outcomes,’ said the report authored published by the U.S. National Library of Medicine National Institutes of Health.

‘This effect was strongly moderated by relationship length, with individuals who reported early sexual initiation reporting increasingly lower outcomes in relationships of longer than two years.’

The study examined four sexual-timing patterns: Having sex prior to dating, initiating sex on the first date or shortly after, having sex after a few weeks of dating, and sexual abstinence.

Each one of these fields yielded different results in relationship satisfaction, stability and communication in dating situations.

Here’s another recent study that shows that if a woman has more than her husband as a premarital sex partner, her risk of divorce increases.

His findings:

Using nationally representative data from the 1995 National Survey of Family Growth, I estimate the association between intimate premarital relationships (premarital sex and premarital cohabitation) and subsequent marital dissolution. I extend previous research by considering relationship histories pertaining to both premarital sex and premarital cohabitation. I find that premarital sex or premarital cohabitation that is limited to a woman’s husband is not associated with an elevated risk of marital disruption.However, women who have more than one intimate premarital relationship have an increased risk of marital dissolution.

Here’s another study that makes it even more clear.

Findings:

Data from the 1988 US National Survey of Family Growth (NSFG) were utilized to assess the impact of premarital sexual activity on subsequent marital stability. Among white NSFG subjects first married in 1965-85, virgin brides were significantly less to have become separated or divorced (25%) than women who had not been virgins at marriage (35%).

[…]The lower risk of divorce on the part of white women with no premarital sexual experience persisted even after numerous intervening and background variables were controlled.

If you’re going to talk to a young person about sex, it’s a good idea to use these studies to explain what you lose by having sex too early in the relationship. Although they may respond with anecdotes to refute studies, studies are important because they represent LOTS of data points, not just one or two cherry-picked cases. My view on all this is the Bible’s view – no sex before marriage. But when talking to people about this issue, I find it useful to have evidence ready in order to be convincing in every way possible.

Previously, I blogged on studies that showed that the number of premarital sex partners increases unhappiness in the marriage, which raises the risk of divorce. Read and be wise about sexuality!

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What do Democrats like Joe Biden think about the moral teachings of Jesus in the Bible?

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Enraged Joe Biden howls out his hatred for Bible-believing Christians
Enraged Democrat Joe Biden howls out his hatred for Bible-believing Christians

Joe Biden gave a speech to the largest gay rights organization in the United States, the HRC. The co-founder of the HRC, Terry Bean, was recently charged with sexual abusing a 15-year-old boy. Do you disagree with what Terry Bean is charged with? If so, then I think it’s important to know how far Joe Biden would go to punish you for your refusal to approve and celebrate Terry Bean.

Here’s the report on the speech from PJ Media:

Biden announced at an event in Ohio on Saturday that his number one priority, if elected, will be to enshrine LGBTQ rights into federal law via the Equality Act, a contentious, Orwellian effort by left-wing bullies to silence Christians who believe biblical teachings on marriage and reject the view that boys can be girls and girls can be boys.

During a half-hour speech at the Hum4n R1ghts C4mp4ign’s annual gala in Columbus, Ohio, Biden said, “It’s wrong and it is immoral what [the Trump administration] is doing,” citing efforts to bar transgender troops from the U.S. military and protect medical providers from being forced to violate their consciences.

[…]During his speech Biden portrayed LGBTQ individuals as victims, ignoring the fact that it is people of faith who have been the big losers in this war of ideas. Bakery owners are being sued out of existence, medical professionals are being pressured to embrace transgender ideology, and major corporations are pulling their business out of states that seek to protect religious freedom — which, by the way, is what made Mike Pence Public Enemy #1 in the eyes of the cultural revolutionaries.

[…]”The current vice president uses religious freedom as an excuse to license discrimination across broadly [sic] areas and denying LGBTQ Americans their basic rights. It is wrong and it is immoral what they are doing,” he declared.

“Just look at how much damage has been done in the past two weeks,” Biden said. […]The Department of Housing and Urban Development announced plans to allow homeless shelters to turn away transgender people. This is beyond the scope of anything remotely what we’ve seen before.”

To be clear, when he’s talking about homeless shelters, he’s talking about putting biological males in with women who are victims of sexual abuse. But if the HRC pays the piper, then the HRC calls the tune. They’re certainly calling the tune for many of our largest corporations.

When Joe Biden talks about people’s “beliefs”, he means the beliefs of Bible-believing Christians that might cause them to disagree with gay activists like Terry Bean. He’s talking about their right to refuse to participate in, subsidize or celebrate LGBT initiatives, such as same-sex marriage, sex-change surgeries, HRT drug treatments for children, etc. He’s talking about forcing parents to step aside while doctors and educators give hormone blockers to their children. Drugs that can have permanent effects. He basically wants to give gay activists like Terry Bean a veto over the Bible, the church, Christian organizations and Christian parents. A veto backed by the full force of the government.

By the way, the Terry Bean story wasn’t the first time that prominent Democrats have been involved in sex with underage boys. I’ll give just one more example. The Democrat mayor of Seattle – a champion of same-sex marriage in the state of Washington – was also charged, and resigned.

Now, the teaching of the Bible is pretty clear. No sex outside of marriage, and marriage defined as between one woman and one man. The definition of marriage is straight out of the mouth of Jesus. If you deny that, then you don’t accept Jesus as anything other than a normal man. Now, it’s a free country. Non-Christians should be able to vote how they please, and act how they please. But we need to be clear that no Democrat politician accepts the Bible as an authority on moral issues, and that no Democrat politician thinks that Jesus is other than a normal man. No Democrat politician thinks that Jesus knew what he was talking about when he spoke authoritatively about chastity and marriage. Democrat politicians like Joe Biden think Terry Bean knows more these moral issues than Jesus, and that’s why Joe Biden is speaking at the HRC rather than speaking at a Bible-believing organization like Liberty University or the Family Research Council or the Alliance Defending Freedom.

To be clear, I have no problem with people on the other side, like Dave Rubin, who disagree with me on moral issues. Dave lives his life in a way that would not be permissible for a Bible-believing Christian. But Dave accepts and defends my right to disagree with him on moral issues. That is not what we have with Democrat politicians like Joe Biden, who want to use the power of the state to suppress basic human rights, like free speech, freedom of association, parental authority, etc. I don’t want to force other people to act as if they believed what I believe. But I don’t think Bible-believing Christians should vote for someone who wants to use the power of government to force me to act as if I believed what they believe.