Jack Schaap in His Own Words

Ok, the first underlined part didn’t seem so strange, since I know there is a Christian tradition of writing about God as a lover. After that, though, it goes off into fantasy land. If this guy was so eager to find passages in the Bible about sex, why didn’t he just turn to the Song of Songs?

There aren’t any clobber verses in the Song of Songs. If Schaap (or any other mutton-eating shepherd) can pull out one of the “You Must Believe This And Feel Holy Fear When You Hear This” verses and get a bunch of people to think that it means what he says it means, then he’s got his flock well trained to obey him and shut their eyes to the things he does.

First of all, read that entire book and it’s entitled “Marriage: the Divine Intimacy”. It is a book written to married couples to help them understand that marriage is a relationship created by God, bd that everything you do as a married couple is a picture of salvation. It is to help them see marriage through God’s eyes, not the spiritual relationship with God through the eyes of marriage. He uses something spiritual to express how marriage is supposed to work, not using something physical to express how salvation and the Christian life are supposed to work. So stop taking excerpts from a marital help book and portraying it as a spiritual self help book. Take it from someone who read the book in its entirety and in its context.

Note the sexism in the first part. Bare least, was it at all necessary to specify gender? Does it really matter? Only if you’re referencing gender roles, as understood in the act of penetration specifically.

Bah! Would it be overly and baselessly, offensive if I sighed and muttered about christians under my breath?

EEWWW! To quote a friend on another forum, “I would never borrow a bible from Rev. Schaap. Too many pages stuck together.”

RMH, so many Christians believe marriage is a “picture of salvation,” but the passages used to support this don’t actually say that. What they’re actually saying is, “look at this particular picture of how Christ relates to the church [that is, laying down his high estate for her in order to raise her up from her low estate to be glorious beside him] and let your marriages imitate that picture.” It’s a picture specifically written for people living in a world where women really were of low estate and men had all the power and privilege.

This idea that sex imitates our relationship with God is directly contradicted by 1 Cor 7:4, which gives husbands and wives equal power and authority in the marriage bed. Unless you believe that we have equal power and authority with God, the doctrine simply doesn’t hold water. God intended marriage to be a thing of mutuality and equality, not a picture of a human creature relating to its divine Creator.

Personally, turning sex into some sort of spiritual act just isn’t my thing. I don’t like to think about–well, I don’t like to have to think AT ALL while I’m doing the deed–but I don’t like to think about church or make someone I typically refer to as ‘father’ a mental third-party in some creepy three-way. Why attach this kind of baggage to a perfectly wonderful act between two loving people?