Purity Today

As a student at Oxford, Carolyn Weber was confronted with the claims of Christ, and she correctly understood that to become a Christian would have an impact on more than just what she believed about God. When I became a Christian and I started to think about relationships differently, and I started to look back and think, oh, I wish someone had told me this. I didn't expect so much grief to wash in. And so once I was a believer and I was engaged to a non-believer who I tried to share the gospel with and who remained resistant, I realized, wow, I'm either going to have to get married unequally yoked. And what does that mean?

Or this really needs to be reevaluated. This is Family Life Today. Our hosts are David and Wilson. I'm Bob Lapine. You can find us online at familylifetoday.com.

The Christmas story, the coming of Jesus, it's a story of personal revolution in the lives of every person who believes. We'll hear about that from Carolyn Weber today. Stay with us. And welcome to Family Life Today.

Thanks for joining us. I was on a radio interview a number of years ago. There were two of us being interviewed, and the question was about the purity culture and whether the purity culture that's been connected to evangelicalism, has that been a negative thing or a positive thing? Should we be doing it differently? And of course, Family Life has a resource called Passport to Purity. We've been encouraging moms and dads to be engaging with their children young about principles of purity when it comes to human sexuality. And I remember in the conversation, we were talking about how some people were damaged by messages that were a part of the purity culture. They felt like there was a lot of shame attached to people who made mistakes as they were growing up. And I thought, that's all true, and we need to be careful that we're not Pharisees, but we can't throw the purity baby out with the bathwater here. Yeah, I agree, because we still need to talk about it. I think for Dave and me, as we were going through seminary, and we looked back on our early years of dating before we knew each other, there were some things that we really regretted. And we were talking about that, and Dave decided to write his master's thesis on an interesting topic. Oh, we're going to go all the way back to that. I was thinking of that.

I haven't thought about that in 40 years. But yeah, you know, most master's theses are about theology. And so I go to my readers and say, can I do a master's thesis about the effects of premarital sex on marriage? And they looked at me like, what? I'd love to study that biblically and experientially, you know, with people, what did they say? And that's what I wrote it on.

Yeah, and it was well received? Yeah, I mean, it was a very interesting study, and the purity culture was actually trying to get at that. There are consequences that you don't even know are going to be consequences in your life and on your future marriage. And one of the reasons we want to talk about this is because it's almost the default today that once you meet someone and you're attracted to them and you feel a connection and you think maybe we're in love, that the next thing you do is you have sex with that person. And I don't think that's new, Bob. Well, but I'll tell you, you watch movies or television programs today, and that's where it goes, and nobody even raises a hand and says, oh, that's too bad. You would be better off if you didn't make that choice. And it seems it's more commonplace than ever before that couples are living together before they get married. And we just want to step in here and say, hang on, time out. The Bible still speaks to the fact that human thriving is connected to God's plan for sexuality, and God's plan for sexuality is that it happens inside a covenant relationship, a covenant commitment, marriage.

And outside of that, you have a good gift from God that's being wrongly used, and that sows seeds that are not going to bear a good harvest. I wish we had an expert that we could talk to this about. We've got a friend who is both friend and expert, Carolyn Weber joining us. Carolyn, welcome to Family Life Today. Thank you so much for having me.

I wouldn't identify myself as a sexpert, but I am certainly glad to join the conversation here. Carolyn is an author, a professor. She lives in Canada with her husband, Kent, and their four children. She's been a guest on Family Life Today before. We heard the story of her surprising conversion from being a secular feminist at Oxford to becoming a follower of Jesus in the first book that she wrote called Surprised by Oxford. And then she wrote another beautiful book called Holy is the Day. We've talked about that. We talked about the miracle C-section that you almost did not survive, and you've just released a beautiful new memoir called Sex and the City of God that is a look back at your transition from how you viewed relationships prior to being a follower of Christ to how you started to view relationships and particularly marriage as a follower of Christ, how you met Kent, how he was instrumental in all of that.

Let's go all the way back to when you were in high school. Your family of origin, your mom and dad, their marriage broke down, right? Yes, it did.

I did. I think I came from a family that many would recognize or identify with. I defined it in Surprised by Oxford as loving enough to get by but broken enough not to deserve God's attention. My parents were not believers.

My home was not shaped by faith, maybe a loose Catholicism by my grandparents, kind of a European Catholicism, but not really any sort of faith. And my father had been a self-made man. He had been very successful in business, and he lost that business and went through some very difficult times.

He ended up actually having a nervous breakdown as a result and dealt with some mental illness. And my mother was raising us essentially alone, and it was a lonely path for her in many ways. And so I would have defined myself by high school as definitely needing to be independent, self-sufficient. I wasn't going to trust a father, let alone a heavenly father, eternal father. I didn't really know any Christians. The few Christians that I did sort of know of were either stereotypes in the media or one or two people that perhaps at high school that didn't seem to fit in.

So I was probably like many. I didn't really know Jesus at all, and the Jesus I knew was this media sort of presented Jesus. And I didn't really think religion was relevant to my life. I didn't think Christianity was relevant. And I think that's really what people are drawn to is how is faith relevant to my life?

How is it relevant to the things I struggle with or my daily concerns? And so that's where I was at by the time I arrived at Oxford. I was really quite determined to be self-sufficient and independent and in no need of a savior.

And how did that worldview, how did that way of thinking inform dating relationships, your view of human sexuality? I mean, in high school you had boyfriends. You were engaged to be married when you went to Oxford, weren't you? Yes, I was pretty much so. I mean, in high school I think I was fairly busy. I was student council president, cheerleading captain, all those kind of things. I loved high school. I was really focused on my grades, focused on wanting to go to university, focused on knowing that I needed a scholarship, because at that point my family was very, very poor and my father was not in the picture at all and my mom was really struggling. I worked a lot of jobs in high school and in college.

My mother also dealt with alcoholism, so a lot of the support of the family fell to me. And I was really joyful and happy and enjoyed school and all that sort of thing, but I was too busy for boys, which I think can sometimes be a great default. But it wasn't actually a faith-based decision.

And by the time I entered college I started dating and I was actually quite seriously engaged into my college sweetheart by the time I left for my graduate work. I would have defined myself as agnostic because I couldn't disprove God. He would have defined himself as really quite overtly atheistic, as was most of my circle of friends. Christianity wasn't really seen as intellectually acceptable or viable.

It really wasn't even talked about. I didn't really know any Christians even in my academic circle. And I'm a perfect example of someone who can go through 20 years of public education and not even crack open a Bible, which is shocking. Even not reading it as a historical text or anything along those lines.

That's pretty much the position I was at. So I was really entering Oxford without any worldview of Christianity. Yeah, as I listen to your background, your story, I don't know if my wife Anne is sitting over there going, Oh my goodness, it's very similar to mine. Even the fact that I went to the Oxford of the Midwest, Ball State University.

I'm kidding. Anne actually found Christ at the university. But here's my question, because my dad walked out when I was seven years old. My mom was an alcoholic.

She was working tirelessly to provide. And I grew up sort of as an agnostic, sort of went to church, but never really read the Bible myself until college. But I realize now looking back, and I wonder if you experienced the same thing, I still had, even though I wouldn't have known it at the time, sort of a father hunger, a desire for a dad.

I didn't have one. And I looked at God as an absent father. You know, he's not around just like my dad wasn't around.

Why would I be interested? Some of it I now know was living in denial, but there was definitely this sense from six, seven years old, all through my life. I'm longing for, looking for a father's love. Did you experience that or is that part of your story?

Absolutely. And you know, Dave, I'm so grateful you would share that because I think that's really an integral and deep part of who we are. When I studied the literature, there's what we call the monomyth, which is the great search for the father, right?

Think about Darth Vader, right? I'm your father. There's something really deep about finding our fathers.

And as Freud said, you can always be sure of your mother, you can never be sure of your father. There's this deep archetypal search we have for the father that really runs through so much of who we are. And I really, I would have, in retrospect, identified as having this longing, wanting to be close to our fathers. When I did my minor in psych, there's a lot of research that shows that we shape our idea of eternal father, of a heavenly father, based on our relationships with our earthly fathers. While my earthly father was loving, and I knew he loved me, but he was intermittent and difficult and volatile and untrustworthy when I was growing up. And I think that that in many ways shaped that idea exactly the same way, and yet it doesn't negate the longing, and that's what I wanted to explore in this book.

What C.S. Lewis called sun-sukhed, you know, that longing, that deep longing we have that can only be filled by God, and we feel that ache, and we have twinges of that joy. It's sort of a foretaste of the heaven or the happiness that we're created for. But I felt that deep within me, it's just I was also busy kicking against it because we're fearful of it as well.

It leaves us incredibly vulnerable. And so I was really quite vanilla as a student. I wasn't really, really promiscuous, and I wasn't dating all over the place, but I also wasn't holed up in my room. You know, like so many others, I just was sort of midstream in many things and just was working without a compass. There were things that I knew I longed or I felt, and I get this with students I even talk with now.

They'll say so many of the same things to me that you've just said, Dave. Christian or non-Christian, secular campus or a Christian campus, you know, where I have this longing, especially on the secular campuses, or I feel like something doesn't sit right. I've had this one-night stand or I've had this relationship that's fallen apart, and they identify this longing, but they feel it too.

There's just not really anything to slot it into, like Pascal said, that God-shaped void that we all have. Well, I know that I tried to fill that need and longing, even though my dad was in the home, he was emotionally absent in many ways. And so I think I was trying to find that even through relationships with men or boys even growing up of just wanting validation, wanting someone to see me, someone to know me. Do you think that's pretty common for women? Oh, and I think it's very common for everyone, men and women.

Women perhaps vocalize it more because that's what we do. But I think we all, I haven't met a single person who hasn't longed to be known. And that's why I was so moved when I first read the Bible, how much sense it made.

The notion of a fallen world made sense, the way that the story moved from Genesis to Revelation. And there isn't anyone that doesn't long to be fully known, and how powerful a verb that is in the Bible in terms of marriage as well, to be fully known. And so that's where marriage to me felt like this mini-covenant, because in a sense it's the only relationship where we make a promise, we have a covenant. We don't do that with any other relationship, but it's also where we're really, really intimately known, whether we like that or not. You know, I've often thought it's proof of grace that there isn't a bubble over our heads saying what we think, especially when we are married. You know, that God knows, God reads, God is there in the heights and depths of it.

But that's such an intimate relationship, there's not even air between it. But we all long for that and nothing else can replace it. Reminds me of a quote I've actually used, and I don't even know exactly who said it, but it's the quote, it says, The man who knocks on the door of a brothel is looking for God. I love that quote because as I'm listening to you and thinking of our own journey, it could be said, anytime a man or woman knocks on the door of any search, they're longing for a father.

Yes. And when we understand who God really is made known through Christ, I think my journey was finally, I've found a father who loves me. Was that your story? Yes, very much so, because, and that's what I tried to frame this most recent book around that metaphor of knocking, and the knocking at the door and the searching and whoever knocks will be answered. And I think absolutely so, I think it was because I was trying to apply an earthly template of understanding a father to God, and that isn't big enough, it doesn't work that way. And also that fathers are human and they're fallible too, just as we all are. So we're all going to fall short and we're all sinners. So there's this way in which God is just that template doesn't work, it's too small for Him. And I think I was afraid of that in many ways.

I was actually afraid of really recognizing who He might be and what His promises might actually be if they were true. Carolyn, what shaped your thinking about sexuality as you were growing up? You didn't have a covenant marriage where mom and dad are living happily together to give you that picture.

So you're a teenager faced with desire and pressure and interest and questions, and you're making choices in that moment. What's informing those choices for you and what's causing you to make the choices you made as a young person to get involved sexually with the boys you were dating in high school and college? Well, I think what it was was like for many people in mainstream, even North America, I probably knew more divorced couples than I knew married couples. And I probably knew more miserable divorced or married couples than I knew committed and thriving and happy or healthy Christian couples.

Not that necessarily Christian couples have to be happy, joy, joy all the time, but that there was a consistency and a commitment. And I think the big bell ringer for me was when I became a Christian and I started to think about relationships differently. And I started to look back and think, oh, I wish someone had told me this or I wish someone told me this.

I didn't expect so much grief to wash in. I can remember just simply sitting with friends, for instance, who were Christians who were saying grace before meals. And I thought, wow, you are so lucky. You grew up saying grace before meals. Like what a luxury, how beautiful that is, how amazing that is. Just grief that washed in.

I think we all have different conversion paths and for some it's a quick boil and for some it's a slow melt. And everyone is a Peter or Paul or somewhere in between. And I envy the Peters, but speaking as a Paul, you know what it's like when you don't have it. And it's very clear. And I remember looking back and thinking, wow, I wish I had known this or this or this because this made sense. This made sense on things that hurt now or things that didn't work now. And so once I was a believer and I was engaged to a non-believer who I tried to share the gospel with and who remained resistant. And a very loving person too. Again, I'm not in an extreme example of having been in an abusive relationship or volatile relationship.

Actually it was somebody very, very loving who you could have argued was more loving than some Christians you know. I realized, wow, I'm either going to have to get married unequally yoked and what does that mean? Or this really needs to be reevaluated because if I'm starting on this foot, that's something different. Then entering together and we both convert later or starting out together on the same foot. What's going to happen when I can't even pray with this person or we don't even share the same worldview? And that's where I was really drawn to Augustine with all of this because I was really interested in his notion of the two cities. You know that when things boil down, there's the city of God and the city of man and they're actually called to live in peace together. But they have two very different theological ends and that makes all the difference. And you have to decide which citizenship is yours. And that means you answer to a whole different set of rules. And actually for the Christian, the bar is higher and it's different and there's more social responsibility.

You are your brothers or your sister's keeper. And as I began to think about my life being my citizenship, choosing to be, wanting to be part of the city of God, wanting to live in the eternal city, wanting to have the eternal inheritance and not a temporal, that begins to shift and color everything. And thinking about my responsibility to someone else in a relationship too, that as well as ordering my loves, which is again what Augustine brings up.

But I kept going back to that first commandment because before I was a Christian, it really irked me. It really made me think God was heavy handed and jealous and commandeering. And, you know, my father was kind of like a King Lear. I remember when I taught King Lear before and I've had students weep who have said to me, wow, my father is like that.

You know, sort of demanding my love, but not really delivering often himself. And I thought, wow, you know, this Old Testament God seems like he's got a screw loose. He's sort of this stalker and he wants all of me and he wants all the other commandments based on this. But as I became a believer and even thought about something like, you know, what Augustine explores in the city of God. And when we organize our loves according to that first commandment, that's the first commandment for a reason, everything else does fall into place. And how then does that make me think about my relationships differently?

And I think that's kind of where the hummingbird hit the glass. Take us back to your conversion experience and you tell your fiance about how you are now following God. What's his reaction? And I'm sure that your lifestyle, your views on premarital sex, all of those were kind of shifting. What was his reaction?

His reaction was, I think, like many. Oh, that's good. Great. I'm happy for you. That's wonderful. And you can do your thing and I'll do mine and we can entirely get married. This is fine.

This isn't an issue. It was like the reaction my mom had when I came home and talked to her about becoming a Christian at Oxford. And, you know, it was like, well, that's great.

You're a good person and I'm really happy about that. Again, people don't always react with antagonism. Sometimes that's easier. You know, my brother's first words to me were, oh great, now you're going to be handing flowers out in an airport and shaving your head.

Sorry, Dave. But, you know, and it was easier in a way. You know, sometimes it's easier to engage that than it is the kind of great live and let live response. And so then I was in a situational row. I had known him for a long time, many years. Our families were close and it was looking like we were just going to be getting married. And I could have just kind of continued to roll on into it and hope for the best and think, well, maybe he'll warm up after we're married or maybe he'll be open to this.

It was actually in many ways more difficult. So you said when you came to Christ, you found yourself thinking, I wish somebody had told me some of these things earlier. We're talking to people today who may need to hear some of those things about being unequally yoked and what that can lead to and why that's a problem. Or about God's design for sexuality and why we ought to observe his ways and not just go with what the culture is telling us. If you were sitting down with that young person today who is saying, OK, so tell me what you think and why you believe these things, what would you tell them? With my Christian students, I've actually talked about being unequally yoked and some of them think that that actually refers to eggs. We've had to talk about a yoke and the notion of bearing burdens and what's a great metaphor. I mean, I love the Bible. You can't make this stuff up. It is so brilliant.

You can't ever get to the bottom of it. And as a literature person, I just love it to the moon and back. There's nothing I've ever read that doesn't point more to the glory of God, secular or Christian. And in the Bible, it's just amazing. And like Gerda said, I have not the imagination for reality and I always feel that way. And being yoked, equally yoked is a great metaphor because living on a farm, I understand it. But when you put the yoke around the oxen, if it's not equal, they will go in circles. And they'll go in circles actually until they go crazy, which is a great metaphor for marriage.

Until you kind of get your yoke together. But if you're going into that and it's not even equal to begin with, wow, that's just a recipe for disaster. And there's, you know, the Bible is such a blueprint, not for perfection because we're in a fallen world, but for righteousness, for trying to become holier in God and helping your closest, most intimate person in that journey together in life doing the same and having that responsibility. And sometimes if you're not married to that person, you still have a responsibility for being in relationship, thinking about the effect of your actions or your heart on them as well. And I'm a big believer in Proverbs 4.23, you know, guarding our hearts, protecting our hearts, because everything else we do flows from it. And people think, I think especially looking outside on the inside at Christians, they think, oh, you know, purity and innocence, isn't that ridiculous? And keeping your heart pure, that's just so not relevant and they're so naive. And there is nothing naive about cultivating a pure heart.

It takes a lot of work. And as the Garden of Eden teaches us, sometimes it means you don't act as well as acting. And I think we give our kids so much information and no wisdom.

So, when I've been talking with students before and I've had numerous conversations along those lines, how can you be faithful and really thinking about what the Lord is trying to teach you through His word and through His example as you're bringing your own deal into the relationship? Because there's still going to be a lot of trouble and struggles and everything else. And we're told that. And we're also told that He is with us in that. But when you're purposely choosing to not equal the yoke, when you're purposely choosing to defy and not be obedient, which is seeing in the dark, it's another form of faith. And sometimes obedience is harder than sacrifice.

It's a form of sacrifice. But it's always blessed, that faithfulness is always blessed out into ways that we can't always see. You know, I think for moms and dads, for all of us raising the next generation, we've got to recognize that our kids are, just like us, being inundated with cultural messages that are antithetical to what the Bible teaches.

And they're coming loud and often. And our mutual friend, Dr. Michael Easley, often says, don't let the culture catechize you. And so, to fight against the culture, we have to make sure we are telling ourselves and telling our children, here's what God's Word says.

And it's going to be different than what you're seeing in the movies, what you're hearing from your friends, from all of the cultural messages. But there is a way that leads to destruction, and there's a way that leads to life. And God's way is the way that leads to life. And I think, as Carolyn said here, it's a hard path sometimes.

It requires much more of you than to go with the flow. But when we can stake out our position and say, you know, I'm going to do it God's way, there is thriving that comes with that. Yeah, and I think, you know, as I listen to you, Carolyn, I know that when I was in college, again at the Oxford of the Midwest, I remember it was my first real encounter with the Word of God. I had never really listened when I was in Sunday school. I never read it on my own. And so, when I started to read, and that's what you do so well in your book, Carolyn, is you lay out what the Word of God ends up. The implications are about sex, about love, relationship.

It's so beautifully done. I was just starting to encounter that, and I'd never heard these thoughts. Who thinks like this? And at first I thought, this is ridiculous.

This is not thriving. And yet now, you know, just as you say in your book, it's like this is God's wisdom. And if you will obey it, it will literally lead you to life. This is a memoir that I would be jealous to give to a college student and say, you're going to delight in this story written by somebody who is brilliant, somebody who is passionate for the things of God, somebody who understands that the Gospel makes claims on our lives.

So we have to not just believe, but to obey. Carolyn's book is called Sex and the City of God, and we've got copies of the book in our Family Life Today Resource Center. You can find information about the book online at familylifetoday.com. You can order it from us online as well, or call 1-800-FL-TODAY to get a copy. Again, our website is familylifetoday.com.

The phone number to call to get a copy of Carolyn Weber's book, Sex and the City of God, is 1-800-358-6329. That's 1-800-F as in Family, L as in Life, and then the word Today. Now, a week from today, we'll be preparing for our celebration of Christmas. It will be Christmas Eve. Two weeks from today, it'll be New Year's Eve.

And in just over two weeks, it'll be 2021. And I think all of us are thinking, I can't wait for the new year. Here at Family Life, we're hoping the next two weeks we'll be busy and active. We're asking Family Life Today listeners to consider making as generous a year-end donation as you can possibly make for a couple of reasons. First of all, because there are a lot of friends of Family Life who this year can't make a donation because of the circumstances they find themselves in. So those who can, we're asking you to be a little extra generous if you can to make up for those who can't. The second reason we're asking is because we've had friends of the ministry who have agreed they will match every donation we receive in December up to a total of $2 million. So any donation you make, $50, $100, whatever it is, it's going to be matched with another $50 or $100. That matching gift means your donation goes even further, and we'll send you as a thank you gift when you make a donation two resources, a copy of my book Love Like You Mean It, which is all about what the Bible says about love and how that applies in a marriage relationship, and we'll send you a flash drive that's got more than 100 Family Life Today radio programs from the last 28 years, programs with Dave and Ann Wilson, with Dennis and Barbara Rainey, many of the guests we've had on through the years, programs about marriage and parenting and relationships, some great stories that are included, really the best of the best. The flash drive and the book are our way of saying thank you for helping us take advantage of this matching gift opportunity with a generous year-end donation.

You can donate online at familylifetoday.com, or you can call 1-800-FL-TODAY to donate, and we're grateful that you would consider it, and we do hope to hear from you. And we hope you can join us again tomorrow when we're going to continue our conversation with Carolyn Weber about the impact that believing the Gospel has on relationships, our marriage. In fact, we're going to hear a great story tomorrow about Carolyn's first kiss from her husband-to-be, Kent. She'll share that story with us tomorrow. Hope you can tune in for that. I want to thank our engineer today, Keith Lynch, along with our entire broadcast production team. On behalf of our hosts, Dave and Anne Wilson, I'm Bob Lapine. We'll see you back next time for another edition of Family Life Today. Family Life Today is a production of Family Life of Little Rock, Arkansas, a crew ministry. Help for today. Hope for tomorrow.