Andrew T. Walker > Quotes

“This period when Christian ideas of sexual morality were challenged and overturned coincided with (and very possibly contributed to) industrialized hormonal contraception. This is not the book to debate the pros and cons of the pill—but one consequence of its availability was to sever the connection between sex and procreation. This was nothing short of revolutionary. While people in times past engaged in pre-marital sex, there was always the potential for a pregnancy to occur. Not any more—and this has enormous repercussions for how society thinks about the purpose of sex. No longer is sex assumed to take place only in marriage.”
― Andrew T. Walker, God and the Transgender Debate: What does the Bible actually say about gender identity?

“So when we say to ourselves, or to others, 'You should obey God,' what we mean is 'We want what God deserves (your obedience) and we want what is best for you (your obedience).”
― Andrew T. Walker

“What if we viewed a bride walking down an aisle toward a tuxedoed groom standing anxiously at an altar as the first step on a lifelong march toward justice and the common good? What if we understood that white dress and tux as work clothes, and the wedding rings as essential equipment for building a strong social foundation? What if a pledge of permanence meant more for economic security than just the fulfillment of sexual ecstasy?”
― Andrew T. Walker, Marriage Is: How Marriage Transforms Society and Cultivates Human Flourishing

“Why are we Millennial evangelicals, who ardently believe that Christians should hold fast to the biblical definition of marriage—a definition that countless societies and countless nonreligious thinkers have all held to? Because we love our neighbors. We can’t sit idly by as the basic social unit of civilization is redefined before our very eyes. If the Bible teaches anything, it teaches that the family is the building block of society. When we distance ourselves from this truth, we’ll certainly change the world—and not for the better.”
― Andrew T. Walker, Marriage Is: How Marriage Transforms Society and Cultivates Human Flourishing

“When we speak of marriage as only a theological construct, we do a disservice to the institution’s public significance. There aren’t two kinds of marriage—one secular, one sacred. There’s only one marriage with one purpose, regardless of how different religious traditions handle or interpret the institution. Government does not uphold a particular theological interpretation of marriage; it upholds a view of marriage that differing theological and nontheological systems rightly accommodate. That’s why civilizations across human history—some of them irreligious—have acknowledged marriage.”
― Andrew T. Walker, Marriage Is: How Marriage Transforms Society and Cultivates Human Flourishing

“We bear our crosses together in community, and community is what makes cross-bearing possible”
― Andrew T. Walker

“Jesus did not hesitate to address the underlying issues of sin in the lives of each of these people. Doing so was not a hindrance to his ministry; it was the point. Jesus came to save us from our sin, not merely to comfort us in spite of it. As his followers, our obligation is to love our neighbors enough to tell them the truth. And, if my former pastor is right, doing so may be the thing that separates us from the white noise of consumer culture, creating a chance for radical intervention. We have nothing to fear and everything to win.”
― Andrew T. Walker, Marriage Is: How Marriage Transforms Society and Cultivates Human Flourishing

“What Happened to Our Hearts Beloved, I urge you as sojourners and exiles to abstain from the passions of the flesh, which wage war against your soul. (1 Peter 2 v 11) Inside every heart, there’s a war; and the heart is both the victim and the culprit. Why? Because every person’s heart is inhabited by sinful desires, and produces sinful desires. There is an ongoing battle within the heart in which unhelpful desires wage war with our conscience. Bitterness. Anger. Envy. Greed. We cannot trust our feelings or all the passions that reside within us simply because we feel them. Our hearts are not pure—far from it: The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately sick; who can understand it? (Jeremiah 17 v 9) The nature of deception is to convince us that our hearts will not be satisfied unless we indulge what our hearts desire. But our hearts lead us astray in countless ways. Envy robs people of joy and contentment, sours friendships, and can lead to compromising morality in order to “get ahead.” Envy does not produce flourishing or joy in people. Indulging envy only results in misery for yourself and others. But none of us think this way as envy rages on. In the moment, the wrath and bitterness of envy assuages the sense of loss and jealousy residing within each of us. Not every impulse we experience should be indulged. We should be suspicious about “listening to our hearts.” Actually, everyone knows this is true. Prisons are full of people who acted in accord with their feelings—and who have been told by society that they shouldn’t. Every time a therapist tells a patient to view themselves more positively, they are accepting that there are feelings that are unhelpful to someone’s fulfillment. Our hearts’ desires can be at war with what is actually good for our hearts. The real question is: which desires should be fed, and which should be starved?”
― Andrew T. Walker, God and the Transgender Debate: What does the Bible actually say about gender identity?

“Can a man become a woman? Can a woman become a man? How and when should children be confronted with the debates about gender? What are we to do with children who are a member of one biological sex but feel as though they were born in the wrong body? What do we say to someone experiencing these feelings and desires? How do we love and help those who are deeply hurting? These questions go deeper than simply what we understand by “gender.” They go to what we understand by “humanity”: who we are, how we got here, what it means to be a human, and what role (if any) God plays in that.”
― Andrew T. Walker, God and the Transgender Debate: What does the Bible actually say about gender identity?

“We are broken actors living on a broken stage, and we do not stand on the stage for very long.”
― Andrew T. Walker, God and the Transgender Debate: What Does the Bible Actually Say about Gender Identity?

“Being creatures means that we cannot re-create ourselves in any fashion or form that we desire by a simple act of the will or the complex work of a surgeon. When we as creatures reject the Creator's blueprint, we are both rebelling against the natural order of how things objectively are, and (thought it may not seem like it) we are rejecting the life that is going to be the highest good for us.”
― Andrew T. Walker, God and the Transgender Debate: What does the Bible actually say about gender identity?

“When the church declines to speak the truth about marriage, it invites competing and false views that rob marriage of its purpose. Were the church to “get out of the marriage business,” as some are tempted, two mistakes will follow. First, the church will allow a false understanding of marriage to dominate the public square. Second, the church will become a secularized version of itself. Christians long ago insisted that a culture of no-fault divorce would not affect Christian marriages. But today, we’re all too familiar with the testimonies of scarred Christians who have endured divorce. The reality of divorce within the church bears out this truth: if the church is not holding fast to the truth of marriage, it will bend and accommodate itself to the dominant marriage ideology of the public square.”
― Andrew T. Walker, Marriage Is: How Marriage Transforms Society and Cultivates Human Flourishing

“God’s plan. It also means that marriage is, to quote Jesus “from the beginning” (Matt. 19:4–6). Marriage isn’t an accident or an afterthought. God’s perfection meant that his plan to introduce marriage between male and female was to be the unquestioned best.”
― Andrew T. Walker, Marriage Is: How Marriage Transforms Society and Cultivates Human Flourishing

“Gnosticism says that there is an inherent tension between our true selves and the bodies we inhabit. The idea that our true self is different than the body we live in communicates that our body is something less than us, and can be used, shaped, and changed to match how we feel. The concept that our gender can be different than our biological sex is a modern form of the old Gnostic idea. What this means, practically, is that a man can identify as a woman, even if they have male chromosomes and the body of a man.”
― Andrew T. Walker, God and the Transgender Debate: What does the Bible actually say about gender identity?