9 Quotes by Victor Lee Austin

Consider again the life of Jesus. He, according to all reliable testimony, did not experience sexual relations. Yet despite this, faith attests him as the one complete human being....To be faithful to the revelation in Jesus, we must say that the experience of sexual union is not needed for a full and complete human life.

It is a sex-saturated world out there, but some people would be open to hearing from the church that an alternative exists, something that is not negative (focusing on what you are not doing--namely, not having sex) but, to the contrary, positive (what you are doing--namely, building real intimacy in friendship).

Sex, apart from its casual use..., is a movement toward one other person to the exclusion of others. Friendship is a movement toward another person that does not exclude others.

In this imperfect world, finite and mystifying, communications can be difficult. Sometimes friends need to tell us things that we don't want to hear but are good for us. Sometimes friends tell us things that they think we need to hear even though they are not good for us. No words are perfect, no communication perfect, in this world of ours.

Friendship is about the good, it leads us to the good, and it is good.

I believe the book of Job does not show us an answer to the problem of evil but rather an answer to the question of human nature. What are we humans really? Job says: we are precious beings, capable of discourse with God, beings who should strive to accomplish friendship with each other.

...hearing is at the heart of obedience. The '-edi-' in 'obedience' is from audire, from which we also get 'audio': obedience is about hearing with someone else (in hippie jargon, being tuned in to the same wavelength)....True obedience is not so much a bending of the will as it is a work of the intellect leading the will.

Prayer is our being placed within the being of God: the Spirit, within us, prays through Jesus to the Father.

With hope for that ultimate intimacy, here are some rules for human beings in this life:Sexual relations outside marriage are wrong, without regard to class, gender, or other human differentiation.Human happiness and flourishing is thoroughly compatible with sexual abstinence.The flourishing of human beings does not lie in marriage but in being able to live with others as friends, and marriage itself should be understood, in its ultimate sense, as being oriented to friendship.