What’s Worse, Sins of the Flesh or Sins of the Spirit?

If anyone thinks that Christians regard unchastity as the supreme vice, he is quite wrong. The sins of the flesh are bad, but they are the least bad of all sins. All the worst pleasures are purely spiritual: the pleasure of putting other people in the wrong, of bossing and patronising and spoiling sport, and backbiting; the pleasures of power and hatred…That is why a cold, self-righteous prig who goes regularly to church may be far nearer to hell than a prostitute. But, of course, it is better to be neither.

C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity, p. 94-5.

 

The Role of Shame in Sexual Sin

God does not call us to a life of shame but to a life of freedom as we move from awareness of our sinfulness to confession and repentance, to redemption and healing, to ministry and sanctification. Shame only offers the lie of worthlessness, and a sense of worthlessness creates fertile soil for the continued exercising of sexual brokenness.

William M. Struthers, Wired for Intimacy: How Pornography Hijacks the Male Brain (IVP, 2009),

 

Salvation According to Secular Philosophy 100 Years Ago (and Today)

Let us see what the religion of the present with its more realistic conception of life has to say about salvation. I have written in the book as follows: “Only that soul is saved which is worth saving, and the being worth saving is its salvation. Salvation is no magical hocus-pocus external to the reach and timbre of a man; it is the loyal union of a man with those values of life which have come within his ken.”

Whatever mixture of magic, fear, ritual, and adoration religion may have been in man’s early days upon this earth, it is now increasingly, and henceforth must be, that which concerns his contact with the duties and possibilities of life. Such salvation is an achievement which has personal and social conditions. It is not a label nor a lucky number for admission into another world, but something bought and paid for by effort. It is like character and education, for these are but special instances of it.

Philosopher Roy Sellars, The Next Step in Religion, 1918