Dennis Prager spoke at Focus on the Family last Friday. One of the points he made was that the emphasis of God’s work on the second day of creation was in separating. He explained that in the Hebrew, the word for "separate" is the same as the word for "holy." That’s why holiness has historically had a context of being set apart and distinct.
Just before going to hear Prager speak, I read a new article in Christianity Today by Marcy Hintz called Choosing Celibacy. That article made an interesting point about how Christian singles can be separate or set apart. Too often, the books and articles I read about Christian singleness seem to seek some kind of hybrid between the single culture we know today and the concepts Paul wrote about two thousand years ago to the church in Corinth.
Unfortunately, those hybrids often seem to err more on the side of accommodating the single culture we know than they do on wrestling with the implications of the fully dedicated celibate life that Paul describes in the book of Corinthians. As a result, we now have a Christian subculture of Paul (and Pauline) the Playboys who wrap their singleness in Paul’s statement "it’s better not to marry," but then fail to live out the kind of "dedicated devotion" that would distinguish them from their secular peers.
Hintz appears to be seeking a more distinctive life as a Christian single. She writes:
Why not call for a vowed, vocational commitment to the church? What would change in our culture of singleness if the church were to reclaim a tradition that reinvokes the memory that we live in the time between the gospel’s first announcement and its final fulfillment—a time in which marriage is celebrated, but celibacy is held out as a radical sign of fidelity to Christ and his body?
