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Victor Lee Austin Books

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“Pleasure is good in itself, and great pleasures are to be particularly valued, for they are signs of the goodness of God. The best pleasures are shared. Yet it is not necessary to our human flourishing that we have any of them in particular. The traditional Christian teaching is that the goodness of sexual union lies in marriage, but one who does not experience this good has no more a diminishment of human flourishing than a person who never jumps out of an airplane. To speak broadly, all pleasures should be understood as ways of binding people together....”

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Book:Friendship: The Heart of Being Human
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“Dear reader, here is a sad truth: you and I fall short of being humans. We own up to this when we admit to being sinners. Sin is not something we add to ourselves and need to get rid of (although it can feel like that; our sins constitute a 'burden' that 'is intolerable,' according to a traditional prayer, and the Epistle to the Hebrews speaks of 'the sin that clings so closely' [12:1 NRSV]). Rather, sin actually is a defect, a falling short on our part of living up to our nature, a failure to be human in the full sense. We sinners, who live among sinners, never have seen in the flesh a totally real human being. The astonishing claim is that Jesus is the one, true, complete human being. So when we say that Jesus is like us in all things except sin, we are not saying that we have something, 'sin,' which Jesus fails to have. It's the opposite: Jesus has something we do not have--namely, full humanity from which nothing has been broken off and taken away. And yet, sinners that we be, we do have Jesus...”

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Book:Friendship: The Heart of Being Human
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“If we are children of God, we are not so in any childish way or inferior way. The point of grace is that we are no longer mere creatures, mere subordinates or servants or slaves. We are also no longer children in the sense of being immature.... We remain creatures, yes; we remain God's servants, one might even say his slaves, but Jesus no longer calls us servants! We remain creatures, yet we know the intimacy that comes from the Son sharing his mind with us. Our obedience is free. We have the dignity of being a friend of our truest friend.”

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Book:Friendship: The Heart of Being Human
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“...something can be a good thing and yet not a necessary thing. It is good for people to be expert at brain surgery. But if you are not a brain surgeon, you are no less human. Or a different sort of analogy: it is good for human beings to have language, but one is no less human if one's language is French rather than Mandarin Chinese, or Sign rather than English. Or yet another: a child, once she exists, is a unique good, but prior to coming into being, she was not necessary. So marriage and be good without being needful; although good, it is not a 'manner of life' that all people should enter. And even though not all people need marry, that does not make it a bad thing.”

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Book:Friendship: The Heart of Being Human
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