Book Quote

I would love to see my church's women's study do a book like the one this quote came from:

"Sanctification (becoming holy), then, is essentially an affirmation of life. The whole purpose of the Christian life is the recovery of the original image of God, in other words, the recovery of the kind of human experience which God intended Adam and Eve to have before the Fall. The Christian experience . . . like theirs, affirms life.
Ironically, those who stand in the doctrinal traditions of the Reformation and the apostolic church have inherited from the nineteenth century a spirit of negativism quite out of character with these roots. It has been the spirit of 'Do not taste, Do not touch.' (Col 2:21) It has been characterized by a denunciation of the mind and a rejection of all cultural activities. The mind has been seen as a boogieman, and creativity as wasteful luxury. And, as in the 'tradition' opposed by Paul, this pirit of negativism has been presented as a virtuous and religious attitude.
Over against such a tradition, we contend for a view of sanctification which affirms all those activities which are truly human. Why? Because that is the sort of experience God intended us to have and which he called 'very good.' . . . Such an experience is fundamental to the Christian life because to be human is to be a reflection, as a finite and physical person, of the experience of the infinite Person who made us."
from Being Human: The Nature of Spiritual Experience by Ranald Macauley and Jerram Barrs

I'd like to know, when there are so many interesting aspects of Christianity to learn about, why does every woman's Bible Study I've ever heard of seem to only cycle through character studies of women in the Bible, being a Proverbs 31 woman, and wifely submission?

This is the book that was selected for the first annual book discussion at the CM Conference coming up in about ten days.