Below is a listing of DOXOLOGY’s lectures and videos from our Insight – August, 2015 – St. Louis, MO. “Finding Our Voice”.
1. The Church’s Voice – Pres. Matt Harrison
1. The Church’s Voice – Pres Matt Harrison
Matthew Harrison opens the conference by setting the church’s confession against the sexual ethic now enshrined in law after the Obergefell decision. He walks through Rome’s coliseum games, Herculaneum’s erotic art, and infanticide to argue that today’s abortion toll and trade in fetal parts outstrip even ancient debauchery, then surveys the coming pressures on chaplains, Christian colleges, and pastors who solemnize marriages, quoting Hermann Sasse on when a government forfeits its claim to obedience. He insists the church argue from natural law rather than seek to Christianize the state, and that Christians welcome all people without affirming every lifestyle. He closes by walking through Romans chapter by chapter, grounding the response in the law that stops every mouth and the justification given for Christ’s sake, so that pastors preach law and gospel with fresh force and even joy in what he calls a passing rain shower over America. Watch the lecture and read the transcript →
2. Marriage and Sexuality – Sherif Girgis
Sherif Girgis argues the marriage debate is not about equality, tradition, or homosexuality but about two rival visions of what marriage is. He shows that the revisionist view, marriage as an intense emotional bond for personal fulfillment, cannot explain permanence, exclusivity, monogamy, or why marriage is limited to two people, and he cites advocates who openly extend it to temporary, open, and multi-partner arrangements. Over against this he lays out the conjugal view: marriage as a comprehensive union of heart, mind, and body, made bodily one in the act ordered to children, which by its nature calls for total and permanent commitment. He traces how law shapes culture and culture shapes behavior, using no-fault divorce and rising fatherlessness to show real harm to children and the common good. He then applies the vision to sexual ethics, explaining premarital and same-sex acts as seeking the image of total union without its reality, and answers questions on divorce, contraception, and reaching a culture indifferent to reason. Watch the lecture and read the transcript →
3. The Art of Conversation – Sherif Girgis
In his second session Girgis turns from argument to method, explaining why reasoned defense matters even inside the church: reason is God’s gift that unpacks and applies revelation, as when Christ answers the lawyer with the parable of the Good Samaritan and Paul reasons at the Areopagus. He makes tone the first priority, urging cheerful confidence, honesty that concedes the opponent’s real points, anticipating objections, and starting on offense by asking the other side to defend its own vision of marriage. He recasts persuasion as a year-long project of planting seeds rather than winning on the spot, avoiding zingers, and grounding everything in friendship and unconditional love, illustrated by his response to a close friend who came out as gay. He closes with what is distinctly Christian: prayer and fasting, turning the other cheek, drawing strength from the communion of saints, and remembering that the aim is not merely winning arguments but Christ himself, in whom no faithful witness is wasted. Watch the lecture and read the transcript →
4. Sexual Fidelity – Alvin Schmidt
Alvin Schmidt draws lessons on sexual fidelity from the early Christians who refused to imitate Rome’s decadence, documenting through Roman writers, art, and emperors how far marriage had degraded and how the early church stood apart. He traces Paul’s condemnation of porneia, especially the focus on homosexual behavior in Romans 1 as a denial of God’s created male-female order, and shows how the Didache, the Epistle of Barnabas, the church fathers, church councils, and later Christian emperors upheld biblical morality for centuries. He then charts what he calls the great reversal, from the Enlightenment’s rejection of biblical authority through Kirk Benny, Krafft-Ebing, Hirschfeld, and Kinsey’s flawed research, to churches adopting the historical-critical method and eventually accepting homosexuality and transgenderism. He urges pastors to preach didactic sermons that actually teach the commandments and Luther’s explanations, warns against Christians who now cohabit and divorce like the surrounding culture, and calls the church to be in the world but not of it. Watch the lecture and read the transcript →
5. Faith and the Halls of Power: Marriage, Family, and Religious Liberty – Timothy S. Goeglein
Timothy Goeglein frames the present as a moral and spiritual revolution and an era of conscience in which marriage, family, and religious liberty are the decisive public questions. Drawing on his Washington experience, he argues politics is downstream from culture, and he marshals data on Planned Parenthood funding, soaring out-of-wedlock birth rates, cohabitation, and fatherlessness, using Charles Murray’s Belmont and Fishtown to show the collapse concentrated among working-class families. He reads the American founding as resting on the conviction that liberty requires virtue supplied by an unshackled church and family, and warns that a secularist project treats religious liberty itself as the obstacle, citing the Little Sisters of the Poor and the Obergefell dissents. Yet he insists the best days may lie ahead, since American reform movements from abolition to pro-life have flowed from faith, and he calls Christians to restate plainly what marriage, family, and the church are, distinguishing law and gospel and modeling both rooted in the love of Christ. Watch the lecture and read the transcript →
6. From Generation to Generation – Dr. Lucas Woodford
Lucas Woodford teaches sexual virtue as part of the whole biblical story, beginning in Genesis where the triune God speaks light and order, creates humanity male and female, and joins them in marriage, which he reads through Cranach’s Creation and Fall painting to show marriage, sex, gender, procreation, vocation, and modesty all established at the start. He argues that a culture that has lost its story leaves people without identity, and he addresses reproductive technologies, surrogacy, and donor conception as producing children who do not know where they came from. He treats pornography and the hookup culture as satanic distortions of a good gift, urging confession and absolution and the reminder of baptismal identity, and he presents the historic liturgy as the narrated world that weaves broken sinners into Christ’s story. He calls pastors to stay in the marriage ministry, gives practical tools for parent workshops and caring conversations with children about sex and modesty, and points to marriage as the icon of Christ and his bride, the church. Watch the lecture and read the transcript →
7. Speaking Up: Be Heard in the Din – Pamela Nielsen
Standing in on short notice for Adrienne, Pamela Nielsen offers practical Lutheran counsel on communicating about marriage, sexuality, and religious liberty, comparing the church’s unpreparedness to a lobster slowly boiled. Speaking from her work in LCMS communications, she stresses knowing your audience as Paul did at the Areopagus, meeting people where they are, and using vocation, whether pastor, parent, or neighbor, illustrated by her decades-long patience with a raging Facebook friend and a cohabiting daughter she has learned not to shame but to love and pray for. She gives concrete media technique, never say no comment, block and bridge to move from the reporter’s trap to the truth, edit everything, and engage local papers and campuses. Throughout she anchors confidence not in the speaker but in God’s word, baptism, absolution, and the Lord’s Supper, urging Christians to be native speakers of the catechism and hymnal while speaking the truth in love with gentleness and respect. Watch the lecture and read the transcript →
8. The Beauty of Chastity: Reclaiming Sexual Virtue
John Kleinig recovers chastity as a beautiful virtue rather than the vice modern culture treats it as, first distinguishing chastity from mere virginity and building a moral case: because sex engages the whole person, sex that is not personalized depersonalizes those who engage in it, splitting soul from body and leaving frustration rather than fulfillment. He critiques both the view of sex as a mere bodily appetite and the view of it as a self-actualizing rite of passage, arguing that chastity before and within marriage frees a person to give the whole self, past and future, in trust without jealousy or the fear of comparison. He then makes a stronger theological case, that unchastity is idolatry which dims our vision of God, while marital fidelity and celibate chastity both share in Christ’s holiness and point to the resurrection of the body and union with Christ, our bodies being temples of the Holy Spirit. He closes with three qualifications: unchastity is not the supreme vice, chastity unlike virginity can be regained through the cleansing blood of Jesus, and it is to be received daily as a gift like daily bread. Watch the lecture and read the transcript →