"Men cannot make Scripture conform to their lifestyle; they must make their lifestyle conform to Scripture"
About this Quote
A line like this doesn’t try to persuade with nuance; it draws a boundary and dares you to cross it. Edwin Louis Cole, a muscular evangelical writer best known for the Christian men’s movement, frames Scripture as a fixed authority and “lifestyle” as the wobbly thing that must yield. The word choice is strategic: “conform” echoes Romans 12 (“be transformed”), and “lifestyle” is doing a lot of cultural work, signaling everything from sexual ethics to consumer habits to the soft, therapeutic Christianity that treats faith as self-care.
The intent is disciplinary in the old sense of discipleship: stop shopping for verses that bless your preferences. Cole’s subtext is suspicion of modern individualism, the idea that the self is the final court of appeal. By making “men” the subject, he’s also speaking to a gendered crisis narrative common in late-20th-century American evangelicalism: men have gone passive, churches have gotten sentimental, and Scripture has been domesticated into inspirational wallpaper. This sentence is a call to reassert hierarchy - not just God over man, but text over desire, command over mood.
Context matters because the line arrives in an era when “lifestyle” became a political keyword (especially around sexuality) and when many Christians felt cornered by rapid cultural change. Cole offers a simple rhetorical move that functions like a litmus test: if your reading of the Bible consistently confirms your life as-is, you’re probably using it as a mirror, not a map. It works because it flatters the listener’s toughness while also scolding them into submission.
The intent is disciplinary in the old sense of discipleship: stop shopping for verses that bless your preferences. Cole’s subtext is suspicion of modern individualism, the idea that the self is the final court of appeal. By making “men” the subject, he’s also speaking to a gendered crisis narrative common in late-20th-century American evangelicalism: men have gone passive, churches have gotten sentimental, and Scripture has been domesticated into inspirational wallpaper. This sentence is a call to reassert hierarchy - not just God over man, but text over desire, command over mood.
Context matters because the line arrives in an era when “lifestyle” became a political keyword (especially around sexuality) and when many Christians felt cornered by rapid cultural change. Cole offers a simple rhetorical move that functions like a litmus test: if your reading of the Bible consistently confirms your life as-is, you’re probably using it as a mirror, not a map. It works because it flatters the listener’s toughness while also scolding them into submission.
Quote Details
| Topic | Bible |
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