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I just finished listening to the series of lectures by Paul Washer. There was going to be a lot I objected to in the first two, but his clarifications in the third removed most of them.
Now the good is that he has a high view of what it means to honor thy father and mother, and he is quite serious about fleeing youthful lust. Still, he comes across as identifying that which is generally prudent with what God requires. This is most clear when he compares praying about not stumbling while being alone with a girl with praying about stealing a car. The latter is clearly proscribed by the Law, the former is not.
While his clarification that there are hard cases is good, I still think he goes beyond what scripture requires in the area of courtship. It would be interesting to do a survey of all the courtships mentioned in scripture and compare them to his idea of biblical courtship. I'm not sure many of them fit this model of the man going to the father first before approaching the woman. For example, The courtship of Boaz and Ruth breaks just about every rule he made (the woman takes initiative, the man doesn't consult the woman's guardian at all, they are alone together before they are married), but perhaps it is not normative.
I also wonder whether the motivation to avoid emotional hurt is biblical. While no one likes to be hurt, I don't think it is wrong to be in a situation that might lead to hurt. In any case, I don't see how his model of courtship avoids emotional hurt. If one is that concerned about avoiding emotional hurt, one is better off avoiding courtship altogether.
This isn't a huge deal, but I wonder where he got this idea that the concept of adolescence comes from an evolutionary worldview. Anthropology has a huge percentage of atheists, yet I don't see anthropologists embracing this idea at all (and it's a question that is of interest to them). They actually recognize that the behavior is different with different societies. From what I understand, the accepted view is that the phenomenon of an intermediate state of rebellion and emerging independence during adolescence is correlated with whether a society is neolocal or not (neolocality is the expectation that children will not live with or near either their parents or their in-laws). The explanation is that relationships between children and parents are more harmonious in societies where the child is expected to live with or near his parents for the rest of their lives. Only 5% of societies are neolocal, so this is why we don't see such adolescent rebellion in most of the world.
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