I understand why Christians today may feel blindsided by the backlash to even the barest statement of traditional teaching on sexuality. The plausibility structures of society have changed. The norms are different. Fornication is “normal” and “purity” strange.
The first headline from The Guardian surprised me—“Sex is for married heterosexual couples only, says Church of England”—not because of the stance taken, but because somewhere someone thought this was news.
The Christian church’s teaching on human sexuality goes all the way back to Jesus, who skipped past all the fallen expressions of sex and marriage we see in the Old Testament in order to reaffirm God’s original design for sex and marriage as described in the opening chapters of the Bible. Therefore, it shouldn’t have been surprising to hear a church reaffirm that any sex outside of marriage “falls short of God’s purpose for human beings.”
Also not surprising was the mockery that followed the release of the statement. People on social media derided the church for its outdated beliefs, its unwillingness to bow to cultural pressure, to bring its morality up to date with the times. Some of the comments focused on the church’s rejection of same-sex marriage, but many commenters were scratching their heads wondering why the church would reserve sex for marriage at all. In the public imagination these days, sex has been severed from both procreation and the covenantal union of a man and woman, and this changed imagination makes the church’s teaching look implausible at best and ridiculous at worst.
Just days later came another headline, and this one, sadly, didn’t surprise me: “Church sorry for saying that sex is just for married heterosexuals.” Leaders in the Church of England said their initial statement had “jeopardized trust” and caused “hurt and division.” Nothing in the follow-up statement retracted the substance of their earlier pastoral guidance, which made their subsequent apology something like this: We’re sorry we told you what we believe.
Road of Reluctance
In recent years, it’s become commonplace to see Christian leaders take an apologetic stand on a controversial issue. Not apologetic in the “defend the faith” sense of the word, but “apologetic” as if to say, I wish this was different, but here’s what we believe. Usually, this fretful posture comes from a deeper desire to appear respectable to society.
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