Christopher J. Gordon

Anthropology and the Sexual Ethic

Written by Christopher J. Gordon |
Thursday, June 15, 2023

Christians, be faithful and uncompromising in your witness, even unto death, remembering that Jesus told us to be of good cheer because He has overcome the world. The sexual revolution is no match for Him, for the battle has always belonged to the Lord.

When I first entered the ministry almost twenty years ago, I was a young, idealistic pastor ready to take on the world and to defend the Reformed doctrines of grace. Though I knew that Western culture over the past century was experiencing a radical change in the understanding of what it means to be human and how that plays out in our sexual ethics, I was not prepared for how quickly the sexual revolution would progress. Who of us entering the ministry in the early 2000s was prepared to face a sexual revolution that would overturn the God-ordained institution of marriage between a man and a woman? I felt more equipped to address the challenges that the Reformers faced from those who troubled the church from the inside on the important nuances of soteriology. It did not take long, however, before I as a pastor faced what seemed to be an insurmountable problem: the entire world’s demanding our submission to an unbiblical anthropology.
The Sexual Revolution
Ever since the Obergefell decision in 2015, when gay marriage was legalized in the United States, a flood of assaults have sought to overturn the creational sexual ethic that God established from the beginning for the good of the human race. We can no longer take it for granted that non-Christians around us agree on the basic definition of male and female. Our institutions have embraced concepts such as gender fluidity and call believers to declare their preferred pronouns and accept whatever view of gender is espoused by those around them. This is becoming no less true among historically robust Christian institutions as parents face sending their children to colleges that will actively seek to indoctrinate them with the new sexual libertinism. Homosexual behavior and premarital sex have for some time been normalized in the mainstream consciousness, and there seems to be no question that as we see the continual unraveling of all creational norms and the embrace of things that are contrary to nature, the next wave of sexual deviancy will demand the acceptance of nonmonogamous relationships and bestiality.
To this point, Christians have enjoyed, for the most part, marginal acceptance by society due to legal protections, but if things continue at their current rate, this time will soon be over. Full participation in the workplace and in wider society will require complete submission to whatever are the prevailing ideals of the moral revolution and the proposed reset of all creation norms.

While our freedoms still remain, we have already witnessed in the church a growing temptation to compromise on biblical anthropology and sexual ethics. Many of the ideologies of the culture have already found a place in many quarters of the Christian church in an attempt toward cultural acceptance. Movements such as Side B Christianity have attempted to forge a middle way by adopting an identity in unnatural desire, such as being a gay Christian, so long as the desires are not carried out.

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