http://www.equip.org

A collegiate website advises young women on how to have a “happy hook-up.” Get “clear consent and mutual agreement to engage in sexual acts,” the article recommends. Then “the whole hookup experience will be more positive for everyone involved.”¹

Glancing at the author’s bio, I learned that she is a student at a conservative Christian college!

When even Christian young people are buying into the hookup culture, it’s clear that traditional ways of teaching biblical morality are no longer effective. “Just say no” is not enough. Young people don’t need simple rules; they need reasons to make sense of the rules. Which is to say, they need to be taught the worldview rationale for biblical morality. Otherwise it is possible for Christian young people to be sincere in their faith, yet thoroughly secular in their thoughts—and, consequently, in their behavior.

Every system of sexual morality depends on a prior view of nature. In Western society, until the modern age, nature was regarded as God’s handiwork, created for His purposes. To use a technical term, Christianity implies a teleological view of nature—from the Greek telos, which means a thing’s goal, purpose, or ideal state. Because humans are created in God’s image, their goal is to become true reflectors of God’s character. The moral law is simply the road map telling us how to reach that goal, the instruction manual for progressing toward God’s ideal.

That instruction manual is derived primarily, of course, from God’s communication in Scripture. But another source is creation itself. We can read signs in nature that indicate God’s original purpose—traces of God’s image that remain even in a fallen world.

For example, the biological correspondence between male and female is not some evolutionary accident. It is part of the original creation that God pronounced “very good”—morally good. Thus it provides a reference point for morality. Our physical anatomy signals a divine purpose for male and female to form covenants for mutual love and the nurturing of new life. Biblical sexual morality is not arbitrary. It reflects the purpose for which we were created.

By contrast, secular morality rests on a view of nature that rejects teleology, acknowledging only blind, material forces. Historically, the turning point was Charles Darwin. The central elements in his theory—random variations sifted out by the mechanical process of natural selection—were proposed expressly to get rid of the concept of purpose or design in biology. As cultural historian Jacques Barzun writes, the “denial of purpose is Darwin’s distinctive contention.”²

This had profound moral implications. For if nature was not the handiwork of a personal God, then it no longer bore signs of God’s good purposes—which meant it no longer provided a basis for moral truths.

The next step was crucial: because nature did not reveal God’s will, it became a morally neutral realm on which humans may impose their will. There was nothing within nature that humans were morally obligated to respect. It was merely raw material to be manipulated and controlled to serve human needs and preferences.

GETTING OFF THE GROUND FLOOR

How does this history explain the rise of liberal sexual morality? The human body is, of course, part of nature and therefore it too came to be seen as raw material subject to the choices of the autonomous self. In the words of Roger Lundin of Wheaton College, both nature and the body were recast as “essentially amoral mechanisms to be used to whatever private ends we have.”³ In other words, because the human body has no intrinsic purpose, we can use it any way we choose.

But who is this “we”—this choosing, controlling self that uses the body for its own purposes? For all its claim to be modern, liberalism has surprising affinities with the philosophy of Plato in the ancient world. Plato taught a dualism in which the soul uses the body instrumentally to affect the world—like a charioteer driving a chariot, as he put it.

An updated version of dualism stems from René Descartes. Philosopher Daniel Dennett (who himself rejects dualism) explains: “Since Descartes in the seventeenth century we have had a vision of the self as a sort of immaterial ghost that owns and controls a body the way you own and control your car.”⁴ That is, most modern people unconsciously hold a view of the human body as a form of property that can be controlled and manipulated to serve the self’s desires.

What does this dualistic view of the person mean in practice—especially in sexual practice? It has created an expectation that the self is free to use the body any way it chooses, without serious consequences. In short, it has led to the hook-up culture.

“What makes hooking up unique is that its practitioners agree that there will be no commitment, no exclusivity, no feelings,” explains an article in the Washington Post.⁵ By definition, hook-ups are purely physical encounters with no expectation of any personal relationship. Hook-up partners are referred to as “friends with benefits,” but that’s a euphemism because they are not really even friends. The unwritten etiquette is that you never meet to just talk or spend time together, explains a New York Times article. “You just keep it purely sexual, and that way people don’t have mixed expectations, and no one gets hurt.”⁶

Except, of course, that people do get hurt. The same article quotes a teenager named Melissa who was depressed because her hook-up partner had just broken up with her.

In practice, people cannot dualistically separate the self from the body. Rolling Stone magazine interviewed a college student who stated the problem succinctly: people “assume that there are two very distinct elements in a relationship, one emotional and one sexual, and they pretend like there are clean lines between them.”⁷

Do you recognize the language of dualism? Young people have come to believe that sexual relationships can be solely physical, disconnected from the mind and emotions—with “clean lines” between them.

Philosophers often illustrate dualism using the image of two stories in a building. In the lower story is the body, which since Descartes has been regarded as a biochemical machine. In the upper story is the autonomous self—with a “clean line” separating the two.

THE SELF
Mind and emotions

___________________________

 THE BODY
Biochemical machine

George Bernard Shaw recognized the problem in his 1931 play Too True to Be Good. “When men and women pick one another up just for a bit of fun, they find they’ve picked up more than they bargained for, because men and women have a top storey as well as a ground floor,” says one character. “You can’t have the one without the other. They’re always trying to; but it doesn’t work.” Today’s young people are still trying to have one without the other. But it still doesn’t work.

Of course, the fact that it does not work ought to tell us something. It means the hook-up culture rests on an inadequate conception of human nature. People are trying to live out a worldview that does not fit who they really are.

Because humans are created in God’s image, their experience will never quite “fit” a secular view of human nature. In practice, non-Christians will always bump up against some point of contradiction between their secular worldview and their real-life experience. That contradiction provides an opening to make the case that the secular worldview is flawed. It fails to explain human life and experience.

Young people like Melissa are trying to live out a worldview that does not match their true nature—and it is tearing them apart with its pain and heartache.

DISSING THE BODY

The same destructive worldview explains the current acceptance of homosexuality. Even in churches, many young people do not “get” why homosexual activity is morally wrong. The biblical rejection of homosexuality makes more sense when we understand the implicit worldview—which is, once again, a dehumanizing dualism.

Think of it this way: biologically and physiologically, males and females are clearly counterparts to one another. The male sexual and reproductive anatomy is obviously designed for a relationship with a female, and vice versa. Homosexual practice overrides that clear design built into the structure of our bodies.

As a result, it expresses a profound disrespect for our physical anatomy.  Essentially it says that anatomy has no intrinsic purpose but is just a mechanistic system of glands and organs that one can use any way one chooses.

As a result, homosexual practice requires individuals to contradict their own biology. It disconnects a person’s sexual feelings from his or her biological identity as male or female—which exerts a self-alienating and fragmenting effect on the human personality.

Some Christians propose that God creates some people as homosexuals. But if so, says Tim Wilkins of Cross Ministry (himself a former homosexual), then “God has played a cruel joke on them. He has engineered their minds and emotions for attraction to the same-sex and yet created their physiology to be in direct opposition to that attraction.”⁸

And the logic of alienation will not stop there. Already the acceptance of same-sex relationships is leading to a full-blown postmodern conception of sexuality as fluid and changing over time. In Saving Leonardo I quote a psychotherapist addressing the problem faced by individuals who had come out of the closet as homosexual, but were later attracted to heterosexual relationships again. So what am I, they asked.

The psychotherapist’s response was, essentially to not worry; it’s okay to change your sexual identity whenever you wish. In his words, today people “don’t want to fit into any boxes—not gay, straight, lesbian, or bisexual ones.” Instead “they want to be free to change their minds.”⁹

This view of sexuality, the psychotherapist stated, is “a challenge to the old, modernist way of thinking” that you were born with a gender that does not change because it is rooted in our biological identity. Instead we are moving to a postmodern view that gender is something I can choose, independent of biology. The implication is that I might have been straight yesterday, but I can be homosexual today, and maybe bisexual tomorrow. One’s psychosexual identity is said to be in constant flux.

In fact, human nature itself is thought of as a social construction, something we make up as we go along. We can call this view liberalism, employing a definition by the self-described liberal philosopher Peter Berkowitz: “Each generation of liberal thinkers” focuses on “dimensions of life previously regarded as fixed by nature,” then seeks to show that in reality they are “subject to human will and remaking.”¹⁰

In other words, previous generations thought there was a fixed, universal human nature that expressed a God-given teleology. For example, they thought heterosexual marriage was rooted in human nature. It was the way humans were created to function.

By contrast, liberalism denies that there is any fixed or universal human nature. Humans are an accidental configuration of matter, a product of blind evolutionary forces. Marriage is a social behavior that evolved because it was adaptive at some point in evolutionary history. It is not intrinsic to human nature, however. In fact, there is no human nature. Therefore we are free to redefine marriage at will. It is open to unlimited “human will and remaking.”

WHICH GENDERS HAVE YOU BEEN?

This rejection of human nature has ever-widening implications. The cutting-edge issue today is transgenderism, a movement that rejects the distinction between male and female itself as a social construction—and an oppressive one at that.

Several universities now offer separate bathrooms, housing, and sports teams for transgender students who do not identify themselves as either male or female. The New York Times reports that some schools no longer require students to check male or female on their health forms. Instead, they are asked to “describe your gender identity history.”¹¹ That is, which genders have you been over the course of your lifetime?

The concept of gender has become fluid, free-floating, completely detached from physical anatomy. This is typically presented as liberating—a way to create your own identity instead of accepting one that has been culturally assigned. A few years ago, California passed a law requiring schools to permit transgender students to use the restroom or locker room of their preferred gender, regardless of their anatomical sex. The new law¹² defined a student’s gender as including “gender related appearance and behavior whether or not stereotypically associated with the person’s assigned sex at birth.”¹³ Notice the assumption that a person’s sex is “assigned,” as though it were purely arbitrary instead of an anatomical fact.

The law is being used to impose a postmodern concept of the person that denies any intrinsic dignity to the unique biological capabilities inherent in being male or female. Physical anatomy is treated as insignificant, inconsequential, and completely irrelevant to gender identity. An Oakland elementary school teaches young children that “gender is not inherently nor solely connected to one’s physical anatomy.”¹⁴ This is a devastatingly disrespectful view of the physical body.

It also endangers human rights. Rights are based on the recognition that there are certain nonnegotiable givens in human nature, prior to the state, which the state is obligated to respect. But if human nature itself is merely a social construction, something we make up as we go along, including our psychosexual identity, then there is nothing in the individual that is given, which the state is obligated to respect—and thus no basis for inalienable human rights.

If America accepts practices such as same-sex “marriage,” in the process it will absorb the accompanying worldview—the redefinition of human personhood as a purely social construction—which opens the door to unlimited statism, because there is no human nature that an oppressive state could possibly offend.

GOD LIKES MATTER

Ironically, Christians and others who respect the givens of human sexuality are often dismissed as prudes and Puritans because of their “repressive” sexual morality. Yet the biblical worldview actually affirms a much higher view of the body than the secular utilitarian view. It offers the radically positive affirmation that the material world was created by God, that it will ultimately be made whole by God, and that God was actually incarnated (made flesh) in a human body.

In the ancient world, these biblical claims were so astonishing that the Gnostics rejected them. They taught that Jesus was really an avatar who only appeared to have a human body. They could not accept the idea of a Creator who actually likes matter because He created it—a God who affirms our material, biological, sexual nature.

Today, in an unexpected twist of history, it is once again Christianity that is defending a high and holistic view of the human person.

Most churches, sadly, do not communicate a high view of the person. A 2007 Barna survey of adult churchgoers under the age of thirty found that about fifty percent said, “They perceive Christianity to be judgmental, hypocritical, and too political.”

These are not critics from outside the church, but young people sitting in the pews. Moreover, the study found that this generation exhibits “a greater degree of criticism toward Christianity than did previous generations.”

Nowhere is this more true than on hot-button issues such as sexuality. Only by digging beneath the surface and refocusing on the worldview level can we show young people why secular views of sexuality are harmful and alienating. A worldview focus gives us the tools to craft a positive approach that expresses love and concern for people caught in destructive life patterns.

Nancy Pearcey’s latest book is Saving Leonardo, on which this article is based. She is also the author of the bestselling, award-winning Total Truth: Liberating Christianity from Its Cultural Captivity. Pearcey currently teaches at Rivendell Sanctuary.

NOTES

1. Ally Karsyn, “The Drunken Hookup Double Standard,” Her Campus, April 30, 2011.
2. Jacques Barzun, Darwin, Marx, Wagner: Critique of a Heritage (New York: Little, Brown, and Company, 1941), 11.
3. Roger Lundin, The Culture of Interpretation: Christian Faith and the Postmodern World(Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1993), 102.
4. Daniel Dennett, “The Origin of Selves,” Cogito 3 (Autumn 1989): 163–73.
5. Kathy Dobie, “Going All the Way,” Washington Post, February 11, 2007.
6. Benoit Denizet-Lewis, “Friends, Friends with Benefits, and the Benefits of the Local Mall,” New York Times Magazine, May 30, 2004, http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/30/magazine/friends-friends-with-benefits-and-the-benefits-of-the-local-mall.html.
7. Janet Reitman, “Sex and Scandal at Duke,” Rolling Stone, June 1, 2006.
8. Tim Wilkins, “Cruel Joke or Medical Anomaly?” http://www.crossministry.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=69:cruel-joke-or-medical-anomaly-proponents-of-same-sex-qmarriageq-owe-us-an-nswer&catid=35:published&Itemid=65.
9. Bret Johnson, quoted by Laura Markowitz, “The Postmodern Queer Identity Movement,” Utne Reader, September/October 2000.
10. Peter Berkowitz, “Rediscovering Liberalism,” The Boston Book Review, March 1995.
11. Fred Bernstein, “On Campus, Rethinking Biology 101,” The New York Times, March 7, 2004.
12. http://leginfo.public.ca.gov/pub/07-08/bill/sen/sb_0751-0800/sb_777_bill_20070409_amended_sen_v98.html.
13. http://www.aroundthecapitol.com/Bills/AB_887/20112012/.
14. Russ Jones, “Parents Defenseless against Gender ‘Diversity Training,’” OneNewsNow, May 26, 2011.

SYNOPSIS

Contemporary Christians in the Western world live in nations with governments that are sometimes called “liberal democracies.” Because such governments allow their citizens to form political parties, vote, run for elected office, and petition the government, Christians in such nations are blessed with opportunities to shape their communities in ways that were absent in prior generations. Although the Bible does not say much about the role of a Christian citizen and his relationship to the state, Scripture does communicate to us certain principles that provide us with insight on the scope of a Christian’s responsibility in a liberal democracy. In order to understand these principles we will explore three topics: (1) Caesar’s coin and the image of God, (2) doing justice, and (3) knowing your government, its laws, and the scope of your citizenship. Christians must use their freedom wisely and behave honorably before their unbelieving neighbors as well as accept and respect the rule of law and the authorities put in place to protect it, all for the sake of the common good.

Should a Christian citizen be politically engaged? Although the New Testament speaks very little about a Christian’s responsibility as a citizen, one may glean certain principles from the Bible that contribute to our understanding. In order to accomplish this, I will cover three topics: Caesar’s Coin and the Image of God; Doing Justice; and Knowing Your Government, Its Laws, and the Scope of Your Citizenship.

CAESAR’S COIN AND THE IMAGE OF GOD

Jesus, in a familiar scene, is confronted by the Pharisees:

“Tell us, then, what is your opinion: Is it lawful to pay the census tax to Caesar or not?” Knowing their malice, Jesus said, “Why are you testing me, you hypocrites? Show me the coin that pays the census tax.” Then they handed him the Roman coin. He said to them, “Whose image is this and whose inscription?” They replied, “Caesar’s.” At that he said to them, “Then repay to Caesar what belongs to Caesar and to God what belongs to God.” When they heard this they were amazed, and leaving him they went away. (Matt. 22:11–13 NAB)

Most readers understand Jesus as instructing His audience that the church and government have jurisdiction over different spheres. Although I believe this is a correct reading, we often miss its subtle political implications. Jesus first asks whose image is on the coin, and the answer is “Caesar.” There is an unsaid question, however: Who has the image of God on it?¹ So, if the coin represents the authority of Caesar because it has his image on it, then we, human beings, are under the authority of God because we have His image on us. Good governments, nevertheless, ought to be concerned with the well-being of their citizens. Thus, both government and the church, though having separate jurisdictions, share a common obligation to advance the good of those made in God’s image.

This implies not only that we should not confuse the state and the church, but also that we should be concerned with the good of our fellow human beings. This concern may be manifested in a number of different ways. We can help the poor, feed the hungry, clothe the naked, or comfort the afflicted. This can be accomplished by our churches or by the wider community through government programs. The issue for Christians is not whether one should support works of mercy and charity—we are commanded to do so by Scripture (Matt. 25:31–46; James 1:26–27). The real question, rather, is what is the best way to achieve success. Christians are, of course, divided on this question. Some emphasize free market solutions, with government playing a minimal role and the church doing virtually all of the work. Others maintain that some social welfare programs administered by the government are necessary, with churches playing a role in politically advocating such programs along with doing their own independent work as well.

We should, however, remember that the theological purpose of Christian charity is not merely to help the poor and others who are in need of the church’s love and care, but also to allow the grace of God to work through us so that we may be conformed to the image of Christ and bear witness to the world of that grace. According to Jesus (Matt. 5:17–24), it is the bearing of fruit, the hearing and acting on Christ’s words, the doing the will of His Father that constitute the life of faith, a life likened by Jesus to a house that could fall if not adequately constructed to withstand severe adversity. The Gospel of Mark recounts these words of Christ, “If any man would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me. For whoever would save his life will lose it; and whoever loses his life for my sake and the gospel’s will save it” (Mark 8:34–35). Because the Christian gospel is as much about getting heaven into us as getting us into heaven, we should not be quick to accept government solutions that may have the unintended consequence of impeding the church’s opportunity to bear witness to Christ’s grace in our works of charity and mercy.

DOING JUSTICE

Scripture instructs both the state and the individual to do justice. Christ, for example, tells us to love our neighbors as ourselves (Luke 10:27), and offers the parable of the Good Samaritan in order to help us to understand that the stranger, too, is my neighbor and entitled to be treated justly (Luke 10:29–37). The Old Testament is replete with calls for justice and condemnations of injustice (e.g., Isa. 58:6–10; Deut. 24:19–22; Prov. 31:8–9). The Ten Commandments (Exod. 20:2–17) tell us something of God’s plan for a rightly ordered, or socially just, community. We are to worship God, honor our mothers and fathers, remain faithful to our spouses, not covet our neighbors’ property or spouse, maintain integrity in word and deed, and respect the intrinsic dignity of human life. In political terms this can be translated to the government respecting and privileging religious liberty, the right to life, private property, traditional marriage, male-female parenthood, and integrity in public life.

A Christian’s moral obligation to do justice may also involve concern for the public culture and how it affects the virtue of its citizens. Political theorist Robert P. George refers to this as a community’s “moral ecology.”² We know that film, art, television, literature, the Internet, and other forms of entertainment and expression have the power to shape and influence a culture. This is why companies advertise. They are fully aware that a well-crafted image or a string of carefully fashioned words has the power to change minds and hearts. This should not surprise us. Jesus uttered parables, not doctrinal treatises, in order to teach theological truths, just as Plato penned his entertaining dialogues in order to offer philosophical arguments on an array of issues concerning the nature of knowledge, reality, politics, and law. Everyone knows the story of the Good Samaritan, but virtually no one, except for a handful of professors, can recite to you the version of Immanuel Kant’s categorical imperative they were taught in college. Stories and images matter.

Just as the natural environment of the Earth requires an ecological balance, so does the moral environment of a culture. Just as a polluted river has the potential to negatively impact fish, wildlife, recreation, and industry, a polluted culture can impair the moral ecology of a community. This seems uncontroversial. Thus, it is not surprising that in the United States some of the fiercest political and legal battles are over public school curricula. Activists from many sides clash over the content of everything from sex education courses to the teaching of evolution in science classes. For all sides know that ideas have consequences and that whoever controls what and how ideas are communicated in the schools shapes the beliefs of the next generation. This is no less true of other cultural phenomena, including the assorted media that incessantly bombard us from all angles, such as radio, television, film, and the Internet. Consequently, if a Christian is truly concerned about loving her neighbor as herself, she should be just as worried about her neighbor’s loss of virtue resulting from, and contributing to, an imbalance in her community’s moral ecology as she is with the loss of her neighbor’s physical health caused by an excess of automobile emissions.

And yet, the Christian has to be careful on how far he or she will extend the power of the government to protect a community’s moral ecology. Take, for example, the debate over gay rights. There is a wide range of opinion on this subject, even among Christians. Very few, if any, Christians, even very conservative ones, argue for the state to criminalize homosexual behavior that takes place in private between consenting adults, though most Christians would not argue that homosexual practice is good or ought to be celebrated by the state. But yet it is clear to the Catholic and Orthodox Churches and virtually all evangelical Protestants that a society that embraces same-sex marriage is one that has effectively abandoned a fundamental truth about human beings—marriage is a one-flesh communion between one man and one woman—supported by both Scripture and natural law that is essential for the common good.³

A Christian must be prudent and wise about how he or she addresses the volatile issues that arise out of the debate over gay rights. First, even if we believe that homosexual behavior is immoral and harmful to those who practice it (as many of us do indeed believe, including me), one must never forget that homosexuals are persons made in the image of God. Thus, we do not want our support of the sanctity of marriage to obstruct our love for those for whom Christ died, including our homosexual neighbors and friends. For this reason, the Christian should focus on what he or she supports rather than merely on what he or she opposes, though at times we cannot avoid speaking frankly about what we believe about human sexuality and the nature of marriage. In those cases, we should ask our dissenting friends and neighbors to extend to us the tolerance and open-mindedness they often (and I believe, inaccurately) claim that we lack.

Second, because Christians, even in the United States, live in widely different communities, one has to be realistic about what one can achieve by the political process. In some locales, the best one can do is to make an effort to protect the church from being coerced by the state to violate Christian moral theology. In Massachusetts, for example, soon after the state’s Supreme Judicial Court in 2003 required that the state issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples, Catholic Charities, which was at the time in the child adoption business, was told by the state that it could no longer exclude same-sex couples as adoptee parents, even though the Catholic Church maintains that same-sex unions are deeply disordered and sinful. Because it did not want to compromise its moral theology, Catholic Charities, sadly, ceased putting children up for adoption.⁴ Even if one supports gay rights, this forced departure of Christian kindness from the public square is an appalling violation of religious liberty. It means that a religious organization with an outstanding track record in placing children in loving homes had to stop that activity simply because it will not acquiesce to the state’s requirement that it violate its theological understanding of the nature of marriage and family. It seems to me that, in situations like this, Christians have a right to resist through legal and extra-legal means such an intrusion by the state on the practice of the church’s moral theology. For this reason, Christian citizens should be aware that laws and court opinions that are defended as liberating for one group may in practice nurture cultural and political hostility toward Christians and other citizens.

KNOWING YOUR GOVERNMENT, ITS LAWS,
AND THE SCOPE OF YOUR CITIZENSHIP

Scripture seems to teach that we have an obligation to understand the nature of our government and its laws and employ that knowledge so that the gospel is not disadvantaged by the state. According to Paul, Christians ought to obey generally applicable laws because they receive their authority from God. Thus, to disobey such laws is tantamount to disobeying God. Paul writes:

Obey the rulers who have authority over you. Only God can give authority to anyone, and he puts these rulers in their places of power. People who oppose the authorities are opposing what God has done, and they will be punished. Rulers are a threat to evil people, not to good people. There is no need to be afraid of the authorities. Just do right, and they will praise you for it. After all, they are God’s servants, and it is their duty to help you.

If you do something wrong, you ought to be afraid, because these rulers have the right to punish you. They are God’s servants who punish criminals to show how angry God is. But you should obey the rulers because you know it is the right thing to do, and not just because of God’s anger.

You must also pay your taxes. The authorities are God’s servants, and it is their duty to take care of these matters. Pay all that you owe, whether it is taxes and fees or respect and honor. (Rom. 13:1–7 CEV)

In order to comply with Paul’s instructions, one must be conversant with the laws of one’s government and the rules and regulations that one is required to obey. The Apostle also rejects a consequentialist justification for this obedience. That is, he says that we should obey the law, not merely because we will be punished if we don’t obey it, but rather, because “it is the right thing to do” even if we know that we won’t be punished if we disobey.

However, it would be a mistake to take the apostle’s general advice to the Romans and apply it to situations in which a good law is administered unjustly, or an unjust law punishes the good and rewards evil, or when the authorities instruct Christian citizens to betray the principles of the gospel.

Concerning the case of unjustly administered law, the Book of Acts records an incident in which Paul, after being beaten and imprisoned with Silas for preaching the gospel, appeals to his Roman citizenship in order to exercise his civil rights and to remedy a wrong:

But when it was day, the magistrates sent the lictors [the Roman magistrates’ attendees] with the order, “Release those men.” The jailer reported the(se) words to Paul, “The magistrates have sent orders that you be released. Now, then, come out and go in peace.” But Paul said to them, “They have beaten us publicly, even though we are Roman citizens and have not been tried, and have thrown us into prison. And now, are they going to release us secretly? By no means. Let them come themselves and lead us out.” The lictors reported these words to the magistrates, and they became alarmed when they heard that they were Roman citizens. So they came and placated them, and led them out and asked that they leave the city. (Acts 16:35–39 NAB)

Several points stand out here. (1) The Apostle used political status—Roman citizenship—in order to ensure that the gospel could be preached freely. (2) He was not afraid to exercise the rights that this political status accorded him as an act of community leadership, even if it struck fear in the hearts of the magistrates. (3) He directly cited a violation of his rights as a citizen—lack of due process (“we…have not been tried”)—against those in the government that committed the act. (4) Paul employed political leverage to correct an injustice done to him and a fellow Christian.

Today, citizenship, especially in liberal democracies, carries with it a greater array of rights and responsibilities than the Apostle ever had. Thus, if Paul thought there was nothing tawdry or unchristian in employing his Roman citizenship and the rights and powers that accompany it in order to protect the gospel and to remedy a wrong, then we ought to take our own citizenship just as seriously when the proper time and circumstance requires that we avail ourselves of its powers.

Consider another encounter between the church and the civil authorities (Acts 5:17–42). This concerned the right of Christian believers to preach the gospel. The apostles were imprisoned in a public jail by the Jewish Sadducee high priest and his colleagues. After an angel released the apostles that evening, the Sadducees convened the Council of Jewish authorities and requested that the apostles be brought before that body. But the apostles were not in jail any longer. They were in the Temple preaching the gospel. So, when the council members heard this, the captain of the Temple guards and his men went to the Temple and escorted the apostles back to the Council. The text goes on to record the following exchange:

When they had brought them, they stood them [the apostles] before the Council. The high priest questioned them, saying, “We gave you strict orders not to continue teaching in this name, and yet, you have filled Jerusalem with your teaching and intend to bring this man’s blood upon us.” But Peter and the apostles answered, “We must obey God rather than men. The God of our fathers raised up Jesus, whom you had put to death by hanging Him on a cross. He is the one whom God exalted to His right hand as a Prince and a Savior, to grant repentance to Israel, and forgiveness of sins. And we are witnesses of these things; and so is the Holy Spirit, whom God has given to those who obey Him.” (Acts 5:27–32 NASB)

In this case, the infant church disobeyed the civil authorities because they were requiring that the church not obey Christ’s command to preach the gospel (Matt. 28:19–20). This records a clear case of a political regime oppressing the church. But it also tells us something else that is often missed by biblical commentators: it shows us what the apostles thought about the truth-value of the message they were preaching. Rather than appealing to a “right to conscience” or some modern concept of religious liberty to justify their preaching (though there is certainly nothing wrong in appealing to such a concept), the apostles told the high priest that they were justified in preaching the gospel because they had good reason to believe that the gospel was true. Given the religious nature of the civil authority they were encountering—a Jewish Council—the apostles delivered to that body the only sort of argument that could justify what they were doing in the minds of their oppressors: we have knowledge of a truth that gives us the warrant, and thus authority, to do what we are doing. Of course, the Council members were not persuaded by the apostles’ argument, for “they, when they heard this, were cut to the heart, and minded to slay them [the apostles]” (Acts 5:33 ASV).

One lesson from this story is that Christians may at times be obligated to disobey the civil authorities. But another lesson, that is often ignored, is that Christians should defend their place in the polity by appealing to the truth of what they believe. Fortunately, for many of us, we live in nations in which our religious liberty does not depend on whether we can make a case for the veracity of our faith. This is because, ironically, as many scholars have argued, the very idea of religious liberty is rooted in a Christian view of human beings that entails that religious liberty is a fundamental right that all persons possess. Denominations as different as the Southern Baptist Convention⁵ and the Catholic Church⁶ have embraced this understanding and defend it as a natural outgrowth of Christian principles found in both Scripture and church history.

PETER’S EXHORTATION

The same Peter who courageously stood up for the gospel in the Book of Acts tells us in his first epistle that in this world we are “aliens and exiles,” and that we ought to “conduct [ourselves] honorably among the Gentiles [i.e., unbelievers], so that, though they malign [us] as evildoers, they may see [our] honorable deeds and glorify God when he comes to judge” (1 Pet. 2:11–12 NRSV). Peter goes on to write:

For the Lord’s sake accept the authority of every human institution, whether of the emperor as supreme, or of governors, as sent by him to punish those who do wrong and to praise those who do right. For it is God’s will that by doing right you should silence the ignorance of the foolish.

As servants of God, live as free people, yet do not use your freedom as a pretext for evil. Honor everyone. Love the family of believers. Fear God. Honor the emperor. (1 Peter 2:13–17 NRSV)

So, the Christian must use his freedom wisely and be honorable to his unbelieving neighbors as well as accept and respect the rule of law and the authorities put in place to protect it, all for the sake of the common good. In a liberal democracy, such as the United States, the Christian citizen has unprecedented access to the levers of power in comparison to his predecessors in the ancient and medieval worlds. Thus, Peter’s instructions, as well as the example set by the apostles in Acts, may have more practical application in our modern age than at any time in the 1500 years following the establishment of the first-century church.

Francis J. Beckwith is Professor of Philosophy and Church-State Studies, and Resident Scholar in Baylor’s Institute for Studies of Religion, Baylor University. He is the author of many books including Defending Life: A Moral and Legal Case against Abortion Choice (Cambridge University Press, 2007) and Politics for Christians: Statecraft as Soulcraft (InterVarsity Press, 2010), from which this article is adapted. His website is www.francisbeckwith.com

NOTES

* This article is adapted from portions of Chapter 2 of Francis J. Beckwith, Politics for Christians: Statecraft as Soulcraft (InterVarsity Press, 2010).

1. This is an insight I learned from Luis Lugo in his essay “Caesar’s Coin and the Politics of the Kingdom: A Pluralist Perspective,” in Caesar’s Coin Revisited: Christians and the Limits of Government, ed. Michael Cromartie (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1996), 14–15.
2. Robert P. George, Making Men Moral: Civil Liberties and Public Morality (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 46.
3. See Robert P. George and Jean Bethke Elshtain, eds., The Meaning of Marriage: Family, State, Market, and Morals (Dallas: Spence Publishing, 2006); and Robert A. J. Gagnon, The Bible and Homosexual Practice: Texts and Hermeneutics (Nashville: Abingdon, 2001).
4. Maggie Gallagher, “Banned in Boston,” The Weekly Standard, May 16, 2006, 11, 33.
5. See “Religious Liberty,” on the Web site of The Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention, available at http://erlc.com/topics/C33/.
6. See Dignitas Humanae (December 7, 1965), available at http://www.vatican.va/archive/hist_councils/ii_vatican_council/documents/vat-ii_decl_19651207_dignitatis-humanae_en.html.

This is the first time you are hearing from me in this column although my name has been in the staff box for more than twenty years. During the past twenty years, one of the attributes that I have always emphasized to others (especially non-Christians) when describing our work at the Christian Research Institute (CRI) and the CHRISTIAN RESEARCH JOURNAL is that, although we cover controversial issues, we strive to address them in a measured and dispassionate manner.

When I started working at CRI, both the Internet and e-mail were still novelties. Since then e-mail, texting, blogs, social media, and a twenty-four-hour news cycle on TV and online have contributed to an increasingly shrill and uncivil tone in public discourse.

Shielded by the anonymity of online interaction, Christians are not beyond participating in the angry and rude discourse that permeates our tech-driven culture. In fact, apart from the absence of expletives, at times it can be hard to tell the difference between Christian and non-Christian political commentary. As we head into the height of the American political process, the incivility seems to be reaching a fever pitch. Christians assert their First Amendment rights to enter into the fray along with the non-Christians and make insulting, dismissive comments online to anyone who does not agree with their views. And it’s not only political differences that raise their ire, but theological ones as well. From eschatology, Calvinism and Arminianism, young or old earth, to whether it is biblically allowable for Christians to see R-rated movies, many of us seem to feel it’s our duty to set people straight with no consideration as to how we approach the discussion.

In this issue’s two Viewpoint articles, we demonstrate an alternative approach to debate. In the Viewpoint piece on the ethics of political engagement, editor-in-chief Elliot Miller responds to a previous opinion piece by JOURNAL contributor Scott Klusendorf on whether Christians should vote straight ticket, and Klusendorf offers a rebuttal to Miller’s argument. Our other Viewpoint article is a pro/con discussion of the biblical basis for Christians to either attend or not attend the same-sex wedding of a friend or family member. Our Viewpoint column has always been a forum to provide readers with respectful, dispassionately written opinion pieces on topics on which Christians do not always agree.

Being strident and censorious is the antithesis of what we strive for in the CHRISTIAN RESEARCH JOURNAL. We say here at CRI that truth matters, and indeed it is paramount, but as  Francis Schaeffer wrote in The God Who Is There, “There is nothing more ugly than an orthodoxy without understanding or without compassion.”

As apologists we take seriously the admonition in 1 Peter 3:15, “Always be prepared to give an answer to everyone who asks you to give the reason for the hope that you have. But do this with gentleness and respect.” We need to interact with both Christians and non-Christians in a respectful way. Jesus did.1 In John 4, as He talked to the Samaritan woman at the well, Jesus associated with someone who was far from acceptable in Jewish society, and while He fully told her the truth, He did so in a kind, compassionate, and redemptive manner. As apologists we too need to speak truth boldly in the public square, but we need to do so as Christ’s representatives, bearing the fruit of His Spirit (Gal. 5:22–26). This means refraining from insults, name-calling, and excoriation not only in theological discourse but also in political. Indeed, more nonbelievers are likely to be observing us in the latter.

 NOTES

1. Some Christians point to Matthew 23 as a basis for addressing nonbelievers. In this passage as a prelude to Mathew 24, Jesus’ strong language to the Pharisees is in the context of His office as Prophet, denouncing unbelieving Israel for their hypocrisy, and pronouncing their forthcoming judgment and desolation’

Anne Rice, the famous author of the Vampire Chronicles who reconverted from atheism to Roman Catholicism about ten years ago, announced recently on her Facebook page that she “quit being a Christian.”¹ Predictably, her declaration created a significant buzz on the Internet and in popular media. Rice directly states,

For those who care, and I understand if you don’t: Today I quit being a Christian. I’m out. I remain committed to Christ…but not to being “Christian” or to being part of Christianity. It’s simply impossible for me to “belong” to this quarrelsome, hostile, disputatious, and deservedly infamous group. For ten…years, I’ve tried. I’ve failed. I’m an outsider. My conscience will allow nothing else.

I have a little sympathy for what she’s saying. Over the past thirty years in ministry, I’ve encountered quite a few quarrelsome Christians, and there were times I was tempted to throw in the towel. But for Christ’s sake, I have not done so. And if Rice remains committed to Christ, as she says, then she should not do so either.

One cannot be committed to Christ without being committed to what He is committed to, and he has stated His undying commitment to His church. Yes, there are tares as well as wheat in the visible church, but Christ makes it clear that the wheat and the tares must grow up together until he returns (see Matt. 13:24–30, 36–43). And the fact that there are unchristlike Christians does not negate the fact that Jesus Christ is building for Himself one unified body of true believers. As the apostle Paul puts it, “There is one body and one Spirit….We will in all things grow up into him who is the Head, that is, Christ. From him the whole body, joined and held together by every supporting ligament, grows and builds itself up in love, as each part does its work” (Eph. 4:3, 15–16).² By rejecting Christianity as a whole because she does not agree with certain visible, institutional representations of it (e.g., the Roman Catholic church), Rice truly has thrown the baby out with the bathwater. In so doing, no matter how much she may protest to the contrary, she is no longer following Christ.

Rice goes on to say, “I quit being a Christian. I’m out. In the name of Christ, I refuse to be anti-gay.” Here as well, Rice fails to make important distinctions. For the record, Christianity is not “anti-gay”! Christians are called to love homosexuals. But the

Bible does not say that being gay is an identity; rather, it describes homosexuality as a behavior, and homosexual behavior does not help anybody. On the other hand, we are indeed “anti-gay” when we don’t tell people the truth about homosexuality!³

Rice continues, “I refuse to be anti-feminist.” Again, Christianity is not anti-feminist. It is Christianity that empowered women in the West and, indeed, it is secularism that has objectified women.⁴

“I refuse to be anti-artificial birth control,” she writes. Well, I personally am against artificial birth control, but the simple fact is that vast segments of orthodox Protestant Christianity are not against it, so why reject all of Christianity over this issue?

A few words later Rice declares, “I refuse to be anti-science, I refuse to be anti-life.” In fact, Christianity is anything but “anti-science.” It was Christians who discovered and formulated the great laws of science. Indeed, it was the Christian worldview alone that historically provided the necessary conditions for science. After the fall of the Roman Empire, an empire that was forged on the anvil of Classical Greek thought—anti-scientific thought in which the world is controlled by capricious gods and therefore not knowable—Augustine pointed out that reason without revelation always leads to the blind ditch of ignorance. As a result of revelation informing reason, we had invention and innovation, Christian capitalism (responsibility associated with wealth), and the formation of Christian universities, out of which science came.⁵ Science is not a secular domain, and certainly Neo-Darwinian evolution is not science, as it flies in the face of empirical science.⁶

I’m not sure why Rice says that Christianity is anti-science, but perhaps she alludes to embryonic stem cell research. If so, she needs to recognize that science has demonstrated that a fertilized human egg is not simply an “it.” A fertilized human egg is a human being. The size of a pinhead, this newly conceived human being contains information in his or her genetic code that would fill an encyclopedia library. From height to hair color, every physical aspect of the emerging embryo is determined and documented. And then that single fertilized egg divides into trillions of cells, forming the most complex organized structure in the universe. Nineteenth century science considered this young life little more than a blob of gelatin, but not so in an age of scientific enlightenment. Although an embryo doesn’t fully exhibit personality, he or she is fully a person—and that’s science! To say otherwise is not only “anti-science,” it is “anti-life”!⁷

Rice goes on to say,

My faith in Christ is central to my life. My conversion from a pessimistic atheist lost in a world I didn’t understand, to an optimistic believer in a universe created and sustained by a loving God is crucial to me. But following Christ does not mean following His followers. Christ is infinitely more important than Christianity and always will be, no matter what Christianity is, has been, or might become.

As noted, however, we cannot dichotomize Christ and His body. Christ’s central work on Earth is to build a body, and that body is organically united to Him as its Head. The Bible knows nothing of isolated, self-styled disciples of Christ (see especially Romans 12). Indeed, it is the love we have for one another within the one body of Christ that demonstrates to the world that we are truly His disciples (John 13:35). “Everyone who loves has been born of God and knows God,” writes John. But “if anyone says, ‘I love God,’ yet hates his brother, he is a liar. For anyone who does not love his brother, whom he has seen, cannot love God, whom he has not seen. And he has given us this command: Whoever loves God must also love his brother” (1 John 4:7, 20–21).

Rice concludes,

I quit Christianity in the name of Christ on this page so that I could tell my readers I was not complicit in the things that organized religion does. I never dreamed others would be so interested, or that they would feel the need to talk about their own religious struggles. But they do. And the public conversation on…this is huge, and I think important.

I certainly agree with Rice that this is an important conversation to have. I think it underscores what we do at the Christian Research Institute, equipping believers to be ready always to give a reason for the hope that lies within them, with gentleness and with respect (1 Pet. 3:15). But if you can’t give an answer—if you’re stumped by the words of Anne Rice—you’re not equipped. If you are equipped, you’ll have the greatest opportunity and thrill imaginable—the Holy Spirit working through you in the process of not only leading another lost son or daughter of Adam to the cross of the Second Adam Jesus Christ, but also participating in the formation of a body of the Second Adam—a bride awaiting the coming of her Bridegroom.—Hank Hanegraaff

Hank Hanegraaff is president of the Christian Research Institute and host of the Bible Answer Man broadcast heard daily throughout the United States and Canada via radio, satellite radio XM-170, and the Internet. For a list of stations airing the Bible Answer Man, or to listen online, log on to equip.org.

Elizabeth Gilbert is the author of the no. 1 New York Times bestseller, Eat, Pray, Love (a movie version, starring Julia Roberts, was released in August). Her new book, Committed, continues the story of her romance with Felipe,¹ the Brazilian businessman she meets at the end of her year-long healing adventure chronicled in Eat, Pray, Love. Committed tells the story of their developing love relationship and the year they are forced to spend traveling together because of an unexpected development: Felipe, whose business is based primarily in America, cannot come back to the United States except to marry Elizabeth (after the required massive amount of immigration paperwork is in order).

Felipe and Elizabeth had already vowed their love and fidelity to each other and even exchanged rings, but they had also vowed never to marry each other. Both had experienced terrible loss in painful divorces; they are completely convinced that their continued happiness (they plan to spend the rest of their lives together) depends on their not getting married. Enter the Department of Homeland Security, with its stricter post-9/11 rules. Felipe must leave the country immediately. As the Homeland Security officials lead Felipe away, he and Elizabeth whisper to each other, “I love you so much, I will even marry you” (p. 18).

Writing with a gracious sense of self-deprecation and a superb sense of humor, Gilbert tells of the research project she embarks on as she travels with Felipe. For her own sake, she has to study the phenomenon of marriage in its history as an institution, practice in several cultures, and personal application to her situation. In short, she has to make peace with the idea of marriage itself before she can marry Felipe. Committed is the result not only of her research, but also of her years of conversations about marriage, intimacy, sexuality, divorce, fidelity, family, responsibility, and autonomy” with her twenty-seven closest women friends and family (18).

Gilbert is a journalist and great storyteller who has many good and interesting things to say. She weaves into her autobiography historical and sociological insights that demonstrate her ability to read history and cultures sympathetically. Her books are important because they reflect a personal journey out of hurt and fear and into faith and love—a journey that many in our culture are making or want to make. She tells her story so compellingly that one can deeply empathize with her even while, just as deeply, questioning some of her basic assumptions and assertions.

She takes brief snapshots of marriage customs throughout the history of Eastern and Western cultures, stopping to look more closely at early Judeo-Christian concepts of marriage. She stresses the importance in ancient Near Eastern (ANE) culture of the extended family. “Those extended families grew into tribes, and those tribes became kingdoms, and those kingdoms emerged as dynasties, and those dynasties fought each other in savage wars of conquest and genocide” (56). It is worthwhile quoting the rest of her paragraph here, to provide a glimpse of her habit of overgeneralization, as well as her overriding bias against the Old Testament (OT):

The early Hebrews emerged from exactly this system, which is why the Old Testament is such a family-centric, stranger-abhorring, genealogical extravaganza—rife with tales of patriarchs, matriarchs, brothers, sisters, heirs, and other miscellaneous kin. Of course, these Old Testament families were not always healthy or functional (we see brothers murdering brothers, siblings selling each other into slavery, daughters seducing their own fathers, spouses sexually betraying each other), but the driving narrative always concerns the progress and tribulations of the bloodline, and marriage was central to the perpetuation of that story. (56)

Several of her oversimplifications show clearly here. She states, for example, the OT is “stranger-abhorring.” In terms of OT law, the people of Israel were prohibited from marrying people from surrounding nations because foreign gods would come in with the foreigners.² The underlying assumption here is that Israel was to be a nation set apart to Yahweh, not because of any merit of their own, but because Yahweh had chosen to love Abraham and his descendants, and through them to bless all peoples in all nations.³ Both in its understanding of covenant relationship with a unique, moral, covenant-making God and in its emphasis on loving one’s neighbor, the OT is unique among other known ANE literature.

In fact, the deep concern for, and protection of, the poor, including the “stranger” (i.e., alien, foreigner), a central theme in the OT, is not found anywhere else in ANE literature.⁴ Even a cursory reading of the Torah and the Prophets demonstrates how important “Love thy neighbor”—especially the poor and needy stranger, widow, and orphan—is to Yahweh and hence to the continuing well-being of early Israel. Leviticus 19:33–34 is particularly instructive here: “When an alien lives with you in your land, do not mistreat him. The alien living with you must be treated as one of your native-born. Love him as yourself, for you were aliens in Egypt. I am Yahweh your God.”⁵

The OT book of Ruth is the story of King David’s great-great grandmother, Ruth the Moabitess (the Moabites were enemies of Israel). David was the greatest king in Israel’s history in the OT, and Ruth was not his only foreign-born ancestor: Rahab of Jericho also shows up in his bloodline.⁶ Likewise, the consistent portrayal of Israel’s founding patriarchs and other leaders as broken human beings capable of great evil underscores the OT’s realistic viewpoint of the “chosen people” over against the foreign nations. This realistic portrait of Israel’s key players is also unique in the ANE.

Gilbert’s treatment of Jesus, the New Testament, and early Christianity shows further bias and distortion. Immediately following her paragraph quoted above, she continues:

But the New Testament—which is to say, the arrival of Jesus Christ—invalidated all those old family loyalties to a degree that was truly socially revolutionary. Instead of perpetuating the tribal notion of “the chosen people against the world,” Jesus (who was an unmarried man, in marked contrast to the great patriarchal heroes of the Old Testament) taught that we are all chosen people, that we are all brothers and sisters united within one human family. Now, this was an utterly radical idea that could never possibly fly in a traditional tribal system. You cannot embrace a stranger as your brother, after all, unless you are willing to renounce your real biological brother, thus capsizing an ancient code that binds you in sacred obligation to your blood relatives while setting you into auto-opposition to the unclean outsider. But that sort of fierce clan loyalty was exactly what Christianity sought to overturn. As Jesus taught: “If any man come to me and hate not his father, and mother, and wife, and children, and brethren, and sisters, yea, and his own life also, he cannot be my disciple” (Luke 14:26). (55–56, emphasis in original)

Jesus and the New Testament are indeed socially revolutionary, but not in the way she thinks they are. For the Jewish people of Jesus’ day, God is One, He is not a man, He is their only creator and redeemer and He alone is to be worshiped.⁷ Jesus is evolutionary largely because He teaches that He is the fulfillment of the Scriptures (OT), the heir of King David, the Christ (OT: Messiah), and the Hope of Israel.⁸ He goes even further, declaring Himself to be God’s unique Son, and therefore equal with God.⁹ His earliest followers see Him as the Christ, the Son of God, and the Savior of Israel and of the entire world. Jesus is worthy of worship as God’s only Son and the world’s Savior.¹⁰ Jesus receives worship and His followers have no problem worshiping Him as the God-Man, through whom all things were created and by whom all things hold together.¹¹ Now these sorts of claims may not have raised an eyebrow in other cultures that had a pantheon of deities and a plethora of gurus, but for Israel, these claims were scandalous and worthy of death.

Second, Jesus flatly did not teach, to quote Gilbert again, “that we are all chosen people, that we are all brothers and sisters united within one human family” (56). For Jesus, the “chosen” of God were those the Father had given Him, Jesus’ followers, and all who would believe in Jesus through the message of the Father and Son.¹² Jesus was kind to Gentile people, providing healing and comfort to any who needed Him, and even saying to at least a couple of them that they had faith greater than all of Israel.¹³ While He made it clear that He is the ultimate expression of God’s love, the Savior of the whole world, He also made it clear that His primary focus at that point was Israel.¹⁴ His words about “hating” father and mother, for example, were a common way to underscore the seriousness of being His disciple as one’s first and foremost priority.

It was Saul, the fierce Jewish Pharisee who persecuted the earliest Christians, until he was practically knocked off the road in his encounter with the risen Christ,¹⁵ who became the apostle Paul and more fully developed the NT theme of God’s love for the world. The conflicts that arose because Paul brought so many Gentiles into what were essentially Jewish-Christian congregations helped form some of the earliest and thorniest theological issues for the young church.¹⁶

Paul disproves, in his own thought and person, Gilbert’s assertion that, “you cannot embrace a stranger as your brother, after all, unless you are willing to renounce your real biological brother” (56). This apostle to the Gentiles, who brought the salvation of Jesus Christ to much of the known world, made one of the most radical statements ever made anywhere, when he said, “You are all sons of God through faith in Christ Jesus, for all of you who were baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ. There is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female. For you are all one in Christ Jesus. If you belong to Christ, then you are Abraham’s seed, and heirs according to the promise.”¹⁷ But this same man could also say:

I speak the truth in Christ—I am not lying, my conscience confirms it in the Holy Spirit—I have great sorrow and unceasing anguish in my heart. For I could wish that I myself were cursed and cut off from Christ for the sake of my own brothers, those of my own race, the people of Israel. Theirs is the adoption as sons, theirs the divine glory, the covenants, the receiving of the law, the temple worship and the promises. Theirs are the patriarchs, and from them is traced the human ancestry of Christ, who is God over all, forever praised! Amen.¹⁸

Jesus’ goal was not to overturn fierce clan loyalty in the way Gilbert asserts. His goal was to show God’s love for the world by dying for our sins and rising from the dead, conquering death and reconciling all of us who believe in Him (Jews and Gentiles) to God.¹⁹

Gilbert also completely misses the point in her analysis of early Christianity. She states, “The early Christian plan was staggeringly idealistic, even downright utopian: Create an exact replica of heaven right here on earth. ‘Renounce marriage and imitate the angels,’ instructed John of Damascus around AD 730” (56). In two sentences, Gilbert skips from New Testament Christianity (circa AD 100) to the eighth-century views of a celibate Roman Catholic monk. An equivalent trick would be to describe early fifteenth-century Roman Catholic beliefs by quoting the viewpoints of a twenty-first-century Reformed Baptist.

From here on, all of Gilbert’s statements about early Christian beliefs are hopelessly anachronistic. She reads back into the New Testament and early Christianity the worldview and beliefs of later medieval Roman Catholicism. She states that the “new Christian paradigm as modeled by Christ’s own example” was to be “celibacy, fellowship, and absolute purity” (56). “Since there would always be more potential Christians to convert, there was no need for anybody to sully himself by generating new babies through vile sexual congress. And if there were no need anymore for babies, then it naturally stood to reason that there was no need anymore for marriage” (57). This is a terrible distortion even of Roman Catholicism. And, of course, she nowhere includes the ancient Eastern church, or even the wide variety of thought represented by the early Western church fathers.

The truth is that while some early church leaders (second-century and later) embraced celibacy as a means of gaining greater closeness to God, and while more than a few were certainly misogynists, these developments arose as Christianity increasingly lost contact with its New Testament and Jewish roots. These distortions grew out of the Western church’s increasing assimilation of Greek and pagan culture and thought, as this new faith became more influential and powerful in the Greco-Roman world.

Nowhere is Gilbert’s misrepresentation of NT Christianity more disturbing than in her treatment of Paul’s writings on marriage. She quotes Paul’s words in 1 Corinthians 7:1: “It is good for a man not to touch a woman” (NASB). Then she adds, “Never, ever, under any circumstances, Saint Paul believed, was it good for a man to touch a woman—not even his own wife” (58). This is such a fundamental misrepresentation of Paul that, to be charitable, I must conclude that she has never read 1 Corinthians 7. In fact, Paul says the opposite in the very next sentences, where he instructs married men and women to have sex often and not to deprive each other in this area.

She continues, “In every possible instance, Paul begged Christians to restrain themselves, to contain their carnal yearnings, to live solitary and sexless lives on earth as it is in heaven” (60). Wrong again! Paul’s actual motivation for asking his readers to remain single, only if they could handle it, is because in their circumstances, where Christians were being persecuted, scattered, and killed, it created much more hardship for them if they married. It also allowed them to focus on their devotion to Christ in troubled times. Paul spends as much space in this passage instructing married people how to be loving and peaceful in their marriages (including his enthusiastic views on married sex!) as he does instructing the single people how best to live.

Nowhere in Paul or the New Testament is marriage and married sex regarded as sin. Nowhere in the New Testament is Jesus’ celibacy ever even brought up, much less used as a model for Christians. In fact, the New Testament teaches the opposite. Paul notes that Peter and the other apostles took their wives with them on their missionary journeys—he chose not to, though he also had the right to do so.²⁰ Since Pharisees were required to marry, Paul had most likely been married at some point, and was probably widowed.

Paul has such a high view of marriage that he describes the marriage relationship as providing a metaphor of Jesus’ relationship to the church, the bride of Christ.²¹ This passage gives us a good theological framework in which to understand Jesus’ celibacy. The reason we are not married in heaven is that, collectively, we are the bride of Christ. In other letters, Paul has detailed instructions for families—husbands, wives, and children. He writes much more frequently about marriage than he does about singleness. In one of the most telling statements of his views on marriage, Paul informs Timothy that, in the last days, false teachers will “forbid people to marry and order them to abstain from certain foods, which God created to be received with thanksgiving by those who believe and who know the truth.”²² For Paul, the forbidding of marriage is the sign of a denial of the Christian faith!

I have to admit, I was astonished at Gilbert’s blatant falsehoods about Paul and disappointed with her treatment of early Judaism and Christianity. At the very least, it is clear she has read little or none of the primary sources of Judaism and Christianity, and she is evidently relying on the reports of a very few biased, apparently angry (at least in this area) historians. I hope that when Gilbert writes more nonfiction, she will do the legitimate work of historical investigation (including consulting the primary sources, as well as a much wider variety of scholars) and leave her biased, largely fictional accounts of early Judaism and Christianity behind. —Carole Hausmann Ryan

Carole Hausmann Ryan, M.Div., is a freelance writer who lives in Montana with her husband, Mark, and their two children, Timothy and Petrea.

NOTES

1. “Felipe” is a fictional name.
2. Exod. 34:15–16; Deut. 7:1–11; Ezra 9–10. Please note: I will be citing a lot of material in both Testaments to address Gilbert’s oversimplifications and false statements about the OT and NT. Issues of critical scholarship (such as source material, dates, and the progressive development of ideas in OT and NT thought) lie outside the scope of this review.
3. Deut. 7:6–8; Gen. 12:1–3; 18:18–19; 22:15–18; 26:1–5.
4. For example, compare the Mosaic Law code with the ancient Code of Hammurabi: “A law such as Ex. xx. 17; Deut. v. 21, ‘thou shalt not covet’ (which the Decalogue, with a perception of the fact that covetousness is the root of all law-breaking, places above all other earthly laws), is not to be found anywhere in the [Hammurabi] code. Hence it follows that the code does not recognize the law of neighborly love, since self-restraint is wholly foreign to it. The institutions of the Torah that protect those who are weak economically, which set bounds to the unlimited growth of wealth, and which care for the poor are peculiar to itself. The law of love to one’s neighbor (Ex. xxiii. 4 et seq.), which takes account of the stranger and even of the enemy, is nowhere discernible in Hammurabi’s code. The law of retaliation, of cold, calculating equity, ‘as thou to me so I to thee’; the revenge of the stronger on the weaker—these form a broad foundation on which the love of one’s neighbor finds no place.” The Jewish Encyclopedia, http://www.jewishencyclopedia.com/view.jsp?letter=H&artid=182#ixzz0uvge7YtF.
5. New International Version. See also Exod. 12:48–49; 20:10; 22:21, 22; 23:9, 12; Lev. 16:29–31; 19:9, 10; 23:22; 24:22; Num. 9:14; 15:13–16; Deut. 1:16; 5:14; 10:17–19; 24:14–21: 26:12, 13, 19; Pss. 94:4–7; 146:9; Isa. 58; Jer. 7:6; 22:3; Ezek. 22:7, 29; Zech. 7:10; Mal. 3:5, etc..
6. Cf. Matt. 1:5–6. An interesting phenomenon in this “genealogy of Jesus Christ the son of David, the son of Abraham” (Matt. 1:1) is the unusual prominence of women.
7. Cf. Exod. 20:1–7; Deut. 6:4; Isa. 40–45.
8. Luke 4:14–30; 9:18–36; 24:13–27; John 5:16–47.
9. John 5:16–47; 6:25–59; 7:33–44; 8:12–59, etc.
10. Even His own family and others, including His enemies at His birth, knew who He was. Cf Matt. 1–3; Luke 1–3. Note that the genealogies in both Matthew and Luke in these sections establish Jesus as the heir of Abraham and King David—He is regarded in the NT as the fulfillment of Yahweh’s promises to both these men. In Jesus’ birth narratives, He is regarded as the Christ, the one who is to save His people and people from all nations from their sins. Cf. Matt. 1:20–21; 2:1–6; Luke 1:30–55, 67–80; 2:25–32, 36–38. John identifies Jesus as the incarnate Word and Paul, as the wisdom of God. Cf. John 1:1–18; 1 Cor. 1:20–31. In Galatians, Jesus is portrayed as the fulfillment of God’s promise to Abraham. Cf. Gal. 3:6–29.
11. John 20:24–31; John 1:1–18; Eph. 1; Phil. 2; Col. 1–2; Heb. 1; Rev. 5, etc.
12. John 17:1–12, 20–23. Read his whole prayer in John 17 to get the context. Jesus’ concern was for all who would believe in Him.
13. Matt. 8:5–13; 15:21–28.
14. John 3:3–21; Matt. 15:24.
15. Cf. Acts 9. After Luke, the Gentile medical doctor who accompanied Paul on several of his missionary journeys, and who wrote Luke and Acts, Paul was the most prolific NT writer.
16. Cf. Acts, Galatians.
17. Gal. 3:26–29 NIV.
18. Rom. 9:1–5 NIV.
19. Eph. 2; 1 Cor. 15; 2 Cor. 5:11–21.
20. See 1 Cor. 9:5.
21. Eph. 5:22–33. Throughout the NT, “church” refers to believers, not to an institution.
22. 1 Tim. 4:1–3 NIV.