New sexual morality hasn’t come out of the void. Massive intellectual changes in the worldview over the past two hundred years have set the stage for the revolution we are in today. We live properly, albeit awkwardly, in an era described as the end of the modern era. Just a decade ago, we were talking about the postmodern era, as if modernity had given way to something fundamentally new. Like all new and self-proclaimed eras, the postmodern era has been declared a form of liberation, while the modern era proclaimed itself as a secular liberation from a Christian authority operating on the affirmations of divine revelation, the postmodern era was proposed as a liberation from the great secular authorities of reason and rationality. It was said that the postmodern era would liberate humanity by operating with “official disbelief in relation to all meta-narratives. “In other words, postmodernity denied all the great narratives that previously shaped culture and specifically ended the Christian narrative.
And yet postmodern thought manifested itself, as all intellectual movements should, in their own metanarrative. So he just died. We keep talking about postmodern thinking, even when we speak correctly about postmodern architecture and art, but we are talking, for the most part, about a movement that has subsided and disappeared. In retrospect, the postmodern era was by no way a new era; it is only the alarm that foreshadows the end of modernity and the beginning of the end of the modern era. Modernity has not disappeared. It just got stronger and also more complex.
- The claim that humanity can only recover and overcome various forms of injustice for secular liberation is not new.
- But it is now a mainstream.
- It is so common in western societies cultures that it does not need to be publicized and is often those born into the cultures of late modernity simply breathe these assumptions while breathing the atmosphere.
- And their worldviews are radically realigned.
- Even if their language retains elements of ancient worldview.
The backdrop to this great intellectual change is the secularization of Western societies. Modernity has brought many cultural goods, but also, unsurprisingly, it has brought about a radical change in the way citizens of Western societies think, feel, interact and reason. of the reason for the Enlightenment at the expense of revelation was followed by radical anti-supernaturalism that can hardly be overestimated. Looking at Europe and Britain, it is very clear that the modern era has taken an entire civilization away from its Christian roots, as well as Christian moral and intellectual commitments. This did not happen at once, of course, even though the change occurred rapidly in countries like France and Germany. Scandinavian nations now record almost imperceptible levels of Christian faith. Increasingly, Britain, are sociologists now talking openly about the death of Christian Britain?And the evidence of Christian decline is abundant.
Some prophetic voices have recognized the magnitude and scope of intellectual changes taking place in the West. Just over thirty years ago, Francis Schaeffer wrote about a change in the worldview of someone who was at least vaguely Christian in the memory of society to a completely different way of seeing the world. This new worldview was based on the idea that final reality was impersonal matter or energy shaped in its current form by impersonal chance. Significantly, Schaeffer noted that Christians of his day did not see this new worldview as replacing the Christian worldview that previously dominated the cultures of northern Europe and the United States, either by personal conviction or cultural impression. These two visions of the world, one generally Christian and the other almost deist, have remained in complete antithesis with each other in content and also in moral results. These opposing ways of seeing the world would lead to very different sociological and governmental outcomes, including the design and implementation of laws.
In 1983, writing only a few years after Francis Schaeffer made this contribution, Carl F. H. Henry described the situation and future possibilities in terms of a strict dichotomy:
“If modern culture is to escape the oblivion that has taken hold of man’s early civilizations, the recovery of God’s will self-revealed in the field of justice and law is of crucial importance. A return to the pagan misunderstandings of the deified rulers, or to a divinized cosmos, or to an almost Christian conception of natural law or natural justice, will inevitably lead to disappointment. All requests for transcendent authority will not really serve God or man. By improving the law and human rights and the welfare of their sovereignty, all kinds of earthly leaders anxiously anticipate the role of the divine and hide the living God from the revelation of the scriptures. The alternatives are clear: do we return to the God of the Bible or do we perish in the well of wickedness?
Writing even earlier, in 1976, Henry had already identified the greatest intellectual obstacle to a cultural return to the God of the Bible: “No fact of contemporary Western life is more evident than growing mistrust of the final truth and its relentless questioning of any word. Is it unmistakable? It is clear that this obstacle to the return to authority of a Christian view of the world is really part of a vicious circle that begins with the departure of at least one cultural impression of God’s revealed authority. The world leads to the distrust of the final truth and the rejection of universal authority, which then blocks the way back to the God of the Bible.
The reality is that Christians who define Christianity in terms of historical Christian doctrine and moral teachings do not simply believe that the Bible is true, but indicates the only way to produce real and lasting human happiness. We’re not just against same-sex people. marriage because we believe it is contrary to the scriptures; We believe that anything that opposes the scriptures cannot lead to human realization.