By Bob Allen
The Southern Baptist Convention’s top ethicist, speaking at a Vatican interfaith conference to support traditional marriage, said Christians cannot afford to capitulate to demands of the sexual revolution.
“Many would tell us that contemporary people will not hear us if we contradict the assumptions of the sexual revolution,” Russell Moore, head of the SBC Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, said Nov. 18 at the three-day gathering of leaders and scholars from many religions around the world titled The Complementarity of Man and Woman: An International Colloquium.
The sexual revolution generally describes the period beginning in the 1960s with the rise of the women’s liberation movement, which sparked a countercultural challenge to traditional morals related to sexuality. With the sexual freedom movement marching on more recently into growing recognition of same-sex marriage, Moore said some suggest “we ought to conceal, or at least avoid” Christian morality and “speak instead in more generic spiritual terms.”
“We have heard this before, and indeed we hear it in every generation,” Moore said. “Our ancestors were told that modern people could not accept the miraculous claims of the ancient church creeds, and that if we were to reach them ‘where they are,’ we should emphasize the ethical content of the Scriptures — the ‘Golden Rule’ — and deemphasize the scandal of such things as virgin births and empty tombs and second comings.”
“The churches that followed this path are now deader than Henry VIII,” Moore said.
“It turns out that people who don’t want Christianity don’t want almost-Christianity,” Moore continued. “To jettison or to minimize a Christian sexual ethic is to abandon the message Jesus handed to us, and we have no authority to do this. Moreover, to do so is to abandon our love for our neighbors. We cannot offer the world the half-gospel of a surgical-strike targeted universalism, which exempts from God’s judgment those sins we fear are too fashionable to address.”
Moore said “a thousand heresies have sprung” from the Bible’s tension between truth and grace.
“There are always ‘almost gospels’ that seek to circumvent either God’s justice or God’s mercy,” he said.
“On the one side, there’s the airy antinomianism of those who would seek good news apart from the law and righteousness of God,” he said. “But such a gospel, severed from the justice of God, is not gospel at all.”
“On the other side, there is the equally perilous temptation to emphasize the righteousness of God without the invitation to mercy,” Moore said. “The Christian gospel tells us that there is life offered to any repentant sinner, and with that life there is a household of belonging, with brothers and sisters, and a place at the table of a joyous wedding feast.”
Moore said behind society’s obsession with sex “there seems to be a cry for something more.”
“In the search for sexual excitement, men and women are not really looking for biochemical sensations or the responses of nerve endings,” he said. “They are searching desperately not just for mere sex, but for that to which sex points — something they know exists but they just cannot identify.”
“The sexual revolution cannot keep its promises,” Moore said. “People are looking for a cosmic mystery, for a love that is stronger than death. They cannot articulate it, and perhaps would be horrified to know it, but they are looking for God.”
Moore said Christians “must stand together on conserving the truth of marriage as a complementary union of a man and a woman” for more than just pragmatic reasons. Rather than an arbitrary expression of nature or the will of God, he said, “marriage and family are instead archetypes, icons of God’s purpose.”
Moore said sexual immorality is not just “naughtiness,” but rather “a sermon preaching another gospel.”
“We cannot capitulate on these issues because we can’t,” he said. “To dispense with marriage is to dispense with a mystery that points to the gospel itself.”
Moore said much is at stake.
“Our neighbors of no religion and of different religions do not recognize a call to gospel mystery,” he said. “Marriage is a common grace, and we should speak, on their own terms, of why jettisoning normative marriage and family is harmful.
“But, as a Christian, I am compelled to speak also of the conviction of the church that what is disrupted when we move beyond the creation design of marriage and family is not just human flourishing but also the picture of the very mystery that defines the existence of the people of God — the gospel of Jesus Christ.”
Moore is one of more than 30 speakers from multiple faiths invited to the Vatican conference. Other non-Catholics include Rick Warren, pastor of Saddleback Church in Lake Forest, Calif., and author of The Purpose Driven Life, and Oxford University New Testament professor N.T. Wright, a retired Anglican bishop.
Moore, who has criticized Pope Francis in the past, said in a Nov. 3 blog he accepted the invitation to the Vatican because “I am willing to go anywhere, when asked, to bear witness to what we as evangelical Protestants believe about marriage and the gospel, especially in times in which marriage is culturally imperiled.”
Moore praised the pope Nov. 17 in Baptist Press for “a strong statement” on traditional marriage in the pontiff’s opening address at the colloquium.
“Pope Francis made clear that male/female complementarity is essential to marriage, and that this cannot be redefined by ideology or by the state,” Moore said. “I am glad to hear such a strong statement on this, and on how an eclipse of marriage hurts the poor and the vulnerable.”