Dr Paul Allen

  Things You Should Know about the Sexual Revolution 1. It has been a long time in the making. One of the mistakes Christians tend to make is assuming that the sexual revolution was something that happened in the 1960s as part of the general loosening of conventional morality which that decade witnessed. In fact, it is of much deeper and longstanding origins. We can tend to miss this because we focus on the phenomena associated with the sexual revolution—for example, widespread changes in attitude to premarital sex, homosexuality, and abortion. What we often fail to realize is that these phenomena are actually symptoms of deeper changes in society, particularly those associated with what it means to be a fulfilled human being. The sexual revolution rests on the idea that fulfilment is a matter of personal, psychological happiness and anything which obstructs that—specifically traditional sexual codes—is by definition oppressive and preventing us from flourishing. And that psycholog...

It’s no secret that sexual mores have changed radically over the past few decades. Certain commonsense and natural beliefs about the purpose and nature of sex and marriage have been uprooted. Given the increase in abortion, our cultural addiction to pornography , and the ubiquity of broken marriages, many people are rightly asking how we can bring sanity back to the conversation. What can we do? We need to show how the ideas of the sexual revolution bump up against reality. In other words, the ideas behind the sexual revolution simply don’t match up with human sexuality. Proponents of the sexual revolution propagate ideas, but reality pushes back. Think about it this way: What happens if you try to push a beach ball beneath the surface of the water? The answer is obvious—it pops back up! Push it down one direction and it will come up another. The nature of the beach ball is to float to the surface, even when people try to keep it submerged. The same is true with human sexuality . P...

In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus compares His people to a city on a mountain ( Matt. 5:14 ). It is a striking image, the point of which is that such a city, on such a prominent elevation, cannot be hidden. It is conspicuous. It stands out. It can be seen by all. The application is arresting, immediate, and direct. Christians are manifest, observable, and pronounced. Like salt on a plate of food, or like light shining in a dark place, they are distinct in the way they live and regulate their lives from day to day. The illustration serves at one and the same time to make a contrast and a comparison. The contrast is that the city is elevated, while those who observe it live elsewhere. The image works because the one reality—the salt, the light, and the city—is the very opposite of the other—the food, the darkness, and the valley. But there is a point of comparison as well. The city belongs to the same territory as the valley. It is not over the horizon. It is engaged every day in th...