Dr Paul Allen

A friend—a faithful Christian and a professor who specializes in political history—recently shared that after listening to Joe Rogan discuss gay marriage with Matt Walsh, he walked away discouraged. While Walsh articulated the biblical view of marriage as well as can be expected given the circumstances, Rogan “won” because his arguments, as silly as they were, resonate deeply with the cultural moment. When our collective moral framework is built around two principles—personal freedom and not causing harm—it’s nearly impossible to convince people that the definition of marriage shouldn’t be expanded to include same-sex couples. To oppose including those couples is now indistinguishable from bigotry. This partly explains why, in December, the Respect for Marriage Act passed both houses of the U.S. Congress with bipartisan support. Thirty-nine Republicans in the House and 12 in the Senate joined every Democrat to codify it into federal law. Support for gay marriage is so widespread that i

  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 psychological

The new sexual morality did not emerge from a vacuum. Massive intellectual changes at a worldview level over the last two hundred years set the stage for the revolution in which we currently find ourselves. We are living in times rightly, if rather awkwardly, described as the late modern age. Just a decade ago, we spoke of the postmodern age , as if modernity had given way to something fundamentally new. Like every new and self-declared epoch, the postmodern age was declared to be a form of liberation. Whereas the modern age announced itself as a secular liberation from a Christian authority that operated on claims of divine revelation, the postmodern age was proposed as a liberation from the great secular authorities of reason and rationality. The postmodern age, it was claimed, would liberate humanity by operating with an official “incredulity toward all metanarratives.” In other words, postmodernity denied all of the big narratives that had previously shaped the culture and spe

Jesus is considered by scholars such as Weber to be an example of a charismatic religious leader. (Photo credit: Wikipedia ) In the face of the sexual revolution , the Christian church in the West now faces a set of moral challenges that exceeds anything it has experienced in the past. This is a revolution of ideas—one that is transforming the entire moral structure of meaning and life. These challenges would be vexing enough for any generation.  But the contours of our current challenge have to be understood over against the affecting reality for virtually everything on the American landscape, and furthermore in the West. This revolution, like all revolutions, takes few prisoners. In other words, it demands total acceptance of its revolutionary claims and the affirmation of its aims. This is the problem that now confronts Christians who are committed to faithfulness to the Bible as the Word of God and to the gospel as the only message of salvation. The scale and scope of thi