Most Americans today see nothing wrong with premarital sex, gay marriage or divorce.
Marijuana is legal in 33 states. Pornography is everywhere. A minority of Americans attend church on a weekly basis.
The sexual revolution of the last 60 years has become conventional orthodoxy in academia, the media and corporate America.
What are card-carrying, Bible-believing Christians to do?
Accept our new status as truly transgressive, iconoclastic disturbers of the status quo.
Now that rebellion against biblical morality has gone mainstream, biblical morality becomes rebellion.
It’s not a rebellion we seek. We cannot help ourselves.
Biblically speaking we are aliens, out of step with the dominant culture.
We seek a better country, a heavenly one, where our citizenship is recorded.
We love all people regardless of sexual or gender orientation because God makes no distinction among us when it comes to his redeeming work in Christ. And yet, love never demands of us that we affirm everything that people believe and do.
Mainstream culture demands that we give approval to what is sinful, but that is neither loving nor biblical.
We are obedient to the laws of the land, but where those laws compel us to deny what we believe, we must obey God rather than man.
And we are willing to pay the price for our conscientious disobedience, as evidenced by Christian florists, bakers and photographers around the country who, sometimes under harsh penalty, act on their beliefs.
Baptist theologian Russell Moore rightly says, “Christianity speaks a strange and scandalous word into whatever culture it comes.”
We proclaim a virgin birth, a shameful cross and an empty tomb, which can be explained only on the basis of humanity’s sin and God’s love for humanity in the person of Jesus Christ.
Jesus bore God’s righteous judgment for sin so that we might bear God’s forgiveness of sin.
What we call good news is an offense to many who deny their own sinfulness and any need of a savior.
We speak a morality that undermines the claims of the sexual revolution: that pornography is a victimless crime, that casual sex is harmless, that you can change your gender, or that marriage is merely an emotional bond between consenting adults apart from any consideration of bearing and raising children.
To challenge these assumptions is to be labelled eccentric at best, hateful at worst and to be excluded from leadership not only in the public square but even in mainline religious communities.
Christianity always comes with a cross.
The Christian faith subverts the notion that all steeples point up and all roads lead to heaven.
We plead guilty of believing that there is salvation in no one other than Jesus, who died for all people, regardless of religious affiliation or lack thereof.
Ironically, every belief system, including atheism, is exclusive of other truth claims as well, but in our culture, only Christianity is condemned for this.
Christ’s ethical standards are a protest against our natural inclinations: turn the other cheek, love your enemies, pray for those who abuse you.
Strange as these admonitions seem, they reflect the gracious nature of God who makes his sun to rise on the evil and the good and rain to fall on the just and the unjust.
Finally, Christianity undermines not only our ethics but also our egos.
When confronted with guilt, we instinctively make excuses, blame others and attempt to justify ourselves in order to appear acceptable.
To take responsibility and acknowledge our guilt shatters whatever self-esteem we have.
But we can confess our wrongs when we know we have a savior who forgives us, and whatever self-esteem we’ve lost is replaced by Christ-esteem.
Our only boast is in the cross of Jesus, for every Bible-believing Christian needs God’s forgiveness as much if not more than anyone else.
To believe such things and to act upon them is not cultural but countercultural.
Such a life is strange, disruptive, even rebellious.
Christianity has been called many things. Just don’t call it normal.
The Rev. John Armstrong is pastor of Grace Lutheran Church in Columbus, and may be reached at [email protected].
