True Sexual Morality: Recovering Biblical Standards for a Culture in Crisis

by Daniel R. Heimbach

Overview

Daniel Heimbach examines the biblical teachings on sexual morality as well as four counterfeit views that have crept into our "sexually revolutionized" society. He gives us an in-depth look at the moral relativism that has spread through our culture and opens our eyes to the effects that nonbiblical sexual choices have on individuals, the family, the church, and the culture.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781433516023
Publisher:	Crossway
Publication date:	11/09/2004
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	528
File size:	4 MB

About the Author

Daniel R. Heimbach (PhD, Drew University) is senior professor of Christian ethics at Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary and a social critic who works at the interface between Christian moral witness and secular culture. Heimbach was educated at the United States Naval Academy, Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, and Drew University, and served on the White House domestic policy staff.

Daniel R. Heimbach (PhD, Drew University) is senior professor of Christian ethics at Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary and a social critic who works at the interface between Christian moral witness and secular culture. Heimbach was educated at the United States Naval Academy, Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, and Drew University, and served on the White House domestic policy staff.

Read an Excerpt

CHAPTER 1

SEX AT THE CENTER OF THE MORAL CRISIS

SOMETHING ENORMOUS IS COMING

I had the privilege in February 1991 of bringing my wife and sons, one five and the other two, to meet the first President Bush in the Oval Office. Needless to say it was a once-in-a-life-time opportunity. It was a farewell privilege for serving on the President's White House staff, and though I had served two years I had never before met personally with the President in his office. It was a place of tremendous dignity, where people met with the leader of the free world by invitation only.

Since we were coming as a family with two young boys, we were very concerned to avoid embarrassment. My wife and I dressed our boys better than ever before, and we carefully instructed them how to behave. But since they were only five and two, there was only so much we could do. We arrived — anxious parents with children — and were ushered into what is perhaps the most dignified office on earth. We felt terribly vulnerable! To our great relief, the president sensed how we felt and, opening a side door, ushered in Ranger, one of the first-family dogs. The boys were delighted, as were we! They with meeting a dog, and we with a gentleman as concerned with preserving our dignity as with his own.

Four years later, Bill Clinton, the next President of the United States, hid from security cameras behind that same door, where he engaged in acts of immoral sex with a White House intern named Monica Lewinsky. The nation was shocked, and many at first refused to believe what they heard. At the start, Hilary Clinton herself said that, if it were true, her husband should resign to preserve the dignity of the presidency.

Sadly, it was true. President Clinton did actually commit acts of flagrant sexual immorality in the most dignified office in the land. But he never resigned, and Hillary, Congress, the media, and most Americans instead changed their minds on sexual morality. After getting over the initial shock, most simply decided that what Bill Clinton did sexually, even in the Oval Office, was not all that important. Some decided it might not even have been immoral. And even if it was, perhaps sexual morality was such a private thing that others should not believe it affects public dignity no matter what a president does, or where he may choose to do it.

By excusing his behavior and refusing to resign, President Clinton affected moral attitudes on sex in the culture, moving many further along in a permissive direction. Many who before thought such behavior was shocking, decided it was their own shocked reaction, not Clinton's behavior, that was wrong. But while Clinton's self-justification and refusal to resign affected many, it was in reality a small part of something much larger. Sexual morality in America has been changing dramatically for decades, and what some called the Clinton factor was itself more a symptom than a cause.

Something enormous affecting sex has been changing American culture, and the cause is something far more powerful and significant than any president, movie, law, political party, celebrity, book, CD, magazine, or video. Like the ripples in the water glass in the opening scene of Jurassic Park, shivers in the moral ground on which Americans stand signal the approach of something enormous. Like tremors rising from deep underground, something seismic is affecting the foundations of our culture. Since we became a nation, nothing so divisive has threatened common life in America, and never have the stakes been so high. In just one generation, we have witnessed a total revolution in the way most people think of sex, and this in turn is creating a demand for monumental revisions affecting every social institution at almost every level.

Pornography in print, celluloid, and electronic forms is exploding, and what shocked our parents is considered standard for entertainment and advertising today. Same-sex relationships are considered normal, and restricting sex to marriage is considered abnormal. Behavior once thought shameful is flaunted now with pride, and praised as daring and courageous. Marriage has never been so uncertain. Sexual identity has never been more confused, and manners expected between men and women have never been more conflicted. Not just the idea of saving sex for marriage but now even marriage itself is under attack, and everything related to sex, gender, and family, whether in law, politics, defense, education, entertainment, health, business, or religion, is being shaken to the core.

The United States Census in 2000 showed that two-parent families now represent less than 25 percent of all households in America, down from 45 percent as recently as 1960. Over the same forty-year period, the percentage of single-parent families tripled, the divorce rate doubled, the percentage of people getting married at all dropped lower than ever before, cohabitation increased 1000 percent (by a factor of 10), and the rate of illegitimacy (births to unmarried women) rose by more than 500 percent (by a factor of 5). But while this rise in illegitimate births is terrible, the actual rise in illegitimate pregnancy has been at least two or three times higher, because 80 percent of abortions in America (which are not counted in the illegitimacy rate) are performed on women who are not married. No one keeps statistics on the rate of sexual promiscuity, but indications like these show that the rise in promiscuity must be epidemic as well.

Yet impersonal statistics like these tell only part of the story. To understand the whole story we must look past raw numbers and consider how these changes are affecting real people in real life.

First, consider the way changing views on sexual morality are straining the military services. In 1991, a few months after I arrived at the Pentagon as Deputy Assistant Secretary of the Navy for Manpower, we were shocked by the shameful behavior of Naval aviators attending a professional conference called Tailhook. This annual event had become known for sexual entertainment, which was bad enough. But as the problem unfolded, I was soon more amazed by reactions in official Washington than with what originally took place at Tailhook.

Most politicians and members of the media were not particularly concerned about the rampant promiscuity, marital infidelity, or failure of officers to set an example of virtue. Instead, I found that what shocked and concerned most others around me was the idea that men aroused by sexual entertainment could not at the same time respect the dignity of female colleagues. For most of my colleagues in Washington, it seemed that the problem was not sexual entertainment for military officers but failing to distinguish the entertainers from colleagues while feeling aroused. We had totally different views about moral responsibility concerning sex, and clearly my way of thinking was no longer the majority position.

Or, consider the way changing views on sexual morality are affecting students. Cohabitation among unmarried college students is now considered so normal that Yale University, in 1997, could not imagine why anyone would need to be excused from a university housing policy assigning unmarried male and female students to the same dormitory, on the same floor, where they were expected to use the toilet and shower facilities together at the same time.

This went beyond tolerating promiscuity to demanding that even modest students live immodestly.

Four orthodox Jewish students asked to be exempt from Yale's housing policy because, they explained, it went against their religious tradition and individual moral conscience. But Yale refused. To the university, denying the relevance of gender differences in the most intimate situations was far more important than respecting scruples based on religion, tradition, or conscience. When Yale denied their request, these students filed a suit in court. But the court favored Yale and ruled against the students as well. Or, consider the way changing views on sexual morality are threatening the freedom of private groups to continue teaching and applying traditional standards. Homosexual behavior is now so widely accepted that the courts are under enormous pressure to move beyond tolerance and to actually deny the rights of groups still convinced that homosexual behavior is wrong. In 2000 a deeply divided U.S. Supreme Court, on a 5-4 vote, denied that the federal government should punish private organizations like the Boys Scouts that teach and apply traditional sexual standards. Although the Court did not change its view of the Constitution this time, it very nearly did. From the way it handled this case, we know the highest court in our land is just one vote away from revolutionizing sexual norms throughout American law.

Or, consider the way changing views on sexual morality are affecting the business world. Top business leaders are moving rapidly to be seen as supportive of the radical effort to redefine what it means to be an officially recognized, morally legitimate member of a family. Businesses are abandoning the idea that being in a family requires either marriage or responsibility for children, and are replacing it with the radical new idea that anyone living in a sexual relationship is a perfectly legitimate family member regardless of marriage or children. As a result, most major corporations, including IBM, AT&T, Sprint, Hewlett-Packard, Xerox, Time-Warner, Microsoft, Kodak, and Disney have been revising company policies on who qualifies to receive employee family benefits. Most major companies in America are now supporting policies that deny any basis for distinguishing between heterosexual marriage and family relationships and all kinds of nonmarital domestic partnerships involving same-sex couples, live-in-lovers, or even just good friends.

Or, finally, consider the way changing views on sexual morality are provoking conflict over sex education. Jane Fonda has become the main spokesperson for a media crusade funded by Durex, the world's largest producer of condoms, which is aimed at saving America from the danger of government-sponsored programs promoting abstinence. This former anti-America protester, who made Vietcong propaganda films and played a sex kitten in the movie Barbarella, is outraged that American tax dollars are being used to support the view that sex without marriage is not perfectly normal or safe. In Fonda's words, "Abstinence until marriage is based on an unreal world that isn't there." And she thinks most people would be shocked to discover "their tax money is being used for that."

These are just a few of many examples illustrating the way thinking on sexual morality is changing the culture. But however much change there is in the culture at large, nowhere is conflict over sex raising more trouble than among Christians in the church. Opposing factions are tearing churches and whole denominations apart. Sexual standards long thought essential are being denounced as un-Christian, and top officials in the church are in some cases themselves claiming that the church will die if Christians do not learn to reject the Bible and take a new, more sensual approach on sex.

I actually believe that never in history has the church been torn by more serious, widespread controversy. Never has there been such ferment — so many articles and books; so many denominational reports; so many battles at convention, or presbytery, or general assembly; so many pronouncements; so many statements; so many major shifts in official policy — over such critically important areas of doctrine. In fact, never has there been such opposition to the authority and relevance of scripture, such demand for revising everything Christian, or such deep and bitter division between crusading factions as now being caused by conflict over sex — not when the church was invaded by gnosticism in the first century, not when the church split between East and West in the sixth century, not when the church divided over the Protestant Reformation in the sixteenth century, not when German higher criticism infiltrated the church in the nineteenth and early-twentieth century, and not even during recent battles dividing churches, denominations, and Christian organizations over the issue of biblical inerrancy.

There simply has been nothing comparable in the entire history of the church, no other time when turmoil has risen so high or reached so far. The stakes in the current conflict over sex are more critical, more central, and more essential than in any controversy the church has ever known. This is a momentous statement, but I make it soberly, without exaggeration. Conflict over sex these days is not just challenging tradition, orthodoxy, and respect for authority in areas such as ordination, marriage, and gender roles. And it does not just affect critically important doctrines like the sanctity of human life, the authority and trustworthiness of scripture, the Trinity, and the incarnation of Christ. Rather, war over sex among Christians is now raging over absolutely essential matters of faith without which no one can truly be a Christian in the first place — matters such as sin, salvation, the gospel, and the identity of God himself. These are not marginal issues! What is approaching us truly is enormous.

ADIFFERENT FORCE IS RISING

In 1971 astronomers discovered the presence of a very different, previously unknown phenomenon called a black hole, after noticing that matter and light were acting strangely in some regions of space. Black holes have such enormous gravitational pull that even light cannot escape, which means they cannot be seen. But they have a tremendous effect on everything nearby. They bend space. They bend light. They draw planets, stars, and galaxies into orbit.

Not only is something enormous approaching in American culture concerning sex, but a new and different force is rising that is giving tremendous new power to those attacking traditional morality. And, just as astronomers discovered black holes in space after noticing strange new effects on other heavenly bodies, we can observe sexual morality changing in strange new ways that indicate the presence of something new in the culture — something with enormous pull. Changes affecting sexual morality are occurring these days that cannot be explained on the basis of natural lust and youthful rebellion. They are coming from a source that is far more significant and powerful. There is indeed a dark new spiritual presence in the culture that, like a black hole, is bending morality in a new direction and pulling everything close into its orbit.

A different view on sexual morality, involving a strange new force linking spirituality with what has traditionally been considered sexual sin, was evident in the movie Titanic. James Cameron, the director, told viewers the movie was not the usual romance story because it had a morally inspiring religious message. But what sort of religion inspiring what sort of morality? Rose, the heroine, in the opening scene credits Jack, a fellow-passenger, not only with saving her physically when the ocean liner sank, but with saving her in a spiritual sense as well. In her words, "he saved me in every way that a person can be saved."

From the story she tells, it is clear that Rose's inclusion of spiritual salvation relates to premarital sex she had with Jack just hours before the ship went down. The claim means that she was saved spiritually — reached a higher dimension of spirituality — through what the Bible calls sexual sin. So, the religion James Cameron recommends is a religion promising salvation through sex, and the morality he thinks inspiring is a morality that treats sexual sin as if it were heroic and salvific.

This very different view of sexual morality — this different view involving a strange new force linking spirituality with sexual sin — was also displayed at a high school graduation ceremony in Vermont in 1998. During the ceremony, a member of the graduating class, Kate Logan, started delivering a speech. But as she spoke, Kate Logan stunned her classmates, their parents, and the visiting dignitaries by taking off her clothes and finishing the speech naked. Afterwards she said it was an effort to express the spirituality of graduation. She explained that "When I was up there, it felt natural. It didn't feel like I was doing anything crazy." She was not pulling a prank and did not think she had done anything wrong. Rather, she believed it made perfect sense and deserved special praise. Why? Because what she did came from a new and different way of thinking about sex and spirituality. To Kate Logan, disrobing in front of everyone at graduation made sense because she believed unrestrained sex is the one true path to spiritual life.

(Continues…)

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Excerpted from "True Sexual Morality"
by .
Copyright © 2004 Daniel R. Heimbach.
Excerpted by permission of Good News Publishers.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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Table of Contents

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS,
FOREWORD,
P REFACE,
LIST OF CHARTS AND DIAGRAMS,
PART I: SEXUAL CHAOS IN THE CULTURE,
1 SEX AT THE CENTER OF THE MORAL CRISIS,
2 THE RETURN OF SEXUAL PAGANISM,
3 PAGANIZING "CHRISTIAN" SEXUAL MORALITY,
4 MAINLINE DENOMINATIONS IN SEXUAL TURMOIL,
5 IS PAGAN SEXUALITY AFFECTING EVANGELICALS?,
PART II: THE BIBLICAL VIEW OF SEXUAL MORALITY,
6 BIBLICAL HOLINESS DEFINES MORAL SEX,
7 BIBLICAL PRINCIPLES SHAPE MORAL SEX,
8 BIBLICAL PROHIBITIONS GUARD MORAL SEX (I),
9 BIBLICAL PROHIBITIONS GUARD MORAL SEX (II),
10 BIBLICAL PROHIBITIONS GUARD MORAL SEX (III),
11 BIBLICAL PROMISES BLESS MORAL SEX,
The First Blessing: Abiding Joy,
PART III: COUNTERFEIT VIEWS OF SEXUAL MORALITY,
12 ROMANTIC SEXUAL MORALITY: SEX AS AFFECTION,
13 PLAYBOY SEXUAL MORALITY: SEX AS PLEASURE,
14 THERAPEUTIC SEXUAL MORALITY: SEX AS W HOLENESS,
15 PAGAN SEXUAL MORALITY: SEX AS SPIRITUAL LIFE,
PART IV: ASSESSING THE STATE OF SEXUAL MORALITY,
16 WHAT IS GOING ON?,
17 UNDERSTANDING THE CONFLICT,
18 WHAT ABOUT THE FUTURE?,
APPENDICES:,
A COLORADO STATEMENT ON BIBLICAL SEXUAL M ORALITY,
B OTHER RELIGIOUS STATEMENTS ON SEXUAL M ORALITY,
C A WOLF IN SHEEP'S CLOTHING: A SPECIAL REPORT BY FOCUS ON THE FAMILY ON THE,
SEXUALITY I NFORMATION AND EDUCATION COUNCIL OF THE UNITED STATES (SIECUS),
D A TALK ON ANGLICANS DIVIDING OVER ELECTING A NON-CELIBATE HOMOSEXUAL B,
ISHOP,
NOTES,
BIBLIOGRAPHY,

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

"This extraordinary book doesn't flinch or equivocate. It is comprehensive, practical and highly readable. What a breathtaking achievement!"
—Fred Barnes, Cofounder and Executive Editor, The Weekly Standard, and Co-Host of FOX News Channel's "The Beltway Boys"

"A very thorough study of biblical sexual morality and how it is twisted by the world."
—Elisabeth Elliot Gren, author, Through Gates of Splendor; widow of Jim Elliot

"Here at long last is a strong, biblical, prophetic, and courageous corrective to the sexual anarchy reigning in our culture. It will frame debate and equip Christians to battle for moral sanity and for souls."
—R. Albert Mohler Jr., President, The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary

"This book upholds high standards of biblical holiness, purity, beauty, and joy in clear contrast to the bankrupt, destructive immorality flooding our culture today."
—Wayne Grudem, General Editor, ESV Study Bible; author 

"Here is an uncompromising explanation of the Bible's clear teaching on God's design for our sexuality. It will be an enormously effective weapon against the pagan sexuality emerging in our culture."
—Richard Land, President, Southern Evangelical Seminary

"This important work is comprehensive and thorough, and most importantly is biblically and theologically sound. It fills a void in current discussion and will be a standard resource for Christians in the years ahead."
—Daniel L. Akin, President, Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary

"Here is a classic Christian critique of our age-a sharp arrow in the Christian's quiver of essential weapons for spiritual warfare-a tour de force for biblical truth and practice."
—R. Phillip Roberts, President, Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary

"All who care about the true good of men and women, and the upholding of truth and scriptural teaching, will find in this book enormous instruction, insight, vision, and encouragement."
—Bruce A. Ware, T. Rupert and Lucille Coleman Professor of Christian Theology, The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary