Both the question of sexual identity and the politics that surround it are not primarily concerned with sexual behavior. They are actually about what it means to be a human being. For Christians, far more is therefore at stake in this debate than the question of which sexual acts are moral and which are immoral. Once sex becomes recreation and once it is detached from the body’s own sexual script, what it means to be human has fundamentally changed. Sexual complementarity, the telos of marriage, and the analogy between Christ and the church all lose their significance. In a society like ours, therefore, how we think about what it means to be human has undergone a significant change. The anthropology of modern Western society is fundamentally incompatible with a Christian doctrine of man. Failure to see this and then try to argue that codes of sexual morality are negotiable and can be subordinated to pastoral strategies of love and affirmation is to contradict central tenets of the Christian faith.
When Being Affirming Isn’t Loving by Carl R. Trueman
If you haven’t read The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self or Strange New World by Carl R. Trueman, you need to. Carl has done a great job at connecting the dots between philosophical movements over the centuries to today.
In addressing Andy Stanley here, he is spot on. There are reasons that certain biblical understandings are important. Sexuality and marriage are fundamental and foundational to our understanding of what it means to be human. The modern warped view on it separates us from God, confuses more than it clarifies, and sets us up for a life of misery.
While Isaiah and his colleagues saw their task as calling the people away from the anthropology of the wider world and back to that of the covenant God, today’s prophets seem to see their task as being religious mouthpieces for the priorities of the wider culture, calling the church away from a Christian anthropology and toward that of the world around.
Go read the whole article and his books as well. Christian, the world’s view has shifted far from that of Christianity. And you need to understand it because you’ll be facing it sooner or later.