Truth Really Matters

http://gradsgate.com/importance-of-alumni-management-platform Is there a dichotomy between you and your body, between body and person?  Or do “the two together form an integrated psycho-physical unity”?  The Christian (biblical) perspective is to honor our own bodies as a revelation of God’s purpose for our lives.

So argues Nancy Pearcey in her wonderful 2018 book, Love Thy Body:  Answering Hard Questions about Life and Sexuality.  She observes that the physical characteristics of our bodies reveal truths about our identities; further, that our bodies enable rational grounds for our personal moral decisions.  Accordingly, ethics depend on biology, especially on the topics of sexuality and abortion.

Pearcey quotes Sam Allberry, a Christian pastor with same-sex attraction who practices celibacy:  “Desires for things God has forbidden are a reflection of how sin has distorted me, not how God has made me.”

With comparable humility and courage to face difficult truths Tim Wilkins, who once lived as a homosexual man, but is now married with children suggests:  If God created some people gay, then “God has played a cruel joke on them.  He has engineered their minds and emotions for attraction to the same sex and yet created their physiology to be in direct opposition to that attraction.”  Pearcey notes that when your emotions war with your physiology, you cannot be a whole person.

We live in a fallen world, but God promises grace to live through brokenness.  When his disciples asked Jesus whose sin caused a man to be born blind, the Lord blamed neither the man nor his parents, but that God could manifest even through such tragedy.

Some Christians with same-sex attraction pray for years for God to change their desires.  Paul endured his “thorn in the flesh” (whatever it was) despite repeated prayers.  Paul ultimately decided to “glory in my infirmites, that the power of Christ may rest upon me.”  Similarly, I’ve had a life-long tormenting malady, but have realized that I would rather depend on God’s grace with the affliction, than to be free of it without God’s presence in my life.

The body we are born with and grow up in does indeed limit our freedom, Pearcey notes.  Similarly, our biological (family) ties are not discretionary.  We don’t choose our parents, relatives, or the place of our birth.  But all these realities form our identity.  Gilbert Mailaender reminds us that we are not just “free spirits but embodied creatures.   Lines of kinship and descent locate and identify us.”

As Christians we are called to honor our parents and love our children, seeing them as gifts from God.  Learning to love and honor builds the character we need to live a fruitful life.

Marriage, differently, begins with consent but continues as a covenant as opposed to a contract.  In a contract there is quid-pro-quo consideration, but in marriage we pledge our very own selves, “for better or worse, until death do us part.”  Love is to be unconditional; after all, it may not always be reciprocated as we like, but God’s typology for marriage is an eternal relationship, not breakable.

Pearcey (dis)credits the loss of the positive view of the body to Charles Darwin.  Darwin, like Richard Dawkins today, could not deny the apparent design of life, but determinedly embraced a philosophy of materialism – matter is everything – the apparent purpose of life and its structures must be the result of blind, undirected forces.

Historian Jacques Barzun:  “This denial of purpose is Darwin’s distinctive contention.”  Dawkins:  “Natural selection, the blind, unconscious automatic process which Darwin discovered . . . has no purpose in mind.”

With no purpose there is no basis for moral truths.  We are merely machines, driven by physics, chemistry, and genetic predestination.  Obviously, without God humans may impose their own will.  Yet I would point out, as I have many times before, that in materialism you and I have no personhood.  If matter and physical laws are all there is, then what is love, hope, meaning, purpose, beauty, integrity, logic, and even rationality?  These are fundamental to human experience, foundational to what it means to be a person.  If our existence is just about physics, then where does your next thought originate?  How small a materialistic worldview is!

(Regarding whether Darwin and his modern acolytes have any clue at all, see my free ebook on the subject of creation vs. evolution.)

This conflict of worldviews is critical to the issues of identity and the body.  If an unborn child is just a ‘blob of tissue,’ then abortion seems plausible.  But then there are no immoral acts of any kind, anywhere and anywhen.

What about casual sex?  It’s “no big deal” according to Western culture.  Yet I’ve noticed that secular fiction (TV, movies, novels) often gets it right when they portray the tragic consequences of sexual sin:  jealousy, violence, divorce, STDs, addiction, etc.

Pearcey reports that a Washington Post book review opined that it is healthy when teenage girls “refuse to conflate” love and sex, reinforcing the “no big deal” mantra.  The Nation asked, “Why should sex have an everlasting warranty of love attached to it?”  Yep, if the body is just a lump of matter, why not just play with it?  A video by Children’s Television Workshop, used in sex education classes, defines sexual relations as merely “something done by two adults to give each other pleasure.”  There is no mention of marriage or family.

It is ironic, Pearcey notes, that some see sexual hedonism as too much emphasis on the purely physical.  Rather, she concludes, it places too low a value on the body, diminishing moral and personal significance.

Extolling the idea of “friends with benefits,” the New York Times explains, “You just keep it purely sexual, and that way people don’t have mixed expectations, and no one gets hurt.”  In other words, avoid actual friendship to avoid emotional connections.  Pearcey relates the story of a teenager who was depressed because her hookup partner had just broken up with her.  Despite the euphemisms (“friends with benefits,” “hookup culture”), God has wired our human body & soul systems to take sex seriously, within the boundaries of marriage.  Troubles multiply outside the boundaries.

Researcher Donna Freitas interviewed hundreds of students and concluded that hookup culture “creates a drastic divide between physical intimacy and emotional intimacy,” teaching young people not to “reckon with someone’s personhood.”  The hookup culture inhibits dissent.  If you want more than sex, like friendship, relationship, or commitment, you will be labeled needy, clingy, and dependent.  One student said, “It’s a contest to see who cares less.”  This is a denial of the reality of our human nature designed by God.  We were designed for marriage, not hookups.

Miriam Grossman, a UCLA psychiatrist, wrote the book Unprotected:  A Campus Psychiatrist Reveals How Political Correctness in Her Profession Endangers Every Student, after experiencing the consequences of university policies that prevented her from using concepts of “right” and “wrong” when counseling students.

Christian teachings shocked the 1^st century world by commanding husbands to love their wives, to be sexually exclusive and faithful within the marriage, and not to seek sexual pleasure with slaves or prostitutes.  At the time it was not considered possible that a man could commit adultery, because women were property.  Adultery was not a property crime.  The Christian view was radical.

Pearcey:  “Biblical morality is teleological:  The purpose of sex is to express the one-flesh covenant bond of marriage.”

When a mother nurses her baby, her body releases oxytocin, called “the attachment hormone,” because it promotes the desire to care and nurture.  Surprisingly to scientists who discovered this, oxytocin is also generated during sex, especially in women, but also in men.  There is a biochemical / emotional bond built between a man and a woman . . . intended for marriage.  In hookup culture, you build and break such bonds continually and trouble is inevitable.  There is biochemistry connected to Paul’s admonition is 1 Cor 6:18 to avoid fornication because you sin against your own body.  Grossman notes, “You might say we are designed to bond.”  Studies consistently report that the people who are happiest sexually are married, middle-aged, conservative Christians.  Shocking.

The biblical view of the body is wholistic, Pearcey observes.  When you eat, you don’t say, “My mouth is eating;” rather, “I am eating.”  You know that you don’t just own your body – your body is part of you.  Someday the body of the Christian will be redeemed, transformed, resurrected, made immortal, because we are “embodied beings.”

In the 1^st century these ideas were counter-cultural.  The philosophies of the day, like Gnosticism, typically disparaged the material world as corrupt, inferior to the spiritual.  Salvation was about escaping the corrupt physical and ascending to a higher realm.  (Note the reinvention of this idea in sci-fi, Stargate SG-1, for example.)

Now, biblically, we live in a presently fallen world, but God created it originally as “very good.”  After the 2^nd Coming of Christ, all the “good” will be restored.  God created a lot of stuff.  Stuff is not inherently evil.  What we do with the stuff can be righteous or sinful.  And God will ultimately redeem all the consequences of the Fall.

Pearcey comments that what really set Christianity apart in the 1^st century was the incarnation – that almighty God took on a physical body!  Scripture teaches that the Lord Jesus will remain incarnate throughout the rest of eternity.  The apostle John offered a test for genuine faith and legitimate preachers in his Gnostic world:  “Hereby know ye the Spirit of God:  Every spirit that confesseth that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh is of God.” (1 John 4:2 and surrounding context)

The resurrection of Jesus is a declaration that God will fix this broken world and regenerate our broken bodies.  We won’t float on clouds in some ghostly state, but will have physical feet planted on physical streets and buildings and parks and tennis courts in a physical New Earth and New Heaven, headquartered in a physical New Jerusalem.

One horrific consequence of the view that the body is mere biology, sub-personal, is abortion.  Virtually everyone believes that “life” begins at conception, but in the Roe v. Wade ruling, Justice Harry Blackmun bluntly declared that an unborn baby is not a person.  He admitted that if the baby were a person, then abortion would necessarily be illegal.  Judge Blackmun will be judged himself for that wicked judgment.

A famous source for mind/body dualism is Rene Descartes:  “I think, therefore I am.”  Descartes saw only the mind as the authentic self.  Pearcey evaluates this perspective as illogical.  “How can a free mind influence a body that functions as automatically as a machine or a robot?  How can a mind control a body whose behavior is determined by mindless mechanical laws?”

The issue is intertwined with materialism.  How can a non-material mind / soul even exist within a matter-only universe?  If there is no spiritual, no soul, then Blackmun is no more a person than the unborn baby he is content to discard.

Bioethicist Joseph Fletcher proposes fifteen qualities to define when human life is worthy of respect and protection, including intelligence, self-awareness, self-control, concern for others, and communication.  A problem is that such qualities are not binary (you have it or you don’t).  They emerge gradually as you grow, in a continuum from conception until death.  Differences between persons are quantitative.  Pearcey:  “What we do not find is a clear qualitative transition point for the momentous transformation from a non-person to a person.”

So equal rights under the law for all persons critically depends on your worldview.  Does God exist and, therefore, do you as a person exist?  What about the unborn baby?  What about the old woman in a years-long coma?  Even Friedrich Nietzsche, the dedicated atheist, admitted that the “Christian concept . . . of the ‘equality of souls before God’ . . . furnishes the prototype of all theories of equal rights.”

Ultimately, it’s not within our moral rights to decide that someone else has no right to life or liberty.  As a being made in the image of God, my rights and your rights are unalienable, bestowed by our Creator, who loves us and provided for our salvation, if we humble ourselves, repent, and trust in Him.  Our world’s cultural and legal and moral disasters arise from those who reject such obvious truths.

Ernst Haeckel was Darwin’s foremost apologist in the late 19^th century.  Perfectly consistent with his evolutionary dogma, Haeckel saw caring for the disabled as interfering with the survival of the fittest.  He urged society to follow “the example of the Spartans and Redskins” who killed disabled infants immediately after birth.  Haeckel also advocated euthanasia for disabled adults, Pearcey notes.

Today there is still a strong correlation between those who embrace evolution and advocacy for euthanasia, abortion, and even the murder of newborn infants who survive an abortion procedure.  Worldview matters.

Pearcey explains how “the Harvard criteria” proposed in 1968 at the medical school switched the debate on euthanasia from biology to philosophy.  No longer would death be defined as when the heart cannot be restarted or a certain number of cells die, but rather when you suffer a ‘loss of personhood.’  It is so ironic that materialists depart from scientific (measurable) criteria to a standard – personhood – that has no meaning whatsoever in an atheistic worldview!  And so death becomes a “social construct.”  Pull the plug when it is convenient to whomever has the power or the money.  Pearcey observes, “Essentially a patient is no longer a person when the attending physician says so.”

One of Nancy’s students works for a suicide hotline.  She said, “I spend hours every week persuading people not to end their lives, telling them that their lives still have value.  It breaks my heart that people think they must be able to function in a certain way to be considered significant.”

The answer to the suicide crisis is, of course, the Gospel.  I wonder how many suicide hotlines offer the assured hope that the Lord Jesus offers, not just for eternal life, but to live with meaning, purpose, and the promise that Jesus will walk with you through the travails of this life.

Right-do-die advocates portray euthanasia as compassionate.  Yet compassion means to “suffer with” (com = with, passion = suffer).  True compassion obligates you to help the suffering bear their burdens, to sacrifice your time and effort and resources – love in action.

When the Declaration of Independence states that “all men are created equal,” that includes a disabled person.  The body is part of the person, “the place where we come to know a person.”  Thinking biblically makes it easy to evaluate the morality not only of abortion and euthanasia, but also organ harvesting, surrogacy, and the sale of tissue from abortion products or frozen embryos.

Let’s try thinking biblically about same-sex desire.  Geneticist Francis Collins writes that “sexual orientation is genetically influenced but not hardwired by DNA, and that whatever genes are involved represent predispositions, not predeterminations.”  Not disagreeing, gay advocate John Corvino writes, “It doesn’t matter whether we’re born this way.  The fact is that there are plenty of genetically influenced traits that are nevertheless undesirable.”

There is plenty of evidence that both maladies and temptations to sin may be genetic (run in families), including depression, alcoholism, drug addiction, and heart disease.  In fact, most people find themselves predisposed toward anger, lust, greed, worry, impatience, etc.  The underlying factors go far beyond the genetic, of course.  The mix of genetic, environmental, experiential, and even free will factors are incredibly complex, beyond quantitative analysis.  God actually knows this, yet commands us to choose righteousness and calls sin out for what it is.  When we sin it’s because we want to and don’t care what God says and, frankly, usually don’t care whether we hurt someone else.  Even when tempted, we can choose to resist, and build patterns into our lives that are constructive.  God helps, if we seek Him.  Christians can help by offering sincere friendships.  We don’t have to follow Freud who saw every relationship as sexual.

We live in a fallen world, and we can do right even if it’s not easy.

Doug Mainwaring ended his marriage to engage in multiple sexual relationships with men, and became an advocate for same-sex marriage.  After ten years he became a Christian, remarried his wife, and they finished raising their children together.  He writes, “Along the way, I learned that marriage is more than just a tradition or a religious or social construct.  Monogamous, complementary, conjugal marriage is a pearl of great price worth investing one’s entire life in.”

Pearcey:  “Our feelings do not define us.  Our moral commitments do.”

Pearcey cites a New York Times article that reports that the part of the brain associated with navigation is enlarged in London taxi drivers, as is the region that controls the fingers of the left hand in right-handed violinists.  So brains can be ‘rewired’ by diligent practice.  Other brain studies show MRI patterns that shift after trauma or significant events.  Biblically, we understand that the brain is a physical tool subject to the immaterial mind / soul.  Scripture teaches that we can grow in knowledge, wisdom, and even righteousness.

Pearcey discusses how Queer Theory produces a very low view of the body, presuming that one’s psychological state, one’s feelings, define the authentic self, disregarding the biological sex you are born with.  But why should mere desires and feelings define identity?  How much of reality are you willing to deny or reimagine because you have strong feelings today, which may change tomorrow?

Pearcey notes that Christianity is often accused of being anti-sex and anti-body.  Clearly, it is the secular post-modern ethic that is anti-body by denying biological reality (given by God’s design) and anti-sex, by relegating sex to mere transient pleasure while despising the God-given institution of marriage.

Pearcey:  “It is Christianity that honors the body as male and female, instead of subordinating biological sex to psychological feelings.”

Pearcey has a lot to say in her chapter, “Transgender, Transreality,” which I won’t summarize here.  Please do buy her book.  It’s a wonderful reference.  One interesting factoid is that the 80 to 90 percent of children who experience some gender confusion, lose those feelings before adulthood.  Yet all the power centers of our culture are pressuring children into mutilating and sterilizing treatments and surgeries . . . God’s judgment will be fearsome upon those who destroy children.

There is a nice historical review of social contract theory toward the end of the book.  The notable proponents were Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau.  They imagined what human nature would be like if we could strip away all accumulated marks of civilization:  morals, laws, customs, traditions, institutions, and religions.  Especially religions.  Rejecting biblical history and the Christian worldview, humans were once, supposedly, in a primeval, pre-social state, the “state of nature.”  Individuals were disconnected and autonomous with no natural obligations.  Therefore all social relations are constructed by choice.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s most famous work, The Social Contract, opens famously with, “Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains.”  Accordingly, we have liberty to throw off whatever chains of cultural or social duties we dislike, and invent our own morality, our own rules . . . or none at all.

Social contract theory was primarily applied, at first, to politics and economics.  But now, it intrudes everywhere.  Rejecting the Bible, we reject Scriptural principles for the God-given institutions of the family, the church, and government.  Let’s create our own visions for alternative forms of marriage and the family, for example.

Pearcey points out that, contrary to Hobbes, “we do not pop up overnight like mushrooms after a rain.”  Starting as a helpless baby, we are born into a pre-existing family, clan, church, town, and nation.  We mature into adulthood only if others, especially parents, commit to us sacrificially.  God designed this pattern; God designed the family, including the strong natural bonds that inspire and ground us.

She cites the Charles Bronson character in the (terrific) movie The Magnificent Seven, who tells a group of boys in a poor village, “You think I’m brave because I carry a gun.  Well, your fathers are much braver because they carry responsibility:  for you, your brothers, your sisters, and your mothers.  . . . They do it because they love you, and they want to.  I have never had this kind of courage.”

I’ve noticed that God’s system works, even when practiced by non-believers.  Years ago I got to know the families that lived in my cul-de-sac, none of which were Christians.  They were all middle-aged or older, had avoided divorce, had raised their children to be productive adults, and were ‘responsible citizens.’  Only one had enjoyed a ‘professional / executive’ level job.  Another had been a ‘garbageman,’ one had been a postal worker, one worked in an auto factory, and another had a modest job in construction.  But they all prospered – nice houses, nice cars, and apparently happy in their lives, as far as I could tell.  Namely, they all worked largely within God’s framework for family, work, and civic life, and enjoyed the benefits.

My neighbors lived reasonably in sync with reality.  Unfortunately, much of America does not, anymore.  Trouble results and disaster looms.  The way to optimally live in sync with reality is to repent, trust Christ, become a born-again Christian, and live in accordance with God’s Scriptural principles for life.  Anyone can do that, but it first requires humility – that we are not autonomous, independent creatures, that we are not little gods who can shape our own version of reality.

• drdave@truthreallymatters.com