In his famous description of “thrilling romance of Orthodoxy,” G.K. Chesterton suggests the early church found an “equilibrium of a man behind madly rushing horses.” She “swerved to the left and right,” leaving behind an Arianism that would make Christianity too worldly before repudiating an “orientalism” that would make it too unworldly. “It is easy to be a heretic,” Chesterton goes on, as it is “easy to let the age have its head.” After all, there are an “infinity of angles at which one falls,” but “only one at which one stands.” The whirling adventure of the emergence of orthodoxy required saying ‘no’ to distortions on every side, so that they might preserve an undiluted ‘Yes’ to the strange paradoxes of Christ’s life and witness.

Such a situation is, I think, our own: it is possible to go wrong on matters of sex and marriage in ways besides affirming the licitness of same-sex sexual acts and desires. Indeed, it is possible to allow the spectacular transgressions our society’s broken anthropology has generated to make us inattentive to the same fundamental attitudes and dispositions present within our own midst, subtle and quiet though they might be. I have half wondered whether that is partly the point of the chaos all about us, namely, to fill us all with the self-righteous satisfaction of denouncing obvious wrongs while ignoring the many ways our own communities have imbibed the spirit of our age.

Matthew Lee Anderson. If you have any stake in evangelical theology and ethics, I would urge you to read my friend MLA’s thorough fisking of the inadequate moral theology promoted by some who have anointed themselves the defenders of orthodoxy on sex and gender.