Onward: Engaging the Culture without Losing the Gospel

by Russell D. Moore

it should not surprise us that the spirit of every age seeks to define human worth in terms of power and usefulness, while the gospel of the kingdom defines human dignity in strikingly different terms, as Christ himself identifies himself not with the powerful but with the vulnerable.

Some have tried to advance the kingdom by law and by force. But that doesn’t lead to the triumph of Christianity; it only covers paganism in Christian veneer. The places where Christianity was once “official” and “state-established” are the very places that are now as burned over and as secular as they can get. This is not a coincidence.

The word chastity is not the same as the word abstinence and the words fornication and premarital sex aren’t interchangeable. This isn’t merely a matter of impatience, as though the marital act misfired at the wrong time. Fornication is, both spiritually and typologically, a different sort of act from the marital act. It pictures a different reality than that of the mystery of Christ. It represents a Christ who uses the church without joining her, covenantally, to himself. It’s not just “naughtiness.” To use another word Christians find awkward and antiquated, it’s blasphemy. That’s why the consequences of such immorality are so severe. There is a real spiritual union formed, mysteriously, but one that is of a different spirit than the sanctifying Spirit of God in Christ (1 Cor. 6:15–19).