We should therefore take note: today’s understanding of marriage is clearly not a recent innovation; it was explicitly advocated by the likes of Shelley over two centuries ago.  Carl Trueman

After nearly 2 weeks of feeling “bleah” due to the flu, I finally felt like I could get back on the bike this afternoon. I did a short ride to see if the body could cope. It looks like I should be able to get back to normal tomorrow. 🚴😀

When healthy sexual activity is considered a matter to be judged by instinct, then inevitably those institutions that disagree with such will be seen as problematic and as hindering human authenticity and freedom. And when the primary culprit historically is religion, this means that religion will be the target of the sexual reformers. In the West, this specifically meant Christianity.  Carl Trueman

Augustine blames himself for his sin because he is basically wicked from birth; Rousseau blames society for his sin because he is basically good at birth and then perverted by external forces. Carl Trueman

Abortion, too, is a deathwork—not simply because it works the death of the unborn child but because it profanes that which the second world regarded as sacred: human life made in the image of God from the moment of conception. Carl Trueman

By contrast, the coming barbarism, much of it here and now, not least to be found among our most cultivated classes, is our ruthless forgetting of the authority of the past. Sacred history, which never repeats itself, is thus profaned in an unprecedented way by transgression so deep that it is unacknowledged.  Carl Trueman

It is not simply that society just happens to be antihistorical in the way it approaches history. It has a vested interest in the actual erasure of history, of those things that conjure up unpleasant ideas that might disrupt happiness in the present. Carl Trueman

In short, the major problem with pornography is not what many religious conservatives might understand it to be—its promotion of lust and its objectifying of the participants. It certainly does both of those things, but the problem is also much deeper: it repudiates any notion that sex has significance beyond the act itself, and therefore it rejects any notion that it is emblematic of a sacred order. Carl Trueman

The sermon for July 3rd 2022 is now available on the New Life web-site.

In this sermon, which is based on 2 Corinthians 9:1-15, I talk about God providing seed for sowing and bread for eating.

Click here to listen in your browser, here to download the mp3

This definition brings out neatly the deathwork aspect of pornography. It is a cultural artifact that takes human sexual activity and divorces it from any moral content. We might add that it also divorces it from any larger narrative or historical context. The sex in pornography is presented as an end in itself.  Carl Trueman