In 1960 the FDA approved a birth control pill, which launched a massive social upheaval in our culture. Attitudes toward sex, gender roles, marriage, and morality were shifted suddenly as sex and procreation were violently separated. Because of this separation, sex and marriage were also separated. Human history has shown that the best environment for raising children is marriage and when the act of marriage was separated from procreation, it was no longer the act of marriage. Sex became a separate activity geared toward one’s personal fulfillment, the granting of one’s own desires, rather than a covenantal renewal between a husband and a wife committed to one another and to any children they may have.
More than 60 years later this upheaval continues. In the aftermath of this FDA approval, divorce rates skyrocketed and have remained high. Children born to unwed parents is the norm. Sex and sexuality have become primary for one’s identity. Sexual behavior has become entertainment rather than an expression of committed love. This was the situation in the first century as well. There, powerful land owners—men—had nearly unlimited access to sex. Nearly anyone in a man’s household was available to him and his selfish interests.
Sex has, of course, always been linked to procreation. It’s how we get babies. Even in the first century, however, the connection between sex and marriage was largely ignored by the culture. Often, powerful men understood a wife would give him legal heirs, but he still had a household of people who existed to serve him. Marriage was often seen as a legal transaction to facilitate the passing of generational wealth. Intimacy and tenderness and genuine pleasure were often sought elsewhere. In many estates the link between sex and marriage was tenuous at best. In 1960 the connection was severed.
Imagine encountering the teaching of the apostle Paul in that culture. Paul instructed husbands to love their wives. A typical Roman landowner would hear this and respond by exclaiming, “Why?”. Love was found elsewhere, outside the legal relationship with his wife. To be sure, there were husbands and wives who loved each other deeply. The cultural elite, however, were driving the culture, and among the elite—landowners—birthrates were falling sharply. In 18BC and then in 9AD, Caesar August passed laws that penalized Roman citizens who were unmarried and married couples who did not have children, by increasing their tax burdens and restricting inheritances. Extra legal privileges were granted to those with three or more children. The government recognized the importance of marriage and family.
In first century Rome, sexual morality was important, but by this they meant a man married a woman and had legal heirs with her, and wives had to remain faithful to their husbands while husbands were not considered adulterers unless they were having sex with other married women. Christians, inheriting the sexual ethics of God’s people prior to Jesus, refused to go along with this sense of what is good and right. Instead, a Christian man was taught to love his wife, to put her needs above his own. In fact, a husband’s role model for loving his wife was none other than the Lord Jesus, who gave his life for his bride, the church. In the second century, Tertullian described Christians:
One in mind and soul, we do not hesitate to share our earthly goods with one another. All things are common among us but our wives.
Tertullian, The Apology, Chapter 39
Here Christians truly stood out from the world around them. Life in the kingdom of God was different, but not in every way. Culture still remained, well, culture. It was how Christians lived in a particular culture that stood out, not that they rejected it entirely or that they embraced it fully. I’ve shared this from the Epistle to Diognetus before, and it’s worth sharing again:
For Christians are not distinguished from the rest of humanity by country, language, or custom. For nowhere do they live in cities of their own, nor do they speak some unusual dialect, nor do they practice an eccentric way of life. This teaching of theirs has not been discovered by the thought and reflection of ingenious people, nor do they promote any human doctrine, as some do. But while they live in both Greek and barbarian cities, as each one’s lot was cast, and follow the local customs in dress and food and other aspects of life, at the same time they demonstrate the remarkable and admittedly unusual character of their own citizenship. They live in their own countries, but only as nonresidents; they participate in everything as citizens, and endure everything as foreigners. Every foreign country is their fatherland, and every fatherland is foreign. They marry like everyone else, and have children, but they do not expose their offspring. They share their food but not their wives. They are in the flesh, but they do not live according to the flesh. They live on earth, but their citizenship is in heaven. They obey the established laws; indeed in their private lives they transcend the laws. They love everyone, and by everyone they are persecuted.
Epistle to Diognetus 5:1-11
This letter was written to a man named Diognetus, who was not yet a follower of Christ. The author explains that while Christians are different, they are not altogether different. They do not withdraw from the broader culture, nor do they embrace the sins of the culture. He says directly they live in the cities they happen to find themselves in, and the implication is they participate in the life of that city, shopping where others shop, working where others work, congregating where others congregate. They do so, however, according to their greater citizenship, which is in heaven. Notice again he says, like Tertullian, Christians share their food but not their wives. They seek to live faithfully in a culture that does not recognize the Lordship of Jesus.
To put this into our context, we live in Grand Rapids or Wyoming or Belding or Grandville. We dress like twenty-first Americans, whether that’s as Gen-X Americans or Gen-Z Americans. We eat in restaurants that are enjoyed by those around us. We shop in the same stores. We enjoy the same parks and bike the same trails. We walk our dogs and mow our grass. Like unbelievers all around us, we live on earth, but our citizenship is in heaven. We live according to the values of the kingdom of Christ. Therefore we love the Lord and we love our neighbor. We live according to his holiness, not according to the values of our culture.
This does not mean we live in hostility to our culture! Rather, it means we remain faithfully present in our culture. As the Epistle to Diognetus points out, at a glance a Christian’s life looks like the life of those around him or her. We don’t dress differently. We don’t have a private “Christian” language. We don’t eat strange foods. However, we don’t embrace the immorality around us, either, but this does not mean we live in hostility with the world! To use the term coined by James Davison Hunter, we are not in a culture war!
As it happens, our sermon series this Fall will be in 1–2 Peter. In these letters Peter writes to Christians in Asia Minor, those who live as exiles, faithfully present in a foreign land. In the words of the Epistle to Diognetus, the believers there “live in their own countries, but only as nonresidents; they participate in everything as citizens, and endure everything as foreigners. Every foreign country is their fatherland, and every fatherland is foreign.” He writes these letters to them near the end of his life, to instruct them first and foremost in the gospel. I was tempted to call this series “The Gospel According to Peter”! In keeping with the dominant thrust of the letters, however, I am calling the series, “Exiles: Faithfully Present in a Foreign Land”. The believers there do not live in hostility against the world. Rather, their “hostility” is against their former way a life, a way of life that seeks to assert itself again and again! In an excellent journal article theologian Miroslav Volf gets at this point quite well:
Notice the significance of the new birth for Christian social identity. Christians do not come into their social world from outside seeking either to accommodate to their new home (like second generation immigrants would), shape it in the image of the one they have left behind (like colonizers would), or establish a little haven in the strange new world reminiscent of the old (as resident aliens would). They are not outsiders who either seek to become insiders or maintain strenuously the status of outsiders. Christians are the insiders who have diverted from their culture by being born again. They are by definition those who are not what they used to be, those who do not live like they used to live. Christian difference is therefore not an insertion of something new into the old from outside, but a bursting out of the new precisely within the proper space of the old.
Miroslav Volf, “Soft Difference: Theological Reflections on the Relation Between Church and Culture in 1 Peter”, Ex Auditu, 10, 15–30
Like the Epistle to Diognetus in the second century, Volf says Christians do not accommodate to the culture, nor do Christians seek to change the culture through power, nor do they reject it outright and live separately in little enclaves with little interaction with unbelievers. To use James Davison Hunter’s phrase, Christians seek to be faithfully present in a foreign land, a land that belongs to the Lord Jesus, though most of the inhabitants of the land are not yet aware of this fact.
As our culture continues to rapidly change, and as the fallout of the so-call Sexual Revolution that began in the 1960s continues to wreak havoc in the world, what is our role in it? It is not to force change, as if legislative power were the means to advance the gospel. It is not to proclaim judgment to the world, as if the gospel were not, in fact, good news. It is also not to withdraw from the world so as to avoid interacting with any who may find our way of life truly distinct—not in the foods we eat or the clothes we wear, but in our love for God and for neighbor, and in living according to the ethics of his kingdom.
The gospel is the proclamation of the victory of Jesus. Christ has died, Christ was buried, and Christ is risen! This is his victory. He is victorious over sin and death and all who will receive this truth, who come to him in faith, will participate in the transformation of all creation. They will be those transformed by his gospel, who look and eat and dress and speak like ordinary folk, yet whose lives illustrate our common confession: Jesus is Lord.
We are not here to judge the world or to condemn it. We are here to proclaim the victory of Jesus. We are called to be faithfully present in this foreign land we call home. We are called to live in a such a way that non-Christians can see what they would look like if they were Christians. We live in the flesh, as the ancient letter says, but not according to the flesh. Even as non-Christians live according to the flesh, we must show them what they would look like if they also trusted in Jesus and were transformed by him, but not in a change of clothing or in the foods they eat. We show them how they would looked transformed in their own spheres of influence, in their own cultural moments, in their desires and in their priorities. This can only happen if we are faithfully present in our communities, with our neighbors, with our coworkers. We ought not seek after power to bring about gospel transformation, for political power cannot bring that kind of change. Nor should we withdraw our presence from those around us. We, together in community, should live faithfully among them, living for Jesus as rather ordinary residents in this foreign land. We must be faithfully present.
As our culture continues to rapidly change and pays less and less attention to Christian morality, we must not get hostile, or even feel persecuted. Yes, the world may hate us for being different, but as Jesus said, the world will hate us for it hated him. How did Jesus respond to this hatred? “Father, forgive them for they know not what they do” (Luke 23:34). We must be faithfully present in the world, even if the world turns hostile against us and hates us and calls us names. That is, we must follow the Lord Jesus and imitate him. We must love our neighbors, and if—when?—our neighbors turn into our enemies, we must also love our enemies and pray for those who persecute us. We must be like Jesus.