Creational Marriage Versus Constructed Sexuality

To stand for the creational family is to stand for the cosmic order. It is to stand for reality. This battle is even more important than the battle for the gospel (a critical battle indeed).

Dec 09, 2022

Dear friends and supporters:

By God’s grace, the CCL West Coast symposium was the best and best-attended in our 22 years. The talks were content-rich and absorbing, and the discussions wide-ranging and illuminating. The enthusiasm for Christian culture and the creational family was palpable (some photos are far below).

This week I’ve decided to include an edited excerpt from my talk on the creational family.

The Cosmic OS

The family is under withering attack almost everywhere in Western culture. Beyond the no-fault divorce and routine sexual immorality and one-click porn and holocaustal abortion that have plagued us in recent decades are now added same-sex “marriage,” transgenderism, and “gender reaffirmation surgery.” Some social scientists predict that the traditional family will simply disappear.

Don’t bet on it. The family is a creational norm, and as such, it’s a vital part of the cosmic OS, God’s operating system for the universe. The family can no more be eliminated than gravity can be eliminated, though it can be assaulted, with results just as catastrophic as the attempt to violate the law of gravity.

Since the family is a creational norm, a foundational component of the cosmos, that’s where we should begin. Why? Because we always begin at the beginning. For Christians, that is with creation.

Foundational Creational Institution

Marriage is the foundational creational institution. The church and the state are vital divine institutions. But they are post-fall institutions. Had there never been sin, there would never have been a state, and perhaps not even a church, at least not as we know it now. The family is rooted in the creation order. It is not an inherent part of God’s redemptive plan, though in a fallen world God can and often does use it for that purpose. In other words, the family can lead us to the gospel, but the family is “very good” even apart from the gospel.

Sex as Culture, Not Creation

Perhaps the most widespread ideological assault on the creational family in postmodernity is the reduction of sex from a creational fact to a cultural fact. John Frame once said that creation is what God makes, and culture is what we make. The problem comes when humans assume they are the original creators rather than culture-creators under his authority.

Human sexuality is an example of creation, not culture. In this sense sexuality is ontological. By ontology I mean “being.” Man was created as a sexual being. Sex isn’t therefore a development of his ingenuity or intellect or diligence (or biological evolution); it’s not a cultural or social construction. Sex (male or female; there’s no third option) is hardwired into humanity’s very being. Man can no more replace his (or her) sex than he can alter his (or her) mind or conscience.

Of course, humans can tamper with and diminish and heighten sex, mind and conscience and many other creational realities. After all, what is sin, but a perversion of God’s good creation? Transgender operations can tamper with the physical traits of God-created human sexuality, but just as man can efface but never erase conscience (Romans 2:15), so he can modify sex bodily but not ontologically.

Postmoderns at war with the meaning of marriage often see sex as culture, not creation. Sex is engineered reality; you can make sexes just as you can make video games or pecan pies. The term “gender” (once a perfectly good term) is now deployed to denote a species of sexuality that each of us creates and changes almost at will. We’re all sexual artists, proving what one writer called “the unlimited malleability of human sexuality.”

Ever since humanity’s primal sin of rebellion against God’s order, men and women have bumped up against the constraints of creation and wished to burst them. This was the creation-defying sin at the root of the ancient Gnostic heresy. “Gender as social construction” is one such striking attempt. Homosexuality, women military combatants, and sex-reassignment surgery are all examples of a contra-creational worldview. Rod Dreher is quite right, therefore, that same-sex “marriage” is not just a social revolution but also a cosmological revolution. It’s man’s attempt to reverse- and re-engineer God’s creation.

The Bible takes it as a given that humanity as male and female are interdependent but distinct as creational realities in which we should delight and for whose gift we should worship God. This is God’s creational sexual order. It’s the antithesis of the postmodern sexual disorder.

Conclusion

To stand for the creational family is to stand for the cosmic order. It is to stand for reality. This battle is even more important than the battle for the gospel (a critical battle indeed) because the gospel has meaning only in the cosmos as God has created it. Undermine the cosmos, destroy the gospel. At a time when even conservatives are aping Leftists by embracing the statist catastrophe, Christians must prioritize cosmos over politics, although politics — and reducing it to its biblically minimalist limits — is vital.

The creational ( = cosmic) family should be the central battle in the cultural wars. No battle is more important in that conflict over cosmos and civilization.

Most Christian ministries derive a bulk of their annual income toward year’s end. This December, will you consider a tax-deductible donation to CCL via PayPal or Venmo? Or mail a check to CCL, Box 100, Coulterville, CA 95311. God uses you to keep us going — and expanding.

Personal

Here are some photos from the just-finished symposium. If you’re one of those people who calendar events one year out, you might want to mark December 2, 2023, the next CCL West Coast symposium. The tentative theme is “Recovering the Free and Virtuous Society.”

Part of the symposium delegates.

Presenters: P. Andrew Sandlin, David L. Bahnsen, Jennifer Lahl, Brian G. Mattson, Jeffery J. Ventrella

With long-time friend and CCL trustee David W. Souther.

Next week’s CultureChange will be titled “Christmas and Liberty.” I plan the last letter of the year to be “Leviathan Joins the Party,” an analysis of how both Leftists and conservatives and have bought into a liberty-crushing, contra-Christian statism.

Yours for Christ and his culture,

Founder & President, Center for Cultural Leadership

Now Available

This easy-to-understand book tackles head-on same-sex “marriage” and attraction”; female subordination in marriage; creational versus Christian marriage; complementarian and egalitarian versus Reformational marriage; the fallacy of “falling in love”; aborticide; eros in culture; the LGBT+++ agenda, the lust for singleness; the child-free life; “natural” law; and much more.

It offers nothing less than a bold, creational, Reformational view of marriage amid the present cultural chaos.

Get the book here.

Listen to my symposium talk here.

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