The sexual revolution promised freedom and bliss but instead brought about pain, according to a speaker at an Anglican theology conference addressing what reason and revelation reveal about sexual difference.
“Sex difference is significant, and amazing,” insisted the Rev. Dr. Gerald McDermott, the retired chair of Anglican Divinity and Beeson Divinity School in Birmingham, Alabama in an opening address.
McDermott was among eight speakers delivering remarks at “To Be Human: Our Selves, Our Souls, Our Bodies” February 27-March 1 at St. Luke’s Anglican Church on Hilton Head Island, South Carolina. The conference drew participants from all three recognized Anglican seminaries of the Anglican Church in North America (ACNA) as well as from an assortment of ministries and parish churches across the United States.
“To Be Human” came about in the wake of another event, the Mere Anglicanism conference, that early in 2024 surfaced disagreement within the Anglican Diocese of South Carolina about Holy Orders and the ordination of women to the priesthood.
Anglicans within the Diocese of South Carolina have an outsized influence in the ACNA and, measured by membership, are the largest diocese in the denomination. The “To Be Human” conference included a worship service presided over by South Carolina Bishop Chip Edgar and preaching by South Carolina Canon Theologian the Rev. Dr. Kendall Harmon.
While some conference speakers noted their viewpoint on Holy Orders, their sessions were not intended to argue the matter, which conference organizers determined would likely be a non-starter. Rather, speakers sought to examine a biblical understanding of humanity and to “deepen our understanding of the truth and beauty of God’s creative action and intent for the world that He created,” in the words of St. Luke’s Anglican Church Rector the Rev. Dr. Jady Koch.
“The profound implication of having been made in God’s image affects every aspect of our lives,” Koch explained in framing the gathering hosted by his parish. “Our work and witness as Christians in the world upholding this truth is needed now more than ever.”
The Importance of Sex
McDermott in his opening address maintained that North American culture “didn’t make sex important enough” and instead saw it “reduced to a recreational exercise.”
The prolific author observed that it is de rigueur to say that sexual difference is a cultural distinction. But, male and female brains are differently wired even before environmental differences can occur.
“Why does God create so that tensions in marriage can make us into better people?” McDermott asked. “We’re being created for something else.” Marriage, he described, is a sign in the visible world of a future love and union that surpasses what we enjoy today.
“It is not good to live as though my sexuality makes no difference,” McDermott stated. “I must live in relation to the other.”
People cannot know the image of God without knowing both sexes, McDermott insisted. “We can learn something about God by seeing how men and women are meant to relate.”
This is not necessarily seen only in marriage, the Anglican theologian added, but he did emphasize that marriage is for the purpose of holiness, not happiness.
“Happiness is what the world teaches, but if you enter marriage for that, you will be unhappy,” McDermott predicted.
Sentiment versus Reality
The biggest problem that Christians currently face in our culture is an abandonment of a biblical ontology (the nature of being and what is real), proposed Ministry Watch President and past Vice President of Advancement for the Colson Center for Christian Worldview Warren Cole Smith.
Smith proposed that Christians must be challenged to recover “Christian Realism.” Those in American culture are “dealing with the world as we would like it to be rather than it is” (sentiment). This was contrasted with biblical realism – the reality of the broken world and our culpability in it.
“The fall that broke the world is a rejection of God’s created order, not a theological dispute,” Smith diagnosed. The Ministry Watch president stated that there is an “obsession with declaring ourselves God and making the world in our image.”
But, Smith stated, replacing God’s order with our own is “rank sentimentality.” Smith noted the writings of the late Rachel Held Evans and Frank Schaeffer as examples of Christians relying upon memoir (personal experience) at the expense of the revealed word of God.
“Evangelicals have been fighting the wrong battles in the wrong ways,” Smith assessed. Quoting American Theologian Robert Webber of Wheaton College, Smith asked, “who gets to narrate the world? Who is telling the truest story of the world?”
While 1984 author George Orwell feared that what we hate would ruin us, Brave New World author Aldous Huxley feared that what we love would ruin us, an example of sentiment.
“Reality always wins, sentimentality cracks under its own strain,” Smith concluded. “The new god is therapeutic, not redemptive, created in our own image.”
Bodies and the Material World
Several conference presentations engaged with concepts such as transgenderism, asceticism, and technology.
There is a belief that the self exists apart from but expresses itself through the body, according to conference speaker the Rev. Dr. Jonathan Mumme, a Lutheran who serves as Associate Professor of Theology at Hillsdale College.
The Rev. Dr. Greg Peters of Nashotah House Theological Seminary and Biola University spoke on asceticism (the effort of the soul to gain virtue) and how Christians engage in ascetical practices, such as fasting, for the greater good of piety.
“Our self-denial of good makes possible our self-offering to God,” Peters, a priest in the Reformed Episcopal Church, proposed.
Peters noted that our asceticism is good for the whole Church, in that it imitates Jesus’ sacrifice at Calvary. This is in contrast to an “unnatural asceticism” that abstains out of loathing for the material creation.
“You aren’t just doing this for yourself but for the good of your neighbor,” Peters stated.
Technology creates problems that set us at odds with ourselves, noted Anne Kennedy of Good Shepherd Anglican Church in Binghamton, New York.
“It [technology] enables certain forms of idolatry that we might relinquish if we could observe them,” Kennedy proposed. The religion writer and devotional author noted a “self-justification through social media” in which “women preach to one another through Facebook reels and Instagram.”
These social media posts as “spiritual messages about the self” probably outnumber the people who go to church, and “many women long for a world they have never inhabited,” Kennedy surmised. She offered a list of seven suggestions to make life more congenial, among them recovering education and reading the bible with curiosity.
“Infantilizing didn’t work,” Kennedy determined. “There has to be catechesis.”
Biblical Anthropology
Among the conference topics was how to effectively identify and address anthropologies competing with the gospel.
“Is your anthropology sufficiently biblical?” Harmon, the South Carolina Canon Theologian, asked in his conference worship service sermon, outlining two anthropological ideas in competition with Jesus.
Harmon identified the first as originating from Genevan philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau who proposed that “humans are fundamentally good.”
“It is everywhere and competing for your attention,” Harmon stated of the prevalence of this idea in contemporary culture.
Second, Harmon listed the worldview of Dutch renaissance humanist Erasmus who proposed that “we do our part and God does his part or, as the Beatles sang, ‘I get by with a little help from my friends.’” But, Harmon insisted, “we contribute nothing: we’re not good and we’re not okay.”
“What the heart loves, the will chooses and the mind justifies,” Harmon quoted from Anglican Theologian Ashley Null’s summarization of the teachings of Archbishop of Canterbury Thomas Cranmer. “The problem is not all external. Left to ourselves, our righteousness is filthy rags,” Harmon stated, citing Isaiah chapter 64.
Harmon noted that the Gospel is a double blessing, quoting Martin Luther: “We get new life (Grace) but we also get the gift of the Holy Spirit which is the power to lead a new life.”
Legislating Morality in the Midst of Culture Wars
“All law by its very nature reflects someone’s moral vision,” shared the Rt. Rev. Derek Jones, bishop for the ACNA’s Jurisdiction for the Armed Forces and Chaplaincy in the final session. “The state has a duty to promote virtue and to prevent vice in the government.”
Jones stated that there has been a deliberate campaign through social institutions to change perception of public morality, citing the advent of “don’t ask, don’t tell” in the 1990s as an initial effort to change broader culture through military policy.
“Wokeism,” Jones insisted, is a “quasi-religious system” that divides the world into oppressor and oppressed. It is another example of policy shaping what is regarded as moral.
“The law plays an essential role in promoting virtue and preventing vice,” Jones maintained. True human flourishing, he added, can only come through alignment with the creator’s design.
The conference concluded with a panel discussion taking questions submitted from conference participants and closing in a prayer offered by Koch:
“Blessed Lord, who has fearfully and wonderfully made the heavens, the earth, and all that dwell therein, and crowned that creation by forming men and women together into your very likeness. Strengthen and confirm in the hearts, souls, and minds of all Your people the trustworthiness of Your Word and the confident assurance of the goodness of Your creative intent for Your creatures. So that, in the midst of the confusion, chaos, and lies of a lost, misguided, and beleaguered world, we would stand firm, hold fast, and boldly proclaim Your goodness, Your truth, and Your love. We ask all of this by Your mercy, in the fellowship of the Spirit, and in the name of Your Son Jesus Christ, in which we pray. Amen.”
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