I ONCE HEARD SOMEONE CLAIM that if you could enter a black hole and reach the event horizon, you would see into the past and future simultaneously. My attempts to wrap my head around this have not yet been successful. I’m no physicist, but I do understand what it is like to stare at my past or to try to see into my future.

Typically, this causes problems. Looking to the past often leads to regret, shame, or depression about what has happened and cannot be changed. Looking to the future often leads to worry, fear, or anxiety about what may happen. The reason for this, I think, is that my gaze is focused solely on myself. In contrast, Christ calls us out of ourselves to look to him. During the Advent season we are invited to look to the past at what Christ has done, even as we look to the future hope of what he will do when he comes again.

David had his eyes set upon Christ when he composed Psalm 110. In the opening lines, God speaks to someone that David calls, “my lord.” In other words, God is talking to King David’s king. This King of Kings is our Savior, Jesus Christ (Acts 2:34–36). The psalm paints a portrait of Christ as victor over God’s enemies, ruler of the nations, powerful, vibrant, and just.

As if this picture wasn’t magnificent enough, the psalm adds another layer to the image: Christ is also a priest after the order of Melchizedek. The author of Hebrews explains why this is significant: “[Melchizedek is] without father or mother, without genealogy, without beginning of days or end of life, resembling the Son of God, he remains a priest forever” (Heb. 7:3). Christ is an eternal priest, unlike the Levitical priests of the Old Testament, a perfect and continuous mediator, intercessor, and advocate between God and his people.

In this poem, David invites us to focus our thoughts, our affections, and our desires on a vision of the priest-king Jesus Christ. As we look into the past and behold the birth, life, suffering, crucifixion, resurrection, and ascension of Christ we are drawn out of our regret, shame, and depression. Christ is king; he has the power to ensure there is nothing that has happened to us, or by us, that God will not use for good (Rom. 8:28). Christ is our priest; all our shame and guilt has been dealt with on the cross.

More than that, Christ has conquered death and the Holy Spirit who brought Christ to life dwells in us, giving us new life and hope for the future. Our worries, our fears, and our anxieties are put into proper perspective when we look to Christ and remember that just as he came once, he will come again to destroy evil, uphold justice, and save his people.

For a psalm so full of violent imagery—enemies made into a footstool, shattered kings, corpses filling the nations—David ends on a surprisingly calm note. In the midst of judging the nations the priest-king stops to take a break. The final portrait David paints for us is of Christ, pausing to take a drink of cool, refreshing water from a brook, then lifting up his head (v. 7). His pause indicates that the end of all things is not yet upon us. We stand in our present moment—the event horizon, if you will—between the first and second coming of Christ. Rather than obsessively staring at our own past or future, through this psalm, Christ invites us to look at him to find forgiveness, identity, peace, security, and hope in what he has done for us in the past, and in what he will do when he returns in the future to establish his reign as priest and king, once and for all.

Andrew Menkis is a theology teacher, with his poetry and prose published in Modern Reformation, Ekstasis, The Gospel Coalition, and Core Christianity.

This article is part of A Time for Wonder, a 4-week devotional to help individuals, small groups, and families journey through the 2024 Advent season. Learn more about this special issue that can be used Advent, or any time of year at http://orderct.com/advent.

The post The Event Horizon of Advent appeared first on Christianity Today.

The notion that sex should be confined to the bounds of a lifelong covenant of marriage between one man and one woman is not simply out of step with a culture reshaped by the sexual revolution and the LGBTQ movement. Many now consider our ethic to be something far worse than outmoded. It’s hateful, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center; “dangerous,” per the Human Rights Campaign; and a source of “great harm,” says prominent ethicist David Gushee.

Evangelical responses to these new norms have varied. Some have doubled down on traditional beliefs as a matter of basic orthodoxy. Some have remained quietly traditional while avoiding public confrontation. And some have joined exvangelicals and mainline Christians to propose a theological revisionism that affirms LGBTQ relationships and sex outside of marriage.

Despite their differences, all three postures understandably have a foundational assumption in common: that our traditional sexual ethic is deeply unpopular. That, at best, it’s a matter of difficult but necessary faithfulness, an obstacle to overcome in evangelism and discipleship—or, worse, a major cause of dechurching, deconversion, and rejection of the gospel.

But is it possible that Scripture’s view of marriage and sexuality is seen by a small but growing crowd outside the church as a feature, not a bug?

The Fault in Our Norms

Bonnie Kristian

It might be too much to say the West is like G. K. Chesterton’s sailor who, having set off for adventure, found himself enchanted by the light of his own home shore. But I don’t think it’s too soon to say that the last decade of upheaval and alienation in our culture of sex and romance have made Christianity’s always-strange sexual ethic freshly attractive.

We’ve already seen this pattern with other elements of Christianity. Most famously, women’s rights activist Ayaan Hirsi Ali shocked the world late last year when she announced her conversion from atheism to Christianity (after previously deconverting from Islam). She embraced Christianity, she said, because she found the “desire to uphold the legacy of the Judeo-Christian tradition” to be the “only credible” option to unite the West in opposition to “great-power authoritarianism,” “the rise of global Islamism,” and “the viral spread of woke ideology.”

Christianity, Hirsi Ali discovered, is the source of the rights and values she wants to defend, and where many progressives see our faith as repressive, she sees it as a great cultural asset. In this, she is not alone. The New Atheist thinker Richard Dawkins expressed his enthusiasm for “cultural Christianity” this past spring. And author Paul Kingsnorth, who moved from atheism to Buddhism to Christianity, similarly described his philosophical journey as one of coming to value some of the very elements of Christianity that modern Westerners are most likely to reject.

“I grew up believing what all modern people are taught: that freedom meant lack of constraint,” Kingsnorth wrote. But Christianity “taught me that this freedom was no freedom at all, but enslavement to the passions: a neat description of the first thirty years of my life. True freedom, it turns out, is to give up your will and follow God’s.”

British journalist Louise Perry has not likewise announced her conversion, but she seems to be impressed, not repulsed, by Christianity’s sexual ethic. Her provocative 2022 book, The Case Against the Sexual Revolution, questions the merits of a sexual order based only on consent and begs for a better ethic, “one that recognises other human beings as real people, invested with real value and dignity. It’s time for a sexual counter-revolution.”

Let the Cultural Christians Come unto Jesus

O. Alan Noble

Though she hasn’t embraced Christianity, Perry looks longingly at the very ethical teachings that many evangelicals see as burdens or liabilities. Here she is, writing in First Things last year:

Whereas the Romans regarded male chastity as profoundly unhealthy, Christians prized it and insisted on it. Early converts were disproportionately female because the Christian valorization of weakness offered obvious benefits to the weaker sex, who could—for the first time—demand sexual continence of men. Feminism is not opposed to Christianity: It is its descendant. …

What if … we understand the Christian era as a clearing in a forest? The forest is paganism: dark, wild, vigorous, and menacing, but also magical in its way. For two thousand years, Christians pushed the forest back, with burning and hacking, but also with pruning and cultivating, creating a garden in the clearing with a view upward to heaven.

In recent decades, Perry warns, the pagan forest is creeping back, crowding out that view.

This is only a collection of anecdotes, of course. Though recent polls show a slight decline in support for same-sex marriage and a similarly small reversal on sex and gender identity, the traditional Christian ethic is clearly still a minority position. Yet this trend among thought leaders of fresh interest in Christianity as a positive cultural force is noteworthy—and perhaps may trickle down to the general public.

What’s more, there may be a lesson here for evangelicals: Rather than being defensive about the countercultural aspects of following Jesus, maybe we can see anew that the very strangeness of Christian ethics can be inviting to those stuck in the thicket of cultural confusion.

This is the approach that theologian N. T. Wright took when asked in 2019 if he is embarrassed by the Christian take on sex and gender. “In the early Church, one of the great attractions of Christianity was actually a sexual ethic. It is a world where more or less anything goes, where women and children are exploited, and where slaves are exploited often in hideous and horrible ways,” he told The Atlantic. “So a lot of people, particularly the women, found the Christian ideal of chastity amazingly refreshing.”

Wright was not naive. When his interviewer pushed back, arguing that a “restricted sexual ethic” that appealed “in the horrible world of ancient Christianity, where it was a terrible thing to be a woman,” might not have the same persuasive power today, Wright acknowledged the “constant difficulties”—but didn’t cede the point that the way Christians live can be attractive in our culture too.

What We Can Offer If We Uncircle the Wagons

Carrie McKean

Could our sexual ethic be part of what Jesus had in mind when he urged his followers to “let your light shine before others, that they may see your good deeds and glorify your Father in heaven” (Matt. 5:16)? We aren’t accustomed to thinking of it that way. Yet we must remember that the Spirit “blows wherever it pleases” (John 3:8)—even toward the aspects of Christianity that we’ve been conditioned to deemphasize in our desire to get a hearing in a hostile culture.

That’s not to conflate the cultural fruit of Christianity and the coherence of its worldview with the miracle of conversion itself. We must be wary of what theologian Carl Trueman rightly describes as “instrumentalizing” Christianity “in the service of a different cultural campaign,” as well as the tragedy of King Agrippa, who answered Paul’s articulation of the gospel by declaring himself “almost” persuaded (Acts 26:28, KJV). And as the writer Andrew Menkis said in his appeal to the almost-persuaded author Jordan Peterson, mere rules “cannot sate the hunger of our soul.”

Still, blessed are those “whose delight is in the law of the Lord” (Ps. 1:1–2), and we should not be so surprised if people outside the church begin to see the blessing of Christian sexual ethics in a world bereft of meaning. Perhaps, like former skeptic C. S. Lewis, they are realizing that the “hardness of God is kinder than the softness of men, and His compulsion is our liberation.”

Daniel Darling is the director of The Land Center for Cultural Engagement and the author of several books including Agents of Grace, The Dignity Revolution, and the forthcoming In Defense of Christian Patriotism.

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The post What If the Christian Sexual Ethic Becomes a Feature, Not a Bug? appeared first on Christianity Today.

Una vez escuché a alguien decir que si uno pudiera entrar en un agujero negro y alcanzar el horizonte de un suceso, uno podría ver el pasado y el futuro simultáneamente. Por mucho que me he esforzado por comprender esto, todavía no lo consigo. Mis conocimientos en física son limitados; sin embargo, sí entiendo lo que significa contemplar mi pasado o tratar de vislumbrar mi futuro.

Por lo general, esto causa problemas. Mirar con frecuencia al pasado lleva al lamento, la vergüenza o la depresión con respecto a lo que pasó y no puede ser cambiado. Mirar al futuro a menudo lleva a la preocupación, temor o ansiedad sobre lo que puede suceder. La razón por la que pasa esto, me parece, es que mi mirada está enfocada solo en mí mismo. Por el contrario, Cristo nos llama a quitar los ojos de nosotros mismos y a mirarlo a Él. Durante la temporada de Adviento, recibimos la invitación a mirar hacia el pasado a lo que Cristo ya hizo, a la vez que miramos a la esperanza futura de lo que hará cuando regrese.

David tenía sus ojos fijos en Cristo cuando compuso el Salmo 110. En las primeras líneas, Dios le habla a alguien que David llama «mi Señor». En otras palabras, Dios está hablando con el Rey del rey David. Este Rey de reyes es nuestro Salvador, Jesucristo (Hechos 2:34–36). El salmo pinta un retrato de Cristo como el vencedor sobre los enemigos de Dios, como el gobernador de las naciones, poderoso, vibrante y justo. Y como si esta imagen no fuera magnífica en sí misma, el salmo le agrega otra capa: Cristo es también sacerdote según el orden de Melquisedec. El autor de la carta a los Hebreos explica por qué esto es tan significativo: «[Melquisedec] no tiene padre ni madre ni genealogía; no tiene comienzo ni fin, pero, a semejanza del Hijo de Dios, permanece como sacerdote para siempre» (Hebreos 7:3). Cristo es un sacerdote eterno que, a diferencia de los sacerdotes levitas del Antiguo Testamento, es un mediador perfecto y constante: un intercesor y defensor entre Dios y su pueblo.

En este poema, David nos invita a fijar nuestros pensamientos, afectos y deseos en una visión del rey sacerdote Jesucristo. Cuando miramos al pasado y contemplamos el nacimiento, vida, sufrimiento, crucifixión, resurrección y ascenso de Cristo, dejamos de ver nuestro lamento, vergüenza y depresión. Cristo es rey: Él tiene el poder para asegurarse de que no haya nada que hayamos experimentado o hecho que Dios no use para bien (Romanos 8:28). Cristo es nuestro sacerdote: toda nuestra culpa y vergüenza han sido resueltas en la cruz. Más que eso, Cristo conquistó la muerte y el Espíritu Santo que lo devolvió a la vida mora en nosotros y nos da vida nueva para el futuro. Nuestras preocupaciones, temores y ansiedades son puestos en la perspectiva correcta cuando miramos a Cristo y recordamos que así como Él vino una vez, volverá de nuevo para acabar con la maldad, hacer justicia y salvar a su pueblo.

Para un salmo repleto de imágenes de violencia —enemigos puestos por estrado, reyes aplastados y cadáveres amontonados en las naciones—, David culmina con un tono sorprendentemente pacífico. En medio del juicio a las naciones, el rey sacerdote se detiene para descansar un momento. La imagen final que David nos muestra es de Cristo haciendo una pausa para tomar agua fresca de un arroyo, para finalmente levantar su cabeza (v. 7). Su pausa indica que el fin de todas las cosas aún no está cerca. Permanecemos en nuestro tiempo presente —digamos, el horizonte del suceso— entre la primera y la segunda venida de Cristo. En lugar de contemplar obsesivamente nuestro pasado o futuro, a través de este salmo, Cristo nos invita a mirarlo a Él y encontrar perdón, identidad, paz, seguridad y esperanza en lo que Él hizo por nosotros en el pasado, y en lo que hará cuando regrese en el futuro para establecer su reino como sacerdote y rey, una vez y para siempre.

Andrew Menkis es profesor de teología. Su poesía y prosa han sido publicadas en Modern Reformation, Ekstasis, The Gospel Coalition y Core Christianity.

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