I want to start by reading a short passage of Scripture. What I want to focus on to some extent this evening is the sexual revolution that is taking place before our eyes. But what I want to do as I reflect on that is to ultimately set it within some kind of theological framework to, I think, help us hopefully to understand that the sexual revolution ultimately isn't about sex. It's about what human beings are. I want to start by reading from Genesis chapter 2 verse 15 to verse 25. I'm reading from the English Standard Version. I hear the word of the Lord. The Lord God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to work it and keep it. And the Lord God commanded the man, saying, you may surely eat of every tree of the garden, but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat. For in the day that you eat of it, you shall surely die. Then the Lord God said, it is not good that the man should be alone. I will make him a helper fit for him. Now out of the ground, the Lord God had formed every beast of the field and every bird of the heavens and brought them to the man to see what he would call them. And whatever the man called every living creature, that was its name. The man gave names to all livestock and to the birds of the heavens and to every beast of the field. But for Adam, there was not found a helper fit for him. So the Lord God caused a deep sleep to fall upon the man. And while he slept, took one of his ribs and closed up its place with flesh. And the rib that the Lord God had taken from the man, he made into a woman and brought her to the man. And then the man said, this at last is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh. She shall be called woman because she was taken out of man. Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and they shall become one flesh. And the man and his wife were both naked and were not ashamed. Thus ends the reading of God's word. A few brief words of introduction before I start on the main part of what I want to talk about tonight. We live at a time, I think, where the most significant challenges to Christianity are coming in the form of challenges to sexual ethics. Christianity has always been challenged throughout the centuries. And the challenges come in different forms. Sometimes it's come in the form of materialism. Sometimes it's come in the form of atheism or direct assaults upon the truth of the faith. I think today the challenge comes to us in the form of a transformation of sexual ethics. And what I want to argue tonight is that that transformation of sexual ethics is about more than just sex. It's actually about a fundamental revision of what it means to be a human being. Knowing the times in general is a key to effective Christianity. Sometimes when I've spoken on this subject, one of the responses I've got was, well, yes, but we know that everybody's a sinner, and therefore there will always be rebellion and discontent relative to Christianity. Well, one of the things I argue in my class when I teach history is this, that general explanations offer little particular insight. example I use in the States is one that resonates particularly powerfully with an American audience, and that is September 11, 2001. It was an event that took place about three weeks after I'd arrived in the United States, three weeks after I'd immigrated. It's fascinating to be an immigrant in a country that goes into a kind of paranoid lockdown just after you've arrived and really doesn't trust foreigners. I'm sure the interesting times I had were far less interesting than they would have been had I come from a Middle Eastern country. It's very interesting to be in a country when something like that happens. And the question I pose to students in class is, well, the point I make is this. If I were to ask you why the Twin Towers fell down on September the 11th, 2001, and you responded to me, gravity, that would be technically a correct answer to the question. would be technically a correct answer to the question, because that is what brought the Twin Towers down on September the 11th, 2001. But in giving me that technically correct answer, you actually tell me nothing about what happened that day at all. You don't give me any specific insights into what happened in September 2001 at all. In order to do that, you've got to get down into particulars. The general laws of gravity simply don't allow me to understand the particular instance, the particular event that took place that day. And as a Christian, I think there is a place for a careful analysis, careful reflection upon the particulars of the times in which we live. Yes, why do people do bad things? They do bad things because they're sinful. But why do they do these particularly bad things in this particular place, at this particular point in time? And I think understanding that question helps us as Christians witness more effectively to the world around us. And I would argue that the world in which we live at the moment requires us to understand the theological significance of the sexual revolution in order for us to be able to pastor Christian people effectively and witness to the wider world effectively. A little bit of background on the sexual revolution. I think the speed of change is quite remarkable. Everybody in the United States expected, I think, gay marriage to be legally recognized last year. I think if you'd told me three years ago that in the last month I would have had to write a letter to my local school board protesting the transgender bathroom policy in the elementary school, that's the primary school, even three years ago, I wouldn't have believed you. I wouldn't have believed that was coming. It's happened so fast. I've got friends who live in New York, which is one of the most liberal cities in the United States. Of all people, you'd have thought they would have anticipated the changes. They've been taken aback by the speed at which these things have happened. The sexual revolution is transforming the world around us with breathtaking speed. in a way that is very, very hard to understand and very, very hard to respond to. And the nature of the change is more than simply that of personal freedom. I think the sexual revolution is being used to dismantle traditional family structures. I think it's being used to undercut religious freedom. And you have your own taste of that here with the cake baking incidents that have popped up here, as they have in the United States. And at the most extreme, it involves threats of violence against those who protest it, however peacefully and reasonably they do so. And so I want to start this lecture tonight by drawing a distinction. I think there are two things that we need to separate in our minds. On the one hand, there are the pastoral issues that occur in the church relative to those who are struggling with sexual dysfunction in our congregations. And secondly, and this is the issue I want to focus on this evening, there is the larger issue of the significance, the political, social, theological significance of the sexual revolution. And I think we need to understand that for several reasons. First, I think we need not to allow our imaginations to be captured by the immediate issues in a way that blinds us to the larger context in which these immediate issues have presented themselves. The fact that the sexual revolution is happening so fast indicates that the conditions for it to happen have been being put into place for a long, long time. For a long, long time. Secondly, I think we need to understand what's at stake in the civic sphere relative to freedom of religion and family. And third, I think we need to understand the nature of the pastoral problems we will be facing. And I would put it this way. As a pastor, it is one thing for me to deal with somebody who commits adultery. Sitting in my office talking to somebody who has committed adultery, as I have sadly had to do in the last 12 months, is one thing. But talking to somebody who has been taught by society to think that an unbiblical sexual orientation is fundamental to their identity is quite another. That's much harder. It's one thing to talk to an adulterer who knows he shouldn't have done it in the first place. and say, don't do it again, or we're going to hit you with the hammer of Thor. It's quite another thing to say to somebody, the way you feel and that you have been told is fundamental to who you are, that's wrong. And you need to think of yourself in terms of a different identity. That's a much harder situation to negotiate. And underlying that is my fundamental argument, which is this, and that's that the sexual revolution involves a basic redefinition of what it means to be a human person. Those who engage in debates about homosexuality, for example, as if they are simply debates about the boundaries of legitimate sexual expression, miss that deeper point. Christians often respond to homosexuality by saying, well, we don't believe that same-sex people should have sexual relations together. Well, we don't believe that unmarried people, heterosexual unmarried people, should have sexual relations. But there's a difference. And the difference is this. In objecting to premarital heterosexual sex, you're saying we believe that that is an illegitimate outlet for a legitimate identity. When we say we disagree with homosexuality, we're actually questioning somebody's basic identity. We're saying to them, who you think you are is not who you actually are. My series title, as David has already pointed out, is a play on Sigmund Freud's Civilization and its Discontents. Freud famously wrote a book in the early 1930s Attempting to explain civilization as the repression of individual instincts, primarily sexual, for the creation of the whole. Civilization comes out of repressing sexual instincts, if you like, so we can all bear to live together. In some ways now we live with the unraveling of that. The world in which we live has unraveled those repressions. Freud published his work in 1930 and it was reprinted in 1931 in the wake of Adolf Hitler's stunning gains in the elections of 1930. And in the second edition, Freud added a final sentence, wondering whether it would be love or death that would win in the long run. And I think we stand at a similar point in history today. Will the sexual revolution continue? And if it does, will civilization be remotely possible? I'm not sure that civilization is possible in a world where law courts have to decide where five-year-olds use the bathroom, for example. Is civilization even sustainable, given the way we are heading? And the focal point of the revolution is the destruction of traditional Christianity because traditional Christianity is what grounds our understanding of ourselves as human beings. We face the difference, if you like, between a world where our personal identity is created by ourselves and a world where our personal identity is created by what God has revealed us to be. in his word. The sexual revolution is ultimately a battle over external versus internal authority. Christianity's discontents are those who repudiate external authority. So, first of all then, I want to lay an Augustinian framework for what I'm going to say this evening. I want us to go back to the end of the 4th century. It always takes a leap of historical imagination, but let's go back to the end of the 4th century, to a town in North Africa, in modern day, oh, in modern, not Libya, I'm trying to think where Souk Aras is today. Algeria, is it Algeria? Souk Aras in Algeria? Tunisia. I think it might be in Tunisia. Go back to Tunisia. It wasn't Tunisia in the fourth century anyway. It's slightly irrelevant. Let's go back to North Africa towards the end of the fourth century. And it's an evening. And there's a gang of youths out prowling the streets looking to do no good. I have two sons. It's always fascinated me that when my sons were growing up, they're adults now, but when my sons were growing up, I was always a bit more concerned when they were out with their friends, who were generally good friends, than I was when they were out on their own. You put a young man into a group of young men and the moral sum of the parts is always greater than the moral sum of the whole. Young men in gangs tend to go downhill. Well, there's a gang out on the street looking to do no good and they clamber over the wall of a neighbor's house and they steal some pears. And the pears aren't particularly good pears. In fact, at least one of the young men involved knows that the pear tree in his own garden has got better fruit. So these young men steal these pears, and they carry them out of the garden, and then they throw them to the pigs. They throw them to the pigs. They've committed this crime for the sheer heck of it. They simply wanted to commit a crime. Years later, one of the young men in this gang was converted to Christianity. And as he reflects back on his youth, he remembers this incident. And as he writes his autobiography, he presents this instance as the literary moment at which he fell, we might say. He knows he was born a sinner, but in the narrative of his life, he presents this as a watershed moment. And he offers a series of profound psychological reflections upon what he did then in order to try to explain why it is that human beings act in the way they do. His name was Augustine. The book is The Confessions. And if you haven't read it, at least the first nine books, you should go home this evening, download it on the internet, and read it. It is one of the great Christian autobiographies ever written. I have here the couple of sentences from book two of The Confessions where Augustine describes this incident. So I'll now give it to you in his own words. There was a pear tree close to our vineyard, heavily laden with fruit, which was tempting neither for its color nor its flavor. To shake and rob this, some of us wanton young fellows," it's a rather archaic translation I got, wanton young fellows, we'd say yobs or hooligans, I guess, today, went late one night, having, according to our disgraceful habit, prolonged our games in the street until then, and carried away great loads, not to eat ourselves, but to fling to the very swine. having only eaten some of them. And to do this pleased us all the more because it was not permitted. It's a great moment in Augustine's confessions. One of the things everybody thinks they know about Augustine is that he identifies sin with sex. But actually, when he comes to write about the great sin in the confessions, he identifies it with what, certainly in Gloucestershire growing up, we would call scrumping, stealing fruit, stealing fruit from a neighbor's garden. And I want you to notice a number of things about this passage, because Augustine uses this, I think, to really probe into the Pauline psychology of fallen human beings. First of all, notice that it's a relatively trivial incident. If Augustine had written about an armed robbery, then the reader would not be drawn into the story in quite the same way. I don't know, is Colin the book here tonight? Can't see him. Colin from the Evangelical Bookstore. I'm sure Colin sells certain books of the, I was a murderous biker and then I met Jesus variety. Because they sell. And why do we buy them? Well really, if we're true, we buy them for the same reason my mum reads the Daily Mail. And that is, my mum wants to get the scandal but to feel kind of righteous about it. There's always that little bit of outrage in the Daily Mail. And we want to read books about being a murderous biker and converting Christianity because we really want to know what it's like to be a murderous biker. There's that element, isn't it, of wanting to know what it's like. But when you read those kind of books, you're not really drawn into the narrative in any profound way because you're not a murderous biker. Most of us have nothing in our lives that bears any kind of close analogy to that story. And therefore, when we read those stories, we are somewhat distanced from them. We understand them, but we're not pulled into the story. If Augustine had chosen a spectacular sin, then as you read the book, you would not be drawn into the story. But by choosing a trivial thing, by choosing an act of scrumping, when I read that story, I'm pulled in. I used to scrump as a kid. It was fun. You know, you waited till nobody was looking, then you hopped over the fence and you grabbed some potatoes or pulled a few apples off and you jumped back over the fence and went on your merry way. When I read Augustine at that point, I can remember specific incidents in my childhood that are analogous to that. And I'm drawn into the story. But notice what Augustine does when he does that. There's another story, isn't there, about fruit being stolen from a tree. Genesis chapter 3. We might say, well, the stealing of fruit is kind of a trivial sin, but is it? Genesis chapter 3 is the story of the original act of scrumping, if we could put it that way without trivializing it. As we're pulled into this story and as we identify with Augustine, we're also carried back to the Garden of Eden. and the first action of stealing fruit. And what Augustine is doing here, I think, is literarily very clever. He's pulling you into the story so you're caught in the trap. You're not reading about some murderous bike or armed robber and just being horrified and outraged by what he did and then glad he turned to Jesus without any identification with the character. You're being pulled in. So we're trapped. Trap is sprung and we too are caught as sinners in Augustine's account. But there are other aspects to this story that are interesting too. And that is the point that Augustine makes, that he himself had better fruit and that they threw the fruit away. They got no benefit from it. Again, think of an armed robber. Now we may not sympathize with an armed robber. But you know, a guy goes into a bank with a sawn-off, holds the bank up and walks out with a million pounds. We may think he's done bad and that's an evil thing, but there's a logic to it, isn't there? He's a million pounds richer than he was. It makes a kind of sense. Yes, it's wrong and it's wicked, but we can still see there's a logic to it. A guy goes into a bank and holds a bank up, walks out with a million pounds and leaves it on the pavement and goes on his merry way. That's weird. That makes no sense. Why would he risk serious jail time for something that makes no sense? And Augustine uses the pointlessness of this sin to draw out what he considers to be something deep about human psychology. At the very start of Augustine's Confessions, he makes a number of beautiful statements, and one of them is this, the heart is restless above all things, O Lord, until it finds its rest in Thee. And underlying that is Augustine's understanding of what it means to be human. For Augustine, God exists as Trinity. The persons of the Trinity exist in a perpetual communion of love. Have you ever thought, have you ever sometimes wondered, what's the importance of the Trinity? Well, one of the reasons the Trinity is important is it means God is eternally love. What is love? Love requires interpersonal relations. And the fact that God eternally exists in more than one person means that he can be eternally love. And man, of course, is made in God's image. And Augustine uses that as a platform for saying, well, what makes a human being human is that they're designed to love. And the human satisfaction, human fulfillment, is found through loving the right thing. And for Augustine, human beings are designed ultimately to love God. And it's only as they love God the infinite object of love that they find rest for their souls. The fall mucks all that up. What does the fall do? Well, to use later Lutheran kind of terminology, the fall turns people in on themselves. The fall turns us inward, not outward. We look to ourselves, not to God. Well, we could recast that in Augustinian terms and say, well, how would Augustine see that? Augustine would say this. Augustine would say, the problem with the fall is it dooms us to giving the wrong answer to the right question. And the right question is this, who or what should I love? Who or what should I love? That's the fundamental question of human existence. And sin, by turning us in on ourselves, means that we will always give the answer, you should love yourself. And that puts us in the dilemma that Augustine highlights at the start of the Confessions, when he says, the heart is restless above all things until it finds its rest in thee. I don't know how many of you have seen the John Wayne movie, The Searchers. I'm a big cowboy movie fan. John Wayne was a terrible actor, except when he acted for John Ford. John Ford, the great American director, could get depths out of John Wayne that nobody else could. And I would say The Searchers might be the greatest movie ever made. And it's about a man's search for his niece who's been kidnapped by the Indians. And at the end of The Searchers, all the family come back into the house, and John Wayne stands in the door And then he turns, and he walks away, and the wind blows across the plain. And you get this idea that he's doomed. John Wayne is doomed forever to wander between the winds, a restless soul. He never found that object of love that would bring him peace. Augustine, for Augustine, all fallen human beings are those doomed to wander between the winds. because they are doomed to love themselves. And loving oneself can never bring you the peace and rest that loving God can because it's not what we're designed to do. How does this play into the pairs? Well, the key is when Augustine is reflecting on the incident of the pairs, he makes this comment that it was because it was wrong. We did it because it was wrong. We did it because it broke the law. Think about it. Who is it who makes the law? Who is it who stands above the law? It is God. So breaking the law does what? Breaking the law cons you into thinking that you stand above the law. Breaking the law cons you into thinking that you are God. If you want to know who to love, then the answer is you love God, the one who stands above the law. So break the law to prove to yourself that you are God. It's the fact that it was wrong that makes it attractive, as far as Augustine is concerned. I find this actually quite interesting in explaining why people commit the same sin again and again, to bring it sort of back to the topic of the evening. Isn't it interesting that when people are busted for child pornography offenses, for example, they typically aren't busted for having one picture on their computer? They're typically busted for having 10, 20, 30,000 on their computer. Why? Because there's a need to be constantly breaking the law, to be constantly proving to oneself that one is God. It's like a drug. You break the law and you think for a brief moment in time that you're God. But then, just like a drug, the effect wears off over time. And you've got to do it again in order to reassure yourself that yes, I am the appropriate object of my love and affection. What Augustine points to is that sin has this relentless inward turn to it where human beings are doomed ultimately to try to find their meaning on the inside of themselves in a way that they were never designed to do. Now, I'm a historian, and my view of history is this. It's always been pretty bad. I'm not one of those guys who looks back at history and says, well, the 16th century was a golden age. If only we could go back to the Reformation. It was great then, and everything's declined since. Not to trivialize it, there were no flush toilets, no painkillers, and no antibiotics in the 16th century. It was pretty bad living in the 16th century. Not only that, but when you look at the church politics, it was just as horrible as it is today. I really do think that history is not the story of a great decline from sort of great golden age that went on for a couple of thousand years and has slowly brought us down to where we are today. It's more like we've been bouncing along the bottom for many, many generations. But I would say this. I think the logic of the inward turn The logic of seeing human beings as those who wish to set themselves up as God is working itself out socially in a more dramatic way in our generation than it has ever done in the past. I'll give you just one example of this. Think of my grandfather. My grandfather was a sheet metal worker all his life in Birmingham, in the industrial heartlands, worked in the automobile, the car industry, all his life. And I remember asking my grandfather, are you happy in your work? Were you happy in your work? And his answer was interesting. His answer was, yeah, because it puts bread on the table and shoes on my children's feet. Interesting answer relative to job satisfaction. My grandfather's job satisfaction didn't come from any psychological satisfaction that he gave him in the immediate performance thereof. It gave him satisfaction because it allowed him to fulfill himself in the social context in which he found himself. When people ask me, do you enjoy your job? I usually say, well, 70% of the time, yeah. Why do you enjoy it? Because I do things that I'm interested in. I enjoy teaching. I don't enjoy grading, that's the 30% I don't like, but I enjoy teaching. I enjoy hanging out with students. I enjoy the academic interactions I occasionally get opportunities to do. Job satisfaction for me is a much more self-centered internal thing than even it was for my grandfather. And I think one of the things that we have to understand about the sexual revolution as it plays out before us is it's actually merely one aspect of a great social transformation that has taken place over the last 50 or 60 years. When we have become dramatically internal in how we understand happiness, how we understand personal satisfaction, how we understand life and enjoyment. And it takes me, and this is gonna sort of flow over into the second lecture. There is a figure, I think, who's extremely important and useful for Christians to reflect upon. He was not a Christian. His name was Philip Reif. And he wrote a book in 1966, 50 years ago, entitled The Triumph of the Therapeutic. And it's one of those books that you read and think, wow, this guy was writing in the 60s, and he couldn't possibly have known how accurate his predictions were going to be. In the 60s, he sounded like a doom and gloom man. He could be writing about contemporary society. And Reif looked back at human history. He was not a Christian, but he looked back at how human beings had understood themselves over history, and he saw some fundamental changes that had taken place in human history. He looked back at the classical world, and he argued that the classical world of ancient Greece and ancient Rome, that the person who inhabited the classical world was what he called political man. What did he mean by political man? Political man was somebody who found his fulfillment and meaning in the active participation in the life of the city. What did it mean to be a human being in ancient Greece, a fully fledged proper human being? It meant to be involved in the affairs of the city. As an individual, you are nothing except as you are connected to the wider society in which you operate it. Political man was the man who found his identity in interacting with his fellow citizens. There was a sense in which he didn't have an identity of his own. His identity was given to him by those around him. And Reif saw this with the rise of Christianity changing to what he called religious man. Religious man found his fulfillment in the active participation of the forms and rituals of religion. One of the fun things of teaching church history is I teach a course on the medieval church, which not many Protestants think very highly of, but I actually kind of enjoy the medieval church. And one of the books I get students to read extracts from is Chaucer's Canterbury Tales. It's fun. There's rude stuff there that if it was written yesterday, it'd probably be banned. But you can recommend it to people because it was written 600 years ago, and it's kind of fun now. And of course, if you know the Canterbury Tales, the whole plot revolves around a pilgrimage to the tomb of St. Thomas a Beckett in Canterbury. It's a bunch of people drawn from all strata of society making their way to Canterbury to pay homage at the tomb of St. Thomas a Beckett. They're Reef's religious men and women. They find their meaning by being involved in religious rituals. Their identity is not something they invent for themselves. It's something they find by fitting in to the world into which they have been born. Finally, a religious man gives way to what Reeve calls economic man who finds his meaning through doing business. An economic man gives way to what Reeve calls psychological man. And it's with psychological man that I will end this half of the evening. Psychological man is this. Psychological man is the one who finds his fulfillment in an inward psychological attitude. Psychological man is the man who creates his own identity based upon his feelings and what makes him feel happy and fulfilled. we might say that psychological man is the triumph of Augustine's fallen man. If the problem with the fall is the denial of God's external authority and the raising up of human authority, then psychological man represents the rejection of God's external authority and the exaltation of my own individual authority. And if you think that that's not a significant thing for Christians to grasp, think of this sentence. I am a woman trapped in a man's body. Don't tweet that, by the way. If you say, Truman's just said that, that will look really bad on Twitter. I'm a woman trapped in a man's body. My grandfather's been dead 20 years. I don't think he would have the categories to understand that statement. The idea that one's identity was not intrinsically wrapped up with one's body would have been bizarre to him. We had a baby born in a congregation the other week. And I was away last Sunday because I was coming over here. And so my assistant pastor was going to make the announcement. And I said to him, tongue in cheek, I said, why don't you say to the congregation that based on a superficial glance at the child's physiology, we are temporarily and provisionally assigning the child as a woman? at this point. He didn't think the congregation would be very happy about him doing that. So I was going to say, you try it and then let me know how it goes. It's one of the things that a senior pastor can do, I guess. But just think about that. I think transgenderism is fascinating as a philosophical phenomenon because it speaks volumes about human identity. It's the ultimate. Well, maybe not the ultimate. I mean, one hesitates these days to say the ultimate identity, but it's certainly a more radical stage of human psychological identity than anything we've ever seen. And my school district, I mentioned it at the start, I come from a relatively conservative, leafy suburb in Philadelphia. And my school district this week became the first school district in Pennsylvania to pass transgender bathroom policy for students at the elementary school. It's completely bonkers. It's completely bonkers. But it is utterly plausible in the world in which we live. And one of the things I think we have to reflect on as Christians is, how do we get there? How do we get to a point where somebody can say, I'm a woman trapped in a man's body, and it makes sense? At least it makes sense within the logic of the culture. And it's that that I want to come back and reflect upon later. As I say, Reif was no Christian. But Reif's book, warning of the rise of a radically psychologized understanding of what it is to be a person, proved utterly prophetic. of the notion of human nature. And I think if we were to look at Philip Reif's work from a Christian perspective, one could make the case for saying that Psychological Man represents the final unraveling of that process that Augustine first started to analyze in his book, The Confessions, when he zeroes in on the incidents of the pairs. and he reflects upon the nature of sin as exalting man's authority over against God. We see an inner psychological turn there, where human beings start to create the world in their own image. And with psychological man, this figure that Reef sees arriving at the end of time, we see somebody whose life is framed primarily in an internal way. And Reif zeroes in on the whole notion of personal happiness. And he says that one of the things that marks out psychological man is that personal happiness and fulfillment, psychological fulfillment, comes to occupy the center of human life. And again, think of my grandfather. And that answer to the question, when I asked my grandfather, do you get job satisfaction? And he said, yes. And he offered me a series of, we might call them, external criteria, which gave him satisfaction. And then think of my answer to that question, which was much more rooted in the pleasure I get from doing my job, which is all related to the individual experience of doing my job, rather than what my job does relative to providing food and shelter and clothing for my family. I think Reif would say that in the generational shift between my grandfather and myself, there you see it. the rise of psychological man. And Rief sees this, he even sees it infecting the church. As I say, Rief was really a secular Jewish figure. But he says, he made this very interesting comment in his book, The Triumph of the Therapeutic. Formally, he says, if men were miserable, they went to church so as to find a rationale for their misery. They did not expect to be happy. That was quite fascinating. You know, the OPC, you certainly go, if you're not miserable already, come to us, we will make you miserable. We may not provide a rationale for it, but we will make you most miserable. But it's interesting, isn't it, there, that Reif is pointing to another shift that takes place with the arrival of psychological man, where really personal psychological satisfaction is no major criterion for judging the value of life. One of my academic specializations is the 17th century theologian John Owen. In the Banner of Truth edition of his works, if you add the extra Latin volume that Banner didn't reprint in there, I think there are 24 fat volumes of John Owen. I love John Owen, but most of it's quite tedious, actually. There are maybe three or four real flashes of brilliance in terms of those volumes, and a lot of it is pretty heavy-going stuff. One of the interesting things about John Owen is that he was married and he had 11 children. Ten of them died in infancy. One of them, a daughter, lived to adulthood, entered an unhappy marriage, returned home, and died. Sir John Owen stood by the grave of 11 of his children. Imagine that. Imagine burying all 11 of your children. And yet in the 24 volumes of writings, he never mentions it once. It's quite stunning. He never mentions it once. And I've often wondered, why is it that he doesn't mention it? And I think one reason might be this. He didn't think it was of that great public importance. that he needed to mention. Nowhere in Owen's writings do we find any wrestling with the sovereignty of God because of the personal suffering through which he went. It was almost as if Owen accepted, if you like, life is miserable and then you die. And was maybe not comfortable with that, but that was just the way it was. I think what Reif points to here when he talks about this is this, you know, people now expect to be happy. People now expect to be happy. And happiness, as we understand it today, is really rather a recent idea. It's only since the Enlightenment, I think, that happiness as pleasure has come to the fore. Happiness conceived as personal pleasure has come to the fore. If you look in the classical world, Not talking in the classical world so much of happy men and women, as of virtuous men and women. Think of the religious world, think of religious man as Philip Reeve talks about him. There, it's godliness that would have been the goal. Not happiness, but godliness. With psychological man, Rief points out that he makes the fulfillment of personal desires and happiness the very purpose of his existence. The fulfillment of personal desires and personal happiness is the very end or meaning of his existence. When you think, when you now throw Freud into the equation, And David mentioned that maybe people should read Freud. I would actually recommend that you read Civilization and Its Discontents. It's about 100 pages long. It's probably the most accessible thing that Freud ever wrote. I hesitate to say it's a fun read, but it kind of is. It's a piece of journalism. It's well-written journalism trying to give a popular presentation of some of Freud's most fundamental ideas. With Freud, of course, Pleasure comes to be identified with sexual fulfillment. Sexual pleasure. Pleasure equals sexual pleasure. So happiness, therefore, equals sexual pleasure. And that has led, I think, to the great transformation in the function of sex in our society. When I was at university, I didn't take this course, but there was a course on Greek homosexuality at Cambridge. I did classics there, it was not of interest to me, I was more interested in doing stuff on Sparta. But there was a course on Greek homosexuality, and I did do a bit of reading in the various history courses that I had to do around the issue of homosexuality in ancient Greece. Because one of the, and you'll notice that in some of the commentary today on gay rights issue, the point is made, and correctly made, that there has been homosexual activity throughout human history. But there is a fundamental difference between how it functions today compared to how it functioned centuries ago. And it is this. Today, it's become a fundamental point of identity. We might put it in this way. We might say that in the ancient world, homosexuality was something you did. Today, homosexuality is something you are. And between those two points, there's a world of difference. And it's hugely significant. I mentioned transgenderism before the break. I've said it's philosophically fascinating, the issue of transgenderism. That sentence, I'm a woman trapped in a man's body, is stunning. Stunning. I've got a friend. He's actually a Roman Catholic professor of law at Baylor University in Texas. And his name's Francis Beckwith. And he's one of the most astute writers on issues of religion and religious freedom out there. And he does this experiment in class when he's teaching these law classes. And he says to the students, what happens if somebody walks into a doctor's surgery and says to the doctor, my arm is not part of who I am. My left arm is not part of who I am. Please cut it off so I can be who I really am. And he says, the students are all horrified. They're all horrified and say, the poor man clearly needs help, clearly needs some kind of help. because for somebody to think that their right arm or left arm is not part of them, that's crazy talk. And then, some of you can probably see the twist coming. He says, what happens if somebody walks into a doctor's surgery and says, my private parts are not part of who I am, please cut them off. He says at that point, the trap is sprung. and the students who railed so strongly against somebody having their arm removed suddenly realize the precedent they've set. Transgenderism is interesting because it rebels against what we might say in some ways is the last form of external authority. If the history of human sin is the history of slowly but surely working out the logic of the rejection of external authority, what is the latest stage of that rebellion? It is the rejection of the external authority of one's own body. Bodies have always been crucial to human identity. Because bodies place us in a world where there are other bodies external to us that exert an impact upon us and shape who we are. Think, for example, of the importance of faces. Faces are important for social relations, aren't they? Because how do we operate as human beings? We look at other people's faces. Faces say a lot, they do a lot. They are the primary point of our interaction with other people. Bodies are important. Transgenderism represents the repudiation of the authority of our own bodies. One's body is something alien to who you actually are that must therefore be rejected. Again, think of that sentence, I'm a woman trapped in a man's body. That's weird, isn't it? It's weird because it denies that who you are physically is of any relevance to who you are really. And, of course, it hangs on a contradiction. One of the strange things about transgenderism is this. People are saying, my body is not relevant to who I am. I'm a woman, but I have a man's body. Therefore, I need my body changed to be that of a woman, because guess what? My body is absolutely crucial to who I am. There is a strange logical contradiction that lies at the heart of this thinking. My body is given as no ultimate say in my identity. It is accidental to me. My body is so vital and essential to my identity, it needs to be adjusted to conform with my identity. Think of how this could play out legally. Think of how this could play out legally. If children are born with the right to choose their own gender, what rights do parents have in that context? It's one of the things about the school board policy that I wrote to protest. And I didn't write an angry letter. I wrote a letter that specifically said the rights of all interested parties need to be balanced against each other. And I got a lawyer friend to check it over before I sent it in to make sure that my legal arguments were philosophically sound. But think, what this policy said was that a child's gender is the child's choice. and is subject to confidentiality. So if the child leaves home as a boy and arrives at school and says, I'm a girl, the school has an obligation to treat the child as a girl and no obligation to tell the parents about it at all. Because it's a matter of confidentiality between school and child. Isn't that stunning? Isn't that stunning that the gender of a child is now something to which the school in the place I live can be privy, but to which the parents will be given no access necessarily at all. As I say, I live in a leafy, relatively conservative suburb of Philadelphia. I don't live in San Francisco. I don't live in Amsterdam. I live in a relatively normal, middle-of-the-road, middle-class suburb. Think of the stunning implications of that for the church. Think of the stunning implications of that for human identity. Think of the burden that places on children. I noticed just as I was walking, it's funny, when I give these talks, every time I give these talks, I just notice something during the day that's gonna be relevant. And David and I were having a cup of coffee and a bowl of soup at lunchtime, and as I was leaving the restaurant, I noticed somebody reading, it might have been the Daily Mail, I couldn't see if there was any outrage involved in the story being told, but there was a statement about, meet so-and-so, the twin brother being brought up as a sister. When I was a kid I didn't read the article, I'm not rude enough to peer over it, but the kid looked 7 or 8. To say to a 7 or 8 year old, you've got to decide what your gender is. Freedom can sometimes be a terrible burden. I think the damage that could be done to children by this is staggering. I used to do this thing when I set exams that some years I would say, you know, students, if you don't like the questions on the exam, invent your own and answer it. Nobody ever did. Nobody ever did. And it reminded me of that. Sometimes freedom needs constraints. You can only be truly free if there are actually constraints. Absolute freedom is a terrible burden. Nobody wants to take the risk of absolute freedom, because the penalties could be terrifying. We're in a situation socially now where we are imposing absolute freedom upon our children, absolute individual freedom. And that is a terrifying prospect. How can we summarize this? I think that the sexual revolution we see around us is the ultimate rebellion against external authority. That what we're seeing unraveling before us is an absolute repudiation, even of the authority of our own bodies. For that reason, I actually think transgenderism is far more radical than homosexuality, which still operates within relatively traditional categories of male and female. Transgenderism abolishes all categories. To quote Nietzsche, he's not on transgenderism, but Nietzsche has this phrase about unchaining the earth from the sun, which is essentially what modern sexual identity politics seek to do. I would also add, however, that maybe there is some hope here. There is. One bit of external authority that nobody can escape. It's the authority of death, if I could put it that way. It doesn't matter what you do with your body, ultimately you've got to die. And I think one of the things that perhaps the church needs to focus on more and more is the reality of death. And we live in a world that is adept at avoiding that. I'm fascinated by the emergence of celebrations of life at funerals that strike me as the most bizarre things in some ways. A funeral is not a, you know, if the person's life was worth celebrating, then the fact it has now ended makes it more devastating for those left behind, does it not? My father lived a wonderful life, and when he died, I was devastated by it. It was not something that I wished to celebrate. The fact that my father had been such a wonderful father and had brought me up in such a wonderful family made his death absolutely not something that I wished to celebrate in any shape or form. Why do we have celebrations of life? I suspect it's so that those left behind could pretend that death isn't really real. Why is it that My Way by Frank Sinatra or The Wind Beneath My Wings are the most popular choices, or certainly were a year or two ago, for funerals? I think it's because we try to avoid the fact of death. If human sin is all about dodging external authority, then we've got pretty far along the line when we dodge the external authority of our own bodies. But yet there is an external authority to which we must all give account, and that is death. And to reflect on that, I would go back not to the fourth century, but to the theologian of the 17th century, a man called Blaise Pascal. Blaise Pascal, if you brought him in the metric system, of course, I think Pascal is one newton per meter squared, isn't it? It's a unit of pressure in the metric system. Having moved to America, I've been able to forget all about the metric system and go back to the weights and measures that my mum used in the house that I actually understand and think in. Pascal was a great scientist. He was a great scientist in the 17th century. But he's also a Christian believer. And he was an astute student of Augustine. And Pascal looked at the world that surrounded him through the lenses provided for him by St. Augustine. When he died, he left a ragbag collection of notes behind. He was writing this major work of Christian apologetics, and he died before it got beyond the note stage. And it's come down to us as his pensées, or thoughts. It's actually, I think, a greater book for the fact it was left in a fragmentary condition because it makes you think as you read it. You know the book of Proverbs, you read the book of Proverbs and it can be confusing because if you try to read the book of Proverbs as a straightforward set of wisdom proverbs, sometimes it doesn't work. Answer a fool according to his folly? Do not answer a fool according to his folly. You have to think and wrestle with the book of Proverbs. Pascal's thoughts is a bit like that. He throws out these paragraphs and these statements that make you sit back and take notice and think. And at the heart of the pensée are continual reflections upon the reality, the impending reality of death. And Pascal, of course, lived in the 17th century, the time of the Sun King, at its most elite, France was a place of great pleasure and entertainment. And in one of his thoughts, Pascal asks a question that on the surface seems strange, but actually allows him, I think, to explore some of the most profound depths of human culture and psychology. And the question he asks is this, why do kings have jokers? Why do kings have jesters? He's reflecting on the court of the Sun King. And he's thinking of this man, this king, is the most powerful man in the world. He can have anything he wants. Anything he wants is at this man's beck and call. So why is it that typically the person closest to him is a professional idiot, a joker, a fool? And Pascal reflects on it in this way. He says, well, If you're left with nothing to worry about, because you have everything you need and all the money to get anything you want, you end up spending your time worrying about the only thing left to worry about. Death itself. Death itself. And so you hire a fool to crack jokes and be silly. So that in Pascal's words, you are continually distracted. You are continually distracted from thinking about your mortal condition. Pascal is not against pleasure and entertainment. He says, I can understand why a poor person might occasionally have a dance, or a poor person might occasionally engage in some tomfoolery. He said, but the king spends most of his time absorbed with this trivia. Why does he do that? Because he fears death. Go back to what I said about Augustine earlier. What is the one thing that ultimately tells you you are not God? It is the fact that you are going to die. And I think another way that Augustine might look at the sexual revolution is this. By continually changing our own identities, by even refusing the authority of our own mortal bodies, what we're trying to do is con ourselves that we're immortal. If today we ask that question about why do kings have jesters, I think it would be this. Why do men who play schoolyard games get paid more than heads of state? American sports are terrible, can't stand them. You know, baseball, it's rounders, isn't it? It's rounders. And, you know, the old game is, in Britain, it's played by girls. You know, it's not a man's game. But it's the big game in the States. Or basketball. My wife wouldn't let our kids watch basketball when they were small because she said, every time they get the ball, they score. You know, there's no skill in just running from one end to the other and putting the ball through the hoop. Basketball players are the highest paid athletes, and I use the word athlete in inverted commas there, they're the highest paid athletes in the world. I'm not sure exactly what the President of the United States gets paid. It's surely, whatever you think of the incumbent, it's surely the most highly pressured job in the entire world. But I'm guessing he gets paid about $400,000 a year. There are lawyers who make more than that in Philadelphia in a year. And no basketball player is going to get out of bed for $400,000. He makes more than that on his credit, his checking account, probably. And yet if the government raised tax by a penny in the pound, everybody's up in arms. And yet year after year, we get gouged for sports tickets. And the question is, why? And the answer, I think, is this. We think entertainers do more important jobs than heads of state. They appear to do trivia, but actually their jobs aren't trivial. Their job is to distract us from our own mortality. From our own mortality. I think that if there is a glimmer of hope in this sexual revelation, it is this. You can run from your mortality. You can run from your mortality, but ultimately you cannot hide from it. Death will catch up with you. And I think if there is a place where the church will get people's attention, it is at the end of their lives. When whatever they've done to their bodies, however they have psychologically constructed their own identities, they ultimately have to face the reality of their own finitude and mortality. For Augustine would say, you can commit sins as often as you want, you can con yourself into believing God as often as you want, but sooner or later, the con trick comes to an end, because life itself comes to an end. So as we draw things to a close here, and I wanna leave, can I leave a few minutes for questions, David? I wanna just offer a few closing remarks. I think the sexual revolution, we should not allow ourselves to be distracted by the sexual part of it. I think that's a significant idiom for expressing human rebellion against God. That human rebellion has been expressed in many ways over the centuries. We live in an era where it's being expressed in terms of sexuality. but we should not allow our minds to be so dominated by the thought of it being sexual that we miss the fact that it's part of a wider phenomenon. Secondly, and I've not talked much about this, but I think we need to reflect upon the speed at which it's happened. The transgender thing has happened with breathtaking speed because it is simply a symptom of forces that have been in play for much, much longer. In a longer version of this lecture, I quote from William Wordsworth, Lyrical Ballads. 1800, William Wordsworth writes this introduction to how he's going to do poetry. He provides a rationale for what poetry is. And he essentially says, poetry is reflecting on one's inner psychology as you react with the countryside. Poetry is not about describing the countryside. It's about describing one's inner feelings as one looks at the countryside. Wordsworth is a psychological man. He's a psychological man. The forces have been in play even prior to Freud. What Freud does is puts a sexual spin on these things. But the forces that form psychological man are deep in Western culture for many, many centuries. Thirdly, and this is a question I'm often asked by students, they say, well, how do we argue against this stuff? The answer is, you can't. You can only argue against something that has first been argued for by somebody. And I don't think the sexual revolution has proceeded by way of argument. I think it's proceeded by way of what I would describe as gut reaction. The acceptance of homosexuality and now the acceptance of transgenderism has been put forward in movies, commercials, adverts, soap operas and sitcoms. The presentation of sympathetic characters and appeals to the heart strings. Not on the basis of argument. Not on the basis of argument at all. I think it is a gut reaction phenomenon. And that means that it's hard to argue against. It's hard to argue against something that has never been argued for. Christians are very good, typically, in spotting sex in movies and things. We're perhaps slightly less good at spotting violence, but we can generally see it when it's there. But it's the things that we don't notice that can be the most dangerous. Again, an analogy I've used a few times is, I could sit in my house, particularly in America, this could be the case, and I could look out of my window and see some guy in a ski mask with a blood dripping chainsaw walking down the street towards my house, screaming my name out. And I'm going to lock the door and phone for the police. If I was in Texas, I'd pull out my shotgun and blow him away. Nobody would prosecute me. An obvious danger. But I could be sitting in that house waiting for the police to arrive and die from carbon monoxide poisoning that is odorless, and I'd have no idea it was there. And it's just as deadly, just as deadly, if not more deadly, because I don't detect it. I think often in the entertainments we watch, it is the carbon monoxide that has proved so deadly in the long run. It's not the explicit sex that has shifted attitudes to sex in the public sphere. It's the implicit narratives about sexuality that have done so. One way to look at movies is this. Think of movies as long extended advertisements for particular ways of life. That's what a lot of movies are. They're advertisements for particular ways of life. And they're false. As a pastor, The people in my church, I know a number of people in my church who have been victims either as children or as partners of adultery. And they don't get over it. They don't get over it. I can think of one or two people for whom their parents' adultery was the defining moment of their life. And it has absolutely shaped how they've thought about relationships ever since for decades. You watch a soap opera or a sitcom, people get divorced all the time and three weeks down the line they're remarried and no damage has been done. It's false but people believe it because it's put across in such a winsome and plausible way and it appeals to how we want to think reality is as opposed to how reality actually is. So thirdly, don't think you can argue against it. because it's never been argued for. The forces promoting this are powerful. Powerful, and they grip the imagination rather than grip the logic of people who are persuaded by it. I've seen it in my own children. I mean, I was a generation where homosexuality, for example, was abhorrent to my parents. For me, it was odd. For my children, it's normal. And it means I have to talk to them and I've had to explain things to them and present things to them in a very different way to my parents had to present it to me or their parents presented it to them. We need to be aware that the forces we're up against are powerful and often hidden. I think we need to understand what's happening theologically. We need to understand that the struggle in which we're engaged is fundamentally a rejection of external authority. That's what's really going on in the sexual revolution. It is that my body is my commodity to do with as I choose. And we need to realize as well that at the bottom of this is the question of what it means to be a human being. What does it mean to be a human being today? I don't think, actually, it will stop with transgenderism. I wrote an article just before Christmas on, it was a somewhat satirical piece I did, because sometimes you just have to mock this stuff. If you can't argue against it, you can at least point out that it's ridiculous. There was a Canadian, I think it was a panel beater, aged 47, who decided that he was an eight-year-old girl trapped in a 47-year-old man's body. And I wrote an article sending this up. I'd coined the term trans-ageism. That's the next stage, that our bodies no longer have any authority over how old we are. Because hey, if I'm six or eight years old, that's what I am. The evidence that I'm not is my body. Well, we've already discounted the body as providing any substantial evidence as to who one is. The response was interesting, in that people thought I was a bigoted nut, some of them. because I was saying this is ridiculous and this 47 year old guy was being allowed by some parents to play with their 6, 7 and 8 year old girls as a 6, 7 and 8 year old girl and I'm thinking this is crazy this is crazy not in Canada not in Canada it's acceptable in Canada apparently crazy stuff It comes down to what we understand human beings to do. Look up Tiger Man on YouTube if you haven't seen him. Tiger Man was the man who thought he was a tiger trapped in a human body. Had all these operations to make himself into a tiger. Even had an electronic tail fitted which would sort of waggle around. It's crazy stuff. He committed suicide. He committed suicide. You can rebel against external authority for just so long and then it comes back to bite you. Suicide rates, by the way, for transgender people in 2011, 2012, running at 40%. 40%. Of course, it's the fault of the society that won't accept people for who they are, rather than the fact that these people needed help that wasn't provided for them in the first place. And I think, finally, the church, churches need to be clearly aware of this and teach counter-culturally on the nature of human existence. The era when the church enjoyed a considerable practical overlap with the world around about what a human being was and how a human being should behave, that's gone. And it means the church can no longer be complacent in teaching on these things. We need to teach our people and we need to teach our children well on what the biblical understanding of humanity is. And I think we need to foster the church's community in order to provide support for people who are struggling within our own communities and also to be a witness to the wider world. I didn't have much time for it. There was a movement in America maybe 10 years ago called the Emergent Church, and I didn't have a lot of time for it theologically, because they didn't have much theology. But one thing it did well was this. It argued that the church needed to be a community of people who support each other. And I think if we are going to be a credible witness to the world around, we need to be communities that demonstrate love and support to each other and to those from outside who come into our ranks. That takes time and effort. I think the church needs to be the place where people can go and know that they are loved and cared for because that will speak. That's not an argument. That's not an argument. It is, if you like, an advertisement or a commercial for a way of life that may yet appeal, I think, to those who have been so damaged by all that has gone on around us.