Sexual Identity: Doing What Comes Naturally

By Jeffrey C. Waddington - Posted at The Place for Truth:

The surging waves of the sexual revolution continue to crash on the shores of our culture and threaten to wash the Christian church, supporting institutions, and believing individuals and their families out to sea. This is not really new. While scholars often point to the 50s and especially the 60s as the groundswell of the sexual revolution in the West, human rebellion against God’s revealed sexual ethic goes back to the garden when our first parents rebelled against God. I am not suggesting, like St. Augustine, that the first sin was sexual. But we need to recognize that sexual sin in all its various permutations, like all sin, goes back to the primal sin recorded in Genesis 3 and our inheritance of a sinful nature.

The fall has wreaked havoc on every aspect (nook and cranny, if you will) of our humanity. Of course, there are limits to the effects of the fall due to God’s common grace. Adam did not become not-Adam after the fall. He went from being holy and righteous Adam to being sinful Adam. The fall was, as Cornelius Van Til reminded us, ethical. That is, human nature was not destroyed in the fall. To put it another way, not even the image of God was destroyed. Human nature/the image was twisted, tarnished, defaced, and perverted. But it was not utterly destroyed. We could not be human otherwise. As Genesis 9:6 and James 3:9 attest, even though fallen and utterly corrupted by sin, we are still images of God. Historically humans have been understood as complex beings made up of bodies and souls. Our soul, heart or personality involves a nature, habits, and acts. The nature has remained intact in the fall. It is the habit or inclination and the acts that flow from our inclination or habit that are sinful. Adam (and Eve, of course) was created with a holy habit or inclination and it is this that was perverted in the fall and now is sinful rather than holy and righteous.

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