Anglican Complicity in the Sexual Revolution
by Jay Thomas, First Things:
According to Archbishop Foley Beach, the Anglican primate of North America, the Anglican Church of the future must be a repenting church. The Gospel itself begins with repentance: “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand” (Matthew 3:2). In his address at the 2023 Global Anglican Futures Conference, the archbishop highlighted personal repentance, exemplified in confession within the Anglican liturgy. But he also specified the need for ecclesiastical repentance.
Ecclesiastical repentance is scary because it requires admitting that the church, the visible source of authority and truth we look to in this world, has failed. Dying to one’s self, repenting, and seeking forgiveness are the normative patterns of the Christian life, but we often shun this pattern as a church body because of its implications—because of our fear.
In considering ecclesiastical repentance, we must acknowledge that in all the most trying ages of the Church’s history, the questions which were most defining and dividing were questions of God and Christ (theology and Christology). Today, as we muddle our way through the sexual revolution, the questions that divide are those of anthropology. But we need to unwaveringly assert that because Christ became man, questions of anthropology are intrinsically questions of Christology. The man Jesus Christ sits at the right hand of the father. Yes, he is fully God; but we cannot forget that he also remains fully man. Christian anthropology participates in Christology. Thus questions of human sexuality, gender roles, and biology cannot be confined to the realm of adiaphora. This is not because Christians only care about sex, but because Christians only care about Christ.
Unfortunately, within Anglicanism, we have behaved as though anthropology does not matter, and in doing so, we have lost the Christological center. No one can deny the immense success of the sexual revolution within Western culture. Our cultural anthropology has been turned upside down. Christ is nowhere present in it. As a church, we cannot allow the culture to dictate our anthropology; however, if we are to successfully restore Christological anthropology to the center, we need to rightly understand where we went wrong and repent of that failing.
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