“We live in a moral wasteland where human beings are desperately seeking answers to hard questions about life and sexuality. But there is hope. In the wasteland, we can cultivate a garden. We can discover a reality-based morality that expresses a positive, life-affirming view of the human person—one that is more inspiring, more appealing, and more liberating than the secular worldview.”
In Love Thy Body, Nancy Pearcey does a superb job illuminating the falsehoods foundational to the secular worldview driving the moral revolution raging around us. Each pressing moral issue of our day surrounding human life and sexuality ultimately rests on a dehumanizing and false dualism between the mind and body. Delving into Scripture, Pearcey reveals that only a sound biblical Christian ethic aligns with reality. We are whole persons, united in mind and body, with intrinsic beauty, worth, and dignity.
Equipping ourselves with a better understanding of the false nature of reality at the heart of postmodern moral theories and the strength and soundness of a Christian worldview enable us to defend truth, for our good and the good of our neighbor. We can be “cultivated” by the weeds of worldliness continually sown around us, or we can plant ourselves firmly in the good soil of God’s eternal word to lovingly and thoughtfully engage our culture.
“Christianity offers a genuine alternative to an empty, pointless cosmos,” Pearcey writes. “It says that we are not alone, that the universe is meaningful, that we do have intrinsic value, that sexuality has its own purpose or telos, that human community is real, and that there is objective truth, goodness, and beauty. Most of all, we are not products of mindless chance but the creation of a loving Creator. Each one of us was loved into existence, and we have the high calling of inviting others into the astonishingly rich experience of living in a cosmos centered in love.”
