THE CENTRALITY OF SEXUAL ETHICS TO CHRISTIANITY

'In the early Church, sexual morality was not baggage, afterthought, or accident. It was the plane on which Christians tried to live in the world, but not of it. Which is why adapting this sexual morality to the modern age has proven as simple as extricating a taut thread from a spider’s web.'

Kyle Harper, 'The First Sexual Revolution' in https://www.firstthings.com/article/2018/01/the-first-sexual-revolution (Accessed 9th February 2019). 

THE CHALLENGE OF OUR CULTURAL MOMENT

'...the modern Church finds itself in an odd position. It is surrounded by a culture that bears some of its own values, but they are shorn of their enchanted origins and presented as neutral axioms of the universe. Ironically, some of the most unabashedly secular models of human sexuality also share with Christianity a belief in the central place of the erotic within the architecture of morality. This is utterly alien to Epictetus, and for that matter to most religions outside the Christian (and to some extent the Jewish) tradition. An avowed secularist is as likely as a Christian activist to proclaim the universal dignity of all individuals and insist upon the individual’s freedom. And yet, however moralized the domain of sex might be, the vast, vacant universe seems to have left only authenticity and consent as the shared, public principles of sexual morality. These axioms derive from a picture of the universe different from the one imagined by Paul, who always envisioned the individual—including the sexual self—within the larger story of the gospel and its picture of a created cosmos in the throes of restoration.' 

Kyle Harper, 'The First Sexual Revolution': https://www.firstthings.com/article/2018/01/the-first-sexual-revolution (Accessed 6th February 201 9)