Pontius Pilate knew what a man was. Yet 2000 years after he woefully declared, “Behold, the man” when parading a beaten and bloodied Jesus before the crowd, our current society is struggling to come up with a definition (Jn. 19:5). Former NBA players are declaring for the WNBA draft after concluding that they meet eligibility guidelines. Tech bros in Silicon Valley are ominously crooning about the transhumanist future. Meanwhile, fertility rates are dropping, loneliness is an epidemic, and Canada is once again trying to commit national suicide.
It would be easy to throw in the towel and live like hermits. I feel the temptation often. Yet if you are reading this, then God has providentially placed you here in this strange epoch of history that, having long ago abandoned first principles, now seems intent on tossing out second and third principles.
To understand the times we live in, it will be helpful to survey a few of the vast social and cultural changes of the latter half of the 20th century. The early ones paved the way for the more radical ones we see today. Behind them all lie assumptions about human nature, and the shifts in those assumptions became possible only when the godless philosophies of the 18th and 19th centuries were handed the tools of modern technology.
The Machine Age
Winston Churchill participated in a cavalry charge, played a significant role in the development of the tank, and wrestled with the devastating effects of the atomic bomb. One lifetime absorbed all of it. The century moved fast enough that a man could outlive the world he was raised in, and the machines arrived faster than the men using them could take their measure.
The Western tradition made its first attempt at suicide between 1914 and 1918. The Great War was needless and fought in a barbarous manner. Christian Europe came out of it with its nerve gone. The men who came home had seen what industry could do to flesh, and many of them concluded that the old certainties had lied to them.
Post-war America answered the doubt with production: assembly lines, suburbs, appliances, and credit cards. American ascendency produced optimism, closely followed by consumerism and materialism. We had defeated a great evil with logistics and technology, and we assumed the same tools would handle whatever came next.
Industry boomed, and so did babies. The baby boom looked for a time like ordinary human flourishing: marriages, children, houses, and churches within walking distance. But the assumptions holding it together were already loosening, and the technologies that would sever them were nearly finished in the laboratory.
Detachment and Fragmentation
The rest of the century runs as a series of detachments. In each case a good that God had joined to other goods was pried loose and handed back on its own, with the assurance that nothing else would be affected. What God has joined together, man is not to separate (Mk. 10:9).
The Pill arrived in the 1950s and 1960s and detached sex from reproduction. The sexual revolution that followed detached sex from marriage. Feminism, in the same decades, detached sex from the social vocation that had always attended it, and in the name of elevating women it taught a generation to treat fertility as a defect to be managed and motherhood as an interruption of real work.
No-fault divorce came in 1969 and spread through the 1970s, detaching marriage from permanence. The first such law was signed by Ronald Reagan, himself divorced, in California. Conservatives are fond of blaming the radicals, but I would rather say it plainly: the ground is usually surrendered by men wearing our own colors.
In 1978 the first child was born by IVF, and reproduction was detached from the sexual union. Genetic engineering, developing over the same years, detached generation from biological givenness. A child ordered to spec is a different thing from a child received. The transhumanist promise now being sung out of Silicon Valley is only this detachment carried to its end, where the body is hardware: editable, upgradable, and eventually optional.
Then came the detachments of the self. Expressive individualism, from the 1960s to the present, detached identity from nature, so that a man is now whatever he says he is. Gay marriage, from the Netherlands in 2001 to Obergefell in 2015, detached marriage from sexual complementarity. Transgenderism, gathering since the 1990s and breaking out in the 2010s, detached gender from biological sex.
Assisted suicide, first legalized by Oregon's ballot measure in 1994 and expanding ever since, detached life from the old rule against killing people on purpose.
Utilitarianism is the result. If goods exist to be enjoyed rather than obeyed, then children become one option among many, and deliberate childlessness starts to look like a reasonable preference. Hence the rise of the DINKs, and the idoglatry (as Samuel Parkison coined it) of couples who lavish on a golden doodle the affection owed to children.
Wanting the Gift, Refusing the Giver
These detachments result from wanting the gift while rejecting the gift giver. God does not hand out His gifts one at a time, to be kept or discarded according to taste. He gives them bundled together. Albert Mohler puts it well:
“The Christian moral tradition emphasizes the unity of the goods that God gives us. The blessings of God are batched, mixed, intertwined in such a marvelous way that they mutually feed off each other, highlighting and complementing each other to drive us into further enjoyment not only of the gifts themselves, but God himself.”
Pull one gift out of the bundle and you lose whatever it was joined to. Sex without children becomes recreation, and then a market. Marriage without permanence becomes a contract with an exit clause. Identity without nature becomes a performance no one can sustain and no one is permitted to question. Add the detachments up and a new man emerges: his own maker, his own authority, and finally his own executioner. He has no givens, only preferences, and a preference can be revised whenever it becomes inconvenient.
Contrast this with the biblical vision, where gifts are given by the one, simple God: “Every good and perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of lights, with whom there is no variation or shadow due to change” (Jas. 1:17).
What a man is was settled before he was born. He is dust and breath, body and soul together, made in the image of God, male and female (Gen. 1:26–27; 2:7). His name, his work, his wife, his children, and his creaturely limits were all handed to him rather than chosen by him (Gen. 2:15–24). He is not his own maker, which is why he does not get to be his own executioner. And when the image was defaced, God did not issue a revised edition. He sent His Son to take the same dust and the same breath and wear them without sin (Heb. 2:14–17).
Behold, then, the true man: bloodied, beaten, and bruised, held up before the crowd and then hung on a cross to save you from your sin.
