The Loss of Transcendence and the Atomistic Worldview
Within the relational dysfunction of our romantic culture, the church’s ability to live well together may be our most important witness to the gospel. Yet our God-given desire to share in a sexual relationship with an “other” has been distorted and intensified. The modern self no longer sees and expresses these human desires within the bigger arc of God’s story of human redemption and reconciliation; instead of pointing to a world beyond this one, sex has become a god in its own right. This loss of cosmic vision—of transcendence—has had an enormous impact on modern sexuality, both secular and Christian.
The Atomistic Worldview and the End of Time
One of the pervasive contemporary realities, unique in human history, is the popular view that the world is a closed system of “cause and effect,” with no connection to any transcendent reality. The world and everything in it is seen as independent, self-sufficient, and radically cut off from God. It has become “disenchanted,” as Max Weber described it. When humans tried to strip God out of creation, they succeeded in stripping created things of any higher purpose.
The influential philosopher Immanuel Kant represented an important transition toward this modern perspective. He argued that even though there may be a transcendent sphere of life—what he called the “noumenal” dimension—we cannot speak about it with any clarity, because we can only reliably experience and describe physical realities. These readily observable realities represent the “phenomenal” dimension of existence. Although the noumenal sphere is opaque for Kant, he believed that our moral sense of right and wrong still reflects divine reality, and so it gives us a small window into a higher realm—things as they really are.1 Kant’s philosophy of knowledge leaves one last delicate thread connecting us to our Creator, but it is vulnerable and exposed.
Friedrich Nietzsche, standing right on the cusp of the twentieth century, cut through this final thread by denying the existence of any noumenal realm. We cannot base our lives on any higher truth, he declared, but must simply embrace the void and travel in the stark reality of the world as it is. This resonated with the naturalistic, Darwinian worldview that was taking root at this time and formed the basis for the “modern social imaginary” as we experience it today.
In the Darwinian vision, a tree is just a tree and, more important, a human body is just a collection of limbs, impulses, and movements. This naturalistic, “scientific” view of the world eventually came to be the dominant way of seeing reality, so that every aspect of our culture is now based on the assumption that our world is purely natural and self-enclosed. This thinking has fundamentally changed the way we live and interact with each other. Whereas the world used to be seen as a “cosmos,” with each part of creation connected to and reflecting its Creator to varying degrees, the world and everything in it has come to be seen as natural, neutral, and autonomous.
The modern self, then, learns to travel in a world that is rooted in a distorted and anemic vision of reality. Popular atheist Richard Dawkins describes this flat, atomistic perspective—with each person or thing suspended in its own detached orbit—with brutal clarity:
In a universe of blind physical forces and genetic replication, some people are going to get hurt, other people are going to get lucky, and you won’t find any rhyme or reason in it, nor any justice. The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil and no good, nothing but blind pitiless indifference.2
This idea of a cold and meaningless world has important consequences for attitudes toward sexuality and relationships. It is summed up in the bleak vision described by the college student to Naomi Wolf: “Mystery? I don’t know what you’re talking about. Sex has no mystery.”3
Myopic Vision and Moral Relativism
The atomistic worldview that Dawkins bluntly describes has resulted in the loss of any coherent vision for life. The only forces to be reckoned with in this brave new world of evolutionary biology are our instinctive impulses and the chance encounters that make up our lives. Within this “disenchanted” world, we can only choose arbitrary rules for living because there is no bigger perspective that can make sense of any particular lifestyle. This fluid moral ecology means that even the limitations or design of our bodies can be manipulated to fit with our personalized desires or preferences without any sense of contradiction.
This moral nihilism says that we are all free to have personal moral convictions about what is right and wrong, but that is all they can ever be—personal. Convictions have no basis in a higher truth, nor can we expect other people to live by them. Any attempt to claim authority for the Christian story is to project our personal views onto a value-neutral universe. This emphasis on living in the world as it is, stripped of any sacred canopy, has inevitably left us with the narrow utilitarian instincts of pursuing pleasure and avoiding pain as our primary motivations. In the end, it is hard to justify any other moral imperative.
This backdrop of moral nihilism, with each person creating his or her own version of truth and meaning, has deeply influenced the present generation, even within the church. It makes us suspicious of any moral code that claims to be authoritative. It also helps to explain why so many Christians feel compelled to create their own unique blend of faith and practice on the basis of what suits their individual preferences and sensibilities, especially when it comes to their sexual lives.
The problem with this temptation is that it is rooted in the atomistic worldview, which has cut us off from any coherent vision of higher reality. It is worth recalling the image I introduced in the opening chapter: if Christianity calls us to see with two eyes—from both a divine and a human perspective—then the modern worldview tempts us to cover one eye and to see only the human, or “phenomenal,” dimension of life. In other words, it compromises our spiritual depth perception. The Christian who designs his or her own personalized blend of faith and morality is making choices from the options available rather than seeking to reflect and participate in God’s character and mission in the world.
The sad truth is that when the world and its people simply become things apart from God, they inevitably lose their dignity and depth. They become mere objects or resources for us to use as we see fit. Consumerism exploits this atomistic worldview, so that moderns have come to see all of life—including relationships—as transactional. When we assume this posture, the key relational question becomes, “What will this person offer me and at what cost?”
When Sex Says Nothing: Metaphysics as Sexual Ethics
This low-horizon worldview, which cuts things off from any higher reality, also strips human embodiment and life of its essential meaning. Postmodernism’s refusal to provide any coherent vision of reality reduces the body to a physical machine by separating it from any animating principle, such as a soul or a guiding purpose—a telos. This denial of transcendence (higher reality) and teleology (purposefulness) leaves us with no foundation on which to think about how to engage our sexuality, except for open-ended self-expression, which fuels the confusion and destructive dynamics of modern sexual practices. The loss of any coherent cosmic structure that gives sex its real purpose—namely, God’s blessing of sex within marriage for intimacy and childbearing—leads to sexual chaos. Our bodies become pleasure machines that are capable of endless different forms of sexual expression, while we have no fundamental reason for keeping this self-expression within certain boundaries.
This is inevitably what happens when we conceive of a world made up of purely natural objects that have no significance beyond themselves. We have created a neutral universe because it is an unaccountable universe, one that allows us to do whatever we want. The atheist philosopher Aldous Huxley famously confessed that he did not want there to be a God, nor any meaning, because it interfered with his sexual freedom. At least he was honest!
To my dismay, several of my Christian friends have had extramarital affairs in recent years, justifying them partly because of the conviction that their spouses were not meeting their sexual needs. The legitimization of this reasoning—which is often greeted with sympathy from peers—is given strength by the atomistic worldview. It views sex not as a sacred bonding between husband and wife but as a bodily fulfillment and natural imperative that must be satisfied for a person to be happy and healthy. In this posture, sex is a fundamental right that cannot be denied to anyone. Even within Christian marriages, this perspective can eat away at a relationship like a cancer.
When Sex Becomes a God
The growing influence of the atomistic worldview over the last century or so has resulted in sex being progressively separated from the social contexts that had traditionally given it its essential meaning. Sex has been redefined as a separate, autonomous entity in its own right, an independent commodity that can be reclassified under any category.4 Whereas sex had always served its defining institutions, it has now become a godlike master over those contexts. Monogamous heterosexual marriage becomes just one file within the growing folder of sexual options. The “disembedding” and “liberation” of sex from its original contexts occurred in five progressive stages throughout the twentieth century with such force that the results of this journey have become unquestioned “realities” today.
The journey began with the separation of sex from procreation, which was enabled by a host of factors, including the invention of contraception, medically assisted conception, and the modern priority given to sex as an expression of companionship rather than as primarily for having children.
This first stage was closely followed by the separation of sex from marriage, so that cohabitation came to be seen by many as a sensible form of premarriage testing or even as an alternative lifestyle. The loosening of sexual relationships is reflected in our use of the term “partner,” which is primarily an economic term. In the name of authenticity and honesty, we declare that we will be partners in this common endeavor for as long as it suits our perceived needs and desires.
A further fragmentation was the separation of sex from partnership. The commodification of sex as a form of recreational pleasure seeking means that many people have come to think of sex as a lone pursuit that just happens to involve another person.
This attitude has led not only to the disenchantment of sex but also to a further fragmentation—the separation of sex from another person. As the reasoning goes, why include other people if sex is purely about self-gratification? The rise of online pornography is a natural result of this cultural reasoning.
The final form of fragmentation, which is the inevitable result of this journey of progressive disembedding, is the separation of sex from our own bodies. Our inherited gender was once seen as normative for determining what form of sex we engaged in and with whom. But it has become a core modern intuition that “gender” and “sexuality” are things we choose, or that our “orientation” is part of a deeper “sexual personality” that transcends our gender. When I recently logged on to Grooveshark, a popular online jukebox, it asked for my name and email address, then gave me the following options to check: “I identify as: male or female?” Cut free from the moorings of divine design, we are now splintered and isolated by an infinite array of sexualities. In 2014 the social media giant Facebook changed its gender options from two categories (male or female) to seventy-one “custom” categories in the UK!5 This stunning transformation has been accepted as self-evident within the modern moral paradigm, and yet such a perspective has been made possible only by the progressive stages of disembedding outlined above. Today, despite the unambiguous testimony of our bodies, we are faced with an open choice.6
Physicality has lost its intrinsic value as an orienting force. This is true not only in the area of same-sex attraction. The normalization of anal sex among many heterosexuals also points to the mainstream view that sex is master over our bodies and relationships rather than the other way around. This becomes even clearer in light of research, which suggests that nearly one-third of Americans have experienced anal sex by age 23, although only 15 percent of the young women within this group report enjoying the experience, despite agreeing to it.7
Churches without Steeples: The Loss of Transcendence within Christian Relationships
This discussion leads us to ask, how is the atomistic vision of life influencing Christians? Our culture’s modern social imaginary—its atomistic worldview—has made it difficult for Western people to believe in God. The guiding message, which is affirmed in every conceivable way, is that we live within a closed physical world of cause and effect. Nothing above or beyond this natural system can or should influence the way we live our lives. Although this worldview is clearly in opposition to our Christian beliefs, it nevertheless affects us in important and subtle ways. Even though we may believe in God, this secular vision has become the air we breathe, affecting our way of seeing and being in the world. It leads to a sort of “practical atheism” whereby we believe in God but find it hard to live as if he exists.
Clarifying this point, James K. A. Smith suggests that Western Christianity has been distorted in two very different ways by the modern world’s insistence on a closed, natural world. At one end, liberal Christianity has been tempted to operate within these limits by essentially working on the human project within “natural” parameters. At the other end, evangelicals have fallen for the same trick by letting themselves be forced into a sort of world/spirit dualism, seeing God as a stranger to his creation who must, on special occasions, supernaturally intervene.8
Smith suggests that a genuine Christian cosmology rejects any such dualism—either naturalism or supernaturalism—and sees the Spirit as intimately involved within creation, including every aspect of our lives. Smith calls this a sort of “enchanted naturalism,” in which God is not an alien or an occasional visitor to his creation but is already present within it. In contrast with secular ideology, which views the world as autonomous and self-standing, the Spirit remains an active and intimate presence in the cosmos just as he was in the beginning, when he hovered over the deep.9 God’s presence in the world explains both the predictability of science (creation has its own integrity) and the heightened work of the Spirit through unexpected actions (creation continues to be sustained by its Creator).
Augustine describes “miracles” as extraordinary events that focus us on the miracle of the ordinary. Such miracles do not break any so-called laws of nature, because “nature” does not have such a reified character. Miracles are manifestations of the Spirit’s presence that are, in fact, “out of the ordinary,” but even the ordinary is a manifestation of the Spirit’s presence.10 C. S. Lewis takes a similar approach in his view that miracles are illuminated windows into the ordinary.11
The naturalized secular worldview I’ve been describing has especially affected the way Christians approach their sexuality and relationships. When we experience or think about God as remote, he becomes detached from the intimate concerns and details of our everyday lives. Sociologist Christian Smith found this sort of worldview at play in the lives of young people in America. He suggests that the vast majority of teenagers, emerging adults, and their parents hold to an anemic version of “faith” that he calls “Moralistic Therapeutic Deism” (MTD).12
Although MTD masquerades as Christianity, it is gutted of most of the church’s traditional convictions, consisting instead of a collection of benign and generalized beliefs. MTD incorporates the following beliefs: that God exists, that it is important to be kind to each other, that our ultimate goal should be personal happiness, that God is seldom personally involved in individual lives, and that good people go to heaven when they die.
Smith argues that MTD has gained such credibility because young people have largely absorbed the cultural beliefs inherent in individualism, multiculturalism, and relativism—to the point that they see little difference between various denominations or even different religions. In other words, once you have extracted the basic moral code of conduct, there’s no need for religious practice. Unsurprisingly, Smith observed that this sort of watered-down faith did not have any real traction in the moral lives of those he interviewed. It translated more into a sort of relational “karma” than Christian faith.
Smith found such a strong consistency in these beliefs across the generations that he suggests MTD has colonized American churches and is now the dominant religion in America. In other words, young people tend to think about religion in exactly the way that liberal mainline Protestantism has encouraged us to do for decades in terms of individualism, pluralism, tolerance, and the authority of individual experience. Yet evangelicalism has also fostered this slide toward personal autonomy, with its anti-institutional bias and its focus on individualized Scripture interpretation.
In light of this, Christian leaders need to consider the ways in which our own teaching encourages the modern social imaginary, undermining the Christian vision of what it means to live in trusting obedience to God in every part of our lives, including our sexuality and relationships.
Encountering the Personal God: The Formative Power of Presence
In his research, Christian Smith found that a more connected worldview has important implications for the moral and relational lives of emerging adults. For instance, he observed a strong positive correlation between “miracles” and “sex” in the lives of young people. (It is not that keeping sex within marriage is itself a miracle!) Smith found that when people had tangible experiences of God in their lives, especially in their early teenage years, these moments retained deep significance for the rest of their lives, including their sexual lives. Specific times when they had seen miracles, experienced answers to prayer, had a moving spiritual experience, or could point to a decisive moment when they committed themselves to Jesus were all influential factors. In other words, a personal encounter with God had a profound influence on their vision and practice of sexuality.
This points to an important theme in relation to our discipling of young men and women within the church today. It is beyond dispute that the morality of Western society has been periodically renewed by spiritual revivals, such as the Wesleyan revival in Britain and the Great Awakenings in America. That same power is at work within our own communities of faith. Although a one-sided focus on Christian spiritualism and revivalism has all too often led to weak moral commitments, the counterfeit should not undermine the authentic. Whereas the vague MTD that Smith describes will have little moral traction within the complex reality of young people’s practical lives, a vibrant faith and encounter with God creates a context of significance whereby all of life is nourished and given meaning by a continuing relationship to God. Miracles—by which I mean the demonstrated reality of God in people’s lives—play an important role in sexual formation because they materialize the kingdom of God, giving it the force of reality in people’s lives. Miracles puncture the gnostic dualism that many Christians experience, which drives a wedge between their beliefs (mind/spirit) and their behavior (body).
Drawing all this together, Smith found that emerging adults are more likely to have a vibrant faith if they believe in divine miracles and do not believe in having sex before marriage. He suggests that these twin beliefs help young adults to form a worldview that provides a vital narrative of resistance as well as a practical alternative to modern secular assumptions. If our culture offers an ethos of unquestioned scientific truth and unrestricted sexual happiness, then what we think about sex and the cosmos provides our most important means of resisting the closed “modern social imaginary” and its vision of life. A strong case can be made, then, for offering young people not only opportunities to encounter the living God personally but also a reasoned apologetic for sanctified Christian living.
Losing a Kingdom Perspective: Rules without Vision
A consequence of our sense of detachment from God—our practical atheism—is that we come to see our lives as consisting of an array of discrete decisions and actions rather than expressing and reflecting a comprehensive vision of life. We think about Scripture’s teaching on sexuality as a “list of rules” rather than as a coherent picture of the “good life.” If Christian instruction about sexuality is just a moral code, then we are tempted to question why these rules are so important. But those who hold this perspective lose sight of the fact that these are not just rules. The Christian vision of sexuality is the gracious provision of a loving God who invites us into a life of flourishing via participation in his own character, the relationships within the Trinity, and the reality of the kingdom of heaven as it takes shape on earth.
A Christian acquaintance recently announced on Facebook that she was moving in with her boyfriend. In support of her decision, she linked to an article that challenges the perceived evangelical focus on sex, what the author calls the “cult of virginity.”13 Obsessed evangelicals, the article’s author complains, treat sexual sins as though they are more serious than other sins. This “unfair” prioritization of sex leaves many Christians who do have sex outside of marriage with a destructive legacy of guilt and shame, and it would be better—he suggests—to drop this negative fixation on sexual rules and to teach a more realistic approach. The article received numerous “likes” on Facebook. No wonder: it articulates a view that is becoming unquestionable within our culture of authenticity, which celebrates moral nihilism, that is, the each-to-their-own approach to life.
But this approach puts the cart before the horse. The significant challenge of living faithful sexual lives does not mean that we should lower the standards of Christian sexuality. If we do, we have no solid foundation upon which to make particular choices in our sexual lives. If we let go of the ideals of Scripture, including Jesus’s own direct teaching, what standards would we replace them with? Our sexual lives, of all things, leave us most open to the ensnaring tentacles of self-deception.
At a more fundamental level, this alternative approach is looking at the Christian life from exactly the wrong end—like peering down the large end of a telescope. The gospel envisions the sort of life that ultimately leads to human flourishing. Sin is destructive because it undermines the good that God has for us, not because it’s forbidden candy that a cruel father keeps under lock and key. This is the age-old temptation that Adam and Eve swooned under in the garden—wondering whether God really does want what is best for us. Yet this truth sits at the heart of our faith: the Christian view of sexuality is an aesthetic vision of human flourishing just as truly as it is one of sacrificial self-denial.
The Loss of Eternity and the Idolatry of Youth
When our “naturalized” world gets cut off from any wider temporal horizon, such as God’s progressive restoration of his creation, we come to see our lives through a distorting lens. In classical and traditional Christian cultures, one of the highest virtues was the attainment of maturity and wisdom, which imbued the aging process with a positive vision. But if we believe that the end of our lives really is the end, we inevitably focus on existential exploration and fulfillment in the here and now. If we view physical reality as “all there is, and all that ever will be,” we will emphasize youth because it is in youth that we experience our physical embodiment at its peak and sexual fulfillment at its most intense.
No wonder our culture puts such a high priority on the twin fulfillments of sex and youth. Unsure of what the ultimate future holds, we cling to these symbols of immortality that offer us the chance to play god without responsibility to a Creator.
Christians profess to live according to a different vision, but the naturalistic worldview and its obsession with youth have dulled our consciousness about how our sexuality fits within the greater horizon of God’s story. It is only within this wider narrative that the sacrifices and consolations of the Christian vision of sexuality ultimately make sense. Within the modern church, we seldom travel with the deep awareness that our lives are given significance and specific shape only by our future destiny. When we do emphasize our future destiny, it is unfortunately often seen as an escape from the world and our embodied existence rather than as a transformation and restoration of life in the here and now.
Although people within the church face genuine challenges in regard to prolonged singleness and a perceived inability to enter into relationships, we have—often—overemphasized the importance of youth and the fulfillment of our sexual and relational aspirations within this compressed time frame. We feel we must live full sexual lives before middle age, or at least before our prolonged adolescence becomes embarrassing. Conversations that Esther and I have had with single Christians over the years have tended to reveal a sense of panic and doom as our culture’s sexual stopwatch ticks loudly in their ears. This sense of loss is exacerbated by the feeling that celibate Christians sit on the sidelines of a sexual feast going on all around them. Many even feel that the church makes too big a deal about sex, while the sacrifices of chastity are not honored and don’t even appear to be blessed by God. Those who have “had their fun” often seem to end up winning the perceived prize anyway—getting married and living happily ever after.
This raises the inevitable question: “How could God ‘reward’ their choices and ignore me?” One of the tragedies we have seen many times is the development of a profound anger at God and, in some cases, a loss of faith entirely. Others, out of desperation, experiment with the secular path for sexual and relational fulfillment, often with sad or even disastrous results. This disappointment in the area of relationships is a significant challenge for the church today as a growing number of single Christians move into the later stages of life.
In order to resist this overemphasis on the ticking biological clock, the church needs to articulate a strong and positive vision in relation to aging. Although peer-group ministry has some important advantages, we also need to reintegrate the different generations within the church. Mature and wise exemplars within the community train us to join confidently with Paul’s conviction that even as the body ages, the inner self is being renewed.14 This is an important theme to which we will return.
Atomistic Thinking in Christian Formation
The modern social imaginary, with its denial of transcendence, has made it harder for people to believe in God. It has also made it harder for Christians to live as if God exists. Yet Christ calls us to live differently as his followers. As part of this calling, we need to be attentive to the subtle ways in which our culture’s atomistic perspective shapes our approach to discipleship. The modern worldview encourages us to think about life instrumentally and pragmatically. In essence it asks, “What works?”
Within this vision people are reduced to flesh-and-blood machines, and even Christian formation can become focused on finding the right “technology.” Provided we get the “science” or “technique” right, the rest will follow . . . or so we believe. But our role as shepherds—whether parents or leaders—is to resist the distortion of human identity along purely pragmatic lines. This resistance involves taking people beyond the modern worldview into the fullness of the Christian vision of life.
The truth is that leaders are overstretched, providing courses and services for their congregations to consume like spiritual protein shakes. But people are not robots, and as helpful as they may be, books, courses, and sermons are not solutions to their issues or technologies to promote their growth. This is the language and mentality of the modern worldview, which views human formation in functional terms. It is a tempting approach, because it gives us clear goals and responds to people’s expectations. This functional approach is also evident in modern parenting. Children are seen as mini-computers to be filled—through endless extracurricular activities—with information and skills (or “software”) that will ultimately help them to get into the best colleges and excel in the competitive world. Within this model, it does not matter who provides their care as long as the job is done.
In the modern mind-set, we view time instrumentally. We ask, “What will doing this achieve, and how can I do it more efficiently?” As a young attorney I had to record every six-minute time slot in my working day, even pausing the clock when I went to the bathroom or had a social conversation. It has taken me many years to shake off that paradigm of productivity, even as it relates to relationships. But it is actually the sacrificial, time-costly aspects of relationships that build our personal foundations and also provide the basis for loving relationships. As Sherry Turkle writes, “Relationships hinge on these investments of time. We know that the time we spend caring for children, doing the most basic things for them, lays down a crucial substrate. On this ground, children become confident that they are loved no matter what. And we who care for them become confirmed in our capacity to love and care.”15
Concluding Thoughts: Mapping the Modern Social Imaginary
As we have seen, the atomistic worldview powerfully shapes personal identity and relationships. Although belief in God still persists, we are becoming a generation of “practical atheists,” living as if God does not exist. Instead of living in a “cosmos” where things and people are intrinsically connected to God and each other, we live in a “disenchanted” earth, a morally neutral sphere on which we walk unconnected to and unencumbered by others. As Christians, too, we have been tempted to build churches without steeples—that is, to live our lives within the low horizons of the modern world.
In this first part of the book, we have mapped the anatomy of the modern social imaginary as well as its comprehensive formation of personal identity and relationships in the likeness of its own image. If this modern worldview has installed an idol—or false substitute—in the place of God, then what would a Christian social imaginary look like, one that effectively counterforms disciples in the reflection of the true image of the One who calls us his own?
1. Immanuel Kant, Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone (New York: Harper Torchbook, 1960).
2. Richard Dawkins, A River Out of Eden: A Darwinian View of Life (London: Phoenix, 1996), 155.
3. Wolf, “Porn Myth.”
4. Sarah C. Williams, “A Sexual Reformation? Marriage and Sexuality in the Contemporary Paradigm” (lecture, Regent College, Vancouver, April 1, 2008).
5. Rhiannon Williams, “Facebook’s 71 Gender Options Come to UK Users,” The Telegraph, June 27, 2014. Examples include “neither,” “gender variant,” “pangender,” “gender nonconforming,” and “trans*person.”
6. See Andy Crouch, “Sex without Bodies: The Church’s Response to the LGBT Movement Must Be That Matter Matters,” Christianity Today, June 26, 2013, http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2013/july-august/sex-without-bodies.html.
7. Regnerus and Uecker, Premarital Sex, 34, 86. For instance, a study of unmarried young women aged 18–32 asked those who had been involved in different sexual activities with their current partner if they liked it “very much.” The results were only 15 percent for anal sex (although no one in Regnerus’s own interviews found this desirable), 38 percent for oral sex, and 83 percent for conventional sex.
8. James K. A. Smith, Thinking in Tongues: Pentecostal Contributions to Christian Philosophy (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2010), 86–105.
9. Ibid., 103.
10. Chris Gousmett, “Creation Order and Miracle according to Augustine,” Evangelical Quarterly 60 (1988): 217–40.
11. C. S. Lewis, Miracles (New York: HarperOne, 2001).
12. Smith, Souls in Transition, 154–56.
13. David Sessions, “What It Will Really Take to Bring Down the Cult of Virginity,” Patrol, January 31, 2013, http://www.patrolmag.com/2013/01/31/david-sessions/what-it-will-really-take-to-bring-down-the-cult-of-virginity/.
14. 2 Cor. 4:16.
15. Turkle, Alone Together, 291.