Do Christians really believe, and are they committed to the claims of Biblical faith, to God’s lordship, the uniqueness of His truth revealed in the Bible, and the moral precepts set forth in it? Our liturgies, sermons, and prayers resound with claims of God’s lordship, and its superiority over anything else. Anyone who has spent any time in an Evangelical environment has heard, and if a participant, has sung, that Jesus “is risen from the dead, and he is Lord,” and yet it is precisely God’s lordship in all of life which is the most controversial legal issue about Christian discipleship today.
Points of conflict about God’s lordship have varied over the millennia. In Biblical times, idolatry at times seduced, at other times, coerced, God’s people. The ancient church struggled with Christology, the medieval church with corruption and violence, the modern church with the doctrine of salvation and the challenges of science and reason. None of these controversies are entirely passé in our day, but for contemporary Christians the real issue on which we are pressured to compromise or surrender our commitment to revealed truth is the sexual morality expounded in Scripture and which was dominant throughout the Christian era. The pressure comes through the antidiscrimination law and policy surging through the Western world, which increasingly makes public choices based on Christian sexual morality illegal discrimination.
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