The Unthinkable Is Now The Thinkable

The same-sex controversy is, at its core, a controversy over the authority and interpretation of the Bible. Throughout the history of the church, and revealed in the historical understanding of Scripture, homosexuality has been seen as contrary to the morality set forth in the pages of the Bible....

This push is evidence of a tragic cultural transformation that has occurred in recent decades - one that pertains to the ethical, to the moral, and to that which is right and wrong. Yesterday's outrage has become today's standard. Today, homosexuality, which at one time was morally unthinkable, is on parade before us as normal, acceptable, and - in order to show its authoritative status - unquestionable. Francis Schaeffer wrote, 

There is a "thinkable" and an "unthinkable" in every era. One era is quite certain intellectually and emotionally about what is acceptable. Yet another era decides that these "certainties" are unacceptable and puts another set of values into practice. On a humanistic base, people drift along from generation to generation, and the morally unthinkable becomes the thinkable as the years move on. Schaeffer, writing in the 1970s, perceptively continued, The thinkables of the eighties and nineties will certainly include, things which most people today find unthinkable and immoral, even unimaginable and too extreme to suggest. Yet - since they do not have some overriding principle that takes them beyond relativistic thinking - when these become thinkable and acceptable in the eighties and nineties, most people will not even remember that they were unthinkable in the seventies. They will slide into each flew thinkable without a jolt.

Schaeffer was not arguing that something is worthy of emulation simply because it was previously done. By itself, Dad and Mom's conduct, while often qualitatively better and more polite than that of their children observed at the local mall, is not an adequate standard for morality. In fact, the point is that the basis of yesterday's morality was of such poor quality that it could not prevent its "unthinkables" from becoming "thinkables" in short order. One of yesterday's unthinkables - the social and moral acceptance of homosexuality in both orientation and act, in both desire and deed - is presented to us today as quite thinkable, and though we are speaking of morality and not the changing tide of fashion, our modern society can seldom tell the difference. 

~James White and Jeff Niell