Holiness – Part five: Accommodation

One of the factors in direct opposition to holiness is what the Bible describes as ‘Worldliness’. Kevin DeYoung writes of Worldliness ‘The world stands for everything that opposes the will of God. In its simplest form, this means “the desires of the flesh and the desires of the eyes and pride of life” (1 John 2:16). Or to put it another way, worldliness is whatever makes sin look normal and righteousness look strange… Worldliness is a serious problem. The Bible says that “if anyone loves the world, the love of the Father is not in him.” Christians used to talk about worldliness and fear its creeping influence…’¹

We saw in Holiness Part 2 that God requires our moral judgments to be shaped according to his character. This means being holy because He is holy. For Christians, right and wrong is not determined by our culture but by God’s nature. How we are to live holy lives is laid down according to the moral precepts God has revealed to us in the Bible. But worldliness is the opposite of this outlook. Worldliness is to be shaped instead by the thought forms of this world which appeal to the outlook of the sinful nature, and so promote sin. Worldliness is at war with holiness and seeks to undermine it.

The increasing growth in secularism and atheism in recent decades is increasingly reflected in British social attitudes when it comes to a biblical understanding of the place of sexuality.² In short, the trend is a rapid movement away from God’s ordinance of marriage described in the Bible, where sexual intercourse is reserved for a married husband and wife, who are married for life (see Holiness Part 3). The National Centre for Social Research has traced this decline over a forty-year period:

• 67% think a sexual relationship between two people of the same sex is never wrong, compared with 17% in 1983.
• 45% don’t think people who want children ought to get married and 50% agree that one parent can bring up a child as well as two.
• 81% think it is all right for a couple to live together without being married, up from 64% in 1994.
• 76% believe a woman should be able to choose an abortion when a woman decides on her own that she does not want to have a child compared to 37% in 1983.³

The only exception to these trends is that 64% describe themselves as not prejudiced at all against people who are transgender, a decline since 2019 (82%). Only 30% think someone should be able to have the sex on their birth certificate altered if they want, down from 53% in 2019. This reflects the fiercely contested debate that continues about transgender.

Graham Nicholls writes ‘But when you stand back it is actually staggering how much has changed in the last 40 years. For all of my married life, the faithful, heterosexual marriage that we committed to, has become less and less honoured as an exceptionally good thing.

My kind of marriage whilst still popular is looked at with some degree of disdain as the traditional, rather dull, option amongst a multi-coloured palette of possible hook-ups in pursuit of love or pleasure, or possibly both.’ ⁴

Nicholls cites an ex-BBC reporter who commented, “And where has this moral revolution got us? We now live in a society where sexual excess is routine. No one is taught – least of all by the BBC – that self-restraint in sexual matters is a much surer route to personal happiness than untrammelled promiscuity. And absolutely no one is keen to emphasise the ruinous effect sexual permissiveness has had on family stability and the consequent happiness and well-being of children.”⁵

This move away from Christian Marriage is also reflected in the breakdown of legislation protecting it. Simultaneously, its passing has encouraged sexual immorality:

• 1967 Sexual Offences Act – decriminalised private homosexual acts between men aged over 21.
• 1967 Abortion Act.
• 1969 Divorce Reform Act – made ‘irretrievable breakdown of marriage the sole ground for divorce, proved by adultery, unreasonable behaviour, or desertion; or by two years separation when both parties consent to a divorce, or five years separation without spouse’s consent. Subsequent procedural changes continued to make divorce easier.
• 2000 The sexual Offences (Amendment) act – reduced the age of homosexual consent to 16.
• 2001 Equal Age of Consent (16).
• 2002 Adoption and Children Act – allowed unmarried and same-sex couples to adopt
• 2003 Justice Act – Repeal of Clause 28 lifting ban on local authorities from ‘teaching on the acceptability of homosexuality.’
• 2003 Employment Equality (Religion or Belief) Regulations – ending discrimination against LGBTQ people by not hiring them or promoting them based on their sexual orientation or gender identity.
• 2004 Civil Partnerships.
• 2008 Human Fertilisation and Embryology Act – allowed three-parent babies and animal-human hybrid embryo experiments.
• 2010 Equality Act – protected characteristics in law: age, disability, gender reassignment (not orientation), marriage or civil partnership (in employment only), pregnancy and maternity, race, religion or belief, sex, sexual orientation.
• 2014 Gay Marriage (excl. NI), 2020 Gay Marriage in NI.
• 2020 Divorce, Dissolution and Separation Act – made divorce quicker and easier, including scrapping the fault grounds so that all divorce is “no fault”.
• Present. Proposals – gender recognition, conversion therapy ban, gay blessings in the Church of England.⁶

The books of Dr Francis A Schaeffer marked a water shed in Christian thinking during the twentieth century. He describes how his early books – The God Who Is There; Escape From Reason; and He is There and He is Not Silent – called for the Lordship of Christ in the arts- art, literature, cinema, philosophy and so on. The later ones – including How Should We Then live?; Whatever Happened to the Human Race?; and A Christian Manifesto – brought ‘the body of thought forward into the area of a Christian’s duty, under the Lordship of Christ, in the whole area of law, government, and standing for a high view of human life.’ ⁷

Schaeffer’s books are adept at comparing secular philosophy, ideology and ethics with biblical truth. He writes ‘Here is the great evangelical disaster—the failure of the evangelical world to stand for truth as truth. There is only one word for this—namely accommodation: the evangelical church has accommodated to the world spirit of the age. First there has been accommodation on Scripture, so that many who call themselves evangelicals hold a weakened view of the Bible and no longer affirm the truth of all the Bible teaches—truth not only in religious matters but in the areas of science and history and morality.’⁸

Schaeffer lamented the number of evangelicals ‘accepting the higher critical methods’ in the study of the Bible” and also their ‘accommodation’ on moral issues. He wrote powerfully against the practice of abortion in this respect.⁹ He also noted that ‘Too often Christians have naively entered the academic world with a glassy-eyed fascination and left their critical judgment and Christian truth behind’ where ‘any distinctively evangelical Christian point of view was accommodated to the secularist thinking in their discipline and to the surrounding world spirit of their age.’¹⁰ Worldliness is essentially where ‘The Bible is bent to the culture instead of the Bible judging our society and culture.’¹¹

So, in this sense, the push for affirmation of homosexual behaviour, even in the church, should not come as a surprise. It should, however, be shocking: Biblically it is opposed to God’s holy character, his ordinance of marriage, and is clearly opposed in both Old and New Testaments as a form of sexual immorality. But the Church has for some years accommodated itself to the culture in pursuit of ‘autonomous freedom’ rather than the careful balance of ‘form and freedom’ we have in the Bible.¹² In so doing we have grown worldly.

The spirit of accommodation is close to home. I have been an accredited minister with the Baptist Union for nearly twenty years and not heard support from the Union for Christian marriage or arguments against related unethical practices including abortion, easy divorce and homosexuality in the way we have begun to think about them here. There has been no representation to Parliament – only a marked silence – from the Union about the very real dangers of Conversion Therapy Ban legislation.¹³ The time is ripe for reform. 

It is God’s purpose to make us holy. Ephesians 5:25-27 states ‘Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her to make her holy, cleansing her by the washing with water through the word, and to present her to himself as a radiant church, without stain or wrinkle or blemish, but holy and blameless.’ Christ sanctifies our lives by the Holy Spirit and his word. For we are called to be the Bride of Christ, destined to share in a glorious future with him (Revelation 19:7, 21:22).

1. Kevin DeYoung, ‘The Hole in our Holiness’, p.36. ↩︎
2. YouGov Poll 2018, ‘No Religion’ nearly 50% of the UK population. See the Bible Society’s Lumino Project. ↩︎
3. From the National Centre for Social Research, 2023, https://www.affinity.org.uk/news/forty-years-of-decline/.
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4. https://www.affinity.org.uk/news/forty-years-of-decline/. ↩︎
5.  https://www.telegraph.co.uk/tv/0/how-russell-brand-made-sexual-excess-routine/ 
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6. From the National Centre for Social Research, 2023. https://www.affinity.org.uk/news/forty-years-of-decline/ and information sent to me from The Christian institute. ↩︎
7. Preface to Volume 5 of Collected Works, p. x. ↩︎
8. A Christian View of the Church. Collected Works Volume 4, p. 321. ↩︎
9. See Whatever Happened to the Human Race? Vol.5. Book 3. ↩︎
10. Vol.5. Book 5, p. 385. ↩︎
11. P. 340.
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12. p.308. ↩︎
13. See ‘A Letter to my MP’ and ‘Christian Ministers. A Call to Faithfulness’ articles ↩︎

David Barnes

David Barnes is minister of Angmering Baptist Church and has been in full time pastoral ministry for twenty nine years. He is married to Elizabeth and they have four adult children and four grandchildren.