God Speaks Out on "The New Morality" Ambassador College Department of Theology
Chapter 1
WORLD IN REVOLT
Why This Book Had To Be Written
TODAY THE WORLD is emerging from the age of hush. A moral revolution is sweeping the world. The professional "authorities" — the psychoanalysts, the scientists, the doctors, the biologists and the marriage counselors — have decided that moral standards are in need of revision. And they are being revised radically — downward — under the catch phrase, "The New Morality"! Few, indeed, realize the shocking facts of this accelerating downward plunge. It is rapidly becoming a greater threat to humanity than the hydrogen bomb! The plain TRUTH of the current moral collapse is staggering, almost beyond belief!
The "Old Morality"
"Christianity," entering the dark ages, absorbed the pagan dualism of Greece, and pasted the label "SINFUL" on sex. Even as the United States entered the first World War, in 1917, it was still unlawful to publish, sell, or distribute any book disseminating knowledge of sex, or instruction on its uses. Sex was viewed puritanically as indecent, degrading, shameful. It was not only considered "not nice," it was positively "sinful." People sorely needed proper instruction. But all teaching was forcibly withheld. Parents taught their children nothing. They themselves knew nothing. Their parents had never taught them! And besides, it would have been too embarrassing! The commonly accepted attitude was: "keep our children innocent and pure through ignorance until marriage — then instinct will tell them what to do." But instinct did not teach them. Humans, unlike animals, do not come equipped with instinct. Blindly, with a smattering of "gutter-acquired" misknowledge, the newly married blundered their way into disillusionments, shattered dreams, bitter resentments, frustrations — and, too often, the divorce courts and broken homes.
A New "Morality"?
But today western civilization is throwing off the restraints. The revolt is on, against prudery, repression and ignorance. Knowledge, of a certain and wrong kind, has been flooding bookstore shelves and magazine stands. The new, wholly physical and sensual sex knowledge has been gulped in by curiosity — hungry minds. Yet this newly released knowledge has been misleading and damaging, far in excess of the former repressive ignorance. And this present toboggan-slide in morals has become one of the world's most fateful DANGERS! WHY has not this release of knowledge proved beneficial? Look at the facts as they have happened. Look at the actual results! In 1917 it was illegal to disseminate technical knowledge of sex in the United States. Down through the centuries sex had been polluted. From ancient Egypt, through Greece, Rome, and organized "Christianity," sex had been regarded as evil-dirty-nasty. Not only was it sinful outside of marriage — but any use in marriage, except for the definite purpose of reproduction, was sternly labeled "SIN." Prudishness filled the atmosphere. True, a very large percentage of girls and wives were kept "pure." Yet some 90 per cent of marriages were rendered unhappy because of false attitudes and sex ignorance. Divorces, through those centuries, may have been kept at a comparative minimum — due to religious convictions and economic barriers. But most divorces then, even as now, were caused primarily by this ignorance. Then came World War I. It brought tremendous changes in thinking, in behavior patterns, in social customs, and in the "double standard." In its wake, the legal barriers against sex instruction were knocked down — and the moral barriers began toppling simultaneously. Many medical doctors, psychoanalysts, "sexologists," and marriage counselors began grinding out volume after volume imparting sex knowledge. Bookstore shelves became well supplied with sex information. But something was criminally wrong with this avalanche of sex literature. It revealed only half of the vitally needed knowledge — the physical, biological half — and even that from the purely materialistic, carnal, sensual approach. Ignorant of the Creator's real PURPOSES of having made humans both male and female, and of the divinely intended functions of sex, these professional "authorities" actually started the western world on the fatal road of immorality and spiritual degradation that is leading, more rapidly than realized, to the utter destruction of humanity! Yes, the professional "experts" decided that moral standards are in need of revision. And so, indeed, they assuredly are! But they are being revised in the wrong direction! They are being revised in a downward spiral! Soon after World War I, Judge Ben Lindsey of Denver, Colorado, shocked the world with his public advocacy of "companionate marriage" — that is, the legalizing of temporary trial marriages. Once people recovered from the shock, too many stopped even bothering with trial marriages. More or less promiscuous premarital sampling became the campus fad. Perhaps "credit" for starting this IMmoral "New Morality" should go to Sigmund Freud, founder of psychoanalysis, who died in 1939. Freud attributed neuroses and many nervous and mental disorders to sexual repression and ignorance. Since the Roman Catholic definition of sex as degradingly sinful caused these disorders, "the way that seemeth right unto a MAN" was to reverse the definition to the opposite extreme of calling sex GOOD — any use of sex, in or out of marriage. If repression and self-denial caused neurotic disquiet, Freud and his followers reasoned, let's emancipate the people from restraints — revise the interpretation of "morality." In a one-generation plunge, civilization in our world has swung to the opposite extreme of the moral pendulum. Premarital sexual experience is no longer being discouraged in many educational high places. Many a modern teen-age girl is being "emancipated" from the old taboos. Teen-agers are literally leaping to embrace the "new freedoms." The western world is fast adopting a new interpretation of morals. Increasingly, modern wives no longer resign themselves to being only the last love affair of their husbands. NOTHING IS MORE NEEDED, NOW, than a voice in the wilderness to cry out against this sudden moral collapse, and to supply THE MISSING HALF of sex knowledge, leading at least those who will, into the God-ordained TRUE MORALITY! For both the old repression-in-ignorance morality, and the soul-damning so-called "NEW Morality" are as false as a subtle devil could devise them! There is a God-given TRUE morality that is right, and will bring humanity happiness, joys, and blessings! Everybody in this world seriously needs the knowledge that no author, until now, has made available. They need, not only the physical details, but a knowledge of the Creator's PURPOSES in sex — its true MEANING — the related SPIRITUAL enlightenment — and the right God-intended ATTITUDE toward sex and marriage.
What KIND of Knowledge?
There is abroad today a teaching that KNOWLEDGE is the key to happiness — the solution to all problems. Given sufficient knowledge, say these intellectuals, and the world will banish all unhappiness and solve all problems. So today we have a tremendous increase in knowledge. In all fields! Scientific knowledge. Technical knowledge. Medical knowledge. Mechanical knowledge. Knowledge from historical research. The prophet Daniel foretold this amazing increase of knowledge. It is one of several sure signs of the end of this world — and the imminency of the happy WORLD TOMORROW! Today bookstore shelves contain many books disseminating sex knowledge. But not only that. A veritable avalanche of sex literature floods the newsstands. Almost every issue of every magazine of popular circulation contains an eye-catching article on sex. Sex appeal is dominant in advertisements and radio and TV commercials. Sex is the major appeal in the motion pictures, in television, and in popular songs. From every source and direction, it seems, sex consciousness and sex knowledge are being hurled at the public. Courses are being taught in many colleges and high schools. But what kind of knowledge? And from what SOURCES? This torrent of sex information, plunging a new generation headlong down the cataract of promiscuity, is wholly physical knowledge! Its source is modern "science," medicine, and psychoanalysis. These are sources which have rejected the revelation of God. All knowledge is not TRUTH. Half-knowledge, then, becomes a poisonous mixture of truth and error. So today we have all this "knowledge" — but NO HAPPINESS! The centuries of ignorance and prudery bore the fruit of unhappy marriages. But this new "enlightenment" is producing increasing unhappiness, destroying the meaning and sacredness of marriage, multiplying divorces, producing a bumper crop of juvenile delinquents, and reaping a harvest of venereal disease. Modern civilization has leaped from the frying pan into the fire. And WHY?
The FOUNDATION of Knowledge
Because these modern "authorities" producing this new flood of sex literature, are themselves ignorant of the true meaning and PURPOSES of sex. They have built a superstructure of "knowledge" without a FOUNDATION. The FOUNDATION of knowledge is the Word of God! The Holy Bible is the BASIS — the starting point — which supplies us with the only right approach to the acquisition of further knowledge. This will be explained later. Biologists, psychoanalysts, medicine men and marriage counselors have neither the true FOUNDATION of sex knowledge, nor the right approach toward it. They have approached it solely from the vantage point of human reason and carnal experience. This new approach to sex knowledge is illustrated by a recent incident. An 18-year-old girl had been engaging for a year in premarital sex relations with her "steady" boy friend. She felt guilty and condemned. Finally she worked up courage to go to her pastor, confess her unchastity, and ask for guidance. She braced herself for a stinging rebuke. Instead, the minister merely asked whether these experiences had been expressions of "deep feeling," or of temporary sensual gratification. The girl admitted they had talked casually of the possibility of being married some day, and said they really were "crazy about each other." "Well then," counseled this minister, "you need feel no guilt at all about what you have done. As a matter of fact, to repress your desires of sex might even be a denial of your human instinct, and I would consider such denial of the natural sex urge to be unwholesome." Perhaps you noticed that I did not say that this clergyman was a minister of Jesus Christ. If you care to turn to II Corinthians 11:14-15 you will find his connection identified! This minister said, "I would consider such denial of the natural sex urge unwholesome." That is how he would consider it! Today human "authorities" speak of how they consider such problems — or how they view various subjects. A doctor says, "This is my view." A biologist says, "It seems to me, thus and so." A psychiatrist says, "We are coming to believe .... " A minister says, "I would consider .... " Yes, men say: — "I think ... " — "I feel ... " — "It might well be ... " — "It would seem logical to suppose ... " — etc., etc., etc. God Almighty says, "There is a way that seemeth right to a man; but the end thereof are the ways of DEATH."
Would God Know?
Isn't it about time we ask: "What does God say about sex?" Is it just possible that the Eternal CREATOR could know anything about SEX? Well, He ought to! He designed and created sex, its stimuli, and its functions in the marvelous human body. Why should a minister of Jesus Christ teach the TRUTH about sex? Jesus said: " ... He which made them at the beginning made them male and female, and said, 'For this cause shall a man leave father and mother, and shall cleave to his wife: and they twain shall be one flesh.' Wherefore they are no more twain, but one flesh. What therefore God hath joined together, let not man put asunder" (Matthew 19:4-6). God Almighty is our CREATOR! He designed the human body and mind. He made the human body to become the "temple of the Holy Spirit." And He designed some human bodies to be male, and some to be female. GOD thought out, planned and designed sex anatomy, both male and female. GOD made the human body so that it would function sexually. Is what GoD purposed, planned, designed, and made, something that is EVIL? Here is what He Himself says about that: "And God saw everything that He had made" — including the human body, male and female — "and, behold, IT WAS VERY GOOD"! (Genesis 1:31.) WHO will say, then, that it was very BAD? — very EVIL? — very nasty? WHO will dare accuse GOD? What GOD made is not evil or sinful. But man has power to put what God made to a wrong and sinful USE! Sin is not the thing — sin is the wrong use of the thing — sin is the transgression of GOD'S LAW! Sin is thinking and acting contrary to God's purposes and COMMANDS! I am a minister of Jesus Christ. I am commanded by Jesus Christ to lift up my voice — to cry aloud and spare not — and to show God's people THEIR SINS! I preach the repentance of SIN. I preach salvation from SIN! The SIN question is a definite integral part of THE GOSPEL. Does SEX have anything to do with SIN? Does SIN have any connection with sex? Two of the Ten Commandments have to do with SEX. The violation of the marriage covenant — whether before or after marriage — is a SIN. "Thou shalt not commit adultery," says the seventh of God's Commandments. Marriage is a physical union, but a DIVINE institution, ordained by GOD. It is GOD who joins together a husband and wife as one FLESH. Marriage is of GOD — it is GOD'S DOING — and His laws protect it. I am a minister of the living God, commissioned to TEACH people about holy matrimony, and God's laws protecting this sacred institution of His! The tenth Commandment says: "Thou shalt not COVET." Of course a man could covet his neighbor's money, his goods, or his house. But he also can, and too frequently does, LUST after his neighbor's WIFE. He also may covet, or lust, sexually. This Commandment, too, enters the area of SEX. The Eternal God instructed our first parents in the right uses of sex. Sex instruction is an integral part of MORAL and SPIRITUAL teaching. It belongs definitely within the field of CHRIST'S MINISTRY! WHY is all this prolific dissemination of sex information of the past 40 years producing such EVIL fruit? A prime reason is simply that it has originated, not from God's Word, not from the pens of God's faithful and true ministers, but from the medical doctors, the psychiatrists, the "sexologists," and professional men in the purely secular and materialistic fields. The "experts" and the "authorities" do not know it, but there is a spiritual law! That law is as real, as inexorable, as the law of gravity. When a man falls from a seven-story building, or a 70-foot-high precipice, the law of gravity is in action. It draws him rapidly downward. Then when he hits bottom, he is quite suddenly affected by another law. Inertia wallops him, probably fatally. For every sexual action, this spiritual law imposes a definite reaction. That law was set in living motion to regulate sexual behavior as the ETERNAL Himself intended. Also there are PURPOSES in sex of which these authors are largely unaware. The real secret of happiness — both marital and premarital — has never been opened to their understanding. Yes, there is this invisible LAW. And just to mention one of its reactions, premarital sex experience diminishes, in greater or lesser degree, capacity for REAL LOVE and happiness in a later marriage! If marriages were previously rendered unhappy by repressive guilt-stricken attitudes and ignorance, they become far less happy under this false "New Morality." The wrong kind of knowledge is more harmful than ignorance. Today DIVORCES ARE ON THE RAPID INCREASE! About every fourth home, over the United States, becomes a divorce victim today. In Los Angeles it is one in three or less. Premarital experience, becoming far more nearly universal than is generally known, is literally shattering young lives by the millions!
The New Campus "Morality"
Of all places where one would expect the TRUE knowledge to be disseminated, the very first should be the colleges and the universities. And yet the campuses housing these future leaders of the world are the very places where this swing to IMmorality seems to be most prevalent. A newspaper headline said: "STUDENTS IN SEARCH OF A NEW MORALITY." Their "search" is leading directly to promiscuous IMmorality. University students are saying bluntly that with the waning of church and parental influence, "we decide for ourselves on codes of morality." A later chapter will bring these codes into sharper focus. I am not only Christ's minister, charged with the moral responsibility of showing God's people their sins, and answerable for the commission to proclaim the RIGHT WAYS of GOD — I am also the chancellor of three colleges, two in the United States, and one in Britain. I am, therefore, quite concerned with the conditions developing on the campuses of the western world. And therein lies the impetus which has finally resulted in the publishing of the present volume - as will be presently explained. Accompanying this trend into moral erosion on representative campuses, is the drift into intellectual materialism. An article in a magazine of 14 1/2-million copies circulation subcaption asked WHY so many students "end up without any genuine belief in God or the moral values." These thousands of students — future world leaders among them — are being fed on the prevailing diet of crass materialism, with true moral convictions largely discarded. The result? Unbelievable thousands of premarital pregnancies; frustrations and broken lives; a shocking rise in mental breakdowns; and an astonishing number of campus suicides. Those are the FRUITS! Accompanying this moral revolution, too, has come a constant weakening of religious conviction, and a watering down of devotion. And, paradoxically, as this magazine article stated, "a new interest in religious values and ideas is sweeping the campuses." But this religious interest is, primarily, curiosity, and interest in ideas, but not in hearing or obeying the TRUTH! Of course life on college campuses — especially co-ed — inevitably leads to romances and marriages. That is normal, and, under right conditions, as it should be. But, on typical campuses, all is not as it should be! An appalling percentage of these marriages results in divorce. And divorce puts the participants through the wringer of emotional anguish, lonesomeness, and frustration. It results too often in broken lives, and the juvenile delinquency of child victims.
Where, and WHY Results Are Different
On our three Ambassador College campuses things are radically different! Students come to these colleges to learn the TRUE VALUES! In their very first year they receive the other half of this needed knowledge — the half these sex-book authors do not, themselves, understand. These students learn the Creator's PURPOSES; they receive the knowledge of God-designed right uses. And — yes, romances do, of course, occur on these cam was captioned: "Is God Leaving the Campus?" The campuses. But results are altogether different — and most happily so! There have been NO DIVORCES! The factors leading to the establishment of this course of instruction in the original Ambassador College explain WHY this book had to be written. Personally, I had learned much about the tragic need of this instruction during the previous years of my ministry. Christians are commanded literally to live by every Word of God — the entirety of the BIBLE! But often they need experienced help in applying Biblical teachings and principles to specific problems. My years of ministry have involved a great deal of counseling about personal problems. And marital and sex problems ranked high among those brought to me. For many years I had known, passively, that the real, though unmentioned, cause of some 90% of divorces was sexual incompatibility resulting from ignorance and wrong attitudes. Of course its legal terminology in divorce actions usually is "mental cruelty." Then in 1949 a certain case induced special research of marital conditions in general. This brought acute awareness, with emphasis, of the appalling TRAGEDY existent in a majority of all marriages! People generally were entering into the marriage relationship with no knowledge of the right attitude toward marriage in general and sex in particular. They were unaware of the divinely appointed PURPOSES of sex, and ignorant of vital physical details. Ambassador College was founded to teach, not merely how to earn a living, but how to LIVE! Its motto has always been "Recapture TRUE VALUES." People entering the married state ignorant of God's truth about sex do not know how to live! Such unhappy marriages assuredly have not recaptured TRUE values! Thus it was brought forcibly to the attention of the faculty the necessity of a course that would correct this tragic situation in the lives of Ambassador students. On first thought it was assumed that such a course should be taught by our college physician, Dr. Ralph E. Merrill. Dr. Merrill was a physician of wide experience and high standing in the medical profession. In collaboration with Dr. Merrill a careful survey was made of the situation. We were reminded that Ambassador policy recognizes the Biblical revelation as the FOUNDATION of ALL knowledge — and as the approach to humanly acquired knowledge. In no area, we immediately realized, is this more true than in this field of sex and marriage. God designed sex anatomy, and set in motion sex stimuli. God was the original Great Educator — and it was God who personally instructed our first parents about sex. Two of the Ten Commandments safeguard the right uses of sex in marriage. The Ten Commandments constitute an invisible SPIRITUAL law. Yet they involve physical actions. Sex and marriage fall within the SPIRITUAL and MORAL category — even though they involve physical usage. Dr. Merrill and the faculty decided that the teaching of this subject is the prerogative of the ministers of Jesus Christ. Only the true minister of God has the proper spiritual approach to this delicate yet vitally important subject. There was, of course, close collaboration with Dr. Merrill, especially in the area of physical and biological details. For this important course there was no textbook available which we felt we could endorse and place in the hands of our students. Of the vast accumulation of books on the subject of sex and marriage, there was, of course, a wealth of factual physical knowledge. Yet even these authors and "authorities" disagreed on many points. But none seemed to recognize a Creator — none approached the subject from the Biblical foundation — none realized fully God's PURPOSES — none viewed the subject from the viewpoint of God's revealed right attitude. None seemed to understand the TRUE morality of the Creator. There was only one answer. It was necessary to produce an adequate textbook of our own! This was to be done as a combined effort between Dr. Merrill, certain of the faculty, and the Graduate School of Theology. Our beloved Dr. Merrill died in 1958 before this work could be completed, though he had contributed the factual physical material needed for the book. Collaboration was continued, however, with his successors as college physicians. Meanwhile, the course was taught as a collaboration between college physician and myself. Since the establishment of this Principles of Living course, beginning the 1949-50 school year, including classes in general family relations and child rearing, hundreds of students have married who previously had taken this course. There has not been one instance, in all that number, of unhappiness due to sex incompatibility. There has not been a single divorce. Jesus said, "By their fruits ye shall know them." The fruits — the actual results — through the centuries, have shown that ignorance of what is contained in this book has led to widespread unhappiness, anguish and tragedy. And knowledge of what you are about to read, contrariwise, has paved the way to ideal happiness and joy in the lives of those who possess and follow it.
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