Joshua Harris: You Can’t Escape The Fall

A lot of Internet ink has been spilled about author/pastor, Joshua Harris, so I figured I might as well add to the torrent. And given my bent, I’ll orient it toward apologetics. Harris recently decided to jettison the ideas in a book he wrote about sexual purity and dating in the 90s, and also decided that the Christian faith he thought inspired those ideas must be jettisoned as well. The marriage of 20 years based on the book’s message, that’s over too. In his declaration of apostasy he also apologized to the “LGBTQ+ community,” which means he’s embracing the moral system of modern liberal secularism. He’ll get plenty of praise from the usual suspects for that move, but there are some lessons here, elephant in the room kind of lessons. I haven’t read the book, but I think what I’ve read based on what’s transpired in his life is accurate.

For Harris sexual purity before marriage (he was only 21 when he wrote the book, and how much wisdom can a 21 year old have?) became the sin qua none of the Christian life. The title, I Kissed Dating Goodbye gives you a sense of how he defined purity. Any kind of physical contact with the opposite sex is exclusively to be saved for marriage, even kissing. He argued that this commitment to purity would lead to a better, maybe wonderful, marriage because impurity, or sexual compromise before marriage would lead to bad consequences, both sexually and relationally. This mindset was not unique to Harris; I’ve heard and read it many times over the years. The problem is that reality doesn’t work that way, thus the elephants. Let’s take these one at a time.

1. C.S. Lewis and Tim Keller have argued that sin isn’t only doing the wrong thing, but turning good things into ultimate things. Another word for that is idolatry. Something evidently good in God’s economy, like purity, can become an idol. Being sexually pure is far better than sexual promiscuity, what used to be called fornication, but sexual purity isn’t what Christianity is all about. Living as fallen beings in a fallen world among other fallen beings is messy, to say the least, and sex is very messy, in or out of marriage. There is no key to marital or sexual bliss within marriage, and what you may have done prior to marriage doesn’t determine what will happen within it. I think Harris missed this obvious point. Sex before or outside of marriage is sinful and wrong, but how each couple endures that challenge in practice will differ. Our trust is not in our will power, but the mercy and grace of our Savior God. Even our very best works, or resisting our worst, cannot gain God’s favor. Harris it seems waded into a legalism that forgot this.
2. Another elephant is Truth, a big old invisible one that people keep running into but deny exists in our postmodern, relativistic culture. The issue of Truth isn’t addressed by Harris as he rejects Christianity. His leaving the faith seems to be a postmodern one, based more on his feelings and experiences than what might be true, or not. The problem for Harris is that something is True. The question for Harris is, what is True. If it is not Christianity, what is? Which leads to the next elephant.
3. This one is as invisible as the others to most people, and unfortunately to many Christians as well. I first learned it from Tim Keller’s book The Reason for God, and I call it, “the necessity of the alternative.” When people, like Harris, decide to leave the Christian faith, they tend to think they are moving into a place where they don’t have to commit to any worldview, to any system of belief. As if there were some neutral place they can exist without any faith commitments, a place where “faith” and “belief” is not necessary. This is, to not put too fine a point on it, ridiculous. Some people, I’ve learned, don’t like when I use such terminology because, I think to them, it comes off as arrogant, or at lest too overly confident. But the point isn’t what I believe, but the indisputable fact that we all have to believe something! I’m not sure why this is so difficult to understand, but I do know where it comes from. Our Western secular culture continually bombards us with the assumption (never argued or explicated) that such a neutral place exists where we don’t need faith, or have to believe things. Faith or belief are only for religious people who have to believe things, the implication is in spite of the lack of evidence, and mostly, right in the face of evidence to the contrary.

Joshua Harris turned Christianity into something it is not, then rejected it, for what? He doesn’t say. Even in his moment of confusion or transition, he is embracing some view of reality rather than the Christian one, something he believes to be true, even if he might call it agnosticism. That is a faith commitment, and a very sad one for a person who once claimed to serve the crucified and risen Lord of the universe. We can only pray that he repents and returns to the Truth, the Way, and the Life, Jesus of Nazareth.