Yes, the church is the bride of Christ, and Christ will be united to His bride. Consequently, Christian marriage, including its physical consummation, is an image of Christ and the church. But proclaiming these beautiful and profound biblical truths is now enough to get Christians mobbed by other (ostensible) Christians.
Pastor Josh Butler was just canceled by The Gospel Coalition, which caved to an online backlash against him over an article he wrote. The offending essay was erased from the group’s website, people who had praised the forthcoming book it was adapted from were pressured into withdrawing their endorsements, and Butler resigned from the newly launched Keller Center for Cultural Apologetics.
Yet Butler’s core claim that “A husband and wife’s life of faithful love is designed to point to greater things, but so is their sexual union!” is entirely orthodox. He is guilty here of nothing worse than expounding this in the sometimes-awkward style of a pastor who is eager to share theological insights in relatable language. This enthusiasm led to some cringey prose — “Christ penetrates his church with the generative seed of his Word and the life-giving presence of his Spirit, which takes root within her and grows to bring new life into the world” — but no heresy, let alone the blasphemy his many angry critics accused him of.
Pastor Butler’s cancellation led the Orthodox writer Rod Dreher to pronounce himself befuddled at all of this outcry over something that is “pretty basic for Orthodox and Catholics.” However,
