Radner on Reilly

     "Reilly’s story, then, is inadequate.  As such, it undermines the credibility of many of his judgments.  Would that it didn’t!  Despite contextual missteps, Reilly rightly hammers home the deep logical and ethical pathology of the new moral consensus.  The fear of imposing any moral limits has led to the dismembering of human community and individual dignity.  This ought to be of profound concern to everyone.  It remains incomprehensible that advocates of sexual liberation within our churches have simply failed to take this seriously and oppose it openly and vigorously—so craven have they become to the advancement of their own personal interests.

     "In the end, Reilly’s abbreviated framework is inadequate because original sin has been airbrushed out.  It is in facing the realities of embedded disorders, pathologies, deformities, and evil that the [Aristotelian] ‘natural’ can best be understood.  The movements Reilly criticizes are marked by a failure to confront embedded sin honestly and self-critically.  That he deliberately avoids dealing with sin is unfortunate.  Ultimately, it is not nature with which we have to deal, but the God of nature—indeed, not only ultimately but immediately.  We must not suppose that, because Christian arguments have no purchase on cultural decision-making, we should mute their most explicitly Christian elements."

     Ephraim Radner, "Sin's nature," First things no. 247 (November 2014):  66 (65-66).