When Adam and Eve failed by refusing to trust their future to the word of their Maker, the rightful Twoist structure of God and the creation became a cosmic war, between the forces of evil and the promised seed of the woman. Through further insignificant elements--the individual Abraham, the tiny nation of Israel, the 300 under Gideon, and finally though this newly-born baby in a food trough in around 2BC, God was working his plan of redemption, though in seemingly unimpressive ways. Since the project had gone south, through the failure of human beings at a significant moment in history, there was no “joy from the world,” only the funeral dirge of human failure. In all honesty, we need help from the outside, from the divine Other, from the new Adam who paid the price of human sin by bearing its punishment on a small hill outside Jerusalem.

The early Christians were faced with a similar situation. The first century Roman historian, Tacitus, charged them with the first recorded accusation of hate speech in Church history: “haters of humanity.” They breached the pagan pax romana.

We must now ask, “When is a culture finally 'given over'”? According to Paul, this occurs when the leading cultural institutions “exchange” their public confession of God as the Creator for interfaith divinized nature; when their worship of the immortal God is “exchanged” for the worship of mortal man and animals; and when their public legitimation of “natural” sexuality is “exchanged” for the promotion of “unnatural” sexual expressions (Rom 1:23, 25, 26). At that point, says Paul, “they are given over” (Rom. 1:24, 26, 28).