Timothy Keller speaks at Movement Day Global Cities at the Jacob Javits Center in New York City, October 27, 2016. | The Christian Post/Leonardo Blair
What's often referred to as "purity culture" is not the same thing as remaining sexually abstinent outside of marriage, though many conflate the two, according to Tim Keller, founder and former pastor of Redeemer Church in New York City.
Keller explained in a Facebook post that in the early church, the Christian sexual ethic — that "sex was only for within a mutual, whole-self-giving, super-consensual life-long covenant" — was "revolutionary," given the prevailing Greco-Roman ethic of the day.
"It was based on a radical egalitarian principle that the husband’s body belonged to the wife, and the wife’s to the husband (1 Corinthians 7:4). That meant that anyone who within marriage exploited or abused was violating the Christian sex ethic just as much or more as those who had sex outside of marriage," he said.