• I’m writing this to equip us. I believe this is a responsibility that falls to all pastors in this particular hour. I encourage you to read through to the end (it will take 5 mins), as the final comments are important. Thanks.
• A friend asks why I write about homosexuality when a much bigger problem in the church is a growing indifference to pre-marital sex. Good question. The answer lies in how homosexuality, as a matter of biblical interpretation, appears to have very quickly redrawn lines of orthodoxy that most biblically-minded people thought were fixed. Homosexuality has exposed a rift in Evangelicalism, between those who believe the Bible has been misread on the issue for 2,000 years, and those who believe it should be read today as it has been read in the past. This is a bigger deal than it might seem, a little like being told your spouse is secretly married to someone else in another state. What you had taken to be true all your life, what everyone around you had taken to be true, is suddenly considered by many around you to be false. And now you are left wondering which truths are reliable, which are not, and how to tell the difference and get on with your life. There’s a great deal here to discuss, but for the purposes of this note I’ll touch on a single aspect of the discussion.
• At this point in history, whenever someone tells you the Bible is just now being rightly understood for the first time, you should be suspicious. Homosexuality was pervasive, and widely accepted, in the ancient world when the Bible was being written, and has, of course, been present in all societies since then. In fact, Plato (in Symposium) argued that love between a man and a man was nobler and more spiritual than that between a man and a woman. So when Paul writes to the Corinthians, for example, “Do not be deceived: neither the sexually immoral, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor men who practice homosexuality… will inherit the kingdom of God”(1 Cor 6:9) it becomes very difficult to imagine that he doesn’t know exactly what he is saying to a world that is fully aware of all the issues — issues present in the local culture for centuries by that time. Yet this is what commentators favorable to homosexuality are suggesting, that Paul meant to forbid only one particular kind of homosexual practice, and that his contemporaries misunderstood him as offering a blanket condemnation. And by “contemporaries” you must include the early Church fathers who wrote on homosexuality in the centuries immediately following Paul’s epistles, all of whom simply assumed the Scripture condemned homosexuality of every kind, and so wrote of it as sin [I’ll include a list of those fathers in the longer piece for the website].
• We should stop and think about this. It’s fair to ask why God would see fit to leave his people in confusion for 2,000 years on a matter of ongoing social and personal relevance. David Wells, an emeritus theologian at Gordon-Conwell seminary, once wondered this about German higher criticism of the New Testament: is it likely that a small group of scholars living 1,900 years after the Lord’s death are the only ones who really understand the New Testament? C.S. Lewis’s comment in an essay called Fern Seed and Elephants is even more to the point: “The idea that any man or writer should be opaque to those who lived in the same culture, spoke the same language, shared the same habitual imagery and unconscious assumptions, and yet be transparent to those who have none of these advantages, is in my opinion preposterous.”
• Finally, and without discounting the necessity of the discussion above, I think there’s a lot of smoke being blown on this issue. I suspect all that has happened is a new generation of writers and leaders has arisen that is, for whatever reason (and I think reasons vary), cares more about the voice of the culture than the voice of God. Read Romans 1:21a and then v.25. It’s a generation that has grown up with economic, material, and spiritual comfort and is unwilling to embrace the discomfort that would come with faithfulness to God and ancient orthodoxy. All ministers who commit to speaking difficult truth know the subconscious, ominous feeling of impending conflict with people they care about. We all dread that feeling. But some ministers begin to imagine the pain can be avoided, and suddenly their minds are open to new theological understanding. Hence the reinterpretation of the Bible to suit the moment. Pastors speak passionately about feeling the pain of their outcast homosexual friends, but I wonder (and I know something about pastors) if it isn’t their own pain that troubles them — the pain of being hated by people they genuinely love. It’s only when we accept that it is the Gospel of grace itself that makes such pain and conflict necessary that we begin to live the cruciform life that Jesus lived; the cruciform life that Jesus calls us to.