Homosexual activism

Albert Mohler: Evangelicals and the Gay Moral Revolution

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R. Albert Mohler Jr.

In the essay below, Dr. Mohler is speaking to an Evangelical Christian readership but many of his observations apply to all Christians. The normalization of homosexual behavior is a moral revolution Mohler writes and not one that Christians can join and remain faithful to their Christian faith. He’s right about that.

There will be pressure to adopt to this new morality as well. We even see it on the edges of the Orthodox Church with the Facebook group Listening: Breaking the Silence on Sexuality within the Orthodox Church for example. Who ever thought that some Orthodox would drag this battle of the culture war into the Church?

Mohler takes the Evangelicals to task for their sloppy handing of the homosexual question. I’m not sure we Orthodox have been sloppy, but we have been complacent. The homosexual moral revolution is at bottom a question of anthropology, what it means to be a man or woman and thus a human being. We Orthodox know some things about human anthropology but we’ve been asleep at the switch.

My conviction is that we may be in a period of social unrest similar to what the Early Church experienced that caused the the forging of the great dogmatic truths like Nicea and others (I touch on this in my essay: Orthodox Leadership in a Brave New World). Great unrest imposes suffering, but it also can unleash creativity.

There’s a lot to be done. We have to resist the attempts to homosexualize the Church from within; teach that the object of one’s sexual desire is not a primary constituent of self-identity; develop our anthropology to answer the homosexual questions with better insight and compassion; learn how to help men and woman properly deal with same-sex desires, and more.

Mohler reproves his Evangelical followers for failing to meet the challenge of homosexuality face to face, and by this I presume he means that some Evangelicals prefer not to have dealings with homosexuals at all. That’s not an Orthodox problem I think because we have an easier time drawing the distinction between people and their behaviors, including their sins. We have a better practical sense that not much more than God’s mercy separates us from the next guy.

Unfortunately, the neo-Episcopalian wing like those on the Facebook group exhibit a deep immaturity about the the human person and same-sex desire. Their immaturity probably derives from moral confusion, particularly defining such concepts as tolerance and compassion in terms of the dominant culture rather than the moral tradition. They craft an apologetic that uses the language of the moral tradition to endorse behaviors that contradict its teaching, yet they refuse to admit that the contradiction even exists.

That’s why when they collapse the distinction between person and behavior they think they fulfill the law of love, and why they believe that insisting on moral parity between opposite-sex and same-sex marriage is pleasing to God.

If their confusion is allowed to prevail, then the dominant culture will trump the moral tradition and the deep anthropological understanding that shaped the language and makes the distinction comprehensible will be lost. So will the important pastoral work that depends on it. The Orthodox will become like the liberal Episcopalians except for our Eastern flair and better looking vestments.

Source: Albert Mohler.com

The Christian church has faced no shortage of challenges in its 2,000-year history. But now it’s facing a challenge that is shaking its foundations: homosexuality.

To many onlookers, this seems strange or even tragic. Why can’t Christians just join the revolution?

And make no mistake, it is a moral revolution. As philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah of Princeton University demonstrated in his recent book, “The Honor Code,” moral revolutions generally happen over a long period of time. But this is hardly the case with the shift we’ve witnessed on the question of homosexuality.

In less than a single generation, homosexuality has gone from something almost universally understood to be sinful, to something now declared to be the moral equivalent of heterosexuality—and deserving of both legal protection and public encouragement. Theo Hobson, a British theologian, has argued that this is not just the waning of a taboo. Instead, it is a moral inversion that has left those holding the old morality now accused of nothing less than “moral deficiency.”

The liberal churches and denominations have an easy way out of this predicament. They simply accommodate themselves to the new moral reality. By now the pattern is clear: These churches debate the issue, with conservatives arguing to retain the older morality and liberals arguing that the church must adapt to the new one. Eventually, the liberals win and the conservatives lose. Next, the denomination ordains openly gay candidates or decides to bless same-sex unions.

This is a route that evangelical Christians committed to the full authority of the Bible cannot take. Since we believe that the Bible is God’s revealed word, we cannot accommodate ourselves to this new morality. We cannot pretend as if we do not know that the Bible clearly teaches that all homosexual acts are sinful, as is all human sexual behavior outside the covenant of marriage. We believe that God has revealed a pattern for human sexuality that not only points the way to holiness, but to true happiness.

Thus we cannot accept the seductive arguments that the liberal churches so readily adopt. The fact that same-sex marriage is a now a legal reality in several states means that we must further stipulate that we are bound by scripture to define marriage as the union of one man and one woman—and nothing else.

We do so knowing that most Americans once shared the same moral assumptions, but that a new world is coming fast. We do not have to read the polls and surveys; all we need to do is to talk to our neighbors or listen to the cultural chatter.

In this most awkward cultural predicament, evangelicals must be excruciatingly clear that we do not speak about the sinfulness of homosexuality as if we have no sin. As a matter of fact, it is precisely because we have come to know ourselves as sinners and of our need for a savior that we have come to faith in Jesus Christ. Our greatest fear is not that homosexuality will be normalized and accepted, but that homosexuals will not come to know of their own need for Christ and the forgiveness of their sins.

This is not a concern that is easily expressed in sound bites. But it is what we truly believe.

It is now abundantly clear that evangelicals have failed in so many ways to meet this challenge. We have often spoken about homosexuality in ways that are crude and simplistic. We have failed to take account of how tenaciously sexuality comes to define us as human beings. We have failed to see the challenge of homosexuality as a Gospel issue. We are the ones, after all, who are supposed to know that the Gospel of Jesus Christ is the only remedy for sin, starting with our own.

We have demonstrated our own form of homophobia—not in the way that activists have used that word, but in the sense that we have been afraid to face this issue where it is most difficult . . . face to face.

My hope is that evangelicals are ready now to take on this challenge in a new and more faithful way. We really have no choice, for we are talking about our own brothers and sisters, our own friends and neighbors, or maybe the young person in the next pew.

There is no escaping the fact that we are living in the midst of a moral revolution. And yet, it is not the world around us that is being tested, so much as the believing church. We are about to find out just how much we believe the Gospel we so eagerly preach.

An Insider’s View of the Collapse of the PCUSA

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This quote reflects Calvinist theology, but the moral point the author makes is applicable to all Christian communions:

“On the surface, it is not obvious how affirming and defending the imputation of Christ’s righteousness adds weight to ordaining only candidates who affirm and try to live by biblical standards of morality. But just as New York City experimented with the policy described as “broken windows” and discovered that cracking down on petty public nuisances could also reduce harder crimes, so the PCUSA may be discovering that once you lighten your grip on seemingly arcane doctrines you also lose the ability to enforce any sort of doctrinal or moral standard.

[…]

In fact, the reactions from proponents of gay ordination very much reflect that for them the question was not whether the church would adhere to God’s word but whether the denomination would find a place for victims of discrimination.”

Source: First Things

What Barth and Niebuhr Could Not Paper Over

By Darryl Hart

With the vote last Tuesday by Twin Cities Presbytery in favor (205-56) of Amendment 10-A, the Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A. now has sufficient approval from a majority of presbyteries to remove provisions in its constitution that prohibited the ordination of sexually active homosexuals.

Gone is the language of “fidelity and chastity” and in its place comes the human relations discourse of competency—“calling, gifts, preparation, and suitability” as well as “ability and commitment.” For both sides of the debate, this is a momentous decision. But for others who have watched the deterioration of mainline Protestantism since at least the 1920s, this decision hardly comes as a surprise.

For almost 150 years, the PCUSA has endeavored to be an inclusive church. Definitions of such inclusivity have not been so easy to find. In 1869 when the northern Old School and New School Presbyterians—divided since 1837—reunited, they did so at least in part to achieve in the ecclesiastical realm what Appomattox had accomplished recently for the United States. If Presbyterians were going to serve a diverse and geographically extended nation, according to the rationale for reunion, they could not harbor the theological divisions that had caused the split three decades earlier.

A little more than fifty years later, during the disputes between conservatives and liberals, the church again affirmed inclusivity and tolerance—except for the nay-sayers of unity who contended as much for the purity as the peace of the church. The PCUSA showed no disapproval of the liberals from New York who had written the Auburn Affirmation, a document that pleaded for room for diverse interpretations of the Bible and the Westminster Confession within the constitutional provisions of the church. The motto of both liberal and evangelistically minded Presbyterians was, “doctrine divides, ministry unites.”

Then in 1967 the PCUSA solidified these consolidating impulses by ratifying a new confession, the Confession of 1967, and by including several other catechisms and creeds within its Book of Confessions. By adding new confessional documents and by embracing a Barthian doctrine of Scripture that for critics too readily distinguished the Word of God from the words of scripture, the new constitution provided ample wiggle room to continue to affirm and empower a diversity of doctrinal convictions and practices within the PCUSA.

From the perspective of these trends, which ran away from doctrinal definition based on a firm commitment to the infallibility of Scripture, the passage of Amendment A is hardly surprising. In fact, the reactions from proponents of gay ordination very much reflect that for them the question was not whether the church would adhere to God’s word but whether the denomination would find a place for victims of discrimination.

According to Trice Gibbons, Co-Moderator of More Light Presbyterians, “My heart is full as I think of all of those children of God who were hurt, who persevered, who left, who stayed and who worked so hard to make the Presbyterian Church (USA) truly reflect the wildly inclusive love of Jesus Christ—too many to name.”

Michael J. Adee, also of More Light, stated, “It is necessary and absolutely OK to celebrate this moment in the life and witness of our Church, the end of categorical discrimination against God’s LGBT children which was wrong in the first place.” He added, “what a journey this work for justice and equality has been.”

For those who trust Scripture as the font of eternal life and regard the Reformed tradition as a worthy expression of biblical truth, this development in the PCUSA is a sad day. It is also an eye-opening one for those evangelicals who have remained in the mainline denomination. The argument for the better part of a century has been that the Presbyterian Church could maintain a faithful biblical witness without being overly scrupulous about the details of its theology—from the doctrine of Scripture to the five points of Calvinism.

On the surface, it is not obvious how affirming and defending the imputation of Christ’s righteousness adds weight to ordaining only candidates who affirm and try to live by biblical standards of morality. But just as New York City experimented with the policy described as “broken windows” and discovered that cracking down on petty public nuisances could also reduce harder crimes, so the PCUSA may be discovering that once you lighten your grip on seemingly arcane doctrines you also lose the ability to enforce any sort of doctrinal or moral standard.

The era of neo-orthodoxy and the heady tomes of Karl Barth and Reinhold Niebuhr appeared to steer the mainline Protestant churches from the excesses of liberal Protestantism. However, that theological era came to an end during the 1960s when the theologies of liberation and identity politics pushed aside the theological and ethical reflection of dead white men of European descent.

But what is now obvious is that the right-turn of neo-orthodoxy did little to correct a much deeper problem, one stemming from the contradictions of ecclesiastical inclusion. The United States is, of course, a free country, and communions like the PCUSA are free to be as inclusive as the nation whose name they bear. But other Americans are also free to wonder if such a church can still credibly claim to speak for God.

Darryl Hart, a member of the Orthodox Presbyterian Church, is a visiting professor of history at Hillsdale College and the author of From Billy Graham to Sarah Palin: Evangelicals and the Betrayal of American Conservatism (Eerdmans, forthcoming).

RESOURCES

The Auburn Affirmation

Chaplains in no-win situation on ‘don’t ask’

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From the article:

Confronted with such a dim future, many chaplains might retire early, resign their commissions in protest, or decline to serve in the first place. More drastically, the bishops, boards or other religious judicatories whose approval is indispensable for clergy to be commissioned as officers might withdraw their official endorsements and pull their chaplains from military service.

In a recent letter to the Armed Forces Chaplains Board, my own bishop, Metropolitan Jonah (Paffhausen) of the Orthodox Church in America, has promised to do precisely that, if any of the two dozen priests under his care “were in any way forced to minister the sacraments” to active, unrepentant homosexuals, or “forced to teach that such behavior is good or acceptable, or prohibited from denouncing such behavior as sinful and self-destructive,” or regarded as purveyors of “prejudice” or “hate language.” It’s at once inspiring and reassuring as a retired chaplain to know that Metropolitan Jonah has, in the peculiar parlance of troops in combat, “got our back.”

Note: Fr. Alexander Webster is an adviser to the American Orthodox Institute.

Source: Stars and Stripes

By Fr. Alexander F.C. Webster

President Barack Obama’s initiative to rescind the “don’t ask, don’t tell” statute of 1993 will, if Congress yields to him later this year, shred the social and moral fabric of our armed forces. The experiment will also test the mettle of the chaplain corps in each of the military services — Army, Air Force and Navy (including the Marine Corps and Coast Guard). Fortunately for the nation and its military defense, many chaplains and their civilian faith group leaders are beginning, at last, to push back on the issue.

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MINNEAPOLIS: Presbyterian gay measures criticized by visiting (Orthodox) priest

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HT: Virtue Online

July 09, 2010

An Orthodox Church theologian who was invited to greet the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) has criticized its approval of non-celibate gay and lesbian clergy.

The Reverend Siarhei Hardun of Belarus said that vote and efforts to approve gay marriage looked to him like an attempt to “invent a new religion — a sort of modern paganism.”

Hardun added, “When people say that they are led and guided by the Holy Spirit to do it, I wonder if it is the same Holy Spirit that inspired the Bible.”

The Orthodox priest’s remarks drew applause from conservative Presbyterians who made similar arguments at the gathering in Minneapolis.

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Freedom of religion devolves to an “anorexic freedom of worship”

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Chuck Colson sounds the alarm about a shift in US policy first noticed by The U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom in its 2010 annual report. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton replaced the term “freedom of religion” with “freedom of worship” in a December, 2009 speech at Georgetown University. President Obama first used “freedom of worship” while remarking on the Ft. Hood shooting in November, 2009 and repeated it on trips to China and Japan (source: Christianity Today).

Is it deliberate? Of course it is. Public language by diplomats, particularly when repeated, signals a shift in policy; either that or incompetence in the White House (also a possibility but never with religion or homosexuality which the administration approaches with unmatched earnestness). Colson’s warning is sound and bears consideration. The George Weigel article Colson references in his talk is reproduced below the video.

Ethics and Public Policy Center

The Erosion of Religious Freedom

By George Weigel
Wednesday, February 17, 2010

Connoisseurs of political kamikaze runs will long debate what finished off Martha Coakley in the recent Massachusetts election to fill the seat Edward M. Kennedy held for 47 years.
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