This past Saturday evening, College Church in partnership with the Culture Campaign hosted another God Sex and the Culture War Forum, this time on the topic of homosexuality. Our speaker was Stephen Bennett, a former homosexual and now a husband and father to two children. He spoke on coming out of homosexuality and the truly alarming changes currently taking place in our society as a result of the advancement of gay rights.
For everyone who is concerned with the safety of children, let me relay a major point of Stephen’s message. Your own children, nephews, nieces, grandchildren—kids in their most formative years, sit in the crosshairs of the homosexual agenda. By means of the media, public education, and with increasing measure governmental policies, young people are being taught to regard biblical teaching as bigoted nonsense that promotes hatred, while exploration of homosexuality is extolled as fully appropriate, fashionable, and open-minded. What shall we do? I think the following insight from Diarmaid MacCulloch, a homosexual himself, provides some direction.
Diarmaid MacCulloch (1951 – ) is Professor of the History of the Church at the University of Oxford and an expert in the Reformation. Though he is a practicing homosexual, he has no patience for Protestants who claim that the Bible permits this practice. He puts the question properly and pointedly: Do you affirm homosexuality or do you affirm the Bible? You cannot do both.
“Protestantism is faced with . . . [a] momentous challenge to its assumptions of authority: the increasing acceptance in western societies of homosexual practice and identity as one valid and unremarkable choice among the many open to human beings. This is an issue of biblical authority. Despite much well-intentioned theological fancy footwork to the contrary, it is difficult to see the Bible as expressing anything else but disapproval of homosexual activity, let alone having any conception of a homosexual identity. The only alternatives are either to try to cleave to patterns of life and assumptions set out in the Bible or to say that in this respect, as in much else, the Bible is simply wrong.1”
What will it be? The Body of Christ can continue to sit on its hands as the gay agenda advances in our families and churches, or instead we can actively advance God’s kingdom. We can promote this advancement by educating ourselves on the issues and then carefully presenting Christ’s gospel to them. Indeed, this must include authentic love toward homosexual people, with a thoughtful balance of grace and truth. The natural consequence of all this is not only the moral condition of our next generation, it will also reveal the functional role of God’s Word in our lives, whether we regard it as truth or “simply wrong.”
For more info about this forum, visit http: www.culturecampaign.com
Footnotes :
1 Diarmaid MacCulloch, Reformation: Europe’s House Divided 1490-1700 (London: Allen Lane, 2003), 705.
