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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.

Harry Blamires (1916- ) started writing through the encouragement of C. S. Lewis, his tutor at Oxford. He has taught both in England and the United States as a professor of English and English literature. He is the author of more than thirty books in various genres including theology, education, English literature, and fiction.

Opposition to the Church is nothing new. One tactic of the modern age, however, is to attack the very foundation of the Church, calling her very existence into question. Such critics should be answered—not by clever slogans or technical language, but with the common sense reality that the Church is God’s idea—not man’s.

“. . . We must not talk—and we must not allow critics of the Church to talk—as though the Apostles sat round a table in the early days and one of them said, “I propose we have a Church,” and another said, “I second that,” and it was carried nem. con. [without opposition]. For the Church was not manufactured to a human plan. The Church happened. God made it, not man. He came to earth and left the Church behind him.

Therefore to talk of not seeing the need for the Church is like talking of not seeing the need for the moon. The Church, like the moon, is not a human project, but a divine creation. It is before us. God put it there. Speculators might argue that, in his omniscience and wisdom, God might have thought up some different instrument of salvation, just as he might have devised a different means of lightening our darkness at night. But where does that kind of speculation get us? We are not concerned with what God did not do: we are concerned with what He did. And one of the things he did was to come to earth and establish the Church.1″

Footnotes :

1 Harry Blamires, The Christian Mind: How Should a Christian Think? (Ann Arbor: Servant Publications, 1997), 119.

Aiden Wilson Tozer (1897 – 1963) was a minister of the Christian and Missionary Alliance who served for almost five decades in the United States and Canada. He spent thirty-one years at Chicago’s Southside Alliance Church, whose congregation increased tenfold under Tozer’s preaching. Among his many books are The Pursuit of God, Knowledge of the Holy, and Success and the Christian. In this passage he talks about the paradoxical nature of genuine Christianity.

“A real Christian is an odd number anyway. He feels supreme love for One whom he has never seen, talks familiarly every day to Someone he cannot see, expects to go to heaven on the virtue of Another, empties himself in order to be full, admits he is wrong so he can be declared right, goes down in order to get up, is strongest when he is weakest, richest when he is poorest, and happiest when he feels worst. He dies so he can live, forsakes in order to have, gives away so he can keep, sees the invisible, hears the inaudible, and knows that which passeth knowledge. And all the while he may be confounding his critics by his unbelievable practicality: his farm may be the most productive, his business the best managed, and his mechanical skill the sharpest of anyone in his neighborhood.1″

Footnotes

1 A. W. Tozer, The Root of the Righteous (Harrisburg, PA: Christian Publications, 1955), 156.