Q. In your discussion of why Jesus doesn’t mention same sex intercourse, you say he refers to it indirectly in Mk. 7 when he says what comes out of a person that is prohibited includes adultery and sexual sins of other sorts. Surprisingly, to me, you do not discuss Mt. 19 where Jesus tells his disciples that there only alternative to heterosexual monogamy is celibacy in singleness— being a eunuch for the kingdom. Why not discussion of that text?
A. To be honest, I should have! Thanks for the reminder (too late for the book though unfortunately).
Q. The appeal to experience, sometimes even spiritual experience is often made to justify endorsing same sex relations within the church. Sometimes it even takes the form ‘the Holy Spirit has told me….’. The normal way I answer this is that you can tell when the Spirit is speaking or guiding you and when not, when you realize the Spirit is God’s Spirit, and the Spirit is not going to tell you anything that flatly contradicts God’s Word. Ultimately, it really is an issue of the authority of Scripture, which should norm our views of experience, reason, and tradition since the Bible is God’s Word.
When people say to me ‘I cannot deny my experience (including I suppose my inclinations)’ my response is— your experiences may be very genuine, and in some ways pleasurable, but in fact the Bible is all the time telling us to resist various of our inclinations and to critique our experiences since we have as fallen persons an infinite capacity for self-justification of our behavior. It is not a loving thing to baptize someone’s sin and call it good, just because they enjoy it and think it makes them happy. And frankly the instability of same sex relationships even since same sex marriage became legal, should tell us something. No relationship that
cannot turn a man and a woman into a husband and a wife with the potential to become a father and a mother is a marriage from a Biblical point of view. The church should not be in the business of redefining the meaning of the words Christian marriage. How do you deal with these kinds of arguments which I know you keep hearing?
A. I think you put it very well and I make the same points. Thank you.
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