What You Believe Matters! The Trinity and Sexual Identity

This week, in an interview with the Huffington Post, T.D. Jakes came out in favor of homosexual marriage and the concept of LGBT churches. The revelation is the latest in what has become and increasing alarm around the African American mega-church pastor. The reason it is the latest increase in alarm surrounds Jakes understanding of the Trinity and now his “evolving” position on human sexuality. In response to the news, Philip Bethancourt of the ERLC tweeted “When your view of the Trinity includes an evolving relationship, it’s no surprise your view of marriage does too.”

When a biblical orthodox  understanding of the Trinity is absent, it should not surprise anyone that beliefs about human sexuality become fair game for evolution!

Timothy Colegrove, a Mennonite pastor and church planter in Boston, Massachusetts has written an outstanding essay that details how our view of human sexuality is impacted by our understanding of the Trinity. Colegrove’s essay, Sexual Difference and the Trinitarian God offers a strong and gospel-centered view of human sexuality and how it displays who God is. Human beings are first and foremost image bearers and therefore, a true understanding of sexuality starts at the beginning and spends time looking at our essential nature as those made in the image of God as male and female. Covenant sexual relationship between man and woman in marriage is a reflection of the other seeking love of God as expressed in the Trinity.

Colegrove does not utilize the masterful work, Theology of the Body by Pope John Paul II to build his case, but the two are certainly complementary. John Paul understands the human body as created in God’s image, as “capable of making visible what is invisible, the spiritual and divine. It was created to transfer into the visible reality of the world, the invisible mystery hidden in God from time immemorial, and thus to be a sign of it.”

Read the essays and be encouraged and challenged that your theology matters and what you believe about God will impact what you believe about human sexuality! the two cannot be divorced as sexuality is a creation of God and finds its right definition and practice within his image.