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<\/a>The\u00a0New York Times\u00a0<\/em>just published one of the more rough-handed pieces we\u2019ve yet seen regarding \u201cgay Christianity.\u201d In \u201cBigotry, the Bible and the Lessons of Indiana,\u201d<\/a> opinion writer Frank Bruni takes the gloves off and seeks\u00a0to bully Christians into caving on homosexuality. The column is frank, direct, and brutalizing.<\/p>\nLet\u2019s consider five takeaways from this striking article<\/a>.<\/p>\n 1. Here\u2019s what Bruni believes opposition to \u201cgay Christianity\u201d is based in: raw prejudice.\u00a0<\/strong>He says as much:<\/p>\n But in the end, the continued view of gays, lesbians and bisexuals as sinners is a decision. It\u2019s a choice. It prioritizes scattered passages of ancient texts over all that has been learned since \u2014 as if time had stood still, as if the advances of science and knowledge meant nothing.<\/em><\/p>\n It disregards the degree to which all writings reflect the biases and blind spots of their authors, cultures and eras.<\/em><\/p>\n It ignores the extent to which interpretation is subjective, debatable.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n The lack of self-awareness here takes your breath away. Apparently, Christians cannot see their \u201cbiases and blind spots,\u201d but Bruni can. Here\u2019s one example of a \u201cblind spot\u201d he might be missing: he claims all \u201cinterpretation is subjective\u201d and \u201cdebatable\u201d even as he presents his viewpoint as authoritative. Though he shames\u00a0Christians for their hermeneutical simple-mindedness, he turns around and makes\u00a0precisely the error he has just accused us of.<\/strong><\/p>\n Editorialist, heal thyself.<\/p>\n 2. We also note Bruni\u2019s\u00a0comments on doctrinal formation, which reduces in his mind to \u201cscattered passages of ancient texts.\u201d<\/strong> Speaking of \u201cblind spots\u201d once more, this is the fallacy of \u201cchronological snobbery,\u201d as C. S. Lewis called it. Simply because a teaching is old means it\u2019s outmoded. This apparently does not apply to pagan sexuality, however, which is the framework\u00a0by which our secular culture now operates. I\u2019m not sure what to think of \u201cscattered texts\u201d\u2013if \u201cscattered\u201d\u00a0means something like \u201chomosexuality is condemned in no uncertain terms in both the Old Testament and the New Testament,\u201d then Bruni is more accurate than he knows.<\/p>\n The collective\u00a0witness of the Bible, spread across diverse genres and eras, is indeed unified\u00a0that homosexual desire and behavior is sinful (see Genesis\u00a019; Leviticus\u00a018:22;\u00a0Deuteronomy\u00a023:17-18;\u00a0Romans\u00a01:26-27;\u00a01 Corinthians\u00a06:9; 1 Timothy 1:10). Beyond the clear teaching of these inerrant texts, homosexuality, as my colleague Jim Hamilton pointed out in his excellent chapter in\u00a0God and the Gay Christian?<\/em><\/a>, fits nowhere in the storyline of the Bible. Marriage is instituted by God between Adam and Eve (Gen. 2:18-25), affirmed by Jesus himself in crystal-clear teaching (Matt. 19:3-6), and ultimately points to the covenantal love\u00a0between Christ and his cruciform people\u00a0(Eph. 5:22-33). <\/span><\/p>\n Both exegetically and theologically, the Scripture is unmistakably clear: homosexuality does not owe to the good design of God, but to the corruption of the flesh. You could call this witness \u201cscattered,\u201d I suppose. You could also call it \u201coverwhelming.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n 3. It turns out that Bruni is not only here to correct us, however. He comes as an angel of freedom.<\/strong> He speaks to us in the verdant tones of \u201creligious freedom,\u201d which he helpfully defines as follows: \u201cfreeing religions and religious people from prejudices that they needn\u2019t cling to and can indeed jettison, much as they\u2019ve jettisoned other aspects of their faith\u2019s history, rightly bowing to the enlightenments of modernity.\u201d<\/em>\u00a0Here it is: your 2015 version of religious liberty. In years past, this concept meant something like \u201cthe opportunity to obey your conscience without prejudice.\u201d Now, it means \u201cthe golden opportunity to believe what secular elites tell you to believe.\u201d<\/p>\n We have reverted, really and truly, to the conditions that led the Puritans and Pilgrims to brave death and come to America four centuries ago. Our worship is now compelled and instructed, just as in days past. But we are not dealing with a state church, or at least not an established one. We are dealing with a cultural intelligentsia that offers us a grand bargain: we can give up our sexual ethics and be just fine, or we can hold onto them and be smashed into conformity. It\u2019s really this stark: the Bible should be \u201crightly bowing\u201d\u2013Bruni\u2019s actual phrase!\u2013to secular rationalism. In other words, we have an authority, and it is not Scripture. It is the culture.<\/p>\n Religious people, according to Bruni, cling to their faith. Now, the time has come. We should give it all away. Like slavery and gender roles\u2013\u201cother aspects of their faith\u2019s history\u201d\u2013we should simply relinquish views that the culture now finds wanting. This is rich stuff. Christianity offered women far more agency than secular Greco-Roman culture did. Christianity over the centuries has ennobled women, protected them from male predation, and given them a key place in the kingdom. Christianity overcame slavery, slavery that pagan cultures practiced without batting an eye.<\/p>\n It is lamentably true that\u00a0far too many Christians embraced the racist and sexist beliefs of secular culture in the past. But it was not Voltaire and Rousseau who championed the abolitionist cause. It was William Wilberforce and William Lloyd Garrison and Jonathan Edwards, Jr. It is not the secular elite who now protect women from the ravages of the Sexual Revolution, with men openly preying on women. It is the church, even the imperfect church, that preaches the gospel and gospel ethics, which overcome both racism and sexism to render the people of God one body, the body of Christ.<\/p>\n The church has never been perfect. But did the church unleash genocide on the world, as secularism did through leaders like Stalin, Hitler, Mao, and Pol Pot? It most certainly did not. Secular authoritarianism has brought great evil and suffering to people. The church, though imperfect, has brought gospel hope, ethical enlightenment, and social justice to untold numbers of people. Bruni ignores and even erases this in his piece.<\/p>\n 4. Bruni waves his hand and thereby dismisses all believers who hold to complementarian convictions.<\/strong> He quotes exactly one obscure pastor to ground this rather audacious claim:<\/p>\n \u201cIn the United States, we have abandoned the idea that women are second-class, inferior and subordinate to men, but the Bible clearly teaches that,\u201d said Jimmy Creech, a former United Methodist pastor who was removed from ministry in the church after he performed a same-sex marriage ceremony in 1999. \u201cWe have said: That\u2019s a part of the culture and history of the Bible. That is not appropriate for us today.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n And we could say the same about the idea that men and women in loving same-sex relationships are doing something wrong.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n This point amuses me. It\u2019s as if there are no denominations with, say, 40,000 local churches that adhere to robust complementarian principles. You\u2019d think the Southern Baptists just got raptured by a secular editorialist. It\u2019s as if the PCA and the conservative Anglicans and Methodists and Pentecostals and hundreds of other groups simply have no voice. Why? Because Jimmy Creech says so, and Frank Bruni has cited him.<\/p>\n This is telling material. The secular left, more than many evangelicals, understands the indissoluble connection between complementarity and exclusively heterosexual marriage. If you give up the first, you swing the door open wide to give up the second. I say this to fellow evangelicals: Bruni is exactly right in this connection. Giving up complementarity means denying both Scripture and natural design. This shift opens the door to embracing transgenderism, homosexual orientation and marriage, and polyamory. There is no other backstop. There is no other iron wall against raw pagan sexuality.<\/p>\n Complementarianism\u2013represented institutionally by CBMW, cbmw.org<\/a>, the organization I lead\u2013is the last line of defense against the secularist sexualism. There\u2019s nothing else to arrest this cultural momentum. Bruni quotes same-sex-affirming ethicist David Gushee along these lines:\u00a0\u201cConservative Christian religion is the last bulwark against full acceptance of L.G.B.T. people,\u201d Gushee said.\u201d Gushee is quite right. So, I ask my fellow Christians: is complementarity bad? Should we downplay it? Should we problematize it, sigh deeply, and wish we didn\u2019t have to hold it?<\/p>\n Or, should we own it, love it, receive it as good, and see it as the outworking of a gospel worldview?<\/p>\n 5. Bruni closes with a peroration worthy of a fiery homiletician. There is one option for Christians, and that is to embrace homosexuality or else:\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n Creech and Mitchell Gold, a prominent furniture maker and gay philanthropist, founded an advocacy group, Faith in America, which aims to mitigate the damage done to L.G.B.T. people by what it calls \u201creligion-based bigotry.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n Gold told me that church leaders must be made \u201cto take homosexuality off the sin list.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n His commandment is worthy \u2014 and warranted. All of us, no matter our religious traditions, should know better than to tell gay people that they\u2019re an offense. And that\u2019s precisely what the florists and bakers who want to turn them away are saying to them.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n So here it is. \u201cChurch leaders must be\u00a0made\u201d\u00a0<\/strong>to stop seeing \u201cgay Christianity\u201d as sinful. This is a \u201cwarranted commandment,\u201d according to Bruni, who states this baldly without reference to any source, authority, text, or tradition. He\u2019s quoted the tiny handful of \u201cChristian\u201d theologians who affirm homosexuality, albeit without so much as a whisper of a reference to the tens of\u00a0thousands of scholars, exegetes, theologians, pastors, and leaders who do not affirm it. Bruni presents his claims as straightforwardly true and \u201cwarranted,\u201d but surprisingly, he gives us no reason for that warrant. Sure, a few scattered ethicists and writers agree with him. But he\u2019s made no case for why he\u2019s right. He\u2019s offered no positive material of his own to overturn two millennia of consensus on sexuality. He\u2019s given us rhetoric and intimidating language, nothing more.<\/p>\n We see in the end that this is not an opinion, a view, or a conviction. Bruni has offered us dogma in his breathtaking piece. This is not dogma that plays nice, either. It does not carve out space for dissent, as Christianity has and does when applied biblically in the public square. We evangelicals actually believe we\u00a0can\u2019t\u00a0<\/em>coerce faith. Bruni and fellow secularists believe they\u00a0can\u2013<\/em>and that they in fact have a moral mission to do so.<\/p>\n Conclusion<\/strong><\/p>\n If you\u2019re a young evangelical who gets the cold sweats when the New York Times<\/em> disagrees with you, Frank Bruni\u2019s piece should wake you up. It should derail you from any mission to draw the approval of the culture-makers. Here\u2019s the reality: if you hold to biblical sexuality, you have no approval. You have in the eyes of many only condemnation, judgment, a this-worldly sentence of damnation on your head. You don\u2019t deserve the freedom of your convictions. You are a bigot. You must, to use Bruni\u2019s\u00a0very words, \u201cbow\u201d to the culture. It\u2019s that stark.<\/p>\n If, however, you stay the course (like Chuck Colson and many, many others<\/a>), and go with God, you must know that you will gain something so much greater than the approval of leading voices. You will honor God himself. You will stand with him on the last day. You will have the opportunity to avoid the hatred and judgmentalism and bullying of Bruni, and you will be freed to love fellow sinners just like him, and preach the gospel to him.<\/p>\n Frank Bruni wants evangelicals to cave. We will not do so. We will not give an inch.<\/strong> We will, however, refute his foolish thinking and bad arguments, laugh at his attempts to intimidate us, and love him. We worship a Savior, after all, who died for preaching his convictions, but who in dying asked even for the forgiveness of those who put him on that cross (Luke 23:34).<\/p>\n We will not cave. Not by a country mile. We will, however, love our enemies, pray for those who persecute us, and, as we remember this very Easter weekend, rise with Jesus in the age to come.<\/p>\n *************<\/p>\n (Image: Wiki<\/a>media Commons<\/a>, no attribution given)<\/p>\n