The Church's Response to HomosexualityHow will evangelicals respond to the challenge of the homosexual movement? First, evangelicals must establish our understanding of homosexuality on the Bible and rest upon an undiluted affirmation of biblical authority. The Bible is unambiguous on the issue of homosexuality, and only a repudiation of biblical truth can allow evangelicals to join the moral revisionists.
Our only authority for addressing this issue is that of God as revealed in the Holy Scripture. We can speak only because we are confident that the one sovereign God and Lord has revealed Himself and His will in an inerrant and authoritative Scripture.
At this point we must address another evangelical temptation. A growing number of evangelicals are shifting the debate over homosexuality and attempting to base their arguments on natural law, the assumption being that natural law will carry greater and broader cultural influence than arguments based explicitly upon divine revelation.
While natural law reasoning has its uses, two warnings should be heeded. First, to resort to natural law reasoning is to retreat from the high ground of the Christian truth claim. In order to meet secular demands, the church would shift its argument from the unassailable ground of holy Scripture to the contested terrain of nature and the cosmos. This is what, in another context, F.A. Hayek termed "a fatal conceit." From such an abdication there is no recovery. Though evangelicals and conservative Roman Catholics will find themselves compatriots in the cultural struggle, it is not possible for evangelicals to adopt natural law reasoning as a basis for moral argumentation and remain authentically evangelical. Natural law reasoning may provide a point of conversation and serve as a means of introducing the revealed law, but it cannot stand as a mode of evangelical moral discourse and reasoning.
Evangelicals should not hesitate to illustrate arguments from Scripture with allusions to nature and the natural order. But the order of ethical reasoning is critical: Evangelicals can turn to nature as illustration only after basing the moral argument on Scripture. At its best, the evangelical temptation to turn to natural law reasoning is an attempt in a difficult cultural context to establish a moral consensus. But this strategy will not succeed. At its worst, this temptation represents a repudiation of the gospel and an abdication of evangelical faith.
Furthermore, we must learn to address the issue of homosexuality with candor, directness, and unembarrassed honesty. This is not an hour for prudish denial. To fail at the task of speaking clearly and directly to the issue is to fail to speak where God has spoken. We must also acknowledge that the issue of homosexuality affords a unique opportunity for the confessing church to bear witness to Jesus Christ as the sole and sufficient Saviour. Salvation and repentance must be preached to homosexuals, and to heterosexuals as well. East of Eden, not one of us has come before God as sexually pure and whole, even if we have never committed an illicit sexual act, much less a homosexual act.
To the homosexual, as to all others, we must speak in love, never in hatred. But the first task of love is to tell the truth. Those who genuinely love homosexuals are not those who would revolutionize morality to meet their wishes, but those who will tell them the truth and point them to the One who is the Way, the Truth, and the Life.
Click Here to Read Part One.
Click Here to Read Part Two.
Click Here to Read Part Three.
Excerpted from The Popular Encyclopedia of Apologetics, Edited by Ed Hindson and Ergun Caner
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