False Identity
The ground was prepared long ago in churches that claim to be orthodox for the difficulties they are now having with the insistence that same-sex desires are admissible in Christian identity as long as the professed Christian remains physically celibate. The inviting loopholes through which these people have moved are numerous statements that will identify only homosexual activity as sin, stopping short of including in these definitions the sinfulness of the desire that lies at its base. Since statements of this kind are invariably produced by theologically sophisticated people, it is difficult to believe the omission is mere oversight.
The question of the compatibility of gay identity and its desires (sanitized and removed from biblical purview by naming them "same-sex attraction") with the holiness of life to which Christians are called is in fact frivolous, and treating it as something to be legitimized in the churches is culpable foolishness. It would be hard to hold against Scripture from Genesis 3:6 forward that there is no such thing as sinful desire, and the question then must follow whether any sinful desire, consummated in action or not, is acceptable to God.
This question is not only absurd but a blasphemous calumny of his character who commands us to "be holy as I am holy" as our only standard for the disposition of both body and mind. Despite the weakness of our flesh, our tendency to stumble, and our constant need to be forgiven, it is nothing less than Christ's perfection in which we are to be formed and which we must unqualifiedly confess. Nor is the belief that we are ever justified in our temptation to quit striving against concupiscence compatible with the faith by which only God is pleased. Thus is the hero who would slay the dragon transfixed by his dead yellow eye and himself slain.
Does it make any sense at all to believe that the Lord, who said of longing for the opposite sex (which is according to nature and not in itself sinful), "But I say to you that everyone who looks at a woman with lustful intent has already committed adultery with her in his heart" (ESV), was exempting same-sex desire from this absolute and comprehensive standard—desire which, along with its actions, his Apostle plainly identifies as evil because it is "against nature" (para phusin)?
Similarly, when St. Paul defines homosexual desire itself in terms of "vile affections" (pathē atimias), what is the likelihood that he was likewise allowing a place for these affections in the hearts of believers and in the lives of Christ's disciples and in his Church? Was it possible he was allowing that the yearnings which define "gayness" were acceptable in and among Christians as long as they weren't physically acted upon? Was he contemplating a division of body and mind such that one could act apart from its union with the other?
What the Scriptures Require
What then is the likelihood that believers should listen to those who would urge us to impose a different moral standard on the movements of the mind than we do on those of the body when it joins it in sinning? Since when have Christians, who from early days have flown to the deserts to avoid the lust of the eye that plagued them in the cities, allowed a privileged independence of the mind from the actions of the body? The conclusion must be that the existence of a gay-but-celibate Christian is as likely as that of an adulterous-but-with-the-eyes-only Christian who sees no incompatibility between his professed Christianity and his sinful desires.
Churches that wish to condemn opinions like this should take immediate steps not only to deny all magisterial status to their proponents, but also to remove them from fellowship unless they come to their senses and repent of their false doctrine. This is surely what the Scriptures require. But where does one find the courage to call them to account among the Great Ones in the churches who will have to answer to God for letting the ravening Sophists, pink in tooth and claw, in amongst his sheep?
S. M. Hutchens is a senior editor and longtime writer for Touchstone.
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more on sex from the online archives
28.3—May/June 2015
Of Bicycles, Sex, & Natural Law
Describing Human Ends & Our Limitations Is Neither Futile Nor Unloving by R. V. Young
28.2—March/April 2015
Man, Woman & the Mystery of Christ
An Evangelical Protestant Perspective by Russell D. Moore
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