Soft Peddling God's Moral Law: A Better Conversation about Homosexuality | Christianity Today

 ". . . the church has mistakenly given primacy to ethics over the narrative functions of doctrine and ministry." -- Christopher Benson

By Charlie J. Ray

Just when I thought Christianity Today could not get any worse I'm surprised by an article that introduced relativism and ambiguity to the issue of human sexuality.   As if there is any question whatsoever about God's original intentions in creation?  The Scripture lays out clearly the condition of humankind prior to the fall of Adam:

So God created man in His own image; in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them. 28 Then God blessed them, and God said to them, "Be fruitful and multiply; fill the earth and subdue it; have dominion over the fish of the sea, over the birds of the air, and over every living thing that moves on the earth." (Genesis 1:27-28 NKJ)

Then God saw everything that He had made, and indeed it was very good. So the evening and the morning were the sixth day. (Genesis 1:31 NKJ)

Jesus reaffirmed the original creation when He said:

And He answered and said to them, "Have you not read that He who made them at the beginning`made them male and female,' 5 "and said,`For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh '? 6 "So then, they are no longer two but one flesh. Therefore what God has joined together, let not man separate." (Matthew 19:4-6 NKJ)

Combine these statements by Jesus with the prohibitions in the moral law against homosexuality and all sexual immorality and it becomes obvious that  Christopher Benson wishes to push "Evangelical" Christians to accept homosexuality as "moral" and "good" and not a perversion of God's purposes in creation.  God literally created Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve or Laverne and Shirley!   (See 1 Corinthians 6:9-11; Leviticus 18:22; Leviticus 20:13; Romans 1:26-27; Genesis 19:5; Deuteronomy 23:17; Judges 19:22).

But Mr. Benson would have us to believe that God's moral law does not "really" condemn homosexuality as immoral and a violation of  God's law, does it?  I am reminded of Satan's temptation of Eve when he said, "Has God really said...?"

Now the serpent was more cunning than any beast of the field which the LORD God had made. And he said to the woman, "Has God indeed said,`You shall not eat of every tree of the garden'?" (Genesis 3:1 NKJ)

Deceivers always come in the guise of ministers of the light.  (2 Corinthians 11:14-15).  Benson is no different and neither is Christianity Today.  At one time Christian Century was considered a liberal periodical.  Now Christianity Today is right up there with the best of them along with Tony Campolo and other false prophets who wish to question the plain teaching of God's Word and the logical propositions of the Holy Scriptures. 

A good example of this is reframing the moral issues of Scripture in terms of situational ethics rather than the deontological, apodictic law as it is expressed in the Decalogue: 

Keeping with the church’s traditional consensus on the sin of homosexuality, Paris, O’Donovan, and Hill view the moral status of homosexuality as important but not all-important. Paris recounts an experience in graduate school when a bisexual, atheist classmate asked if she could handle going to a gay bar, even though she had never been to any bar before. Feeling “like a fish out of water or, more to the point, a conservative Christian out of church,” nothing about it shocked her. When this friend tested her—“Jenell, now that we’re on my turf, let me ask you this: Does Christianity really condemn homosexuality?”—she answered as most of us have answered with a simplistic message that affirms the sinfulness of homosexuality. Seeing the hurt and anger in her friend, regret followed. “I had stood up for my faith,” she writes, “so why did I feel like my faith had let me down?”

Maybe because she was thinking in terms of pleasing men rather than obeying God's law and pleasing God?  (Colossians 1:10; 2 Corinthians 5:9; Galatians 1:10).  The true Christian is not ashamed of the Gospel of Jesus Christ.  (Romans 1:16).  And even though the moral law reveals all men and women to be miserable sinners who fall way short of God's glory and holiness (Romans 3:10-23), the true Christian cannot shirk his or her duty to stand for the truth and not sell out to paganism or the immorality of the world.  (Ephesians 6:11, 13; 1 John 2:15-17; 1 John 3:1, 13; 1 John 4:1).

Perhaps the Arminian idea that we can persuade with human arguments the wicked and the reprobate to convert to Christ is the impetus behind such compromises of God's final Word on all matters of faith and practice?  But the Bible clearly teaches that God either hardens the reprobate (Romans 9:18-21) or softens the hearts of the elect (Acts 16:14).  No amount of persuasion can change the spots of the leopard or the skin of the Ethiopian and neither can the sinner convert himself by "free will".  (Jeremiah 13:23; John 3:3-8; John 6:44, 65).  The odds of persuading a homosexual or a trans-sexual into changing their self-deception is next to nil, particularly when society, the world, and even false churches and false prophets are all endorsing their immorality and agreeing with them.  (Romans 1:32).  Unless God regenerates and effectually calls the sinner and the homosexual and the trans-sexual there will be no change of mind, no repentance, and no true conversion.  Christianity Today has once again confirmed that that the editors and promoters of the magazine have forsaken Christ and gone into outright apostasy.

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Soft Peddling God's Moral Law:  A Better Conversation about Homosexuality | Christianity Today

The Transgender Myth

(Note: Click here to read, "I'm a Girl -- Understanding Transgendered Children," on ABC's website).

Last night on ABC's 20/20 Barbara Walters gave the classic propaganda push for the normalization of a condition that is still considered a psychological disorder in the American Psychiatric Association's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, 4th Edition, Text Revision or DSM-IV-TR. The sad part of this whole debate is that there is practically no scientific proof to support the position taken by Barbara Walters and other popularizers of postmodern mythology, such as homosexuality being a genetic and inborn condition and that the transgender condition is somehow biologically preconditioned by hormonal imbalances.

The real problem is that neither homosexuality nor the transgender condition can be proved from the research available. The best they can do is find some "suggested" links but apparently this research is biased since the assumption is made ahead of time. Amazingly, even the biased science cannot give solid proof for the a priori condition.

This leaves us to assume the obvious. The causes for homosexual and transgender disorders are psychologically induced, which basically goes back to the old nature versus nurture debate. Those of us who have read the material know that most cases of homosexuality and transgender are connected to nurture where a person is converted from heterosexuality to homosexuality or the transgender condition either by self-discovery or by encouragement from a confused and psychologically disordered parent.

Last night's show on 20/20 had at least one clear case where a mother deliberately manipulated harmless childhood role-playing and brainwashed her son into thinking he was a girl trapped in a boy's body. The fact that this goes all the way back to his two to three-year-old childhood and that his mother encouraged and hid the transition from his father for many years shows clearly that the mother deliberately and without shame shaped and molded her son into thinking he was a girl. She even admitted taking him out to buy dresses and otherwise encouraging him to become a girl mentally. There is no way that a child of five or six years of age can understand anything at all about this whole debate about transgender. It is so obvious that the child was influenced by a mother who wanted him to be a girl, rather than a boy who wanted to be a girl. I noted right away that the mother appeared to be of the domineering and overbearing type and that the father himself was "effeminate." Also, telling was the fact that the father's discovery of the manipulations by the mother almost caused them to divorce.

The real irony of this sort of propaganda is that reporters like Barbara Walters will say that religion is wrong because it is not supported by science. Yet when it comes to pushing a political agenda for all sorts of social and psychological aberrations like homosexuality and the transgender condition, true scientific evidence and empirical proofs seem to be completely unnecessary. Science was barely even mentioned in the program except as an aside. Moreover, postmodernism taken to the extreme is an anti-intellectual movement which picks and chooses what science it will accept and what science it will reject.

Even more ironically, the same people pushing the evolutionary theories based on natural selection and random mutations ignore the fact that if homosexuality and transgender is genetically propagated, the burden of proof lies with them to show how this fits with natural selection and evolutionary theory? How does it profit a species to pass on dead-end genes which cannot reproduce because homosexuals don't generally have children? I suppose we could allow for lesbians who get artificially inseminated but that still would not explain the vast majority of cases where homosexuals and transgenders come from otherwise normal bloodlines of heterosexual families.

Basically, a person who becomes a homosexual or a transgendered individual undergoes a psychological conversion process that is essentially in the mind, not something that is genetically or biologically predetermined. On the other hand, to say that a person is biologically predetermined would in fact go against the philosophical principle of free will and would instead support the idea that people are basically slaves to their environment and their natural composition. I suppose in that sense the proponents of homosexuality and transgenderization are in line with evolutionary thinking, which basically says that humans are just another animal that randomly evolved into a more intelligent and intellectually superior species. The assumption is there no God and that we are just a huge cosmic accident or "miracle."

Moreover, this sort of thinking has gone to the absurd level. A transgendered person is the opposite sex trapped in a biological body of sex they were born with. But such a person could have a homosexual orientation, a heterosexual orientation, or a bisexual orientation. Wait a minute, though. Are we referring to the biological sex of the person or the preferred gender of the individual? If we are referring to the biological sex of the person, if they like people of the same biological sex, they are technically "homosexual." But if we buy into the whole transgender myth that they are really the gender they want to be but are trapped in the wrong body, they would then be "heterosexual." This is totally confusing and silly, to be honest. A boy who wants to be a girl would be both a homosexual and a heterosexual, depending on which view you took. Or is he a bisexual or all three at once?

As you can see, modern political correctness has basically become fragmented, anti-intellectual, irrational, and schizophrenic. I could not believe that Barbara Walters could do this program with a straight face. The anti-scientific basis for the whole thing is just astounding to me, especially since they reject conservative Christianity supposedly on the basis of "science." Give me a break!

Christianity is really the basis for solid science and a consistent, coherent, and congruent worldview in the first place. Reason taken out of the context of a Christian worldview leads to all sorts of irrational conclusions including homosexuality and transgenderality. It is time for Christians to step to the plate and do the hard work of intellectual investigation of the issues and to prove the Christian worldview to be the superior and rationally acceptable alternative to the postmodern absurdities we see in the modern media, particularly the deranged and detrimental programming pushed by ABC and Barbara Walters last night.

This shameless piece of propaganda should be rejected for what it essentially is: anti-intellectualism at its worst. It is time for thinking individuals to wake up and stand against this sort of irrational political correctness taken to the extreme. The parents of this little boy should be ashamed of themselves for destroying his life, and ABC and Barbara Walters should be ashamed for promoting the destruction of the future of innocent children who have been brainwashed to promote a political agenda.

May God have mercy!


Charlie

Post script: Isn't it amazing that a two-year-old has the vocabulary of an adult:

When Jazz was two, he asked his mother a question that left her numb and frozen. "[He] said, 'Mommy, when's the good fairy going to come with her magic wand and change, you know, my genitalia?" according to Renee.

This is obviously not a case of "nature" but one of "nurture" where a psychologically disordered mother has chosen to corrupt her son in her desire to have a daughter. The fact that Barbara Walters does not question the mother on this shows her bias and her lack of understanding of the scientific method. Never be afraid to question anything if you are truly a scientist. I question this entire ABC episode and article. It is sheer propaganda, not science. [Post script added 1/25/2009]

Addendum:  Blame Who?