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.

Click here to confirm the opinion of this writer:

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

Postmodernism Trumps Creation: Girl Scouts troops disband after chapter says it will allow transgendered 7-year-old - New York Daily News

Leaders of three troops of Girl Scouts quit their posts and disbanded the troops after the organization’s Colorado chapter said it would allow a transgendered 7-year-old to join.
The troop leaders, all affiliated with a Christian school in Louisiana, resigned in protest of the Colorado chapter’s decision to allow participation from any child who identifies as a girl, The Christian Post reported.

Controversy erupted when Felisha Archuleta tried to enroll her son, Bobby Montoya, who identifies as a girl, in a Girl Scouts troop in Denver.  Click here to read the story:  Troops Disband

Is it a surprise to anyone who is a Bible believing Christian that modern man thinks everything is optional, including a person's biological and physical body?  The post-Enlightenment rebellion against reason has reached a new low where nothing is certain, not even one's gender.  Gender, like reality, is merely an illusion of the mind to be changed at will or molded like a ball of wax.  After all, it is feelings that really matter, not facts.

It is this same sort of thinking that guides modern theology, which essentially denies that special revelation can exist except in subjective analogies and relativistic "factual" myths.  Michael Horton's new systematic theology is proof enough of that.  For Horton the Bible is not doctrinal or propositional unless it happens to be convenient for whatever point he wants to make.  Not even the Reformed confessions are about propositional truth for Horton.  Rather it's all an inspiring drama where the believer "feels" God analogically, though nothing univocally true exists.  Truth is ultimately relative and the God who reveals Himself remains hidden.  (See Part One:  Review of The Christian Faith.  See addendum below).

Carried over into the main culture not even science can determine what is obvious to the rest of us.  A baby born with certain biological and physical characteristics, including chromosomes, is not the test of gender.  Rather gender is simply a matter of psychological predetermination.  Or is it?  Now, it would seem, gender is more a matter of choice on the part of a person rather than a matter of God's established creation.  In the beginning God created Adam and Eve as male and female, husband and wife (Genesis 1:1, 26, 27; 2:7, 20-25; 5:1; Matthew 19:4; Mark 10:6)  What we see being pushed as the politically correct propaganda of the day is that individual liberty trumps biblical truth, special revelation and even natural revelation.  Even empirical science must bow to the idol of psychological "feelings" and "emotions" rather than objective truth.

Gordon H. Clark was prophetic when he said that science is only trustworthy in what it can produce practically.  Basically, empirical science is influenced by the subjective presuppositions of those who practice it.  Combine that with postmodernism and it is not hard to see why a postmodern culture defines reality via psychology and sociological presuppositions.  Empiricism, psychology, sociology and every other modern "science" basically sees what it has presupposed it wants to find.  This is why Clark began with Scripture as the ultimate basis for absolute truth in every other area of life.  With the special revelation of God in Holy Scripture all other "sciences" devolve into irrationalism--including Cornelius Van Til's theology of analogy.  Michael Horton's irrational tome, The Christian Faith is just more evidence that theology has become identical with existentialism and psychological feelings rather than propositional truth or absolute truth.  It's all relative.  Or is it?

The culture war is not over.  In fact, it has expanded.  The liberal left and the socialist agenda has taken the game to a new level.  Apparently the game plan is to divide and conquer, take no prisoners.  Sadly even so-called Christian churches, seminaries and leaders have sold out to this same agenda.  It seems to me that Mike Horton is more on the side of the enemy than defending the truth of Scripture, the law/gospel distinction, and propositional truth.


 Girl Scouts troops disband after chapter says it will allow transgendered 7-year-old  - New York Daily News

Addendum:  Horton reveals his prejudice in the postmodernism direction with statements that are explicitly Barthian:

As with all of the divine attributes, it is crucial to avoid two extremes, both of which presuppose a univocal rather than an analogical view of the relation in comparisons between God and human beings.  On one hand, the biblical testimony to a living history with a living God in a covenant with genuine interaction resists all Stoic and Platonic conceptions of a nonrelational and nonpersonal One.  In the unfolding drama there are suits and countersuits, witnesses and counterwitnesses, and God is presented as repenting, relenting, and responding to creatures.  On the other hand, we must always bear in mind that in revealing himself God hides himself.  God explicitly forbids univocal comparisons (Numbers 23:19; 1 Samuel 15:29; Isaiah 44:8, 9; 46:4; Hosea 11:9).   Michael Horton. The Christian Faith: A Systematic Theology for Pilgrims On the Way. (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2011), p. 240.

The idea that God "hides" himself even in special revelation comes from the theology of the neo-orthodox theologian, Karl Barth, and not from confessional and Reformed theology.  If there is no univocal truth but only analogies and comparisons that at no point coincide with God's words, thoughts, or absolute truth then the door is wide open to the sort of equivocation we see in the transgender movement.

Charlie

Homosexuality and Transgenderism Is Neither Innate Nor Unchangeable

Postmodernism and the Decline of Western Science

With the advent of postmodernism and the departure of the soft sciences from empirical, evidentiary discipline we begin to see the spiraling of science itself into absurdities where reason itself contradicts itself. A good example of this is the transgender movement, homosexuality and gay rights movement, and abortion. It seems obvious that political clout can influence the sciences more than pure science itself.

I guess Thomas Kuhn was right after all. Science is not so much dependent on pure reason and the facts or evidentiary and logical proofs as it is dependent on authoritative sociological factors like peer pressure and dominant paradigms. Seizing the insight of Kuhn, the gay rights and transgender rights movements have actually been able to overturn the dominant paradigm within the scientific community simply by exerting political muscle in the media. Hence, we see homosexuality no longer described as a psychological disorder in the American Psychological Association's catalogue of disorders, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders DSM-IV-TR Fourth Edition.

How long will it be before the transgender lobby also overturns current "science" which describes the transgender condition as a disorder? As it stands now, according to the DSM-IV-TR 4th ed., Gender Identity Disorder is still as disorder contra Barbara Walters and ABC's 20/20:

Gender Identity Disorder is where a persons anatomical sex and their gender identity conflict. This is also called transsexualism. In this disorder, there is a desire to be rid of one's own gender appropriate anatomy and to live as a person of the opposite gender. These people often, but not always, cross-dress to be in line with their gender identity. Increasingly, numbers of those with this disorder are choosing surgical interventions.  (See: Medical Interventions).  (Note:  This is apparently a dead link now.  Sorry about that.)

Notice that the sick patient chooses to mutilate himself or herself with the full approval of the treating psychiatrist/psychologist. Could it be that doctors of psychology and psychiatry are more interested in personal profit than the well being of the patient? Instead of curing the patient of the disorder the doctor helps the patient to mutilate his or her body to conform with the irrational thinking at the root of the disorder.

What other disease is treated by giving the patient the power to treat himself or herself? I suppose we should just dispose of the medical profession altogether and let the patients treat themselves?

If the current trend continues, science itself is headed back toward the dark ages where superstition and magic were dominate over reason. Perhaps we need a healthy dose of Enlightenment/modernist thinking to check this irrational trend toward postmodernist irrationality? Just a thought.

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?