The BPFNA list has heated up once again, and as usual the topic of dissension is gay rights. To me, this issue is crystal clear, and I find it incredibly frustrating that so many people seem to get so confused on it. I think the problem is complicated by a lack of clear thinking about what exactly the issue is, so let me start there.
The issue is not "orientation." No Christian should claim that someone who experiences temptation to homoerotic behavior has sinned on that account. The unfortunate fact, of course, is that some worthless bumps on the Christian log have done exactly that. That is sad, and let me state my condemnation of that attitude very clearly: if you have taught that God rejects people based upon their homosexual orientation, then you have sinned grievously against the gospel of Jesus Christ, and must repent. The opportunity of justification through the grace of Christ is available to everyone, regardless of their sexual orientation, past sins, or present temptations. This specifically includes those who experience homoerotic temptations, the gay, the lesbian, the bisexual, the transgendered, but also each and every human on the planet. There is only one unforgivable sin, and misplaced sexual attraction is not it. (Something for which I am quite thankful! If misplaced sexual attraction were the unforgivable sin, then any man who ever felt even a momentary attraction to a woman not his wife--including me--would be condemned!)
But, to leave it there may be to offer cheap grace. The grace which we receive on account of the covenant faithfulness of Jesus demands change -- it demands discipleship. The question before us is not whether God can accept someone who is of gay orientation, but whether Christian discipleship requires us to resist homoerotic temptations. If discipleship does demand that we resist homoerotic temptations, then (obviously) the church should do nothing to legitimize the fulfillment of them—"gay marriage" is right out.
This is where the waters get muddy. We are told that homosexuality is not a behavior, but an orientation. On those grounds, we are asked to believe that God has made gay people the way they are, and that we should bless them in that. However, this argument is seriously complicated and possibly moot if homosexuality is either not innate, not changeable, or (even if it is innate and unchangeable) if it is not created by God. Let's take these one at a time.
I have a good friend who claims—and I believe him—that he was gay and that he has not experience an homoerotic temptation in decades. I have also had the opportunity of meeting many gay people who claim to have successfully changed their orientation. Over against this appeal to counterexample, the gay rights movement offers their own set of counter-examples: people who have tried unsuccesfully to change their orientation. It is reasoned that, if so many people of gay orientation have tried and failed to change, then change must be impossible.
I don't find the arguments of the gay activists convincing. First of all, if the argument is that change of orientation is impossible, then it only takes one success to prove it wrong. Since I know personally many who claim to have changed their orientation, this is already proved wrong for me. Worse, members of the GLBT crowd have a grand time slandering the reputations of those who claim to have successfully changed their orientation. We are told that these are "torture systems" and that there is no one who claims to have changed their orientation who does not make money off reparative therapy. Yet, each of these claims is found false on the basis of my own knowledge, and are furthermore ad hominem in their force. Thus, the argument fails entirely.
However, this leaves the possibility that for some people, change is possible, but for others it is not. My counter-examples prove that change is possible for some, but not that it is possible for all. However, we are still left with another, even greater problem. Persons who experience homoerotic temptations claim that God made them this way. This is frankly unproven: this world is not the world as God wanted it to be. God meant for us to have a world with no sickness, no death, no cancer, no adhd, no autism, and no homosexuality. Each of the last three is (arguably) an innate disorder, impossible to cure, that can only be palliated, and not part of God's Shalom intention for our world. However, this deck is loaded: both ADHD and Autism can lead to violence, just as homoerotic temptation can lead to fornication. Are we then to say that violent is how God made some people and that they are therefore to be blessed in their violence? Hardly. I see no distinction—sin is sin.
I think that the most important point in this mess may be that we cannot set the disasterous precedent of allowing something which would otherwise be considered sinful to be tolerated on the basis of a claimed genetic predisposition. Are we to give up the church's witness against alcoholism, or drug abuse, or domestic violence because each of them has a genetic component? Are we to allow unlimited promiscuity because (demonstrably) the human male is genetically predisposed towards it? What is really happening here is that, based on the individualistic ethics of the enlightenment, some have decided that homosexuality is not sinful and that, therefore, it is not sinful. It's status as innate or unchangeable is irrelevant, because the decision to tolerate it has already been made.
So... What does the Bible say? "Gay theology" has done much to obscure this question. We are told that certain words in the New Testament that would seem to refer to homosexuality in fact only refer to sexual immorality or pedophilia. I'm not going to waste a lot of space dissecting these arguments, as they've been dissected by far more capable exegetes than me. However, I think it is fair to say that these proposals are convincing only to those who are already convinced that homosexuality must be legitimized and are seeking a way to do so. If you happen to buy the logic of these arguments, I urge you to look again, more deeply, and ask you whether you do not believe them because you want to? Could anyone honestly have gone to the Bible and found these interpretations if they were not desperately seeking an interpretation to validate the behavior they were unwilling to change?
So, what to do? Well, I think that the church needs to maintain a clear witness that homosexual orientation is changeable, and offer that opportunity to those who want it. At the same time, we must not bless or bind gay couples—their relationship is not one we can bless, as much as we might like to. Instead, as a matter of compassion, we must hold out to them the opportunity of changing, and decline to bind them in a permanent covenental relationship that would make change all but impossible. This doesn't mean that we should go back to the bad old days of stigmatizing homosexuality. As I said above, sin is sin, and homosexual behavior is a sin like any other. We should exercise church discipline with regard to homosexual behavior precisely to the degree that we exercise church discipline for adultery, divorce (which in our culture is usually just adultery legitimated), theft of all kinds, gossip, slander, bitterness, and anger.
One thing I don't understand is when sexual satisfaction became a right. There was a time when Christians taught that sex was something to be carefully moderated. Now, we seem to have followed our culture in saying that sex is something to be endlessly indulged, without boundaries.
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