Homosexuality and the roots of division

Jared Wilson makes a very important point—one on which I’ve been intending to comment for several days—on the decision by the ELCA (Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, a seriously misnamed denomination) to allow self-affirmed practicing homosexuals to be ordained as pastors:

When concerned folks raise voices of protest and warning, when they say adamantly “This isn’t right,” they are accused of singling out the sin of homosexuality for special treatment, laser-focusing in on the homosexual as a sinner above all sinners, worse than the rest of us.

But I actually think it’s sort of the other way around. It is the proponents of gay clergy who single out homosexuality. It is they who are pressing us to respond to this issue. Nobody is pushing for resolutions on the allowance of adulterous clergy, of gossipy clergy, of alcoholic clergy, of p()rn-addicted clergy, or what-have-you.

It is not those who protest who are singling out this sin. It is the proponents of the sin as normative—or at least, passable—who are singling it out. . . .

And it isn’t those who believe the Bible when it says homosexual behavior is a sin that are being divisive; it is those who are introducing the idea that it isn’t. If you push a decision on something that innovates on the Bible’s testimony, you’re creating the division. But, sure, many of us will oblige in parting ways with you. If pressed—as when votes like this go the way they did—we will cooperate in division.

Read his whole post, because he has more to say beyond what I’m highlighting here, reflecting on the nature and origin of the historic creeds (and, I would argue, the confessions as well); I want to focus, though, on this point, because it’s an important one to understand. The division over the issue of homosexual behavior is the creation of those who want to change the church, and it has been created deliberately to accomplish that purpose; for them to blame that division and the fighting that goes with it on those who disagree with them, as if we should have just surrendered as soon as they made their first demand, is wildly unjust.

It’s interesting, if you hang around in mainline circles, you’re bound to hear folks on the left complaining that “they” (meaning the biblically orthodox) want to take “our” church away from “us.” Which would make sense if the church had taught for 2000 years that homosexual sex is just fine with God, and the view that it isn’t was the innovation. But that’s not how it is; it is, in fact, the exact backwards of the truth (as Mike Callahan might say). If anyone is trying to “take the church away” from anybody, it would be those who are trying to change the established teaching of the church going all the way back through the history of Israel to the writing of the book of Genesis.

Now, I do not say that the singling-out of homogenital contact as a particularly awful sin is the creation of the contemporary Left; that singling-out is itself a sin, and there’s no question that it didn’t originate in the years following Stonewall. But then, that’s not unique to homosexual activity, either; as G. K. Chesterton rightly protested in one of his Father Brown stories, the church has always tended to have fashionable sins, for which it makes excuses, and unfashionable ones, on which it comes down with excessive and graceless force; what they are changes with the times, but the tendency rolls on unabated. I do believe, though, that the way in which the Left has pursued its agenda on this point has served to exacerbate this problem among many on the Right, as counter-reaction pushes those unwilling to surrender biblical orthodoxy toward viewing homosexual activity as uniquely awful, and thus uniquely to be despised; and that does no one any good.