19 March 2015 A.D. Dr. Robert Gagnon’s “Why San Francisco’s City Church Got It Wrong About Sex”
19 March 2015 A.D. Dr. Robert Gagnon’s “Why San Francisco’s City Church Got It Wrong
About Sex”
Gagnon, Robert. “Why
San Francisco’s City Church Got It Wrong About Sex.” First Things. 17 Mar 2015. http://www.firstthings.com/web-exclusives/2015/03/why-san-franciscos-biggest-megachurch-is-wrong-about-sex. Accessed 18 Mar 2015.
The senior pastor and elders of San Francisco's evangelical City Church
will no longer require members to abstain from homosexual practice, so long as
the homosexual activity occurs in the context of marriage. According to a letter written by senior pastor Fred
Harrell on behalf of the Board of Elders, “We will no longer discriminate based
on sexual orientation and demand lifelong celibacy as a precondition for
joining. For all members, regardless of sexual orientation, we will continue to
expect chastity in singleness until marriage.”
“Our pastoral practice of demanding life-long ‘celibacy,' by which we meant
that for the rest of your life you would not engage your sexual orientation in
any way, was causing obvious harm and has not led to human flourishing,” the
letter said.
As a church inspired by Tim Keller’s Redeemer Presbyterian Church in New
York City and founded in the Reformed tradition, City Church is supposed to
give preeminence to Scripture. Instead, on the matter of homosexual practice,
the Pastor and Elder Board gave preeminence to their judgment regarding what
conduces more to human flourishing and, oddly, to a scripturally misguided book
written by former Vineyard pastor Ken Wilson called A Letter to My Congregation. The
letter recommends it to church members for showing, “great empathy and maturity
to model unity and patience with those who are in different places on this
conversation, all the while dealing honestly with Scripture.”
Wilson contends wrongly that the biblical indictment of homosexual practice
is limited to exploitative relationships with adolescents, slaves, and temple
prostitutes, as though these were the only forms of homosexual practice known
to persons of the ancient Near East and the Greco-Roman world. In fact,
adult-committed relationships in the ancient world were widely known, with
early Christians and rabbis forbidding even adult-consensual marriages between
persons of the same sex as abhorrent acts.
We receive indication that Paul did not have only exploitative or promiscuous
acts of homosexual practice in view, given (1) Paul’s appeal to a nature
argument in Rom 1:26–27; (2) his strong intertextual echoes to Genesis 1–2 and
the Levitical prohibitions when citing homosexual practice (Rom 1:24–27; 1 Cor
6:9; 1 Tim 1:10); (3) the unqualified character of his indictment (including an
interdiction of lesbianism in Rom 1:26); and (4) the fact that even some
Greco-Roman moralists (to say nothing of Jews and Christians) rejected
homosexual practice absolutely.
The best biblical scholars who have studied extensively the issue of
homosexual practice, including advocates for homosexual unions (such as William
Loader and Bernadette Brooten), know that the scriptural indictment of
homosexual practice includes a rejection of committed homosexual unions.
Wilson also contends that Paul’s approach of tolerance toward matters of
diet and calendar in Romans 14 should govern the church’s actions on homosexual
practice. For Wilson, homosexual practice is an adiaphoron, a “matter of indifference,”
over which Christians can and should agree to disagree. Yet Paul never
relegated matters of sexual purity to the classification of adiaphora. On the contrary,
he repeatedly warned converts that unrepentant participants in sexual
immorality—including homosexual practice, incest, adultery, sex with
prostitutes, and fornication—would not inherit the kingdom of God (1 Thess
4:3–7; 1 Cor 5; 6:9–10; 2 Cor 12:21; Gal 5:19–21; Eph 5:3–5).
In the context of Romans, there can be no question of Paul regarding homosexual
practice with the same moral indifference as matters of diet and calendar. This
is obvious from the beginning of his letter, where Paul in 1:24–27 treats
sexual “impurity” (Gk. akatharsia)
in general and homosexual practice in particular as egregious instances of
suppressing the truth about the way the Creator made us. It is also clear from
the middle of the letter, where Paul in 6:19 repeats the term “impurity” as a
description of behaviors that Christians must now either give up or face the
loss of eternal life. Finally, it is evident from the last stages of the
letter, where Paul in 13:13 includes “sexual misbehaviors” (Gk. koitai, literally “lyings”)
among acts that believers are required to put off (a term that calls to mind
Paul’s reference to arseno-koitai in 1 Cor 6:9 as a particular instance, “men
lying with a male”).
As the Apostolic Decree indicates (Acts 15:20), in the early church no
self-professed Christians who actively and impenitently engaged in sexual
immorality (porneia)
could become a member. Sexual offenders who were already members were put on
church discipline, to be sure as a remedial rather than a punitive measure (1
Cor 5).
The same scriptural justification City Church offers to treat as permissible
homosexual sex in the context of what City Church deems a marriage could be
used to say that incest is acceptable so long as it occurs in the context of a
“marriage” between consenting adults. At Corinth the solution for the
incestuous man was not to marry his stepmother but rather to cease from sexual
intercourse altogether with his stepmother. A homosexual “marriage,” like an
incestuous “marriage,” merely celebrates and regularizes (i.e. renders
long-term) the abhorrent sex. Marriage does not make unnatural acts more
natural.
Although the City Church letter appeals to Jesus’ mission to outcasts as a
basis for jettisoning a male-female requirement for marriage, it is difficult
to claim that the Jesus we encounter in Scripture would have countenanced
homosexual sex in the context of a “marriage.” Jesus appealed to the two-sexes
requirement for marriage (and thus for all sexual activity) given in Genesis
1:27 and 2:24 as the foundation upon which all sexual ethics must be based,
including the limitation of two persons to a sexual union. Just as Jesus did
not reach out to exploitative tax-collectors in order to justify their
exploitation of the poor, so too Jesus did not reach out to sexual sinners in
order to provide a platform for impenitent sexuality. He reached out to both
groups in order to call them to repentance so that they might inherit the very
Kingdom of God that he was proclaiming. That is true love, not the
impersonation of love now being peddled by City Church leadership.
The words of the risen Christ in Revelation 2–3 are apropos here:
“Remember, then, from where you have fallen and repent and do the first works.
But if not, I am coming to you and I will move your lampstand from its place,
if you do not repent. . . . In this way likewise, even you have those who hold
tightly to the teaching of the Nicolaitans [who promote sexual immorality]. So
repent. But if not, I am coming to you quickly and I will wage war with them by
means of the sword of my mouth.” The one who has ears to hear ought to hear.
Robert A. J. Gagnon is
an Associate Professor of New Testament at Pittsburgh Theological Seminary and
author of The Bible and Homosexual
Practice: Texts and Hermeneutics (Abingdon Press).
This article has been
updated to correct an inaccuracy about the size of City Church.
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