The Revoice Conference and the Questions and Cultural Issues Surrounding It

Michael Krugger:

If you’re new to this world of RTS, I’m Mike Krugger, I’m the president here and also New Testament professor, and we’re so grateful this morning to have Al Mohler joining us for a special lecture. Usually at this time on a normal week, we have our classes going on, but with Allentown, we had a great opportunity to hear from him some of the critical issues facing the church today. So we’re really thrilled to have him with us. If you’re also new to RTS, you may not know that this is really the kind of thing we’re about around here. Reform Theological Seminary is about delivering the word of God, the word of God that we think is inspired and authoritative and in errand and in many ways as we can. That includes certainly our special lecture occasions like this one. It certainly involves our classroom lectures with our students, men and women training for ministry.

It involves different special events and Bible studies and other opportunities for you to learn God’s word here in the RTS world. So if this is a new world to you, just want to invite you to plug in and get involved in many ways as you can. We try to deliver our content in different venues, certainly ones like this in person, but you may also not know we have a mobile app on phones. It almost has all our classes online, believe it or not, for free for you to listen to. And so we hope you’ll just learn more about what’s going on into the RTS world through those different opportunities. This morning. Of course, we’re excited to have Al Moeller with us. He’s in town, of course, for not just us, but also for the conference that’s going on at Christ Covenant this weekend. And we hope you’ll take not only an opportunity to hear him this morning, but also this weekend. Think of this morning as sort of the movie trailer and the full movie is later this weekend. So you get a little sampling now, but we hope you’ll sign up. I know there’s still space available at the conference at Christ Covenant, I think. Is that right Kevin? Still some room for folks to sign up, Even register at the Door can register at the door as well. Special discount For students. Yeah, so if you’re a poor seminary student, and that’s a bit redundant right? Then you can sign up at the door and get a special discount this morning. Of course, Dr. Mo will be given a lecture and then he’ll be following it with a short time of q and a. So be thinking about your questions. We won’t be able to have an extended time of q and a, just for time reasons for his schedule. Now, by way of introduction, Dr. Moeller, of course, hardly needs one. Most of you’re familiar with him through many different venues. Of course, he’s been here before as one of our Harold OJ Brown Lecturers and Time Gone by. But also just a few notes about him. He of course is the president currently of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky. And we were just talking in my office, I think he’s in his 26th year now, which is a remarkable run author of numerous books.

I won’t even try to list the host of the daily podcast called The Briefing, which many of you know and just countless folks listen to around the world. He does it every day. I don’t know how you do that every day, but maybe you’ll share that with us this morning. He’s also the co-founder of Together for the Gospel, along with our own chancellor Ligon Duncan, which is a tremendously encouraging event. Just a quick note of the first time I heard about Al Moler years ago, this is in the 1990s. As Al and I were talking before the internet had made its way around the world. Al had just been appointed president of Southern Seminary in 93. I was starting my PhD program at the University of Edinburgh a few years later, if you know that when Al took over Southern, there was some changes that needed to be made there.

It was a seminary that needed a fresh shot of biblical fidelity and there were some many challenges. And when I got to Edinburgh, one of my, actually two of my fellow PhD students at the University of Edinburgh, I found out were Southern seminary grads. They had done their MD there. So I asked ’em how their experience was and they were not very happy about their experience. And I was like, well, what was the problem? And apparently the problem was this guy hadn’t heard of yet this new upstart president named Al Mohler who had come in and started making waves. So I asked him, I said, well, what has this guy done that’s so bad? And I found out that the thing he was doing is he wanted to hire professors that actually believed the Bible.

Can you imagine such a thing? And as I heard about what he was doing at Southern Seminary, I was thinking to myself, this is my kind of guy. I like this guy. And of course, ever since that time that Al’s been a bright light in Evangelicalism, a fantastic leader and a good friend of RTS Today, he’s speaking of course on the very broad topic of the health of the Evangelical Church, but we here at RTS and me in particular have asked him to speak in particular about some of those challenges we’ve seen over the last year, just putting it plainly on the table. One of those challenges, of course, is this conference that we heard about called the Revoice Conference that came up just this last summer, which has caused ripples in many of our worlds and denominations. And so I ask Al to speak on what is arguably a very thorny issue, and he’s been very willing to come and speak on that issue within the broader context of just how is the Evangelical church doing today? And so we really look forward to hearing his wisdom on that. So join me as we give a warm welcome to Dr. Al Moler,

Albert Mohler:

President Krueger and RTS family. It’s so good to be with you. I understand that I missed my dear friend Ligon Duncan by a matter of hours. We miss each other all the time at 33,000 feet. We thanks speed to God, end up being in the same place at the same time. Often he’s one of the dearest friends I have ever had or ever hoped to have, and I’m just thrilled to be here in this place where he is Chancellor, thrilled to be here with President Krueger and with your faculty and with Dr. De Young and with the conference this weekend, it reminds me of something I want to say to seminary students, which has nothing to do properly with theological education, but everything to do with ministry, which is you will need friends throughout your ministry in ways you do not know. You will need friends throughout your ministry, you’ll need friends in ministry.

And I would just encourage you to make deep friendships that will endure for life. Because at the end of the day, a friendship, a set of friendships that began in my life when I was a very young man, in particular with Mark Dever and Ligon Duncan, they have been used as instruments of grace in my life to such a way as to be friends when I might not have had any other friends. And in ministry you will have dark nights, interesting twists and turns and you will need friends as the apostle Paul did and was bold to admit. So I’m good to be here. I’m glad to be here among friends. I’m so thankful for RTS. And when I was the first elected president of Southern Seminary, one of the first persons to call me was Luter Whitlock. And Luter knew exactly what I was going to be about and he wanted to help. He invited me to come and speak to the RTS faculty. The first time the RTS faculty had been combined in one retreat. Now it was not pulled off very well. Is there anyone here who was there? Yeah. Yeah.

It was in a conference center in Panama City that had been, I should say partly vacated by spring breakers basically. And it was basically an abandoned fraternity house on the beach where we were meeting, but it was a good fellowship and had some interesting moments in it, which is always good. Dr. Nash was a member of the faculty at RTS. Then he had been in Kentucky teaching at Western Kentucky University. He had no hope the Southern Seminary could be recovered, and so he decided I must be a simpleton who had been put up as a puppet in order for the liberals to continue to run the school. And he didn’t say that before I spoke, thankfully it would’ve been quite demoralizing and he could be quite demoralizing actually. But, and so I spoke, Lutter had invited me to give this lecture. I gave an hour long lecture on my vision for theological education and Dr. Nash just showed up to me, looked at me in the face and said, you’re not an idiot, basically, which was just very affirmative actually. I’ve lived sometimes on that. And the fact that he decided I wasn’t an idiot. And of course later he came to teach, of course at Southern Seminary, that’s the way that happened. Somebody comes up and says, you’re not an next thing you know, they’re your professor.

I do very much appreciate the opportunity to speak to the issue assigned, and I appreciate Dr. Krueger’s introduction about how that came to be. I also appreciate the fact your Presbyterians generally, many of you, certainly most of you, which means there are few surprises. I’m president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. That means more surprises. And one of them came when I had been president just a matter of weeks. And I had been involved in some issues in the public square giving testimony before state legislatures and Congress. And so that was in the background. But what was in the foreground was Mother’s Day and a very tall steeple. Southern Southern Baptist Church invited me to come preach on Mother’s Day, which kind of made sense. This is one of those things that happens. And so I was determined to be about the task of biblical exposition, but I did know that Mother’s Day was in the background.

And so I chose the text on which I was going to preach and crafted the message that I was to deliver with that very much in mind. It was a biblical theology of motherhood. And I thought, when you’re doing this kind of hit and run preaching, I want to deliver more than the average hit and run preacher delivers. And I had worked very hard on this message. In a typical tall steeple, southern Baptist context, the preacher is introduced, then the choir sings an anthem. Then you get up to preach, well, this is my surprising life. And when the pastor gets up to introduce me, he introduces me. Thus he says, Dr. Mohler is here. We’ve asked him to come because of particular concerns in our community. Thus I’ve asked him to preach on a Christian view of sex education. The first, he neglected to tell me that that was the topic of his great concern until he was introducing me. And I had only about a four minute anthem in order to develop what I was going to do. So my message was developed in between a four minute beginning and end of an anthem. But indeed, I preached on a Christian view of sex education with a marvelous finale of a biblical understanding of motherhood.

I am glad to speak to the issues surrounding the Revoice Conference with a wonderful crescendo on current challenges facing evangelical Christianity. No, I really do appreciate with Presbyterians, few surprises in other denominations, a lot more surprises and many of them wonderful. But it is wonderful to be here with you. This is an important topic. It’s one that requires sober mindedness and humility. It’s one that must be placed within a larger context. And that larger context is understanding that biblical Christianity has always required a very specified revealed sexual ethic that the Christian Church has been assigned by the inspiration of the Holy Spirit by the message of the apostles hosts in the message of Jesus, as fulfilled as the Old Testament is fulfilled in the new, the old covenant fulfilled in the new ways that the Christian churches had to struggle with for 2000 years. And so together for the gospel, just a matter of a few months ago, I preached from one Corinthians five and six, which is a reminder to us or the humbling reminder of how much confusion had to be clarified even in apostolic Christianity in a church like Corinth, which raises another interesting Baptist question, and that is why any Baptist church would name itself.

Corinth Baptist Church makes you quite concerned that they haven’t read either of the epistles. It’s actually a Presbyterian church. Well, there you go. Then it’s even more premeditated when you look at that context. It is humbling to understand two things. I think number one, how easily we confuse matters of sexual ethic and the understanding of God’s purpose and God’s glory in creation and in new creation related to our sexual selves, sexual relationships, something so fundamental as marriage and the credible witness of the church. We also have to look at this and understand that we are talking about real human beings. We’re not just talking about issues and questions as we’re looking at the history of the Christian Church. It’s a progress of centuries of trying to wrestle with these questions. And there are, as always, continuities and discontinuities. So the discontinuities have been forms of argument, specific pastoral applications, different cultural contexts that have called for different kinds of adjudications.

Some of this very clearly true in the early church in its negotiation in a new place in the empire. It’s very clear in the medieval church, once you had the medieval synthesis very much in place, the form of argument shifted and you had a primarily a natural law-based argument that emerged within Roman Catholicism. And then in the Reformation, all of this comes up again. I mean, it’s often forgotten that some of the precipitating factors leading to the foment of the reformation in the 16th century had to do specifically with how the sexual ethic of the church was to be applied and to whom it was to be applied. Some of the thorniest questions faced by someone like Luther had to do with very tense negotiations concerning marital issues with the various German princes. There’s no golden era to which we can turn when the Christian Church had all these things absolutely figured out.

And it had its pastoral application of biblical truth absolutely consistently and uncontroversially applied. But there are continuities that are extremely important, and those continuities have been based in both an explicit and an intuitive biblical theology and an engagement with the text to scripture. And it so happens that sexuality and ourselves, human beings made in God’s image, made male and female by no accident, of course appears in the very first chapters of scripture and so does marriage and the conjugal union of a man and a woman. And if you fast forward to the New Testament, we find Jesus, for instance, the gospel of Matthew speaking of God’s purpose from the beginning, such that the sexual ethic of the church is not a correction of the sexual ethic of Israel. It is rather an extension based in a far deeper gospel mandate. It is actually re-grounded in creation, which Jesus does.

Speaking of God’s purpose in the beginning in making them male and female, one of the consistencies throughout the history of the Christian Church is the understanding of the ontology of marriage. Now, Catholics and Protestants did and do disagree about the sacramental nature of marriage, but the consistency is understanding and affirmation. A necessary affirmation of the ontology of marriage and the ontology of marriage is really important because it’s oddly enough, an affirmation of the physicality, the corporeal reality, which is a conjugal union of marriage, the Bible. So em embarrassed to speak about what now is not only controversial and confused, but frankly even among Christians so often superficially understood, it’s actually a part of God’s order of creation that a man and a woman come together and procreation and the gift of children. And it’s tied to the mandate in Genesis one, verse 28. There’s no way other than that means that God devised for us to His glory, for us to be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth.

And one of the issues of course of biblical theology is remembering that what God has designed is by definition to his glory. The right exercise of God’s design is what leads to both human flourishing and the greatest revelation of God’s glory. So why are we having the conversation we’re having now? Again, a bit of historical context is important. These questions were not without urgency, virtually every generation of the Christian Church, but the question is now being asked in a very different way. And it’s of course also because of a great massive shift that has taken place and you can’t really speak of one but of many. But at least we can say that if you’re looking at the history of the West, you are having a different conversation before and after the reformation. You’re having a different conversation before and after the Renaissance. You’re certainly having a very different conversation before and after the enlightenment.

And we’re now having a very different conversation before and after what can only be described as a revolution in sexuality and gender, which means ultimately a revolution, a claimed revolution in ontology. By the way, by definition, there is no actual revolution in ontology that can come only by the creator. But there are claims being made now that have ontological status amongst those who are pressing for a revolution in sexuality and gender and morality. I often cite Theo Hobson, he’s not one of us, he is a champion of the sexual and moral revolution. But presciently, he defines what such a revolution actually represents. And he does so by saying that a total revolution can only happen if three fundamental realities are met. And this comes in three different statements. Number one, what had been condemned must be celebrated. So a reversal, a true revolution in morality in the entire structure of morality.

And Theo Hobson, who is a theologian, is wise enough to understand that if you can revise sexuality and revise human identity, you’ve revised everything by inevitable effect. So what was condemned must be celebrated, not merely tolerated. It has to be celebrated to use the language of sociology, normalization must be reversed. What was once not normal is now normal. What was condemned must be celebrated. The second statement is what was celebrated must be condemned. That’s how important the shift is, an understanding that there’s a sharpness to it. It’s not just that there are now two rival claims concerning human identity, human sexuality, marriage, human sexual relatedness. They’re not two rival claims. Society can only live by one claim. Society can really, in terms of its major currents in terms of its normalizing structures, in terms of its structure of authority, even as translated into public policy and regulations, even something that gets down to the habits and the morays of society can follow only one of these arguments.

So it’s not just that what was condemned must be celebrated, but what was celebrated must be condemned. And this is what many Christians did not see coming. Even many more liberal Christians did not see this coming. So if you look at as I have over so many years, the discourse in liberal Protestantism, it’s really interesting that the argument was made that we can make room for this. But you’ll notice what happens. Those who hold to a traditional biblical sexual ethic are really kicked out because every single bureaucracy, every single regulatory entity has to operate by one set of rules. It can’t operate by two. It follows one logic, not two. And not only that, there’s a moral impetus to it. There’s you have to make a moral argument for why what was condemned must be celebrated. But you do so. You’ve also made simultaneously the argument why something that was previously celebrated must now be condemned.

And then thirdly, those who will not celebrate must be condemned. And you can understand how this is coming. What must happen is that those who will not celebrate must be condemned. Now, this is sheer cultural mayhem. We’re living right in this moment and there are very few honest and consistent voices in the midst of all of this, frankly, on either side. Conservatives tend to speak in what we believe to be realistic and truthful soundbites, but are largely without argument. And one of the reasons is that the defenders of a traditional biblical, we could say in historical perspective accurately the Judeo-Christian understanding of sexuality did not have to make such arguments because the dominant culture did not require us to make such arguments. You only have to make such arguments and the dominant culture is making you account for your beliefs. Or more importantly, when the mainstream culture says, we’re not going to follow your rules anymore.

And quite frankly, the intellectual energy on this issue was primarily on the side of the revolutionaries for the better part of the last 100 years. And in particular the latter part of the 20th century and now into the 21st. So what you had amongst the sexual revolutionaries, and they understood themselves to be nothing less. And we also have to understand that the sexual revolutionaries honestly believe, and this is where Christians, we must be very careful to understand what’s going on. Those who are pressing these arguments honestly believe that human flourishing, human joy and human happiness can only come by overthrowing a repressive, intolerant, ontological, sexual and marital ethic. And so you have two rival visions of human good here. Two starkly rival visions. The march through the society was announced. The sexual revolutionaries were quite clear about their ambitions and it fit within a larger context of a revolutionary spirit.

We’re in 2018, and I look around this room and recognize there are very few of us in this room who know what 50 years ago looked like. But you do need to know that almost all, not all, but almost all of the arguments that are now rather normalized in the society were being projected in the sixties. And in one crystallizing moment, we’ll just take 1968, many of these things can be traced to manifestos and statements, books published and movements abour that would produce the world as we know it now. And one of the interesting things is that it’s not true to say that there was some kind of ER conspiracy to include every imaginable cause There was however, an ER conspiracy, an original conspiracy to upend an entire system of society. So if you look back 50 years ago, the rhetoric of the late 1960s on college campuses and on the streets of cities, including again, it didn’t begin in the United States, began in Europe, it began in cities like Paris and spread throughout much of Europe.

It was a claim to upend the entire society. I was alive then that I was not a teenager then. I was 10 years old. But I do remember hearing the expression down with the man just as shorthand for all traditional authority. And ultimately, of course, I can remember Billy Graham saying ultimately who the man is. Okay? I do know ultimately it was a revolt against theism, against revealed Christianity and against a civilization that dared to claim that same sexual ethic as normative. And of course at the same time, you have other things going on here. You have an intellectual laboratory, and this is where it is interesting. You have so many people on the far right now who all of a sudden they’re talking about the Frankfurt school and critical theory. My goodness, that’s an interesting conversation. It’s one I’ve been involved in ever since I was 18.

And with the primary sources and with some of this still unfolding, and basically you’re right to point to that as the call for an ongoing ruthless, never ending critique of society that in its acidic effect would dissolve all claims to morality, all claims to authority. We tend to forget that the radicalism of the 1960s was not an extension of what was considered then to be Marxism. It was a claim that Marxism had not been taken far enough. It was a far more radical claim. And so to just kind of jump ahead, one part of that is, is that totally comprehensive claim for a critique. It meant that there is never a limit to the focus of that critique. It can’t be, you can begin with this part of society, this sector, this authority center, this set of rules, this particular issue. So that’s the reason why if you could go to the end of what I want to talk about, if you’re talking about L-G-B-T-Q, that’s going to be a never ending list.

LNG did not buy into T, but T demanded to be a part of LG and B and as one of the interesting things is that you’ve got overlapping critiques that aren’t working, even if they’re similarly based in the same foundation of critical theory because you had first wave feminism and then in my lifetime you had second and third and now what’s called fourth wave feminism. And the interesting thing is that they are now in, they’re in different worlds intellectually because the whole premise of second wave feminism with Betty Friedan, and it was the idea that they actually knew what a woman was and that women had been the objects of discrimination and marginalization. And it was for the rights of women, it was for the equal rights amendment and the liberation of women from the domestic consultation camp of the home as Betty Friedan said, okay, well then you end up now with the idea of intersectionality and feminism to where white feminists actually are considered to be part of the problem white heteronormative feminists.

And so the interesting laboratory to look at here are the so-called seven sisters, the seven historically elite women’s colleges in the United States where I mean the gymnastics, and I don’t mean sports, the intellectual gymnastics are unbelievable. I talk about this from time to time. Just go to their websites and look at who can apply and who can graduate. Right now at one of them there is an eight point checklist. It’s a grid. The only person who cannot apply or graduate from these colleges is someone who was born biologically male and identifies as biologically male because the other seven permutations can all both apply and graduate. And you look at that and you go, I can’t imagine any previous generation in human history understanding what this grid means, but you hand this to Betty Friedan and she’s not going to understand it either. Well, as you look at this, you understand that the gay rights movement as it was known and it was called the homo feel movement in the beginning, the gay rights movement was primarily about white male liberation.

And then female non heteronormative groups began to join in. And then of course bisexual and transgender and queer questioning. You just go through the whole list. The point is that if you’re talking about these things in the year 2018, we’re now using a vocabulary that actually emerges out of this context. And it’s almost impossible not to use this vocabulary, but the vocabulary is actually it’s laden with significance. That puts us at a very significant disadvantage because we have to use now linguistic units in which the entire world behind them, the worldview behind them is not one that we can accept. But nonetheless, this language is foisted upon us. This is a part of the problem, especially as we’re talking to people in the public square about these issues. Because identity language is so embedded within this discourse, it puts us at a great disadvantage. But here we are now, the revolution that is underway is one that is by its own affirmation, a comprehensive universal acid in the larger society.

No dimension will remain untouched. On the briefing this morning I go to a very interesting observation by Mike Allen on the collapse of high school dress codes in America. And it really is interesting. And so I decided to go and do a bit of documentation myself. And so the most interesting I found was in Texas, Texas, it is Texas. This is one place. It is like you would figure if there’s any, you could go to Seattle, you kind of expect this, you go to Manhattan, you expect this. But para in Texas, you don’t expect this. But the school board is now being intimidated to change its dress code because it makes a clear distinction between boys and girls. And even on the issue of makeup, it actually has a line in the dress code that says boys may not wear makeup. And so you’ve got teenage girls saying that’s not fair. He should be able to wear makeup if he wants to. It’s his choice. And then you’ve got parents who are now, here’s another moral revolution, siding with the students rather than with the school and demanding all this be changed. You got an assistant superintendent backpedaling as fast as he can. These things aren’t written in stone. Well, oddly enough, by a certain extension we think they are.

This is he just toppled the entire Judeo-Christian truth claim sort of right there. But I guarantee you that’s not what he meant to do. But you look at this and you realize that everything must change. It is. Marx said it clearly, all that is solid melts into air. That’s the context. The question is, is there some kind of middle ground? Is there some way to accept the fundamental intellectual structure of this revolution and what’s behind the revolution and still hold to traditional great tradition Christianity? And that brings us to the conversation about revoice. I didn’t want to jump to it immediately because I think we need to recognize at least first what those who would organize this conference would say that they’re doing and who they say they are. So the context right now is a conversation which is very interesting about side A and side B Christians on the L-G-B-T-Q issues side A, using the language of this movement side, A refers to persons now generally clearly in control of mainline Protestantism who say that the full spectrum of sexual identities must be affirmed.

And the traditional biblical Christian sexual morality must be absolutely relativized and overturned. It’s now an embarrassment to us and Veeva the revolution just we have to join it. And again, that takes us back to the fact that what was celebrated must be condemned and those who will not celebrate must be condemned. Those who established revoice clearly want to identify with what they call side B, and they didn’t invent this dichotomy. It is been embedded in the discourse for a while now. Side B are Christians who want to identify as L-G-B-T-Q but also want to be very clear in identifying as believers in Christ who believe that a biblical sexuality defined by scripture precludes all same sex erotic relationships. And so to quote revoice in its own declaration, we believe that the Bible restricts sexual to the context of a marriage covenant which is defined in the Bible as the emotional, spiritual and physical union of a man and a woman that is ordered toward procreation that that’s an amazingly clear statement.

So if we’re going to talk about revoice, we need to state that they are declaring themselves quite clearly as an event and by extension as a movement on this question, they clearly want to speak of a future Christianity where LGBT people can be open and transparent in their faith communities about their orientation and or experience of gender dysphoria without feeling inferior to their straight cisgender brothers and sisters, where churches not only utilize but also celebrate the unique opportunities that lifelong celibate LGBT people have to serve others. Where Christian leaders boast about the faith of LGBT, people who are living a sacrificial obedience for the sake of the kingdom and where LGBT people are welcomed in the family so they too can experience the joys challenges and benefits of kinship. Now even in that language, a part of what we must hear as gospel Christians is a cry of the heart, a very loud, generous cry of the heart.

This is a message clearly intended to reach us with this kind of poignancy and desire to be part of the body of Christ having affirmed a biblical understanding of sexual behavior and of marriage, they continue At the same time, we also believe that the Bible honors those who live out an extended commitment to celibacy and that unmarried people should play a uniquely valuable role in the lives of local faith communities. They understand that their convictions, these are their words, constitute the traditional sexual ethic because it represents the worldview that the Bible consistently teaches across both the old and New Testament and that Christians have historically believed for millennia. Well that’s very encouraging. So this means there really is a distinction between side B and side A. And furthermore, we know where side A is and where it’s going. We should understand side A continues to speak to us more or less as captives being dragged along by a sexual revolution or as churches they think will just be inevitably made more and more sectarian and pushed to the margins of society.

The side B folks here who are behind revoice and most of us in the room know some of these, they’ve been starting an argument long before revoice. And so a key date is 2008, that’s 10 years ago. And very openly now we’re told that groups began to speak trying to kind of formulate what would be a side B position and to try to come up with a new voice. Thus the name of the conference revoice a new voice for traditional even evangelical Christianity on these issues. There’s not enough time to go into the detail I would want, but one of the things we need to recognize is that the side B of this equation still emphatically uses the identity constructs that produce side A. That’s the crucial thing to watch. And so as biblically grounded Christians, one of the things we have to look for is the anthropology, the understanding of humanity, both created edic humanity and fallen humanity.

And to understand where this goes, now there’s a prehistory here that’s really, really important because, and it takes us back to some of what we were talking and that intellectual development, the worldview shifts critical theory and the identity language because you can’t have one without the other. You can’t have critical theory actually having much impact in the United States without the psychotherapeutic revolution and the great turn to the self. And so most as saw parts of this most thinking people, I mean average, most people don’t see any of it. They’re just the objects of it, especially through popular culture, which by the way, on the briefing this morning I talk about the New York Times, this massive front page article in the style section on the market and that means fashion market now completely embracing the gender fluid future. And it’s a really horrible article. The photographs are beyond belief in the New York Times. I’m just thinking the old gray lady, which is the old term for the New York Times, is breaking entirely new ground these days when you look at it. But the interesting thing is that guy Tra Bay, the fashion editor, one of 12 full-time writers on fashion for the New York Times, what does that tell you?

He makes the argument explicitly in this article in yesterday’s edition of the New York Times that what had been discussed in academic circles 50 years ago is now the new normal. This is exactly what he’s talking about. And he said it is gone pop, that means it’s gone popular culture. So most Americans are just seeing this filtered through popular culture. I don’t even really realize what’s going on, but for some time more aware Christians have been looking at what Philip Reef called the triumph of the therapeutic and have been watching humanistic psychology begin to redefine human beings. And at the same time you’ve got very explicit shifts in the academy towards an understanding of humanity. And of course behind all of this is uncreated humanity, cosmic accident humanity, and entirely naturalist and materialist explanation for humanity. Because by the way, if you’re going to have a sexual revolution, it’s really hard to do that in the face of a creator who gets to tell you who you are.

And so just as Richard Dawkin said, it took Darwin to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist. It also takes Darwin to be an effective sexual revolutionary by definition. But when you’re looking at this from a perspective of 2018 to talk about these issues now in a side B context is to be aware that all the identity language I know who I am understanding of humanity and of the most fundamental basic issue of the sexual self, that’s all taken over into it. So with time running out, this gets to the key issue. Can we rightly speak of a gay Christian? The entire premise of revoice under the side side is that we can indeed speak of an ongoing identity is a gay Christian. So a part of what you see that was revealed both in the promotion for the event and in the discourse at the event is a fundamental LGBT and they didn’t use the Q as often identity that continues as definitional of the believer after conversion and even in sanctification. That’s really interesting. Behind that is an understanding of sexual orientation. Now in 1993, the National Association of Evangelicals held a think tank at Geneva College in Pennsylvania trying to deal with these questions. And the two theologians invited to speak to that. Well, I was one and Dr. Carl Henry was the other. And if you know me, he’s in so many ways a mentor to me, including the fact I was the editor of his last writings.

So I want to tell you, I think we made a mistake and a part of it’s the changing landscape between 1993 and the present. I denied and felt I had to deny and had biblical basis to deny any notion of sexual orientation. It’s because even then the sexual orientation was being used as an argument that it’s it’s natural a given and therefore what is given must be normalized. And this is back when lave was claiming DNA evidence for an inclination towards male homosexuality and all the rest. I spoke in 2000, I think it was 16, and said I think that’s a mistake in once, I apologize to those who are struggling with L-G-B-T-Q issues because what we ended up denying is something that I don’t think actually we should deny given a biblical worldview, which is the fact that in a fallen world there is a certain givenness to erotic orientation to even what Nate Collins would speak of as an aesthetic orientation.

And so I think the problem was that in 1993 trying to be as biblically minded as possible, we had failed to make a really adequate distinction between pre-fall and post-fall notions of a certain givenness. Now the thing is that I believe we were fundamentally right and the church has been consistently, fundamentally right? It must be fundamentally right now even in affirming exactly what Revoice said about the biblical sexual ethic, which is that the only appropriate expression of human sexual behavior is conjugal a union between one man and one woman in the holy covenant of marriage, period. The problem is that now this orientation language has become identity, which is also something we did not understand. I must be honest, in 1993, it was not at all clear that that was a more fundamental identity being claimed. And a part of it is because, and I’ve done some checking with some of the gay rights activists that I’ve been in conversation with for 30 years, and many of them are honest enough to say no, that is not what we were saying in 1973.

That is not what we were saying in 1985. This identity language, it has an intellectual pedigree, but it is now fundamental and that’s what really makes Revoice different than the conversations that have taken place before. It is because when they use the language, again speaking of LGBT identity, that turns out to be what they understand and publicly confess to be so fundamental to their identity that it actually modifies everything that follows. Now here’s where if you were looking at the event, certain developments are explained such as the fact that both in what happened at the conference and in the conversation prior to the conference in their publicity for the conference and in their books and public addresses, they clearly identify with the LGBT community writ large. And so some of them will write about their great joy of being at their first gay pride event.

And so identifying and what’s also really interesting in a tighter context, if we leave the secular world, let’s just look at that side A and side B conversation. What actually unites them is that they commonly hold to the very same notion of sexual identity, the very same explicit claim that it is fundamental and that it is enduring, it’s permanent. Now at this point, you might think of perhaps the most notorious statement that came in the publicity about revoice, and I’m having to speak quickly here, but in one of the breakout sessions entitled Redeeming Queer Culture and Adventure, I’m just going to read you the words. It was presented this way, explained here, the conference session for the sexual minority seeking to submit his or her life fully to Christ and to the historic Christian sexual ethic, queer culture presents a bit of a dilemma Rather than combing through and analyzing to find which parts are to be respected, to be redeemed or to be received with joy, Christians have often discarded the virtues of queer culture along with vice, which leaves culturally connected Christian sexual minorities, torn between two cultures, two histories and two communities.

So questions that have until now been largely unanswered remain. What does queer culture and specifically queer literature in theory have to offer us to follow Christ? What queer treasure, honor and glory will be brought into the new Jerusalem at the end of time, citing Revelation 21, 24 to 26.

And there’s a lot of people who knew enough to see that and just be absolutely shocked. But this is where if we’re thinking carefully, we have to look at this and understand there’s a prehistory here too. And I’ve been writing about these things for many years and lecturing about them and I may misunderstand them, but at least I’ve been following them closely. And I’ll tell you one of the things that is very clear is that those have been pushing these arguments have had to shift their means of argumentation because having conquered liberal Protestantism, which after all had denied biblical authority and so abandoned the gospel, it was there for the taking and the revisionist arguments that have been offered. Romans one, it is just about, or the entire biblical context, let’s leave the Old Testament for a moment or let’s not and say Sodom Gamar was just the sin of inhospitality. Or you go to Romans chapter one, Paul doesn’t know anything about sexual orientation. And so he’s actually just talking about, as one prominent mainline Protestant thing said, it will be wrong for heterosexual people to commit homosexual acts because he doesn’t know about homosexual people. That’s their whole argument. Well, you look at all of that and you step back and say, what’s happening in Al main nine Protestantism? None of that. Why? Because you don’t need to argue about the Bible anymore.

You don’t need that. So Matthew Vines and folks like that, and this is a part of that conversation that’s going on in the last 10 years or so, decided, let’s take that language because evangelicals still talk about the Bible. So if we want to change what evangelicals view on these things and then that’s where we’re going to have to bring those arguments and look, they’ve been successful in some part. I mean if you just look over the last 10 years, there are some people who clearly would identify as evangelical who are accepting those arguments, flawed, obviously flawed as they are, but there’s something more fundamental here. And when you look at this statement, what’s behind it? Well, I’ll tell you a part of what is understand is that ontology has to be dealt with and the biblical meta narrative has to be dealt with. I was flying to speak in Baltimore and was flying across the country, I think it was on the night that Nicholas Volter stor was giving his address in which he announced he’s changing his position.

And he was speaking into a denominational controversy in his own church about this. And I’m not a prophet, but I was traveling with someone and I said, he’ll have to get to ontology. You have to. He did. And he said in explaining his shift towards a traditional sexual understanding of Christian biblical understanding of marriage to supporting same-sex marriage, he said, I came to the conclusion that LGBT sexual orientation is actually a part of the goodness of creation, not a product of the fall. Okay? They have to get there. If you’re going to make a serious argument now, then you got to make an argument that it’s a part of the goodness of creation. That is what’s embedded in this statement. And so this is a rewriting of the biblical meta narrative to where erotic, or at least what Nate Collins, again, he’s a PhD graduate of our institution. These things happen.

But I mean he’s written this extensively. He, he’s saying that it doesn’t, sexual orientation is not merely an erotic orientation because, and explicitly erotic orientation would be sinful, but it can be an aesthetic orientation. And I just have to tell you, I find that theologically not less problematic, but more as it’s laid out here, same, same-sex aesthetic orientation. Number one, my understanding of sin is reformation based, which I believe is biblical in which I don’t think you can have aesthetic without erotic nor erotic without aesthetic. I think that that’s not possible, but it’s the grounding in the biblical meta narrative, this really important, where does it fall? Well, falls the wrong word here. Where’s it located? Because if LGBT erotic orientation is found in Eden, then it’s good. If it’s found in Eden, it will be fulfilled in a new heaven and a new Earth. I don’t believe you can possibly faithfully read the Bible that way.

But that means if it’s not in Eden and it is a product of the fall, and let’s be clear, the Christian Church has been fundamentally certain of that for 20 centuries reading the scripture, then it is not something that will be found at all in the new Jerusalem. There is no queer treasure to bring into the new Jerusalem. But the good news is there’ll be many queer people identified at some point that way on earth who by the transforming power of the gospel of Jesus Christ and by God’s redeeming purpose will be in the new heaven and the new Earth. But the identity can’t be that it can’t possibly fit the biblical meta narrative in scripture. It can’t possibly be consistent with the gospel to say in the new Jerusalem, sexual identity having been so fundamental is going to be a part of anyone’s identity. Then to the extent that even as we will continue to be male and female, and Jesus himself said, our even biblically defined sexual identity will not be a part of the new Jerusalem.

There will be no marriage nor giving in marriage. Well, you can understand and sympathize with an effort to try to create this different new position, but you will see several things problematic in this. One of them is that the side A and side B Christians are in fundamental agreement with the identity question. And ultimately, I don’t say this with any kind of presumptuousness. I certainly don’t say it with any kind of enthusiasm, but having witnessed similar things over the church, the history of the church over the last several decades, I don’t see any way that side B doesn’t end up sliding into side A and side A is not going to continue to see side B as authentically a part of the community holding to the positions of side A. Look at mainline Protestantism. It just doesn’t work. There are other big issues here. I could find a way to make these arguments if I were Roman Catholic, given Roman Catholic’s understanding of concupiscence. And so we differ on the understanding of sexual desire, which means sexual identity because that’s how the identity is established just by sexual desire. And you see this in all the testimonies. I found out I was A, B, C or DLG, B or T because of desire, because something was awakened in me, my own personal identity.

This is where Protestants have been united in understanding the sinfulness of concupiscence. In fact, as the Puritans argued, as the very source of sin, lived out transgressions of the law in our lives. And the Roman Catholic Church, remember at Trent answering the reformers, it was at Trent that the Roman Catholic Church formally affirmed concupiscence as not sin even in a sentence in which at Trent, the Roman Catholic Church says, acknowledging that the apostle speaks of concupiscence as sin, the church has never taught concupiscence as sin. Well, that’s okay, my goodness, that kind of candor, that’s where the Southern Baptist just expects a lightning bolt any minute. I know that Paul believed, and James and John believed the Inc is sin, but the church has never believed that Inc is sin my goodness. But as Protestants, as confessing Protestants, as evangelicals, especially as reformed folk, I don’t think there’s any way that we can see this as a legitimate expression of scriptural Christianity of the gospel, nor can we see it as a stable project and we should not misrepresent it.

There’s much more to be said here, but I take every one of these leaders at his or her word that they mean to maintain a commitment to great tradition. Christianity is defined by many of them and to a biblical sexual ethic. I don’t believe it’s a stable project faithful to scripture and gospel that can endure. I do believe that there are and should be, and we should celebrate in our churches, many persons who struggle with the same sex attraction, but we can’t buy into the identity language for them or of them nor of ourselves other than the identity of being united with Christ and new creatures in Christ, who by the way continue to struggle. Remember, we’re reformed here. We believe in puntil justification and progressive sanctification. And furthermore, we believe the church is made up of people who should include honesty to demonstrate honesty in dealing with these things in order that we can encourage one another to sanctification by the ordinary means of grace being conformed to the image of Christ, but being conformed to the image of Christ means that any identity, no matter how important it might be to us, and for some who would claim to be evangelical Christians being Republican, might be an identity language they don’t even recognize that they think of as being more fundamental than being Christian.

One last observation here. Even at Revoice, it’s real clear given their own pattern of thinking and proposal, there’s no indication, nor was there any real public acknowledgement of how T fits into this because what in the world does a commitment to a traditional biblical Christian sexual ethic mean for T? So celibacy is one of the things they point to for LG and B, but T, that’s a different thing, and I think it’s another, it will be another wedge to shift them further away from side B and towards side A. I hope I’ve spoken with respect and accuracy here. It’s an important issue. It’s a gospel issue, and I say that to mean the only authority we have with which to speak is the authority of God’s word. The only measure by which we know to consider any proposal such as this is the gospel of Jesus Christ. So thank you for your consideration and President Krueger, I turn it back to you.