What It Means to Be Evangelical

RealClearReligion ^ | 01/22/2015 | Rob Schwarzwalder

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A number of thoughtful Evangelical commentators (captured here by my brave and faithful friend Owen Strachan) have responded pointedly to Elizabeth Dias's Time story, "Inside the Evangelical Fight Over Gay Marriage." They have demonstrated logically, theologically and philosophically why the movement to abandon Scripture's teaching on human sexuality in order to accommodate supposedly Evangelical advocates of normalizing same-sex "marriage" and attraction is an offense to God and the Gospel.

At the Family Research Council, we have joined them in addressing the concerns of younger Evangelicals regarding homosexuality, in recognizing the uniqueness of male-female complementarity and in celebrating God's plan for sexual intimacy as exclusive to marriage between one man and one woman, for life. We have hosted such careful exegetes as Pittsburgh Seminary's Robert Gagnon and published studies by leading theologians like Andreas Kostenberger. And we have answered those who assert that Scripture's teaching on homosexuality is culturally-conditioned or plain misunderstood.

Rather than recapitulating all of these arguments, I'll make three simple observations about Time's story:

1. Those professed Evangelicals who are willing to jettison the Bible's teaching regarding homosexuality can no longer claim to be persons of the Gospel -- Evangelicals. In terminating their allegiance to the bi-testamental instruction about homosexual conduct, they are diminishing what God's Word teaches about sin, the eternal penalty for which God's Son died on the cross. Their exegetical gymnastics admit to a sense of desperation: We have to get the Bible on our side or we can't make our case to those who believe in it. The problem is, contort Romans 1, et al, as they might, Paul and Moses and, yes, Jesus still say what they say: Homosexual behavior is wrong in the sight of the Creator.

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