Christianity

Albert Mohler comments on KBC decision to oust church

Yesterday, the Kentucky Baptist Convention (KBC) voted to sever ties with the historic Louisville congregation Crescent Hill Baptist Church. The KBC moved to disfellowship because the church has recently announced that it no longer believes homosexuality to be a sin. Albert Mohler commented on the move yesterday to a reporter from our local NBC affiliate. See above.

19 Comments

  • Bill Smith

    I know this guy is married and has a few kids but my gaydar was seriously going off watching this guy. They made a choice, it has consequences.

  • rachel topham

    Yes God is love and we love homosexuals. And because of that and for the sake of truth, they have to remove them. God loves us all too much to let us remain the way that we are, which is why he died on the cross for our sin. It is only in calling sin, sin can there be any hope. Only in proper diagnosis can there hope if a cure.

    • Phil Coulson

      Agreed. You have to appreciate those churches that boil down God’s character to just one thing. While forgetting righteous, holy, etc.

  • Curt Day

    As much as I am for the allowance of same-sex marriage in society, I am against it in any church. The defense given for Crescent Hill Baptist Church’s stand includes reducing God to what people can understand about love to standing with those who are marginalized. And there is an important point here. When we try to marginalize gays in society, are we contributing to the sin of those who feel they must justify homosexuality in order to defend gays who would be otherwise marginalized?

    • Chris Ryan

      Yeah, that’s well said. Within society we should recognize ppl’s right to decide these things for themselves, but within the church we’re obligated to apply scripture.

  • Tom Sikes

    In any family this is an issue, in Gods purview it is your personal value statement. . Him or a human! In Gods family it is a problem that must be met lovingly, but must be met and discipline now is better than discipline in His presence for condemnation.

    Matt.10:36-38
    36 and a man’s enemies will be the members of his household.

    37 “Whoever loves father or mother more than me is not worthy of me, and whoever loves son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me. 38 And whoever does not take up his cross and follow me is not worthy of me.

    The point is that no person no matter how apparently valuable to us as humans or our own preferences can or will stand before Him guiltless, neither can they expect salvation.

  • James Bradshaw

    Here’s a question for those who claim to believe in the inerrancy of Scripture:

    Have you ever felt in your bones that something was immoral that the Bible said nothing about or that the Bible actually endorsed?

    Have you ever deeply believed that something was MORAL even though the Bible explicitly condemned it?

    In either case, did you reject your own intuitions about whatever that thing happened to be in favor of what the Bible happened to say about it?

    I’m referring to the dilemma of many gay Christians, but I’m curious as to whether others have experienced this regarding some other moral issue and what they did about it.

    • Daryl Little

      All the time. And without exception it boils down to what I want over against what God wants.

      What did I do? Probably I sinned, but then, over time, I brought my will into submission to Scripture.

    • Barbara Jackson

      Yes. As one who was brought to saving faith later in life, a radical restructuring of my very heart began to take place very quickly and it was a VERY traumatic thing; but one thing that I quickly came to know is the faultiness of my own fallen judgment in the face of a holy God. There are hard things in Scripture, VERY Hard things; but it comes down to whether we personally know and love and trust the God of the Scripture, or if we still have our feet solidly planted in humanisitc ideology. For me, it came down to seeing the blackness of my own heart in the light of a good and just God who deserved far better from me than for me to believe my wisdom was better than His. For that alone I deserved to be cast into the abyss, but instead He held out the cross of Christ to me! And He took my punishment upon Himself. His ways are not our ways. His thoughts are so much higher than ours. But it takes knowing Him and trusting Him to really delight in His ways.

      We finite creatures can so often be tunnel-visioned and think that comfort in the here and now is the greatest good. And we are so saturated in the world’s value system that seeks to glorify man rather than God, and part of that is refusing to call sin what it is, yet offer forgiveness for “mistakes’ and “bad choices” as if that were all it were. It keeps us from true forgiveness and from growing away from our fallenness into greater reflection of the glory of the God who made us, who loves His people enough to have provided the perfect sacrifice to atone for us and bring us into fellowship with Him, where true and eternal joy is to be found. To continue to hold out the hand of fellowship in Christ to those who have soundly rejected His counsel is to withhold love from them; both Jesus in Matthew 18 and Paul in 1 Corinthians 5 spoke of how to deal with those who would not listen (Matt 18) and who are caught up in sexual sin yet still considered themselves brethren (1 Cor 5). Both are for redemptive purposes; if you don’t realize your sin, you cannot have hope of life through repentance and faith.

      I have found that to seek to know Him and to pray for a heart that will be joyfully submitted to HIs truth in the hard places, to have eyes that see as He does rather than as I always have; is a place of battle, many times I have had a rip-roaring internal fight that makes me think of the death throes of a large fire-breathing dragon flailing about….but it does die and I understand better, and so I can grow in Him rather than digging in my heels leaning unto my own understanding (which I had done for the first 40 years of my life). It is a blessed place, and as time goes on and I walk with Him longer, He and His ways that I once loathed become more and more precious as He works the fruit of HIs Spirit in me. He gives many promises to sustain His people through those pruning times and He definitely refreshes and restores the soul.

      Hope that helps some. I know the battles, but He who has called us is faithful.

    • buddyglass

      “Have you ever felt in your bones that something was immoral that the Bible said nothing about or that the Bible actually endorsed?”

      Yes. Mostly stuff related to the conquest of the promised land and the choice of stoning as a means of execution.

      “Have you ever deeply believed that something was MORAL even though the Bible explicitly condemned it?”

      I can’t think of anything I’ve felt was a moral imperative that bible condemned, but there are a few things where I have, at times, had trouble understanding why they’re forbidden. Off the top of my head, homosexuality and women serving as pastors. Also, if you’re someone who interprets Bible to endorse a subordinate role for women in marriage, then that as well.

      In terms of what to do about it, I see three choices. To preface, I’ve experienced God in ways that, for me, make his existence and certain other aspects of Christian theology (namely my sinful state) extremely hard to deny.

      1. Walk away. Come up with alternate explanations for the times where I feel like I’ve “experienced” God. Delusions, maybe. Weird brain phenomena. Reject the Bible because it endorses immorality and condemns things that aren’t immoral.

      2. Explain away whatever passages in the Bible cause problems. Tons of people have gone to great lengths to do this. Jefferson just cut them out. In general, I don’t find their explanations compelling, so this isn’t much of an option for me.

      3. Stay. Have faith that God is just and merciful and there must be some explanation (possibly beyond my capacity to understand) for how the things I read in the Bible that seem cruel or arbitrary are, in fact, not cruel or arbitrary.

  • James Bradshaw

    Thanks for the replies, all.

    To reiterate, though: I’m not referring to instances where we fail to live up to our values or act contrary to our values because of weakness. We’ve all done this. Instead, I’m asking whether we’ve acted contrary to our own consciences *because* we believed it was the will of God. Buddy touched on this a bit, but let me give another example.

    Suppose a woman was married to a man who was an alcoholic and physically (but not sexually) abusive to both her and her children, perhaps not to the degree of breaking their noses, but enough to leave welts and scars. While this abuse was done in private, he’d also verbally abuse them in front of others, humiliating the children in front of family and perhaps their friends. Unfortunately, the man claims to be a believer.

    This is a real world example. The notorious Fred Phelps knew the Bible backward and forward, yet the children of his that left have claimed that he physically abused both his wife and them, sometimes beating them with leather straps or an ax handle.

    Scripture, if taken at face value, leaves very few “outs” for marriage. Three passages quoting Christ Himself suggest that the only permissible reason for divorce is infidelity.

    This is my problem with taking Scripture at face value. The values it espouses in one passage are thrown out the window in favor of adhering to some ideal for its own sake.

    Does anyone believe that a woman who flees such a marriage for the protection and sanity of her children is offending God in some fashion? Perhaps the woman believes that to be the case. So she stays, even though her own conscience may be insisting that the lives of her little ones take precedent over her own safety or even her own soul.

    I find this difficult to swallow, to say the least.

    If God is really “love”, what sort of love demands that a woman subject herself (or her children) to chronic abuse? It’s not a definition that is sufficiently coherent that I could even apply such a system of values to my own life. Does this make sense?

    In this real-life scenario, Mrs Phelps (I believe her name is Margie) apparently took the letter of the law to heart. I think her family and the world was very much worse off because of it.

    I know this is an extreme example, but I know it’s not all that uncommon either. Pick up the paper, or look within our own extended families.

    • Barbara Jackson

      Mr. Bradshaw,

      While there are different hermeneutical principles out there, I believe that Scripture interprets Scripture, and that if compassionate biblical church discipline is brought into the picture in the way Jesus commands (as I referenced earlier with Matthew 18 and also 1 Cor 5), with the commands given to husbands in terms of how they are to love their wives (Ephesians 5) and bringing the character of God with His command to His people over and over again to love the brethren, then if the abusive husband is unrepentant and unwilling to work with the elders in and the wife and family are in danger, then there is absolutely room for the man to be treated as an unbeliever and 1 Corinthians 7 comes to play there; she is not bound to him. There is also a place for Christian hospitality to take in this woman and her children while her husband undergoes the necessary counsel and work toward change. To take Scripture at face value is not to take it at a shallow value; it is important to be diligent to rightly divide the word of Truth.

      And to be clear, Fred Phelps may have claimed to be a believer, but he denied the Gospel at every turn.

      God bless,
      Barbara

    • Don Johnson

      On divorce, one should read the words of Jesus in a first century Jewish context, not in some supposed “face value” way, as the latter is a great way to take text out of context. In this case, doing a supposed “face value” reading is very different from what Jesus meant and the misunderstanding starts right with the question Jesus is asked in Matt 19:3. See David Instone-Brewer’s masterwork on divorce for details.

      On homosex, what the text means depends crucially on the meaning of some words, the Hebrew toebah (often translated as abomination) and the Greek arsenokoitai and malakos. See “The Bible Now” book for an analysis of the Hebrew. For the latter two, Paul seems to have invented the first Greek word, and one can figure out both are related to homosex activites, the question is whether Paul was referring to all such activities or just exploitative ones. In other words, it is an interpretation question.

      • Robert Karl

        Don:

        I have read Brewer’s article and strongly disagree with his conclusion. Jesus’ won words are pretty simple and straightforward–why the need for academic gymnastics. Husband and wife and husband one united with God. Anything less is what the pagans do. John Paul 2 ‘s Theology of the Body ( and his other writings) is a very good read on marriage and sexuality on how it is ultimately a convenant with God.

        • Don Johnson

          One needs to read David Instone-Brewer’s book, not just an article, to get his full argument.

          I agree that the words may SEEM simple and straightforward, but it is a trap. There are basically 2 ways to read it, as a Greek speaker (wrong) and as a Hebrew speaker (correct), especially as a 1st century Jew as this was a discussion between Jews. If you miss the Hebrew idioms, you totally misunderstand what is going on. In Matt 19 Jesus is correcting seven misinterpretations of Torah by the Pharisees, but if you do not know what they taught, you will not see what he is doing. One can see what the Pharisees taught from the Jewish Mishnah, which provides essential context for the divorce passages (and many other things in the NT).

  • Christiane Smith

    I found a startling quote from Philip Yancey that may be food for thought for the diverse attitudes towards same-sex unions and the Church, this:

    “Sociologist and researcher Amy Sherman has said that Christians tend to have three models for interacting with society: fortification, accommodation, and domination.
    To put that in layman’s terms:
    We hunker down amongst ourselves, water down our witness, or beat down our opponents. For many reasons, those aren’t New Testament models.” (Philip Yancey)

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