Whenever I speak on the topic of homosexuality, it seems that one question keeps coming up: “Is Same-Sex Attraction Sinful?” How you answer this question has tremendous practical implications, not only for those who experience SSA but also for those trying to minister to them. I recently sat down for a brief interview with Heath Lambert to answer this very query. In short, my answer to the question is “Yes, it is.” If you are interested to hear how and why, you can download it here or listen to it below. You can sign-up for the excellent ACBC podcast here. Read about it here.
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How pastors save their people (and yes, they really do save them).
“Pay close attention to yourself and to your teaching; persevere in them. For by doing this, you will save both yourself and the ones who hear you.” -1 Timothy 4:16 This verse has caused problems for many readers of scripture. It sounds a little unorthodox to hear Paul tell pastor Timothy that Timothy can “save” the people he preaches to. Indeed, some commentators have tried to avoid this difficulty by suggesting that the word translated “save” isn’t talking about eternal salvation. But I think that interpretation is incorrect. We have to work with what the text says, not with what we think it ought to say. Paul routinely uses this…
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Red and yellow, black and white. We can be all of them in his sight?
The name Rachel Dolezal is all over the news and social media today. She’s the head of the NAACP in Spokane, Washington, but she’s now under scrutiny for pretending to be black. Now exposed, news outlets have asked her about her race. Her responses have been cagey, as The Spokesman-Review reports:
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Bruce or Caitlyn? He or she? Should Christians accommodate transgender naming?
How should Christians respond to transgenderism in general and Bruce Jenner’s “transition” in particular? I think Christians are at their best when they recognize a need for both compassion and truth-telling. Compassion for those who experience painful alienation from their own bodies and truth-telling in the face of fictional accounts of gender identity. As I have written before, transgenderism is a denial of God-ordained differences between male and female (Gen. 1:26-27). It is an untruthful suppression of the sexual binary that God has encoded into every cell of our bodies. When a person feels their gender identity to be out of sync with their sexual identity, the problem is not…
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The predominant view of “the least of these” in church history
It’s hard to predict when a blog post will be particularly popular or controversial. I had no idea that my post last week about “the least of these” (Matt. 25:40) would provoke the response that it has. Some people have expressed appreciation, and others have been positively outraged at the suggestion that “the least of these” might be a reference to Christians and not to the poor in general. In fact, the comments from some on social media have been downright angry and sometimes even foul. There was even a news story devoted solely to discussing the post. One of the most consistent objections that I have read is that…
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The “least of these” are not the poor but the Christian baker, photographer, and florist
Yesterday during the panel discussion at the Poverty Summit, I noticed a repeated biblical allusion to the “least of these” (Matt. 25:40, 46). I think every speaker on the panel—including President Obama—used the phrase “least of these” to refer to our fellow citizens who live in poverty and who need help. This is how the phrase is commonly understood, and so it wasn’t a surprise to hear the panelists speak this way. The phrase stood out to me because I recently delivered a sermon to my church on this very text from Matthew’s Gospel (download here or listen below). . It turns out that the panelists’ use of this phrase…
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An insightful critique of “Red Letter Christianity”
Karen Swallow Prior has an insightful article about “red-letter Christianity”—a movement that gives hermeneutical priority to Jesus’ words (the so-called “red letters”) over the rest of the words of scripture. Her bottom line says it all: All of the words of Jesus come through the narrators of the Bible. If the black letters of the narrators are reliable, so too are the red letters of Christ. If the narrators are unreliable, however, then the words of Christ they convey are untrustworthy as well. The only way to the red letters is through the black letters. It’s a really helpful article dealing with the question from a literary perspective. Read the…
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Check-out the new ESV Bible app!
The ESV Bible app was designed to make reading the Bible on your iPhone or iPad as similar to reading a print Bible as possible. It looks like a really helpful resource for Bible readers. You can read more about it here. Download app from the iTunes store.
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On the ethics of sexual attraction (same-sex and otherwise)
The Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society has just published an article that I have been working on for a little over a year. Even though the piece is titled “Is Homosexual Orientation Sinful?,” it’s really just an extended treatment of the ethics of sexual attraction. My contention is that the Bible speaks a clear word about our experience of sexual attraction be it heterosexual, homosexual, or otherwise. Whenever we desire something that God forbids, we are experiencing an “attraction” that is sinful and that God would have us to repent of.
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Media freak-out lands on “Hardball with Chris Matthews”
Kudos to Russell Moore for fighting the good fight in a tough venue. Moore completely outmatched the activist that he was paired to debate. Still, what strikes me about this conversation is that it is clear that Chris Matthews has no idea what the Indiana bill says. After 5 days of national debate, he still doesn’t have a basic working knowledge of this law. Not only that, he apparently is unaware of the bakers, florists, photographers, etc. who have been at the center of this debate for years now. How can he not know the basics by now?
