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Good evening, everyone. Obviously, everybody here is not rugby supporters. No amens? Okay, by the way, let us start. Let us start with a bow of prayer, and I think it's always good to start with Jesus watching over us.
Let us close our eyes and pray. Lord Jesus, thank you for the opportunity tonight to have a conversation, to speak, and Father, also to listen. We pray, Lord, that your name will be glorified and that you'll be lifted up in this conversation tonight.
In your holy name we ask. And God's people said, amen. Amen, just turn to the neighbor next to you and say, behave tonight. This is South Africa, so I know it works. I know you've got a friend that is enthusiastic, so I'm gonna ask you right now, please take your cell phones, put it on silent.
I'm doing it as well, because last time I said it, and then my mom phoned, and it was on. So it's pretty embarrassing, but please put your phone on silent. I don't want you to put your phone off, and there's a reason for it.
What we're gonna do during the discussion is my number will be placed upon the wall a little bit later on, and you are welcome to send your questions to me. Now, this is important, because it is your opportunity to ask a question.
What is gonna happen with the format of the debate is each speaker will have a few minutes to give their introductions, they'll have rebuttals, and then what we're gonna do is they're gonna have a question and answer session against or for or with one another.
After that, then you can send your questions, and I think hopefully in the introduction, some of your questions will already be answered. So if there is another question that you wanna pose, keep it short.
A question is usually that which contains a question mark after the sentence, and then please send it to my personal number that will be flashed on the screen. Well, we will just put it on the screen, won't flash it for those people that have epilepsy.
But anyway, we will definitely then make sure that we have you ask the questions as well that is relevant for you tonight. Please, when you send an SMS, can you please just put the person that you addressed the question to?
If it's both, say James and Graham, and you can all send to Graham or James, and I can read it in a fair order. Is that okay? Okay, so please just note, and I just wanna just give you a little bit of background.
Three years ago, we already started with a conversation. Who was year three, well, not year, but three years ago, who listened to the conversation that we had? Wonderful, I would encourage you to listen to that because it is a good primer as to how the temperament of the speakers are, and also, it is a good primer just in a general way to start a discussion, and I thought that was done with great excellence from both speakers, and I really enjoyed that.
Tonight, we're gonna pause it and take the conversation a little bit forward, and what we're gonna do is we're gonna start off by saying that both of the speakers on stage are professed evangelical Christians tonight, so that is very important for us to understand that we are invited into an open conversation where they will pass their questions to one another.
I'm gonna ask for you, while you're here listening, sometimes we get enthusiastic. I know this is a mildly charismatic church, so we can cheer, and we can jeer, and we can say hallelujah. We're not gonna do that while they speak.
It's quite distracting, and I think the points they wanna make, they wanna keep their line of thought, so please just be honoring that. Don't boo, don't yay, don't say woo-hoo, or anything like that.
Is that okay? That is the ground rules. If you're not, in actual fact, gonna behave, what we will do then is we will stop the conversation, so there's not gonna be second warnings. There's not gonna be anything where we're gonna please calm down.
The conversation is here for everyone to listen, okay, and so please let us start with that in mind. It is of cardinal importance to understand that both speakers believe that the Bible is God's word, and it should be studied.
It should be understood, and therefore, when we speak tonight, we need to understand that both of them have taken time to prepare for this conversation, and even though they have different interpretations and different conclusions, we're gonna respect them.
We're gonna give them time so that they can speak what they need to say. So again, please be seated. There will be a time period where there'll be a break because you're sitting on hard chairs, so what we'll do is we'll give you a 10-minute break to where you can stand and you can just relax a little bit and let the blood flow, but please do not rush the stage, okay?
Give them an opportunity just to relax and just to stay focused as well. So that is very important, and therefore, I would invite you and say thank you for coming to this important discussion. It's wonderful to have you here, and it is wonderful, as usual, to have this conversation in this wonderful church.
Thank you to this church. I'm already saying thank you because we might run out of time in the end, but thank you for coming, and I will maybe sneak in the rugby scores if you behave, okay, just if you behave.
Maybe halftime, no, I'm teasing. I will sneak in the rugby scores. That's just the way I am, but please enjoy this conversation, and I'm gonna give over to the speakers, and Graham, I think you're gonna go first.
James, I'm wrong again. James is gonna come first, and he's gonna give his introduction. Thank you.
Obviously, Graham is much taller than I am, so I will just have to deal with a short man's problem of dealing with the microphone from there. It is good to be with you. I cannot help but remember an evening when I was in Sydney during the last World Cup when Australia was playing, I think, New Zealand, and they moved the entire service up an hour because they knew there was no reason why even bother, so I highly recommend you for being here this evening and choosing the greater thing, even though some of you might be questioning that by the end of the evening.
Let's say that someone came up and started proposing to us a new definition of the doctrine of the Trinity. What would we do? We would first look at why the church has taught and affirmed the Trinitarian revelation of God found in the New Testament from the first words of the New Testament through the earliest writings of men such as Ignatius of Antioch or Clement of Rome or Melito of Sardis onward.
We would look at why the church has always taught what it has taught. And secondly, we would ask if this new proposal is in any way consistent with the understandings of the prophets, the apostles, and the teachings of Jesus himself.
Could we have simply missed their meanings in every generation, in every language, every culture, everywhere for almost 2 ,000 years? Is that a likely scenario? And finally, we would have to ask what the source of this new suggestion might be.
Did it come from a breakthrough, an exegesis, a new understanding of a Greek rule or term, newly discovered documents shedding light on lexical meanings of words that we were wrong about before? Is that where it came from?
Or if the source is to be found outside of scripture, what should that tell us? How should that factor into our analysis of such a suggestion? Might the source of the new definition be found in culture, in the changing views of mankind?
If we embraced this new definition, what would this say concerning the clarity, the perspicuity, and the inspiration of scripture itself? These are very, very important questions. The people of Israel, as far as the Hebrew Bible can tell us and as far as all external sources as well can tell us, have always believed marriage to be definitionally heterosexual, a heterosexual covenant relationship.
As far as we can tell, from as far back as scripture can reveal, this has been the understanding of the people of Israel, the prophets, kings, leaders, whoever you might want to identify. And so here is the key issue this evening, not whether there have ever been perversions of monogamy, for example, as there were.
There were periods of time when polygamy was practiced. It was a step down from God's original intention, but it happened. That's not the issue this evening. Or for example, in the institution of having concubines, which Solomon had many, we see what happened to him.
But whether there is anything whatsoever to be found anywhere in any fair reading of scripture from Genesis to Revelation that would allow the fundamental redefinition of the foundational reality of marriage as a heterosexual covenantal relationship.
That's the issue this evening. Is there anything, any fair reading that would indicate to us using the same standards by which we derive all the rest of our beliefs, the same exegetical standards that we would utilize to identify the meaning of the resurrection of Jesus Christ, the identity of Christ as the eternal son of God, the centrality of the church as the bride of Christ and everything that means, using the same standards by which we identify those central definitional beliefs, is there any way to come to the conclusion that there is freedom for Christians to redefine the foundational reality of marriage as a covenantal heterosexual relationship?
The New Testament moves us far beyond the Hebrew scriptures in its rich detail concerning marriage, but it stands utterly united with the previous scriptures in one fundamental reality. Marriage is solely heterosexual.
There is nothing, there is not a single word anywhere in any language, to be honest with you, that would give us any inkling of an idea that any of the apostles, or the Lord Jesus Christ himself, ever in any positive way spoke of any possibility of redefining marriage.
Instead, they taught that God established it from the beginning and held every following generation accountable to that establishment. There is nothing, not even the slightest hint of any openness or even acknowledgement of the propriety of defining anything outside of a heterosexually defined union as marriage.
In fact, given the plain condemnation of homosexual activity, you're gonna have to go back and watch the debate that we did a few years ago and judge for yourselves the information that was presented there, the condemnation of homosexual activity and orientation by the New Testament in Romans 1 or 1 Corinthians 6, as established in our last debate, the idea that the first human institution, which was divinely ordained by God before any other, the family and the man-woman relationship of marriage could possibly be defined by Christians on the basis of any other behavior, especially a behavior that is specifically prohibited, is beyond all possibility.
Now, we could look at many, many texts. We could very profitably look at Revelation chapter 19 and look at the marriage supper of the Lamb. We could look at every reference to the concept of husbands and wives and their relationships and their differing duties and the direct connection between those duties and the gendered reality that God is the one who made man and woman and that it was good and that it was his intention.
We could look at many passages, such as in Revelation chapter 19. Obviously, we could look at Ephesians chapter five. Maybe we'll have time to. Christ and the church, the husband and the wife, a mystery, a mystery so sublime that Paul has to define which one of the two he's talking to when he's talking about Christ and the church, and Christ is clearly distinguished from the church in his roles and offices and purposes, and the husband and the wife where the same indications are clearly there, and I would suggest to you that that would be utterly redefined by a same-sex relationship.
There is no way to say, well, you know, Paul would have minded if we were talking about two women or two men there. Wouldn't have ever crossed his mind as a possibility, and the question this evening is, will we derive our beliefs from scripture, or do we look at scripture as something that we take our beliefs from culture, from the current movement, and find a way to read the scriptures in a way that removes some of the contradiction?
There's two, those are two completely different approaches, two completely different approaches, and I would suggest to you, the history of the church demonstrates that whenever the church has adopted the idea of using scripture in that way, that way of being a source book to where we can just go, and we've got our beliefs, and so I'm gonna find this verse here and that verse there, and I'm gonna patchwork something together.
Every time the church has done that, the church has suffered greatly as a result. We, as the bride of Christ, listen to the voice of Christ found in his word, and that word, therefore, must be the positive source of what we believe, so if we cannot find positive example and exhortation to redefine marriage as Christians, we must recognize the grave danger in going that direction.
Every reference to husbands, wives, fathers, mothers, have to be completely redefined when we redefine the most fundamental relationship that the Bible reveals to us in scripture, but two key texts make the futility of this modern, culturally-energized redefinition plain, and they are found in Hebrews chapter 13, verse four, and in Matthew chapter 19, verses three through nine.
Let's take a look at what those say. In Hebrews chapter 13, verse four, I'm gonna have to be brief because I wanna spend most of my time in Matthew chapter 19, but here we are told that marriage, hagamos, is to be honored in all things.
Marriage is to be honored in all things. What would that have meant to the writer of the Hebrews, given that the book of Hebrews is immersed in the Old Testament? You will not have had any idea what the first 12 chapters of Hebrews was about if you don't know everything there is to know about Leviticus because he draws from it all the time.
We know what marriage was in the Old Covenant. We know what those scriptures say marriage was, and so there is only one meaningfully exegetical conclusion as to what marriage meant, and it is to be honored by all and in all places, and then he says, and most English translations say the marriage bed or something like that.
It's actually the Greek term koite, and koite is something we discussed in the last debate because the term arsenikoites that is used in 1 Corinthians 6 and 1 Timothy 1, 10 in regards to what men do with men in bed, and of course, we get the term koitis through Latin coming from the Greek at this point, and so it is to be considered pure, undefiled, and so the author is saying in marriage, the sexual relationship between husband and wife is undefiled.
It is to be honored in all places. Christians are people who honor the divinely ordained order of marriage, and how do we know that this is the divinely ordained? Because what's the next phrase? For those who commit pornia, all sexual sins.
Jesus used that term to sum up the sexual sins found in God's law, and those who commit adultery, the specific denial of and violation of the marriage, God will judge. Those are the words of Hebrews 13, four.
Those are the words of Hebrews 13, four. There is only one way to interpret them. There is only one contextually, linguistically, scholarly way to understand what is being said there, so upon what basis can we look at a text like that and say, yeah, but today things have changed, and we can completely redefine all of these words, even though the original author, yeah, what he meant by pornia, yeah, we know what that would have been, and we know what koite would have been, and we know what gamas would, we know what all those terms would have meant for him, but where does that but come from?
Where does that authority come from? That is the question that we must deal with this evening, because as was stated in the opening, if we believe scripture is our final authority, you see, the vast majority of people promoting this redefinition also abandon the authority of scripture.
They say, that's old, it's outdated, it needs to be rejected, that was then, this is now, I'll give you some examples later on when I have time to, but that's not the foundation that we're supposed to be operating on, so where is the positive command?
That's what we need to find, but my time is leaving me very quickly. I hardly have time even to look at Matthew chapter 19, but this is the most important one, because this is Jesus speaking, and he is interpreting for us God's intention in marriage.
The Sadducees are trying, the scribes of Pharisees, sorry, are trying to, Pharisees are trying to drag him into a debate they were having at that particular point in time between the two schools of Hillel and Shammai, and they were having a big debate over whether you could divorce your wife for any reason at all.
Notice the woman did not have this right. There was a gendered reality that is even behind all of this, and so they came tempting him, and they said, is it lawful for a man to put away his wife, to divorce his wife for any reason at all?
And he answered them, have you not read that the one who is the creator, that the creator, the one who made them from the beginning made them male and female? So Jesus begins his response by going to creation itself, to the absolute bedrock of revelation, and even though they were coming up with a modern question, he goes all the way back to Moses, he goes all the way back to Genesis, and he says the answer to this question is to be found in understanding we have a creator, and that creator has a purpose in exactly how he has created and said it was good, and he created them male and female.
Boy, I'd like to expand on that, but I don't have time. He made them male and female, and said, for this reason, a man will leave his father and his mother. I suggest to you that those are words that are self-definitional.
We cannot change the meaning of those words without fundamentally distorting the message of scripture itself. A man will leave his father and his mother and shall be joined, the opposite of separated later on, shall be joined to his wife.
Those words had clear meaning, there's no ambiguity whatsoever as to what those words meant in the Jewish context of the first century, none. There is no confusion at all, and in that joining, they are no longer, the two shall become one flesh.
I suggest to you on the authority of Jesus's own teaching that the only way that a true marriage relationship can be brought into existence, that a one flesh relationship can come into existence is in this context, a man leaving his father and mother and being joined to his wife.
There is an absolutely foundational gendered reality in what is being said here, and no one listening to Jesus speak would have had any other idea than that, none. And there is nothing in Jesus's words that even begins to suggest that here in giving foundational interpretation, and I believe this is God in human flesh upon earth, interpreting his own word, that's the final authority, there can be no other greater authority than that, right?
And so the two shall become one flesh, then he repeats it, they are no longer two, but one flesh, therefore what God has joined together, this is a divine institution. That's why the violation of it is so, is considered, God says he hates the violation of this institution in the prophets, because God joins these two together, and therefore what God joins together, do not let men break apart.
Now may I suggest to you, that in that context, Jesus was answering very plainly, by appealing to foundational authority, creation ordinance, the controversy that existed in his day amongst the Jews, that they shouldn't have ever even gotten to this argument if they had had an understanding of the foundational reality of God as creator.
But may I also suggest to you, that there are other ways in which this divine truth can be denied and can be broken. And by redefining what marriage means, we are breaking apart the very truth that Jesus lays out right here.
Because the only union that is blessed by God from Jesus' teaching, is one that is of a male and a female, that's why he laid it out, that's why he used the technical terms for male and female, this is how God made us.
Marriage is a gendered reality, it is a heterosexual reality. And therefore to redefine that relationship, is to fundamentally break apart what God has joined together. On what basis, what positive biblical basis, are we going to be able to suggest this evening, that we actually have the authority to redefine that heterosexual relationship in such a fashion, that two men or two women can be considered to become one flesh in the way that Jesus defined it here.
There needs to be something other than cultural influence and cultural weight. Just as we would not accept a redefinition of the Trinity that did not have positive, clear, exegetical power behind it. We cannot this evening be impressed by, well, it doesn't necessarily mean this, and it doesn't necessarily mean that.
No, you need positive, sound, exegetical conclusions to redefine what Jesus himself established for he and his apostles and his followers to this day, as the foundation of our understanding of the relationship of men and women today.
This is what the word of God reveals to us. This is what we must look to this evening. And I thank you for your attention. God bless you. Thank you so much. Graham, over to you.
Thanks, Rudolph. Good evening, James. Good evening, everybody. I fully understand why the issue of affirming LGBTQI people in our churches and looking at scripture and saying, do we see God affirming gay marriages?
I fully understand why this is causing deep concern amongst conservative Christians. I fully understand why people are stressed. There are two main reasons. Over the last little while, I have reminded myself again of the work that Dr. White has done on this topic.
I tell you, it's closing in now. I'm not sure if you know how many, but it's closing in on 30 hours of podcasts, one which includes an epic five-hour podcast in a single episode and a number of different debates.
And the heart of what Dr. White suggests is that this is a gospel issue, by which he means we have lists of people in the Bible who will be excluded from the kingdom of God, and some of these people are people who are homosexual if you read the Bible and the fair and plain reading that he wants you.
This makes it a gospel issue. That's important. That means that we have people who are excluded from the kingdom of God if we say, don't worry, you're not sinning, you're fine. So I understand that. The second reason is that it asks us to reflect on the authority of the scriptures and how we interpret the Bible.
So I fully understand the stress. I fully understand the concern, and I fully understand why this is important. So I want to deal with both of those issues this evening. The first is this issue of it being a gospel issue, and the best place to go for this, although the number of verses already quoted this evening, the best place is 1 Corinthians 6.
And if you have your Bibles, please turn with us. Both James and myself are gonna refer to the Bible, and you do keep up. In 1 Corinthians 6, Paul gives us a list of people who will be excluded from the kingdom.
It's not a complete list. He's talking into a particular context. It doesn't include murderers, for example. So it's not the 10 Commandments in the New Testament, but it includes people who are called, depending on the translation you're reading, are called many, many different things.
The Greek words are arsenokoitos and malakos. And there are a number of different translations that have been used over the centuries to talk about this. Dr. White and I actually agree on this. James, I see you taking notes, getting ready for rebuttal.
Don't take too many notes yet, because we agree completely on this. The King James Version used to call it, what was it, abuses of themselves with mankind, just to really make it plain. It was only the RSV in 1946 that first used the word homosexual.
Seriously, before then nobody used this. Martin Luther translated this, molesters of boys. But if you've got an older NIV, which is what I'm using over there, some of the earlier editions, it says homosexual offenders.
If you've got a later NIV that's been taken over by the conservative printing press, they drop the word offenders and just say homosexuals. I put this list out to say that these are contested words, not contested in the sense that we don't know what they were talking about.
It's talking about men who have sex with other men, but is it done in a way that says there's a particular class of people who do this that Paul has in mind? And I think there is. You see, Paul made up these words.
These were not the words that were in normal use in the language. Paul made up the word arsinokoitos and malikos, and I know Dr. White agrees with me on this. There's no contention about that. Paul wanted us to not just think of all gay people and all gay activity.
He wanted us to narrow down to a particular class of people who were doing a certain thing. And he used this phrase, arsinokoitos, Dr. White's already referred to it this evening, to ask us to go back to Leviticus.
It flows on. You can go back to our previous debate where Dr. White led with this argument. I commend it to you. I agree with everything he said on this in the last debate because Paul wants us to go back to Leviticus.
He wants us to stick within the Bible. He doesn't want us to go to culture, I agree. He doesn't want us to go to our own likes and dislikes. He wants us to stick with scripture, so let's go there. Let's go back to Leviticus 18.
It's Leviticus 18, 22 that he's referring to. And if you read there that in a list of things that Israel is not allowed to do, it says that men should not sleep with men. But of course, there's a context to that verse.
Paul wasn't just pointing you back to one single sentence in the Old Testament. The reason he made up this word arsinokoitos is he wanted you to go back to the Holiness Code, which is an entire section of Leviticus.
And if you got your Bible open, look at Leviticus 18, verse 1. That's a good place to start at the beginning of the chapter. So God says to Moses, speak to the Israelites and say to them, I am the Lord your God.
You must not do as they did in Egypt where you used to live and you must not do as they do in the land of Canaan where I am bringing you. Do not follow their practices. You must obey my laws and do what I demand.
Then there's a whole list of laws, which looks like a list of sexual things not to do. Don't have sex with your father, your mother, your grandparents, your uncles, your aunts, your sisters, your in-laws, your grandchildren, and so on.
Just by the way, as an aside, polygamy is completely accepted in that list. Have a look. In verse 7, it says, do not dishonor your father by having sex with your mother. Fair enough. Verse 8 says also, don't have sex with your father's wife.
Isn't that the same person? Well, if you've got two wives, it isn't. He's saying don't have sex with your mother and don't have sex with any of the other wives your father's got. You can see it again, by the way, down in verse 18 where it tells you not to marry a woman and then also her sister.
Because there'll be rivalry between them because they're sisters. You can marry other women if you want to, just don't do sisters. That wouldn't be clever. So you get this list and you think, is this a list of sexual sins?
But then verse 21 hits you. And verse 21 of Leviticus 18 says, do not sacrifice your children to Moloch. Moloch was the god of the Canaanites who demanded child death, child sacrifice, to bring the rains in the season.
Then you get to our verse in verse 22. The immediate next verse after sacrificing your child to Moloch, suddenly this doesn't feel like a sexual list anymore. But anyway, we go back to do not lie with a man the lyings of a woman.
That's the literal translation. It's a weird translation. But we don't have to argue about it because it does mean that men shouldn't have sex with men. Then it says you shouldn't have sex with animals and then it reminds us why we've got this list.
Verse 24 now. Do not defile yourselves in any way because this is how the nations that I am going to drive out before you were defiled. Can you see that the entire context here is to say there is a Canaanite cult.
They use all of these sexual rituals leading right up to child sacrifice in order to make their religion work. Do not do that stuff. This is not a list of sexual sins. This is a list of ritual, cult, temple practices.
Now, I can prove this because Leviticus 20 repeats the list, just giving punishments next to each of the things. So it's pretty much Leviticus 20 you can compare. It's the same thing, it just adds punishments except verse one leads off with don't sacrifice your children to Moloch.
In other words, there's a clear context here. Oh, by the way, you can't ignore Leviticus 19 as if it doesn't exist. So if you look through Leviticus 19, it begins by looking as if it's the 10 commandments.
Do not murder and do not steal and all the rest and then suddenly it becomes weird. Verse 19, do not mate different kinds of animals. Do not plant your fields with two different kinds of seed. Do not wear clothing of different kinds.
Don't cut your hair on the sides of your face and so on. Is this just a random list? Are these three chapters just Moses' stream of consciousness or the bad things he could think of? And he just goes, don't do any of that stuff.
I'm sure it's not gonna surprise you that there are no random lists in the Bible. There's a structure here, there's a form to this, there's a reason that these specific things are mentioned. In this place, in this order, in this way, it's called the Holiness Code, you can go and look it up.
It was the Canaanite religion. Now, why does Paul reference this? Because Paul wants to say to the people in Corinth and by the way, the people in Rome and the people in Ephesus who he wrote to through their pastor, Timothy.
All three of those cities have temples of Diana and Aphrodite, which were basically the Roman modern-day equivalent of the Canaanite cult. They used sex as part of their rituals. They had sexual slavery and prostitution, both heterosexual and homosexual.
And Paul's basically saying, guys, guys, guys, remember when Israel was standing outside the land of Canaan and God said to them, I need you to be holy, to not do what the people were doing in Canaan, to not get caught up in the Canaanite cult.
Well, you people in Rome, you people in Corinth, you people in Ephesus with the cult of Diana and Aphrodite, which were huge cults and cults that the emperors themselves followed, don't get caught up in them.
By the way, you can see this in the rest of 1 Corinthians 6 because he goes further and his main point is actually in 1 Corinthians 6 verses 19. He says this, do you not know that your bodies are temples of the Holy Spirit?
Why would he use that language if he wasn't talking about the ritual cults in the temples? He was saying specifically to the guys in Corinth, when you look up in the middle of the city on the mountain in the middle of your city and you see the temple of Diana there and you know what goes on there.
There's homosexual and heterosexual rape going on there. There's men having sex with men. There's people filled with lust doing all sorts of orgies, child sacrifice in the Canaanite era. I don't want you to be involved with that stuff.
Do you not know that your bodies are temples of the Holy Spirit who is in you, whom you have received from God? You are not your own. You were bought for a price. The young boys who were in the temple used as male boy prostitutes were slaves, sexual slaves, trafficked.
The image is clear. That's why Paul wants us to go back to Leviticus. So what does that mean for us today? Does that sound like Paul is talking about gay marriage? Does that sound like Paul has a beef with two people who love each other?
Or does it sound like Paul has a problem with pagan rituals, with religions that are trying to subvert the true religion of God, that are using family rape as part of their, and don't look at me as if that doesn't happen today.
Should I just say Jeffrey Epstein to tell you that this is happening today? So we need this word today. We need our Bible. We need Leviticus. We need Corinthians to tell us no sexual slavery, no rape, no prostitution.
Hashtag me too if you want to. Our Bible speaks loud today. I am not trying to bring any other culture into here. I'm not trying to reinterpret the scripture on the basis of some lifestyle or cultural choice.
I am simply trying to understand exactly what the Bible is saying. Why did Paul make up a word? Why did he not just say, hey, don't be gay? Why did he say, hey, don't be Leviticus temple ritual gay? Why did he say that?
So if you're going to go to the Bible, as I believe Dr. White wants us to, and I agree with him completely, well then please go to the Bible, and stick in your Bible, and understand what your Bible is saying.
Paul is not placing a restriction on homosexuality in general. He is commanding us not to abuse sex, not to use it for temple cults. Those rules still apply today. No underage sex, no coerced sex, no ritualized sexual cults.
The Bible applies today. I agree with Dr. White. But it's got nothing to say about gay marriage. In fact, it's got nothing to say about gay marriage. Nothing. It doesn't tell you you can't get gay married, and it doesn't tell you you can.
Now think about that. If this was so foundational, as Dr. White suggested, it wouldn't have been difficult to put it somewhere as a rule. He's had to infer that rule from other commentary. This brings us to the second reason why I think this is deeply troubling for people, and that is because it asks us to think differently about the Scriptures.
You see, a lot of people want the Scripture to be a law book. They want the Scripture to be a book of rules, so they want to be able to say go to that verse, and it tells you. But then how do you know if you can get a heart transplant?
Where does the Bible say you can or can't get a heart transplant? Or use contraception. Roman Catholics say we're not allowed to use contraception, and they try and find it in the Bible. And then we say we can, and we try and find it in the Bible, and you can't.
It's not there, because that's not how the Bible works. That's not the type of book it is. This doesn't mean you can't find principles. It doesn't mean God doesn't have an opinion about this. It just means that there isn't a verse you go to, so we have to extract these principles.
It gets more complex, because the Bible actually gives us lots and lots of examples of marriage that is not one man and one woman, marriage. There's lots of polygamy going on in the Bible, lots of things.
But I want to focus on two final things in the few minutes and one or two that I'm going to steal of my time. The first one is to go back, Dr. White talked about, we have to go back to Genesis and see it as foundational.
So if you want to see Genesis as foundational, to say that the creation of Adam and Eve creates a pattern or a model or an archetype that has to be followed throughout time, why do you just look at Genesis 1 and 2?
Isn't the whole book of Genesis an archetype then? Why would you just go to Genesis 1 and 2? Again, I'm asking why we would restrict our reading of the Bible. Genesis is the book of beginnings, therefore the whole of Genesis is the book of archetypes.
So Adam and Eve are created, I agree completely, there's no doubt that that was a man and a woman, that was the first marriage. What was the second marriage? A little bit of incest somewhere, because one of Adam's sons had to marry one of Adam's daughters.
So the very second marriage breaks the rules. Then you move on to Abraham. Abraham has a wife, he can't have a child, so his wife gives him a handmaid. And then he tries to get his line going through, so the very first patriarch breaks the rule.
Then he has a third wife, by the way, after that. Then we go to Isaac, right? Isaac gets a servant to go and find his wife, and they find a cousin, incest again, okay? It's in the family. Then Isaac has Jacob, Jacob has two wives, they're sisters.
Then Jacob has 12 sons, and a daughter, by the way, but he has 12 sons, these are the patriarchs of Israel, whom God blessed, there's nowhere is God saying, hey guys, don't do this, this is not the right thing, what's going on here?
They're all blessed, they're growing, God's blessing them, they're becoming a nation. So Jacob has 12 sons from those two wives, right? Rebekah, his favorite wife, has his favorite two sons, and then there's the other 10 from the other wife.
That's what you think, because you haven't read your Bible. No, his first wife Leah gives him three sons, then the next two, Dan and Asher, come from Billa, who's the handmaiden, then Zilpah, the next handmaiden, is given to Jacob, and the next three sons come from her, then he goes back to, the patriarchs of Israel came from four different women.
And you know who Joseph married? He married a woman called Osnett. Do you know in Jewish tradition who Osnett is? It's his sister, Dinah. If you wanna go back to the book of Genesis and look for patterns, I think the only pattern that I can see is there is no pattern.
The only pattern of marriage that I can see in Genesis is like everything. You can do anything. That isn't the pattern. The pattern is that God goes outside of the standard religious models always. Jesus does that.
He doesn't come and embrace the Sadducees, he embraces the prostitutes and the tax collectors. Jesus goes outside, he breaks the models. It's the outcasts, the people that the religious establishment have said, this is not how it should be done.
Jesus goes, but you are my people. We see that right from the very beginning. So if we go to Matthew 19, very briefly, I've got a minute or two. I love that when people talk about Matthew 19, and they say that Jesus is giving us the description of marriage, they do two things wrong.
The first thing is, they fail to tell us why this is the only time, Matthew 19, Jesus is answering a question. Dr. White set that up very nicely. Think of all the times Jesus answered questions and tell me where else he ever gave a straight answer.
Tell me which other question that was asked of him when Jesus turned around and said, good question, here's my answer. He messed with those religious leaders. He twisted his answer so that it blew their minds.
So where's the twist in his answer here? Dr. White says this is a straightforward answer. Really? That's not Jesus' style. First time ever he did that. So where's the twist? Well, the twist is in the bit that Dr. White didn't answer.
And that twist is the next few verses. I'll have to come back to that in my rebuttal. If you've got Matthew 19 open, read it. We'll take an ad break.
Thank you. Thank you. Now for Dr. White's rebuttal for 10 minutes. And let me just say, when you start speaking, I start the clock.
I feel like Tim Conway. You don't know who Tim Conway is, never mind that. 10 minutes, right? All right, thank you. All right, before you forget it, I want to immediately address and bring your attention back to what you just heard.
For approximately three minutes, Graham argued against Jesus' own interpretation. I want you to hear it. Did you hear it? Everything that was said. Why do you limit it just to early Genesis? Because Jesus did.
Jesus did. Everything that was said could have been used by the Pharisees to argue against Jesus' own response. That is the difference, my friends, between deriving your beliefs from the text of Scripture and putting your beliefs onto the text of Scripture.
Because everything that was said, well, Jesus, you just said from the beginning, male and female, but you didn't go to the rest of Genesis. What about what happened with Jacob? What about what they said?
Those have been the responses of the Pharisees if they wanted to argue against Jesus. Do you hear that? That illustrated better than anything else I can imagine. Well, there are a number of illustrations.
There are a number of illustrations. For example, going to 1 Corinthians 6 and saying, it was only a certain kind of homosexuality that Paul has in mind. It's just the ritual stuff. It's just the Holiness Code stuff.
I preach 35 sermons on the Holiness Code. I would direct you to those for a rather full discussion of the historical background, the religious background, everything in regards to those chapters. But what is most important is what would the Jewish people, and we don't know that Paul made up that term.
He might have made up that term. He might have gotten it from a Jewish rabbi that we don't know, so on and so forth. But in utilizing the term arsenikoites in the first century and writing to the Corinthians, what would they have understood that term to mean?
And did you notice how we did the same thing? None of this has anything to do with two loving people in a monogamous relationship. Notice how you're assuming your conclusion, reading it in without having given anything from the text of scripture that even begins to substantiate the existence of what you are now asserting.
Where would any of the apostles, where would Jesus have even acknowledged that the biblical use of the term loving could be described in that context, given that the first love we're to have is for God and his law, and his law defines what loving is?
So listen to what's being said here, because what you just heard, very, very important. Nothing was given. There was not a single positive word given to establish the redefinition of marriage, not one.
We had a revisiting of a portion of our last debate which surprised me. I mean, we can go back over 1 Corinthians chapter six, we can demonstrate that the utilization of two terms, not only arsenicoites, but malakoi, as the ESV translates simply, homosexuals.
That's the active and passive participant in the homosexual relationship. So that's not limiting it, because that is in any of those relationships, that's not limiting it to the cultic context of Leviticus 18, and in Leviticus 20, when the law is repeated for the people of Israel, there isn't a cultic context attached to it at that point.
It is simply prohibited in toto. So that's a misuse of the Leviticus passages, and that's a misuse of Paul's epistle to the Corinthians. That's not how they would have understood it. They would have been very confused by what they were just told.
So, as I said, we need to use the exegetical standards that we use to document what we believe in common, such as the deity of Christ, the trinity, the importance of the resurrection, atonement, et cetera, et cetera.
This is not the exegetical method that is utilized to substantiate those things. There was not a single shred of positive evidence put forward to you in 20 minutes that would substantiate the idea that any of the writers of the New Testament would have agreed with the thesis that marriage can exist between non-heterosexual pairs.
Not a word. And since you're not supposed to bring up new evidence after that, I suppose that's pretty much the end of that. But there were other things that were said. By the way, Graham began by saying, I have frequently called this a gospel issue.
I have, but not for the reasons that he said. He presented it as if we're nervous, we're upset about this, et cetera, et cetera. You know why this is a gospel issue? It's real simple. We proclaim Jesus as the savior from sin.
Therefore, we have to be able to define what sin is. If you can't define what sin is, you don't need a savior from sin. And if we can have the clarity of Leviticus 18 and 20 and Genesis 18 and 19 and Romans chapter one and 1 Corinthians chapter six and 1 Timothy chapter one, if we can have that level of clarity and then say, well, but we're not really sure.
Maybe that was just, if it was done over there. If we cannot have clarity on the definition of marriage itself, when Jesus said it was a first principle to understand this, then how can we proclaim a savior from a sin we can't even describe to you, we can't even identify?
That's why it's a gospel issue, because without this, you can't define the gospel. You end up with the gospel of liberalism, which is you feel good about you and whatever you do, it's all about you. And the gospel of scripture is all about God and what he's doing in redeeming a people unto himself.
That's the difference, that's the difference. So yeah, it is a gospel issue. And so when you hear, and this is, we got to it right toward the end there, but I want to make sure you caught it. This says nothing about two people in a loving relationship.
Paul was not restricting homosexuality in general. What would have to be presented to you to substantiate the assertion that Paul actually had a positive view of any kind of homosexual relationship? What would be the evidence that would be required?
No evidence was offered. It was just simply put out there with no evidence. In a formal debate, that is immediately rejected. It must be immediately rejected. There was no foundation given. So I'm gonna ask, what is the positive foundation in the writings of the Apostle Paul, in the context in which he lived, that there were any Jewish people in his day that had a positive view of homosexual relationships of any kind that could substantiate the assertion that was made?
Because that assertion was made. Either that or it needs to be withdrawn. Without foundation, you can't make the assertion. Now, there you go. In reality, no positive case was made. None. Now, you might say, well, he's just simply, he's in a position of just denying yours.
But the positive case I made wasn't touched either. So I guess in the last two minutes and 30 seconds, I'll ask a question that I've asked a lot of people. And I think it really touches upon this issue.
If we believe that Jesus was the Son of God, who eternally existed as the divine second person of the Trinity, who was incarnate in flesh, that means he was the creator of all things, the maker and creator of all things.
And that means when he ministered amongst the people, he knew that there were same-sex attracted people in front of him who would love to engage in marriage. And he's the Redeemer. He's the one we were just told who goes against the religious norms.
And yet when it comes to marriage, what does he do? He's absolutely as traditional as you can get. He didn't say a word. He didn't say a word. And if what we're being told is that to truly follow Jesus is to affirm these behaviors, rather than to say these behaviors need to be repented of and Jesus will be found to be the perfect savior of anyone who will repent of anything like this, he can heal anyone, he can change any heart, but it's repentance that is the key.
Don't ask the church or the Bible to repent. Jesus asks us to repent and he is a savior of repentant people. But the question is, if that's the case, why didn't Jesus bring freedom at that point in time?
Why didn't he criticize the traditional heterosexual nature of marriage at that time and say, no, we need to have freedom, never did it, never did it. Instead, he affirms the very foundational realities.
How can that be? If he was indeed the one we claim him to be. And if by following him, we are to redefine what his apostles taught, what the prophets who prophesied his coming also taught. Jesus said from Moses onward, what Moses taught too.
We have not been given any reason to embrace these redefinitions whatsoever. And so in 10 minutes rebuttal, I don't know how you can make a positive case, but that's what needs to happen now is a positive case needs to be brought forth to answer these vitally important questions.
Thank you very much.
Thanks and thanks for your good posture. And no sounds from there, but Graham, 10 minutes for you now.
To make a positive case, you would have to accept that the Bible needs to be interpreted as a rule book. So Dr. White is asking, where is that rule? I'm saying that is an abuse of the Bible to see it that way.
I realize there are many people here this evening who see the Bible that way. They see it literally, they see it as a rule book and you haven't come for a debate. Some of you have spoken to me, some of you have spoken about me on social media this week.
You've come to see me demolished and crushed, your words, by Dr. James. To you, I say, enjoy the show. It's probably going well because you're in the same space that he is. This debate's going exactly the way I was hoping it would because that's all that they're looking for.
Where's the verse? No verse. Sorry, move on. We're not having this conversation. But why did I go back to Leviticus? Because Dr. White has said homosexuality is a sin that you need to be saved from. And he's now looking for me to get a verse that says it isn't.
I'm saying to him, the Bible never establishes that it's a sin. The Bible establishes that a certain subset of homosexual behavior is sinful. It also establishes that a certain subset of heterosexual behavior is a sin.
It establishes that there is a lot of behavior that is sin. And I believe that all of that stuff is still sinful. But where we need to go now is back to that first principle, the first principle that Jesus repeated in Matthew 19 that comes out of Genesis.
In other words, we have to ask, and here is the positive case, sir. We have to ask, what is the purpose of marriage? If breaking the marriage bond is a sin, then what is the purpose of that marriage bond to start with?
Now, if you did have a look at Matthew 19, before I stopped in my previous section, you might have seen the bit that everybody leaves off, which is where Jesus talks about eunuchs. He says, yeah, but this is a tough thing to think about, but there are some people who have been eunuchs from birth.
There are others that are made eunuchs by other people. There are some people that make themselves eunuchs. This is a tough teaching. Those are Jesus' words, not mine. I have no idea what he means. I don't think anybody knows what he means.
But what we do know is that he wasn't just talking about marriage. There's something else going on there. You cannot just ignore those verses as if they don't exist there, as if everything is buttoned up and saying, go back to Genesis, it's all fine.
Go back to Genesis with a few eunuchs, and then it's fine. So what is Genesis on about? What does Genesis say the purpose of marriage is? I think there are three. The first is companionship. It's not good for people to be alone.
God sees that he needs to bring two people together so that it's not the only way to get companionship in the world. You don't have to get married. If you are single here this evening, if you're watching this and you're single, God's not saying you're deficient in some way.
We must have companionship, though. If you have no companionship, if you have nobody to share life with, there's a deficiency there. You're not made for that. You're made to connect, and marriage provides one of the greatest bonds of companionship, but can you think of any reason why that has to be gendered?
Companionship can be between two men. Companionship between two women. So companionship is what marriage is for, but it doesn't have a gender requirement. You understand where I'm going with this thought?
So let's put that to the side. The second thing is partnership. So there are functions. Adam needed Eve for both companionship as well as the King James Version, a help, meet for him, not a help meet, a help that was correct for him.
But does that need to be gendered? If I ask the married couples here, heterosexual married couples here, who does which function? Let me give you a list and you, well, you're not allowed to shout out.
They're gonna be ejected if you do. So just in your head, tell me male or female, cooking the food, ironing the clothes, buying the food, taking the kids to school, doing kids' homework with them, choosing where to go on holiday, earning money, having a job.
Are any of these male or female? They might be in your relationship specifically, one or the other, but they are not gendered. There is nothing, not a single thing in a marriage relationship that requires it to be done by the wife or to be done by the man.
Except for one thing. All of you, if you would, you're shouting it out inside now, having babies. That's the third one, by the way. So companionship and partnership have got nothing. You can have a gay marriage.
You can't have gay marriage and your own children. I know science can do it today, but let's stick within the bounds of scripture. So there's only one function of marriage that would be said to be something that you cannot do if you're gay married, having kids.
So now a simple question. Do you have to have children? Because if you don't have to have children, then that is not a necessary requirement for marriage. Do you see what I'm saying? And you don't have to have children.
Children are a blessing, but they are not a requirement. You are a married couple, beautifully, perfectly married without children. If you choose not to have children, you are not cursed. You are not sinning.
You have not let God down. Now, that's not true for everybody. If you're in the British royal family and you're Kate Middleton and you don't have children, you've got a problem. Meghan Markle, she's a baby factory.
She has to have children. That's what's going on in Genesis. Fill the earth and multiply, create the nation of Israel. We have to have heterosexual marriage because you've got to have children. Well, you can do it with almost anybody.
I've told that story already. As long as you've got children and you're building up. But what happens when we fill the earth? And what happens if you're not part of the patriarchs of Israel? That wasn't a rule for everybody at all time.
You do not have to have children. You do not have to be married. And by the way, nobody will be married in heaven. Marriage itself is a temporary institution. It is not a foundational institution for our faith.
It is not anywhere near on the same level as the Trinity because marriage will disappear. It is a completely temporary human situation that God gave to us to give us companionship, which doesn't require heterosexual connections, partnership, which doesn't require heterosexual connections and procreation for those who want to.
And if you don't, well then gender doesn't matter. So no, I cannot point you to the verse that says gay people can get married. But I can show you a God that says it is not good for you to be alone. Then I can show you a God who said, I have made you in my image.
And that means that he's made you gay people in his image. There is some gender fluidity. 1 of all gay people are gender fluid. So you will hear stories of people who used to be gay and now aren't. Extreme cases, we understand them, it's gender fluidity.
Almost 99 of all gay people were born that way and they know that for sure. And God says I made you in my image and it's not good for you to be alone. Find companionship, get partnership. The Bible is wonderful about saying, well adoption's a picture of our relationship with God too.
So maybe we don't only have to be children through procreation. No, I can't show you the verse because that's not what the Bible is. It's not that kind of book. The Bible tells me who God is. And because I know who God is, I know that he's not against gay marriage.
Thank you.
Everyone, what we're gonna do now is we're gonna take a 10 minute break so you can just move a little bit around. Please don't rush this stage. The number will be displayed for your questions right now and then you're welcome to send that as well so we can read it to them.
So you're welcome to stand, relax a little bit. Please don't come to the stage. They're gonna just need a break. Thank you. Wonderful. Okay, what we're gonna have now, if everybody can be seated. Okay, we're gonna have, first Graham is gonna ask Dr. White questions for 10 minutes and then we're gonna do it the other way around.
So everybody ready? Okay, let's go.
Thank you. So James, I was really interested in your choice of analogy. So you said that there would be a real problem if we came up with a new definition of something. And you could have chosen anything.
There would have been a wonderful list of things. It's a really important question. But I was fascinated to know why you chose the doctrine of the Trinity. Because the Trinity doesn't have any positive statement in the scriptures.
Oh, I disagree thoroughly. I'm sure you do. I haven't asked my question yet. I haven't asked my question yet. I'm interested because I know you would disagree but in my mind, there's a wonderful, it's the sort of example I would have used to make the point that you were making.
Because you have to infer and you have to work things out. Why did you choose the Trinity?
Because you cannot begin to understand the New Testament without understanding that it is written from the standpoint of Trinitarians. Remember, the Trinity is revealed between the Old and New Testaments.
It's revealed in the gutter of your Bible between Malachi and Matthew. In other words, the fundamental revelation of the Trinity is the incarnation of the Son of God and the outpouring of the Holy Spirit.
So everything written in the New Testament is written in light of that historical reality. We prove it by doing exegesis. I prove it by demonstrating the Bible teaches there's one true God. I do that with explicit passages.
We do that by proving that there are three divine persons. I do that with explicit passages. We do that by then demonstrating the equality of persons. I do that with explicit passages. The point was that the exegetical method that I utilize will utilize in Durban next week, less than on Friday night and Saturday night, I'll be debating two Muslims.
This will come up in Durban. The methodology that I will use to demonstrate who Jesus is and what the Trinity is is the methodology that we must utilize to answer our question tonight as well. That is sound exegesis, not treating the Bible like a rule book, treating the Bible as if it is sufficient as the sole infallible rule of faith of the church.
Two very different things.
So we would look then at what you're saying is we would look for foundational principles that God is one God, that Jesus is also God, that the Holy Spirit is also God. And then we can formulate, because the word Trinity, there's no Greek word that's used in the scripture.
So we're using foundational principles in order to arrive at that truth statement.
The key issue is the utilization of exegesis and that it requires us to believe that the scriptures are sufficient to answer the question as to who is the God that we worship. And that's why I utilize, I'm simply saying if we utilize a different methodology of biblical interpretation on this topic, why, what's the reason?
Is it an assertion of a lack of clarity in scripture?
What's the reason? Sure, so my contention would be that if we use those same approach, using foundational principles as the process that I laid out in my rebuttal, that we can get to the point of saying, yes, there are certain homosexual activities that God would consider to be wrong, but there are homosexual relationships and activities that would not be wrong.
And I know you would disagree with that, but I'm just saying, I'm pointing out to people that the Trinity is a fascinating example to use because I, using exactly the same process that Dr. White uses to get to Trinity, I get to gay marriage is good in God's sight.
I'm gonna take that as a question. Yeah, go for it, I'll throw it across to you. And that's simply a statement because that's what it was. We both know that's exactly what it was. I'll throw a question mark in there.
And here's the error in the statement, and it's a fundamental error. There is nothing in the doctrine of the Trinity that is definitional to the doctrine of the Trinity that is supplied by saying the Bible isn't a rule book, I know God, and I know God isn't against gay marriage.
There is nothing in the Trinity where someone says, I know God, and therefore I know God's a Trinity. That is not going to work in a debate with a Muslim on the Trinity. It can't work this evening either.
The point is you have to have positive exegetical foundation to give the heart of the definition, and the Bible defines the heart of the definition of marriage as heterosexual.
So then let's get to the heart of my definition and say I gave a definition of marriage or a purpose of marriage, not a definition of marriage. I suggested that there were three purposes for marriage that scripture gives us, companionship, partnership, and procreation, and that only procreation has a necessary gender requirement to it.
So why would you make procreation then absolutely foundational to marriage? Why would you say that you have to be able to have children in order to be married? Well, you put those words in my mouth.
And since I didn't say them, I'm not gonna defend them. What I am gonna say is that Jesus made heterosexual relationship absolutely definitional in Matthew chapter 19. Nothing he says afterwards changes any of that.
He is the one that used the specific languages of male and female using the specific gendered terms of that biological terms to identify what God made and who is united and becomes one flesh. The normative result of becoming one flesh is procreation and the continuation of the human species and it is considered a curse.
It is considered a great heartbreak throughout the Old Testament when a woman cannot have children. We can provide numerous examples of this.
Do you believe it's a curse if women can't have children? It is a blessing to have them.
And if they want them and can't, then that's definitely a horrible thing.
That's a great answer. And if they choose if they choose not to have them? I think it's foolishness. You think it's foolishness? Yes, I do. So, you came back and you said in your answer.
I wish I had more. For those of you that are gasping.
You said in your answer that, no, let me just ask the question differently. Why? Why is Jesus' definition foundational? Because he's not giving a definition of marriage. He's answering a question about divorce and the question implies a heterosexual context.
So, it would be obvious that Jesus would answer the question with a heterosexual frame. Why do you think Jesus is creating an archetype?
Because he appeals to the archetype. His entire answer is, have you not read? Have you not read that God from the beginning made them male and female? He's the one who said the answer to your question about divorce is found in the nature of marriage itself, which is found in the creation of male and female and the fact that God established marriage.
God established the family and therefore, he gets to define how it works. I don't even know how you can make heads or tails. Okay, so. Of his response to them, other than to say that from your perspective, Jesus never gives straight answers and therefore, this can't be a straight answer because if you take it as a straight answer,.
This debate is determined. No, because there's one more question to ask. So, I won't put words in your mouth this time but I'll ask the same question. Why? Why does marriage have to be that way?
Because that's how God designed us to be. The very term that you used, when you came up with your own definition, which I noticed was not a biblical definition but your own definition of marriage, when you mentioned companionship and the, not the second.
Partnership, whatever language you wanna use, yeah.
You made reference to the Hebrew phrase etzer kenegdo, that the woman was created as a helpmate for the man but etzer kenegdo means one who is corresponding to him. A man cannot be an etzer kenegdo to another man because that violates the kenegdo, one who is corresponding to but different from.
A woman cannot be an etzer kenegdo to another woman. So, if Jesus is drawing from that, which he clearly is, then he's the one who wrote it because I believe Jesus is God in human flesh and he knew what he was saying and therefore, to answer the question why, Jesus is the one who defined these issues both in Genesis and then affirmed it in Matthew chapter 19.
There's perfect consistency.
So, your answer is because God said so. Yes, that's a good answer. Yeah, it is a good answer. No, it's a very good answer except if it doesn't make sense because God is a God of sense. He's a God of, his commands to us are not nonsensical.
That's right. There's order and structure. Yeah, it makes perfect sense. There's order and structure. For me, it doesn't make sense because the kenegdo, you cannot give me an actual example. It's a philosophical construct but you can't tell me what is it that the man has to do that a woman can't do in a relationship.
Well, the point is that the relationship of a husband and wife is not a mirror image and anytime you have a male-male relationship or a female-female relationship,.
You're talking about a mirror image. No, you're not. You've got different personalities, ages,.
Cultures, backgrounds. Between males and females that are good things. We need our wives. Give me an example.
Can we, is everybody buzzing? I don't have a buzzer. I can't get mine to stop. Do you want to finish your thoughts? I'll give you a minute for that. It's just a question, so I'm asking James. Just asking for an example of something that he can't do that only his wife can.
I am going to, I'm simply going to look out at every married couple out here and every woman and she's looking at him going, oh, do I have a list? But I'm going to be very, very serious. My son was born seven weeks premature.
He was in neonatal intensive care. We were poor for years trying to pay for that and I'm thankful that we had that opportunity. But I will never forget my wife nursing that tiny little four pound little thing and my recognition of how helpless I felt at that point in time and the reality that there is such a thing as a woman and motherhood that is so far beyond anything I could ever do that I can't even begin to say it.
And if you can't understand that, I can't explain it to you. Yeah, okay. Okay, okay, Graham, I began this debate by saying that the fundamental issue here is how we interpret scripture and whether we believe that scripture is sufficient.
When you finished your rebuttal, you said the Bible is not that kind of book, which you use the term rule book, and because I know God, I know he is not against gay marriage. Does that not illustrate completely the difference between us in regards to our view of the sufficiency of scripture to answer these questions?
Are you not saying scripture doesn't answer this question?
No, I'm not. It does illustrate the difference in our interpretative approach, absolutely, although I think we have a very similar hermeneutical approach and background in evangelicals. But no, for me, I've tried to help people to see this evening that I am not trying to step outside of scripture.
You and I might have different views of how to interpret scripture, but I'm not saying that we need to go beyond scripture. Some people who defend the position I'm defending, that's their view, but it's not my view.
Okay, so what is wrong with my assertion that if the church is going to positively teach something, which it does in regards to marriage and the relationship of males and females, that that needs to be positively grounded in the words of scripture itself?
You're saying the church can teach something positively that is based upon your claim of personal relationship to God. Is that not what you were saying at the end?
No, not at all. I am saying that there are many things that we would need to engage with in our lives. So if I can go back to your opening example of the Trinity, I think that is, although I found it an interesting analogy, I also think it's a completely wrong analogy because Trinity and who Jesus is and who the Spirit is, the stuff in the Apostles' Creed is foundational to our beliefs.
Gay marriage fits into another category of moral issues, which includes slavery, owning women as property, the divine rights of kings, and so on. These are different categories of issues that we're looking at.
And the way that we interpret scripture in many of those instances, so the divine right of kings, the Bible does not talk about democracy. So how would we defend democracy? There's no positive statement of democracy in the Bible.
There's no positive statement of modern healthcare. There's no positive statement in favor of contraception. There are a lot of things that we have to draw principles. I'm not saying the Bible doesn't give us information.
I'm not saying God doesn't have an opinion, but I'm saying that there isn't, you don't go to a statement to find that. You look at principles.
You said God has an opinion, and you know that opinion by knowing God. Is that right?
And by reading his word, and by studying his word, and by engaging with God's people to get a sense of whether maybe you have misinterpreted. And that's why through the course of human history, we've changed our mind as a church on all sorts of issues.
But when Jesus says, have you not read, isn't he making it very clear that this is something that does not depend upon your feelings or your experience, but it's he's holding these men accountable for what is found in the scriptures themselves.
Is he not?
Paul uses not the same, but as a similar characterization where he says, do you not know that the very nature of things tells us that men should have short hair?
So you think that appeal to Fusis is the same thing as an appeal to what has been written by Jesus.
Speaking to the Pharisees? Yes, I think it's a very similar thing. It's the same thing as have you not heard? Do you not know? Is this not the things that we know? Yes, but now you're going to a nitpicking on a Greek word, whether it's have you heard or have you read?
No, it's the source that he's directing us to. He's not directing us to some interpretation of natural revelation. He's directing us to the scriptures. So I'm simply saying, if someone came up to you and said, I know God and I know God is Benetarian, not Trinitarian, what are you gonna say to them?
I would say the Bible tells you otherwise. So if the Bible corrects his Benetarianism, I'm saying to you, the Bible corrects your insertion of a concept never mentioned into the text of scripture. Why am I wrong to do that?
And why do you identify that as treating the Bible as a rule book? No, I, yeah. Scratch that. Why isn't your correction of the Benetarian not a violation of what you've accused me of, of using the Bible as a simple rule book?
That's a great question. And it very well possibly could be. That's why the way that we engage with scripture and theology is with the word of God, which involves translation and trying to get back to original languages.
And I'm not nearly anywhere near as good as you are. You've got your actual Greek text open in front of you. But it also involves tradition and it involves the engagement of community. And so when somebody comes up and says, I actually don't believe that the Bible says we should keep slaves.
Slaves is a great analogy, because slaves is also an analogy of our relationship with Christ. So there were some people who were arguing we should have slaves because we are slaves of Christ. So slavery is built into the very nature of things.
It actually includes the fusis and everything else because people are saying slavery is a natural part of the world. It's ordained in the Bible. And then we began to have the conversation. It took us actually centuries as it happens as the church to change from a slavery endorsing community to a slavery abhorring community.
And I'm saying we're in that same process. So I have complete and utter sympathy for your view of saying, but the Bible has said this all along. And I say, yes, I know it has. And I used to believe that as a person.
But I'm saying, can you not see the principles of who God is override the principles of some explanation of Arsinoe Coitus here and some list of lustful maniacs in Roman one? When you begin to see it from a different perspective, you go back and look at the verse and say, I can't believe I didn't see that they showed this issue in a different light.
So you just said the Bible and tradition.
Is there anything in early church tradition supportive of gay marriage?
Well, nothing that you would believe because you've basically burned all of your Boswell books.
Boswell has been refuted so many times that he's a laughing stock.
Yeah, well, there we go. So then it's difficult to answer you because I'm not. I teach church history. Church history. And as a church historian,.
The man has been refuted thoroughly. Please do not even try to cite his material. No, he hasn't. And that's why I'm not going to.
Because I know your views of him. But there are many instances through church history where there have been minor traditions. But that's also irrelevant because I'm not claiming church history.
I'm claiming now. You said tradition, community, Bible. So you've said the Bible doesn't give us anything positive. You just made the idea that there are minor things. So fundamentally, when you get down to it, you are saying that if you know God, you just said your fundamental thing is if you know God, then you're going to see that he cannot be opposed to gay marriage.
And I say, the only way you can know God is first and foremost through his word. And his word positively lays out marriage. You're redefining that. What do I need to hear from you that would cause me to think that my understanding of who God is based on his word is an error at this point?
Have you given, do you believe you've given me, knowing what I believe, enough positive information to make that decision? No. Can I give you more?
Can I give you more on that answer? Are you happy with a no? No, but I believe that those people who are here this evening, who know LGBTQI people, so you've got somebody in your life who is gay, and then you go back and you read the scriptures, Romans 1, 1 Corinthians 6, 1 Timothy, and you read the scriptures, and you listen to the description in the scriptures, and then you think of the person you know, I believe you will say, this Bible is not talking about this person.
Something is wrong here. The person that I know is not evil, malevolent, only thinks evil thoughts all of the time, a drunken swindler, or the list of Romans that shows a progression down into the depths of evil, only doing evil all of the time.
And if that's who you are this evening, then I believe I have shown you enough to say that what the Bible is talking about is a particular subset of homosexuals who shake their fist at the sky and say, I don't want to know this God, I do not want to live by his rules, which is a subset of all other people.
But will you admit that the creation of this subset is not something you derive exegetically from scripture at all?
Yes, I do. That's exactly why I started where I started. You said you were surprised I started there. I don't know any other way to start. In 1 Corinthians 6, the Bible that you have in your hands will say the homosexual offenders, not just homosexuals.
And maybe there's the buzzer, so look at that. Is there a difference between a homosexual and a homosexual offender? I think there is. Thanks, guys. Let's give them applause.
Okay, what we're gonna do now, I will make sure that I read you the questions that have been sent to me. I've received just over 70. So forgive me if I don't pick your question. What I will do, though, is if it is okay, I will forward your message at one time to any one of the two, and then if you want to, you can discuss that.
Two minutes for the one that is receiving the question, and a one-minute reply from the other side.
Is that okay? Okay, we don't need all that time. Okay, first question.
To Dr. White. If same-sex marriage is so destructive, why did God not make it one of the Ten Commandments?
Okay, there's a fundamental problem in the very form of the question. Defining marriage as between a man and 14 horses would be greatly destructive. Do you really expect there to be a commandment against that?
The point is you provide a specific, positive definition of marriage, and then that precludes everything else. So when people say, that's sort of like saying, well, Jesus never talked about homosexuality.
Yes, he did. He affirmed God's law, and God's law had directly spoken to that. And so there's a fundamental error in the very idea that there needs to, well, talk about treating the Bible as a rule book.
That would be viewing scripture as having to be some compendium of all possible sins and a prohibition specifically of every possible sin. If it's not specifically listed, then it's okay. No, there's nothing wrong in recognizing principles.
The problem is the principle that would be derived from any fair reading of the apostles and prophets and the Old and New Testament together is that marriage is always fundamentally heterosexual. It is a relationship between a man and a woman.
There was no positive reference to anything like that outside of that. Boswell has been shredded. He has been caught making things up since his death and has been torn apart. There is nothing in tradition.
There is nothing in scripture that would even begin to give that foundation. So again, this evening, there has to be a positive. This isn't using the Bible as a rule book. This is using the Bible as the Word of God, which is sufficient, the sole infallible rule of faith for the church.
And if marriage is gonna be part of the rule of faith, then the rule of faith can't come from my experience with other people. It has to come from what is God's Word.
Yeah, I'm equally not worried that we don't have a prohibition, but I'm also not worried that we don't have the positive statement either. At one stage, James, you said, Paul wouldn't have been able to imagine an analogy of marriage with two men in it.
I don't know why. Why wouldn't it be? If there are two men who are in a marriage and they have got companionship and partnership and the only thing they can't do is procreation, I don't understand why that wouldn't have been a good analogy.
The only way you can think that's not a good analogy is if you have some kind of cultural ick factor to men loving men and women loving women. The Bible doesn't have that ick factor. The Bible's got great examples of men loving men and women loving women without the ick factor.
So yeah, but I agree with Dr. White. I don't think we need to see either a verse against or a verse for gay marriage. It fits into the category of things we develop out of principles. Tom.
Okay, Graham. You speak to homosexuals as being born that way, speaking to a fundamental identity rooted in sexual orientation. I understand, this is the questioner, the Bible to teach us as being born fundamentally sinful and so can't the same argument be made for others who sin with which we are born with.
Why is homosexuality seemingly exempt from having to deal with our inborn sinful nature?
They're two different things. So some people are born left-handed, some people are born right-handed. That's, it's a different category of things to sinfulness. Any part of your life can exhibit sinfulness.
And so I'm not saying that people aren't born in sin and that sin doesn't exist. I'm just saying that your sexual orientation is not one, it's not, that's not in that category. What you do with your sexual orientation, what you do in sexual activity is what either defines something as being a good or a sinful thing later.
But the actual orientation itself, Scripture never, ever, ever says your sexual orientation itself is fundamentally sinful, heterosexual or homosexual.
Dr. White, one minute. Yes. The insertion of modern concepts of orientation would also be foreign, simply because though the disciples did know that there were people who claimed this, they said you are made in the image of God and God's law, therefore, defines for you who you are to be.
God created you. His law reveals his will for you. And that's why in 1 Corinthians 6, verse 11, it says, and such were some of you. That includes the clear identification of the dominant and passive partners in a homosexual relationship.
Such were some of you. Past tense. There's not a single manuscript in the world that has anything other than the past tense at that particular point. Such were some of you, but what? You were justified.
You were cleansed. You were changed. And so there is a fundamental change. And to parallel that to right-handed and left-handedness is to completely miss the Christian worldview. That it? Good. You said one minute.
Excellent.
I was two minutes, what? I was two minutes short? I was two seconds short? Okay, here's a question to both of you, and I think both of you can answer this. To both James and Graham, what is the penalty or punishment stated in the Bible for adultery, divorce, and rape?
And what is the penalty or punishment for homosexuality?
I jump on things faster than you do. If the questioner is asking under the theonomic system in Israel, where you have Deuteronomy chapter 20, then there's gonna be differences, for example, in regards to rape, as to where it takes place.
There are all sorts of evidentiary things. And so trying to put them all together and answer them in two minutes would be very, very difficult. And then you have to then make the application to the modern situation that we have today and how that would be applied in our situation, depending upon where the culture is and the culture's understanding of the Lordship of Christ and its relationship to the law of God.
And there's all sorts of things that would go together at that point. So I'm not really sure how to answer that question or exactly what its relevance would be other than the general answer that I would give, and that is the wages of sin is death.
And so the point I would think that came up and I felt a level of dispute from Graham was when I identified the historic Christian position as to the identification of homosexual behavior, he was saying, well, see, he thinks it's a sin to be delivered from, and I got the feeling he didn't agree with that.
And I would think that would have to do with the orientation issue and things like that. So it's difficult for me to put all those things together and to answer it in a way that would be logical.
Yeah, no, I'm kind of what he said, but let me try and maybe try and discern, and I'm happy if there's a throwback here because I don't want to mischaracterize. I think I agree with you there. I think the question behind it, though, is is homosexuality, and maybe it's the distinction between the homosexuality that might exist in your innate desires versus the homosexuality you act out on.
And I think that scripture is clear. We obviously, there's a sinful nature inside of us. Then there are the things that we might do if we weren't spirit-controlled, and we recognize that I'm not a sinner because I sin.
I sin because I'm a sinner. And we really need to be looking at the homosexual activity and asking, is this sinful activity or not? And I'm guessing you would say all homosexual activity is sinful, whereas I would say, like heterosexuals or asexuals, there would be some activities that would be sinful for a variety of reasons, and then there would be some activities that would not be sinful because they would be done in a way that produces healthy relationships and healthy engagement with God.
And I know that we would differ on which those are, but that's how I would answer the question.
Here's an open question to both of the speakers. What is your respective definition of sin? I'm gonna give you two minutes each because it's a question to both of you, and if you wanna have a one-minute reply from each, you're also welcome to do that.
Yeah, I'll start on this one.
Definition of sin is anything that goes against God's will and anything that breaks any of the commands that God has put in. I think that you would, if you had half an hour, maybe three days, you could do a theological lecture that goes to layers and layers and layers on that, but I think at its heart, a simple answer would be anything that goes against God's will.
Because I have two minutes, what I've been trying to do this evening is to ask the question, why? That's the question I want you to take away. Why would two gay men or two gay women who marry each other, why would that be against a pattern or an archetype or a first principle of God?
There's a lot of things you can do that would break principles, but why would that thing? I don't think it would. I think it is a beautiful analogy, a beautiful picture of God's love for us. God himself is not gendered, so there's no male and female in the Godhead that has to be replicated in our marriage, so why?
Sin is defined for us in Scripture as violation of God's revealed will, specifically, and it is willful rebellion against God and his ways. It flows from the fact that our first father fell and that we fell in him, and we can only inherit from him what he can give to us.
That's the whole argument in Romans chapter five, is either you are in Adam or you're in Jesus. In Adam, death. In Jesus, life. That's really the entire argument that flows from justification by faith and it's central to the gospel itself, and so in answer to the question why, the repentant person wants to know what God says is true and honest and just, and God defines for us how we are to relate to one another, and God defines, for example, for the thief, that you are not to steal any longer, but you are to respect other people because they're made in the image of God, and so you don't take their property, and anger, you're not to have anger toward others because they're made in the image of God, and to have anger toward them is to have hatred toward them, and when it comes to this issue, God has defined that homosexual behavior is wrong and that the orientation is disordered, specifically because of the positive teaching of the relationship of men and women, who a husband is and who a wife is, and we haven't gotten the fact that you cannot define marriage without using the terms husband and wife, and there are meanings to those words that will be destroyed in a homosexual relationship.
Those are gendered words, those are heterosexual words, those are good words, same as fatherhood and motherhood, and we are seeing in our society right now the destruction of those terms, and in my country, you're even now able to get birth certificates without those words being used.
That is a fundamental reorientation of the entirety of humankind, and it is sinful. The person who is repentant goes to God and says, what do you say about this? You do not come to God and say, I say this.
You need to accept what I say. There's a huge difference between those two perspectives, a huge difference. Thanks.
Here's a question to James. James, would you object to two men living together in marriage for companionship and partnership so long as they don't have sex? Is sex also a prerequisite for marriage?
Yes, I would, because it's not marriage. God defines marriage, my friends. I'm sorry if you're gonna dislike me for saying that. As a Christian, God defines marriage. We have been given nothing this evening, and if you believe the sufficiency of Scripture, if you believe it's the sole and fallible rule of faith in the Church, then that is a true objection, and the only way to get around that is to say, well, I'm not really concerned whether Scripture is a sufficient rule.
It's just a rule, and there can be other rules, so I function under the rubric of solo scriptura. I can make a strong case for that. I've debated it many, many times, and if you believe that Scripture is sufficient for the man of God, for the teaching of all good deeds, as Paul wrote to Timothy, and if marriage is a good deed, then the Scripture is sufficient to define marriage, and if you can't find it in the Scripture, then you don't believe what Paul believed about Scripture, and you don't believe what Timothy believed about Scripture, because Paul said the man of God will be thoroughly equipped for every good work by that which is theanoustos, which is God-breathed, and that which is God-breathed defines marriage as between a man and a woman, and to call something marriage that God has never said is marriage, and that goes against His definition, is sinful, and it needs to be repented of, and I include nations in that.
My nation needs to repent of that if they want God's blessing. I say that openly, and look, Jesus Christ is Lord of, He is King of kings and Lord of lords, and that means He is over every nation, every government, and every king.
He gets to define these things.
We do not. Thanks so much. Graham, do you, oops, you need one minute.
Again, it's interesting that you used the concept of trinity earlier, which emerges out of principles. Now you're closing in on the issue of sufficiency of Scripture, which in the definition that you use it, it also doesn't appear in Scripture.
I know you'll argue with that, but it has to emerge from principles, and that's what I want people to see. This is a discussion about what this book is and how we use it, and it is a discussion of who's in and who's out, and it is important, and you have to make a decision.
If your decision, the decisions you make about the issue of homosexuality are also decisions you are making about the kingdom of God and the Scriptures. We both agree on that completely this evening, and so you will have to make your decisions, but the decisions you make on one issue definitely flow into the decisions you make on the others.
Thanks, Graham.
Here's another question for you, Graham. You kept on saying that you view the Bible as a rule book. What is your actual view of the Bible?
The Bible is God's word. It is God's word for us that comes to us through the ages that is everything God wanted us to have. In that sense, I believe it to be sufficient, but it is not a constitution.
To put it frankly, if it is trying to be a constitution, it's pretty badly written. Because otherwise we wouldn't be having these debates. It includes a variety of genres, including stories of ways in which people have interacted with God, and it includes invitations to us to interact with God, always coming back to reference what is in here and to make sure that we live by it.
So I'm not going to answer that question in a way that's helpful to me, to use all the language that would make it easy for me to be accepted in what I'm saying. But I believe that this is God's word, that we must study it, and that we must adjust our lives according to what we read in it.
But I don't expect to open it up and find lists of rules and find those statements that tell me I can do this and I can't do that. I don't expect that in this book. There are some places where that happens, but I don't expect it on every page, to be clear.
Excellent, Doc White,.
Do you want to give your perspective on the scriptures?
How do you read the scriptures? Well, am I responding to him, or is that for both of us? It is a general question, so you're welcome to reply to him.
And to give your own statement. Oh, that gives me two minutes, yes. Excellent, yes, two minutes, two minutes. Sneaky, all right, sneaky. Sneaky.
I mentioned this just before, but I was very quick about it. Let me direct you to 2 Timothy 3, verse 16. All scripture is theanoustos. It means it is God-breathed. When you speak and you hold your hand in front of your mouth and you feel that breath, that's what the description is.
It is intimately God-speaking. All scripture is God-breathed, and therefore, it is profitable for what? Teaching, doctrine. If you teach it, you can get it from that which is theanoustos. For teaching, for rebuking or exhorting and correcting for instruction in righteousness.
In other words, everything that Timothy needs to do in that church in Ephesus, he can go to that which is theanoustos, and God has given to him that which is sufficient. So the difference between us this evening is I believe in sola scriptura.
Scripture is the sole infallible rule of faith for the church. My personal experience, as strong and as special as it might be to me, is not a rule of faith of the church and it cannot bind anyone else.
And so I can sit here and say you just need to, if you just knew this person, then you would know what they do is, the Bible just can't be condemning that. That is not a rule of faith. That is a violation of sola scriptura.
That is a fundamental violation of sola scriptura. And that is why Graham knows 99 of the people that hold the position he holds in affirming homosexuality and gay marriage do not hold his view of scripture.
They may have started where he was, but they eventually realized, I've got to abandon that because it goes on to say, so that the man of God may be thoroughly equipped for every good work, every good work.
If it's a good work to teach what he's teaching, he needs to find it in scripture. That's what the apostles said. Excellent.
Give a hand to both of them. And just, I just want to say thank you to every single one that was here. It was in actual fact done from the floor with such a great attitude. Thank you so much. Pat yourself on the shoulder and say, well done.
Okay. You can receive an applause from these guys as well. Okay, now we're going to have the closing statements. Graham, you've got 10 minutes first and then Dr. White, you've got 10 minutes.
Thank you very much. And because I won't get a chance to do this later and want to make sure it's part of the formal proceedings, leading up to this week, as there is every time this topic is talked about, the way in which Christians engage with other Christians on this topic is frightening and horrible.
There are some people who contacted me and said, am I going to be safe coming to the debate with the amount of vitriol that was put together? And I just want to thank Dr. White who travels around the world doing this in a variety of different ways for the way in which he does it.
Because he never brings that knot in interactions before or afterwards or during. In a sense, this is possibly how it should be done. We don't have to shout at each other, call each other names and that we disagree vehemently, but we do it this way because we are brothers in Christ.
Now, Dr. White said that the difference, my time did start earlier, so I'm not starting now, I'm just making sure I can see it. So Dr. White said that he believes that the difference between us is this issue of sola scriptura, possibly.
Because yes, he and I would have differences. He has a very reformed view of sola scriptura and we don't have to talk about that and debate that, I do not hold that view. So he is correct in that. But not entirely correct.
Because I do go back to scripture. I understand why 95 of the people who hold my view don't because they don't have 15 years of theological study in Greek and Hebrew language like I do. So I am hoping to help them do the work so that they loop back again to where I am.
I understand that many of the people who are talking about this are on the pendulum somewhere. Out that way, I speak to them too and I ask them to come back and they will because that's how things work.
This thesis and antithesis and then ultimately synthesis. So I get that and I get that concern and I share that concern. But I believe that church history shows us that even when and if you believe that the scripture is sufficient and is everything that you need, and in that sense I'm happy to say that I do, that we still change.
Church history screams that at you. How can you possibly look at church history and say nothing ever changes? That everything every Christian has ever believed has been right because that's essentially what you're saying then.
We were wrong about slavery. We were wrong about the divine right of kings. Hang men, we were even wrong about whether the earth was flat or not on the basis of the sufficiency of scripture. And so now we find ourselves here, not because there's a thread of tradition that we need to go and search for, but because we are here now.
This is our generation, our moment in history and our issue to deal with. Slavery, tick, done. Women's issues, I wish. Still working on it, but mainly done. We don't quite treat our wives as property anymore, although the scripture tells us to.
Democracy. A variety of issues around science. The age of the earth, that's not also done. There's people in this place who think the earth's only 10 ,000 years old. I am here tonight not to speak to the people who don't believe anything ever changes, who have frankly, breathtaking pride, mind-blowing arrogance to think that at this moment in history, everything they believe is right.
And that someone like me who believes something different on something that has never been an essential, it's not in the Apostles' Creed. Sexuality you'll find nowhere in the Apostles' Creed. But mind-blowing arrogance to say that they must be right and I am wrong, so wrong that I am going to hell.
So tonight I don't want to speak to those people as I close. I want to speak to those of you who are wondering whether the gay people you know are really an abomination to God because they don't look like it.
Okay, maybe that one guy does. But you've got LGBTQI friends and that doesn't fit the definition that Romans gives you. You know LGBTQI Christians. They come to your church, they love Jesus. They have a thousand reasons to run from the church.
The church has treated them monstrously and yet they come, they're seeking Jesus and they are more Christian than any of your other heterosexual Christian friends in their grace and their love of Jesus and their caring.
And you think this does not sound, Star Wars fans, you'll know the reference. These are not the droids you're looking for. This is not what the Bible is talking about. So I hope that what I have done this evening is just shown you that there are principles in scripture.
We do not have to violate our understanding of foundational principles in scripture in order to get to a point to say that marriage was designed for companionship, for partnership, for the foundation of society.
And the only thing that gay people can't do is have children. But there are a whole lot of heterosexual couples who can't do that either. And they're not going to hell because of it. In the three minutes I have left, I believe.
Let me then put a positive case to you for why we as this church should do gay marriages. Marriage is a sacred institution and a sign of a holy covenant made before God. We don't want people who want to spend their lives together with another human being to just do it in a half-hearted way.
We want to bring them before God and say, this needs to be a covenant that is witnessed by heaven, that you will be faithful to each other, that you will love each other and be the complement to the other.
Because James has not answered this evening what that complement might be. Because two men can be complementary to each other. Two women can be complements to each other, filling in the gaps that the other doesn't have.
And when you do that, and we call it marriage, we want you to do it in the sight of God and we want you to do it in the church. That's why as a straight man, married for 28 years with three children, one adopted, no gay family members as far as I know in my even wider circle of family, that's why I'm taking this seriously.
I lost my job because of this. I did nearly a decade of theological training and was ordained in the Baptist Union of South Africa and was forced to leave it because I took the stand. I resigned before I was fired, but I lost my job at the age of 30 because of this.
I'm not mucking about here, but I'm also not justifying any personal lifestyle choices or trying to hide something away from a family member I love. I'm doing this because God demands justice. 150 years ago, He demanded the justice for slaves.
And there were Christians who had to stand up and mainly fight against their Christian brothers and sisters to make the case. This is our issue, and we must do it because God loves gay people. God created gay people, and it is not good for anyone to be alone.
I thought you still had a minute and 24 seconds, so. Okay, excellent. James, 10 minutes for you.
God demands justice, and He demonstrated justice on the cross of Calvary. That's where justice is done. And in the forgiveness of sins, He defines and gets to define as the Savior what sin is. We can never allow ourselves to get in the position of thinking that our modern cultural movements can redefine what God did on the cross 2 ,000 years ago.
That's what we're in danger of doing here. And by the way, I know it wasn't said directly this way, but on Graham's own Facebook page, someone commented about this debate. Thank you for taking a stand on this issue.
I'm so tired of the Bible bigots making this an issue. It's never been about the Bible. It's always been about bigotry. It goes both ways, it goes both directions. There are people that don't believe we should even have the freedom to say the things that I have to say if I'm going to honestly represent what the Bible actually says.
By the way, it was just said that the Bible teaches us to treat our wives as property. The Bible tells us to love our wives as Christ loved the church. That's as far from property as I can get. And that's taking all of the Bible instead of just the parts you want to look at.
Changes in church history, but we haven't changed what the Bible clearly defined about who God is, about Jesus's authority, and we have not heard a word this evening that even begins to get close to overthrowing the positive teaching that Jesus himself gave in Matthew chapter 19.
Not a word. I suggest that you go back and listen carefully to both sides, and you will see this with clarity. I was asked, I had made the statement, Paul could not have imagined two men together in a marriage relationship, and he said, why not?
Because there is not a shred of evidence to be found in Paul's writings, in anything contemporaneous with Paul, in anything in Tanaitic Second Temple Judaism to substantiate the idea that anyone ever had the dream that that could be called a marriage.
That's why. You have to make it up and insert it historically. That's not scholarship. You don't do that. That's not representing Paul correctly. That is misrepresenting Paul. That is reading something into him that was never a part of his experience in any way, shape, or form.
As a rabbi, we know what they believed about marriage at that time. We had the statement made, James is using the Bible as a rule book. This is an abuse of the Bible, so I do not have to give to you a positive case.
Then at the end, you sort of got a positive case, but it wasn't a positive case based on scripture. It was a positive case based upon emotion. We need to stand for justice. We need to be loving. Well, what is loving?
I suggest to you the greatest demonstration that any Christian can ever give to you of love was on a bloody Roman cross. And it was my sin and your sin that nailed him there. And what we're talking about tonight is can we even define what those sins were?
Because I suggest to you that all of us know people who are entrapped in sinful behaviors that otherwise we find to be just a great person. And so therefore, I mean, if you just know them, you know they're not that bad.
No, the Bible says the wages of sin is death. And if that offends you, then the cross should offend you. Because God took the amazing, the amazing act of entering into his own creation to give his perfect human life that he joined to the second person of the Trinity to atone for sin.
He takes it very seriously. And I suggest we need to take his definition of what it is seriously. And that's if you're, and if you're here this evening as a person involved in a homosexual lifestyle, I hope you heard 1 Corinthians 6, verse 11.
Such were some of you. And the real question is for all of us, I don't care what your sin is, who are you gonna love more, Jesus or your sin? Because if you love Jesus more than your sin, you're gonna be repentant.
And you're not gonna hold on to that sin and demand that Jesus bow to your definition of your reality. He is your creator, he gets to define your reality, not you. And I'm glad of that, aren't you? I'd rather have him defining it than anybody else.
Vitally important Christian understandings here. But folks, the reality is we do approach scripture differently. I do believe in the solo scriptura. That's because Paul taught it to Timothy. And he functioned on it.
Scripture is the sole infallible rule of faith for the church. And that is violated by Graham's position. He admitted it. And when you can say that fundamentally, the Bible isn't that kind of book, and I know God, and the God I know, he's not against gay marriage.
That's your ultimate authority. Now you may try to bring it and say, well I'm using principles and so on. No, I'm sorry. But you are making yourself and your experience the fundamental interpretive grid through which scripture has to fit itself.
Rather than as a creature going, I am in submission to the Lordship to Jesus Christ, I am in submission to the revelation of God's word, I need to know what God says about this because I can be deceived.
I can be deceived by close relationships, and I have been, and so have you. I need an objective standard. And we have that in scripture. And so if someone says, the God I know is not against gay marriage, that is only an argument for a subjectivist, not for a follower of Jesus Christ who taught us that the scriptures cannot be broken.
Who said to the Sadducees, you err, not knowing the scriptures nor the power of God. And then he based his response, those Sadducees, in the book of Matthew, chapter 22, upon the tense of a verb. Do you remember that story?
About the resurrection? He rebuked them and said, you are wrong, you don't know the scriptures, you don't know the power of God, and then his answer was based upon the tense of a verb. Was Jesus using the Bible as a rule book there?
Is there something objective about the reality of scripture? Most definitely is. Now look, I understand fundamentalism. And as a reformed theologian, I'm not a fundamentalist. I recognize the need to test my traditions by scripture.
I recognize how powerful tradition can be. I get it. And I've been teaching church history for longer than you've been married. And I know how many times people in the past have abused scripture and have taught as traditions as if they were the word of God.
I get it. And it would have been real easy to win this debate tonight. Go to Matthew chapter 19 and give me some way of understanding the clear, perspicuous words of Jesus in any other way than what they were obviously meant.
And dropping down to some subject later on is not gonna overthrow the reality of what Jesus said, that God's our creator, he makes us male and female, he joins us together, and the only union that he blesses that results in one flesh is a man and a woman in the sight of God.
All you gotta do is give me something more than your feelings. I'm standing for justice. I say you're not. I think I am. Well, how are we gonna find out which one's right? I can go to the word of God.
And that's what I did this evening. That's what we must do in all of these things. And yes, we have to prioritize things. There are things that are central and definitional, and there are things out on the periphery.
But when Jesus addresses something, and Jesus says, as our creator, God intended it this way, we had better be real careful if we've gotten to the point of saying to Jesus, I'm not sure, it doesn't really seem to go real well with our culture today.
Graham says he had to leave because of his taking a stand. There are a lot of people in our culture that are losing a lot more than that today because they dare to stand on God's word on this issue. People are getting fired all over the place.
And we all know why. So the decision you have to make this evening is, is that revelation from God sufficient to answer this question outside of your subjective input as to how you feel about it? And I suggest to you, if your answer to that is no, then you don't have a gospel to proclaim to this world anyways, because it's all just your personal opinion.
I have a gospel, because you know what? There is an empty grave, and that's a historical fact, and the one who came out of it has the right to define who man is, because he's my maker, he's my redeemer, he's my creator, and he said, one man, one woman.
That's marriage, and I believe it. I hope you do too. Thank you very much.
Thank you to both of our speakers. Thanks, Graham. Thanks, Dr. White, for giving us this wonderful time, and also for you, the audience, for being here tonight. I just also want to thank this church. It was really hard to get the right venue, and I'm really thankful for this church.
Pastor Tom, Jean, the sound people, Ishmael, recording this, thank you so much. If you are looking to look at the recording once more, the recording will be readily made available to both parties, and they will upload it to their respective YouTube pages in the week, so I think this is something.
Yeah, if YouTube allows it. Okay, but here's the wonderful thing. We should mull over this more, and we should look at it again. I think there's a lot that have been said, which we should really reflect on again, and again, and again, so thank you to you.
Have a good night. Drive safely, and don't go all to McDonald's. Thank you.