Gay Marriage Debated

Good evening. My name is Jason Wallace. I am pastor of Christ Presbyterian Church. It's a pleasure to have you here with us this evening. The question that we have before us this evening is whether gay marriage is supported from scripture.

We have with us Pastor Dee Bradshaw of Sacred Light of Christ Metropolitan Community Church here in Salt Lake City. We also have with us Dr. James White, director of Alpha and Omega Ministries in Phoenix, Arizona.

This is Dr. White's 10th debate that he has done for us on various subjects, most dealing with LDS theology, but three of them dealing with Roman Catholic theology as well. We have been very privileged to have him.

He is the author of numerous books and is an elder in the Reformed Baptist Church. As I said, the question before us this evening is over gay marriage, and we will begin with Pastor Bradshaw.

Homosexuality, Idolatry, and the Clobber Passages

As I prepared for tonight, one of the first things that always comes to people's mind when they even think about same-sex marriages is whether being homosexual is acceptable or not anyway, because if you don't believe it is, it's kind of a mute point, because if it's not acceptable, then it doesn't matter what anybody thinks anyhow.

So the first thing I would have to say is that for me, of course it is, because I am a gay man, a homosexual. I came out in 1978, and the scriptures were, for me, as for most people, the biggest stumbling block that I had to deal with.

Growing up in the church, you have this relationship with God, you have a relationship with church, with your family, and then you start realizing that those feelings that you've had all your life, those strange feelings where you're attracted to the guys.

And not the girls,.

And it's uncomfortable because you're going on dates and you can't go because you don't really want to go, start entering into your life, and so then you have to start looking at your life and saying, okay, Lord, what's going on here?

What's taking place in my life that's so different from everybody else, and why is this happening to me? And obviously, being in the church, you start looking at the scriptures, and you look, obviously, at the typical scriptures that everybody looks at, what we affectionately call the clobber passages, and those are Genesis 19, Leviticus 18 and 20, and Romans, 1 Corinthians, and 1 Timothy, and you look at those, and I can tell you from my own experience that as you read those, as you're a faithful believer in Christ and a follower of Christ and you walk with God, you start questioning yourself, obviously, and as you do that, you have to go to the Lord in prayer, and you have to talk to God a lot about it because it's a problem, and the problem is that as you look at those scriptures, if you're gay, you look at those scriptures, and you look at them, and you say, Lord, is this me?

Is this a picture of me? And you realize that it's not because you read the story in Genesis about Sodom and Gomorrah, and people put that as a classic homosexual, you know, destruction scene, and if you look at Sodom and Gomorrah, and you can think, well, yeah, okay, yeah, they were going there, and they were wanting to rape these guys.

I'm not really inclined to rape people, so does that really apply to me? Heterosexual or homosexual rape is not acceptable, and so does this really apply to me? And so then I go on to Leviticus, and Leviticus was probably the hardest because it says, man shall not lie with man as you lie with a woman, and I thought, okay, well,.

I haven't done either of those,.

So it doesn't really apply either, but the feelings are there, the desire's there to date a male and not the girls, and that's where my interest lies, so that was a problem. So then you go on to Romans, and again, you know, you find these passages that talk about behavior and certain things that are taking place, and you start looking at those, and again, you have to ask yourself, you know, Lord, is this me?

And that's basically the approach I had to take in looking at my sexuality was looking at the scriptures that people use to say that I can't be who I am and be a Christian, and I had to go to the Lord and say, Lord, is this me?

And the answer was no, it's not, and I played the game for 32 years. I was a good little churchgoer, did everything I was supposed to, and at 32 years old, I couldn't take it anymore, and finally, I had to admit that I was gay, and again, I took it to the Lord in prayer, and very distinctly, just like the time when the Lord let me know.

That he existed.

And was a vital part of my life, that spirit came to me and told me I was fine, but I was the same person I'd always been, except that now I knew who I was, and there was a peace,.

And there was a calm,.

And there was a gentleness that I hadn't experienced in a long time since I first went to the Lord to find out if God really existed in my life, and it was that same peace and that same calm of the spirit, okay, but those scriptures still sat there, and they sat there for many years because the church didn't want me anymore because I didn't fit.

Into the mold,.

And so it was difficult to look at those passages, and so then, I started looking at them to find myself there, and one of the things I always hear now, you're going at it with a set agenda, you're going at it with a perspective of homosexuality is okay, of course I am, because I am homosexual, I can't go at it from any other viewpoint, and I found it interesting that people automatically assume because of what's described in there that homosexuality is wrong when actually what I always find in there is certain behaviors that are wrong, like in Genesis, like I said before, gang rape is never acceptable, and that's what you're talking about, if you go to Ezekiel and you read about the sins of Sodom, it talks about all, they're being unkind to the poor, they're being wealthy, they're being lazy, abusive to the poor, not taking care of people, and down the list, and then it gets to the part where it says, and they performed abominations.

Before the Lord,.

Well, some people associate abomination with homosexuality, but in doing the research that I've done, I found that the word that's used there, that abomination, primarily is used when associated with idolatry and things associated with acts of idolatry, and then I looked into Canaan itself, the land where they went, and in Exodus 34, the Lord told the people of Israel that they were to drive out the people of Canaan.

When they went in there,.

They were not to make any covenants with them, they were not to marry with the people there, because if they did, their sons would be dragged into prostitution, and the prostitution they're talking about isn't just making money, it's temple prostitution, because that was the land of idolatry, the lowest form of idolatry you could find where sex was just rampant.

Last night, there was a debate here about temples. Well, they would go to the temple, but it wasn't the same, it was a free-for-all sex-wise in those fertility cults, and people had sex with everybody and anything, and one of the prime people at those fertility cults was the temple priest, who represented the god or goddess of that particular cult, and to touch that person was a blessing.

If you were privileged enough to have sex with them, it was almost like being guaranteed immortality, and they seriously believed that their sexual activity excited the gods so that those gods got excited and would achieve orgasm, and the land would be made fertile because of the activity, and so it was very wild, and Canaan was the wildest of the areas, and God said, run those people all out, or you will be troubled with this.

All your life.

It didn't happen. They didn't run them out. They made covenants with one by that trickery, and if you read through the scriptures, they were troubled with idolatry all the time until they were carried off the captive into Babylon.

They were in idolatry, and there were male prostitutes all over the place. So then, okay, that's not me. So then we get to Leviticus, and again, I looked at it, and it tied right in there at the beginning of chapter 18.

It says, you are not to do the things that the people of this land do, nor are you to do the things that the people of the land of Egypt where you came out of do. Well, both of these people, lands, were idolatrous, and one of the books I read said that what God was doing in giving him all these commandments was gradually weaning them from the milk of idolatry they had been fed all through their time in Egypt.

If you look at the account where Moses went up on the mount, he'd been gone for a while, and they got together, they put their jewelry together, and they made a god, and it says they ate, and they drank, and they went out to party.

Some of the context I read said basically they held an orgy because that was a part of the fertility cults. So it was a part of their culture, and God was weaning them from that. So if you read through Leviticus, it's a lot of don't do this, and don't sleep with this, and don't do this.

It tied in with a lot of the fertility cults and the idol worship that was a part of their life at the time. And so even when it gets to that part where it says, man shall not lie with man as with a woman, it's an abomination.

There's the abomination word again that ties in with idolatry. We get to Romans. Well, Rome was also another country, city that was full of idolatry, that was full of prostitution. It was very immoral.

I mean, they had holidays for the prostitutes. And so it was a very immoral city. So when Paul wrote to the people in Rome, he was not writing to your local church out there in West Valley, telling them about the culture around them.

Because if you look around the city of Salt Lake today, you do not find prostitutes. Well, excuse me, you do. But you do not find temples of prostitution. You do not find cult temples. You do not find any of those things that were so prevalent in Rome.

I mean, it was bad enough that one of the historians wrote of Caesar that he was every woman's husband and every man's wife. And so the morality of Rome was terrible. The same thing with Corinth, when they wrote to Corinth.

The city of Corinth was not a good town. It was not a quiet little suburb. It was a port city. It was also festive. It just overran with this idolatry and so on. And so what they were talking about, if you read Romans, it starts out by saying that these people knew God, but yet they turned their back on God.

And they walked away from God and they took after other gods. And therefore God gave them over to the lusts of their heart. And again, I find idolatry there, where they're tied in with this worship attitude.

And they're doing all kinds of things. And it even talks in there about how women left their use of women and men left their natural use of men, excuse me, for women and went after men. Well, in the temples that could happen.

But it talks about lust. That they had a lust for the other person. Well, lust is not a word that's a nice word. When you lust after someone, you have no concern about that person's well-being, that person's ideas, their thoughts.

When you're lusting after somebody, it's about sex and that's it. And so I looked at myself again and I said, am I lusting after these men? No, I'm not. Not to the jeopardy of their well-being. And one of the problems that often we run into is when people think of homosexuals, they think of the sexules.

And too often when people think of homosexuals, they think of perverts, weirdos, pedophiles, all those kinds of things. Do they exist in our community? Of course they do. Do they exist in the heterosexual community?

Of course they do. If you list statistics on pedophiles, 98 are heterosexual. Our church works with people who are coming out of those programs, who are in the halfway houses. We work with people coming out of the prison systems who were pedophiles.

Because what they found is that most of those people did not deal with their sexuality and so they acted out. And sadly, children seem to be easy victims and presumed to be safe victims. And that's too bad.

But once these people get out of the system and they find out who they are, most of them never go back again because it's not their orientation. So I had to look at those things and say, is this me? And it's not.

Did I want to give up God? No, I did not. And I did not give up God. Did I want to give up the peace and the spirit of the Holy Spirit? No, and I didn't. And I can tell you that God has led me so many places, so many wonderful places, experiences.

Sometimes places I didn't want to go. When you're working on your house and the back wall's torn out and the Holy Spirit says to you, go to California and you don't want to go, but you have to go. And you know your dad's dying and probably will die that week and you need to go.

And finally you give up and you go because your friend is terribly depressed, your heterosexual friend, by the way, is terribly depressed and you spend three days with her, you get her through it,.

You come home,.

And the night you get home, your father dies.

It's not easy, but it's worth it.

To listen to that spirit. So we look at the scriptures and we can say, yeah, we can point out a ton of scriptures that people can point out. Yeah, this says this and this says that. You know, I could have got up here and done the other argument tonight because I know him well enough.

But the point wasn't, was that what the scripture says? Yes, the scripture talks about that activity, but I had to look at myself and say, is it talking about me? Do I hate my parents? Do I do all those nasty things at the end of Romans that it says?

No, I don't.

Have I denied God?

No, I don't.

People will say I'm chasing after the idolatry of my sexuality. My sexuality is not an idol. Again, it's not about the sex. My partner and I have been together for five years. We met at church. We dated for months.

We lived together for almost a year. We, in fact, we bought a house together and we'd never had sex. It wasn't about the sex. It was about our relationship with each other. We still have separate bedrooms and bathrooms.

It's about a relationship. It's about our love, our compassion. Could I do that with a woman? No, I could not. I was engaged twice.

I tried.

I have hundreds of friends who got married because they said it would go away if you did.

It didn't.

And they had children and they have ex-wives. I have a friend that was an evangelical pastor, preached all over the world. He was told that if he preached against it, it would go away. So he preached vehemently against it for 38 years.

Never went away. Never has gone away. Has he been miserable? Yes, because he's living a lie. He's preaching a lie. He's not walking in that spirit. So do the scriptures support homosexual marriages? Not in so many words.

I mean, Hebrew tells us that marriage is for everyone and it doesn't say a man and a woman. It says that marriage is for everyone to prevent fornication. And that it's good for everyone.

Oh, I could take that.

But then you'll say I have an agenda.

I do.

Who doesn't?

Luther had an agenda.

Calvin had an agenda.

We have so many churches because people had an agenda. The Southern Baptist Church was born because the people there wanted to keep their slaves. So a lot of times go on with agendas. We look at things through the eyes we see.

Why do we look at them? Because we're trying to find ourselves there. You look at the scriptures trying to find yourself. And you do. And that's good. Some people try to use Jonathan and David as an example of homosexual relations.

Can't prove it. But I can tell you that when I read about their love, it rings a bell. It rings home. Because they're exactly the same feelings I've had for my partner. How many heterosexual men that have met someone that they fall in love with them immediately, the first time they meet them, take them home, pledge their love to them, make a covenant of love to them, make a commitment to them, take off their valuable possessions that represent their position of royalty and give them to that loved one.

That'd be about like you meeting a man, going home, making a covenant of love, giving him your car, your house,.

And all your jewelry.

On your first meeting. Yeah, I can relate to that. As a deep love.

Heterosexuals can't.

Because heterosexuals don't know what it's like to be gay. They think that we are heterosexuals who have just chosen to go a different way. I can tell you it's not true. I've had no desire for women. In fact, the thought kind of makes me sick.

No offense to you women. I work in the medical field. I've been in the medical field for 30 years. I help deliver high-risk babies. I know what it's all about.

Not interested.

Not because I chose not to be. I tried to be. It wouldn't work. And so rather than drag somebody else.

Into the lie,.

I decided I could not do that.

And I took it to the Lord.

And again, the Spirit let me know that I'm fine. And only I know what my walk with the Lord is. And only you know what your walk with the Lord is. Nobody else can tell you.

Thank you.

We'll now have a 20-minute opening statement by Dr. White.

I have stood in many a situation to defend the sufficiency of the Word of God as the sole infallible rule of faith for the church. God has not left us up to our own devices. He has given the church His Word.

He has preserved that Word. He has made that Word perspicuous, clear, interpretable. And if we will honor that Word, then we can know what His truth is for His people. I have defended that in many a situation, even last evening in the debate that was held in this place.

That was part and parcel of the real issue. If we believe in the sufficiency of Scripture, then it tells us what the church is to be about and what about temples and worship and the sacrifice of Christ and things like that.

When it comes to the issue that now faces our society regarding homosexual marriage, the Bible does very clearly express to us what marriage is. For example, if you'll turn with me to Matthew chapter 19, the Lord Jesus Himself addressed this particular subject.

And it came up many times in His ministry because the fact that the Jews had adopted a very lax view of marriage and had given to men the right to dismiss their wives for almost any purpose whatsoever.

And in Matthew chapter 19, beginning of verse three, some Pharisees came to Jesus, testing Him and asking, is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife for any reason at all? Now, Jesus' answer takes us back to the very beginning of God's revelation because He says, He answered and said, have you not read that He who created them from the beginning made them male and female and said, for this reason, a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife and the two shall become one flesh.

So they are no longer two, but one flesh, what therefore God has joined together, let no man separate. So here you have the incarnate Son of God, the very one that we believe spoke and the worlds came into existence, telling us what marriage is all about.

And He goes back to a passage of scripture that many in liberal theological circles today do not even believe was in fact penned by God or is just merely a human reflection upon these issues. He goes back to the Pentateuch.

He goes back to Genesis chapter two and notice his interpretation. He says, have you not read that He who created them, God is our creator. God defines the parameters of male and female and what the family is.

That is God's right as the creator. We as the creation do not have the right to change the parameters that He Himself lays down. Jesus says that God is the creator and He created them from the beginning.

This was not just a cultural thing. This was not just something that was relevant to the period of time of Moses' existence or Leviticus 18, but from the beginning as a part of His creative decree, He created them male and female and said for this reason, a man shall leave his father and mother.

Now here you have the family. You have the family made up of a father, a mother and offspring. Here is from the beginning, God's intention in the family laid out for us. A man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife and the two shall become one flesh.

Here is the Lord Jesus' own interpretation of the family unit and the continuation of that family unit. So they are no longer two but one flesh, what therefore God has joined together, let no man separate.

I suggest to you that these words make no sense outside of that which the church has always believed and that is marriage is between a man and a woman. In fact, the very term homosexual marriage would not even be a meaningful phrase from a biblical perspective.

When we look at Hebrews chapter 13 verse 4, which is alluded to earlier, where you have there that marriage is to be held in honor by all, the only way to understand that in the context of Hebrews, especially given its reliance upon the Old Covenant and the Old Testament scriptures is that the marriage bed is referring to that which is seen here in Matthew 19, seen in Genesis chapter 2, male and female, a man and a woman together in that marriage relationship.

When we go back to Genesis chapter 2, we are also faced another very important aspect of this and that is the presentation of the words the Lord Jesus quoted is in the context of the fact that there is no helper found that corresponded to the man.

And this is one of the most important things I think we need to focus upon this evening and that is the scriptures use marriage as an illustration of the relationship between the Lord Jesus and the church.

In the book of Ephesians, Paul draws this marriage relationship out and identifies Christ as the husband and the church as the bride. And there is a complementary relationship that exists between Christ, the savior of the body and his body, the bride of Christ.

And that complementary relationship is seen in the male female relationship. In Genesis chapter 2, we are told that it was not good that the man was to be alone and that the man could not find in the created order one that was complementary to him, one that met his needs.

And so we have the creation of woman and when woman is brought to man, man sees that he is flesh of his flesh, bone of his bone, that he meets that which he himself lacks. You see, in the creative decree of God, God has made the male female relationship such that the female completes the male and the male completes the female, that there is a complementary relationship.

There is no complementarianism in a homosexual relationship. It is a situation where you have a mirror image, you do not have the creative decree of God being fulfilled in that situation. And that's why you do not have, even though Paul writes in a situation where homosexuality was well known, Plato had already written about almost every aspect of homosexual behavior, homosexual relationships.

Paul was well aware of these things. He had read the Greek philosophers. He was a man of the world. He understood these things. Many times he is presented as if he just, he didn't address these things because he didn't know about them.

No, that is not the case whatsoever. He knows about all these things and yet we have no reference whatsoever in the New Testament to this kind of radical redefinition of the nature of marriage and male female relationships that would be required if in point of fact Christians were going to support this concept of same sex homosexual marriages.

Now, obviously I've spent significantly more time already on the issue of marriage than we did in the opening presentation. I wanted to address that first because the fact that I think it's important that we recognize that there is a positive biblical presentation given to us as to what marriage is and how it functions.

There in Genesis 2, you have male and female, father, mother, offspring. These are all elements of what God intended marriage to be about and that's how he created us. But of course, the presentation that I am responding to this evening has primarily focused upon, well, but is it really wrong to be homosexual in the first place?

And this evening, we can hardly exhaust the amount of information that needs to be discussed. Obviously, that is something that comes up in this particular issue. In this particular debate, the first and foundational issue for someone who claims the Bible is the Word of God is to determine whether in point of fact the Bible addresses this issue.

And we have been told that no, the Bible doesn't address the issue of specifically a monogamous homosexual relationship that is based upon love and the assertion that God made me this way. This is the way he created me and therefore all those passages that address the issue of homosexuality are not speaking about me.

Allow me in just a few moments that I have to make some comments on the passages because most of the relevant comments were relevant passages were indeed referenced. That is Genesis chapters 18 and 19 in regards to Sodom and Gomorrah.

Leviticus chapters 18 and 20 in regards to the holiness code that is contained there. Romans chapter one, the Apostle Paul's description, and then the use of the Greek term arsenikoites in 1 Corinthians 6, 9 and 1 Timothy 1, 10.

Now, in essence, what I would like to try to explain to you is the consistency of the biblical revelation at this point. There is no reason whatsoever in looking at the biblical text and accepting it as a consistent revelation from God to believe that there is any difference in the presentation from the beginning of Genesis to the end of Revelation.

Indeed, the situation in Genesis really goes beyond the concept of gang rape. In point of fact, that only becomes an issue after Lot has identified the desire of the men, and notice it's the men of Sodom, the desire of the men of Sodom in Genesis 18 as wicked.

And notice that that's the very same term that God himself used in Genesis 13 when he said that he needed to find out, that he needed to test the men of Sodom to see if the wickedness, the men of wickedness, that was truly the case.

And when he says, it's like I said, the angels down back in Genesis 13, there is this cryptic statement that the men of Sodom were exceedingly wicked. Now, this is before anything about gang rapes or anything else.

It is about the everyday activity that went on in Sodom. This is clearly seen in Genesis 18 because when Lot encounters the angels, the visitors, he doesn't know that they're angels at this point in time.

When he encounters them, he wants to get them out of the city square as fast as he can. He knows what the city is like. The issue of gang rape has not even come up. And that whole situation does not even arise until after the men have surrounded the house and demanded these men be brought out so that they might know them.

Only then does Lot identify this as wickedness. And so the issue of what is an abomination, which was brought up in the opening presentation, in reality does come out in Leviticus 18 and 20, where there we are told that this activity is toeva.

Toeva is a Hebrew term that it was quite rightly said is frequently attached to idolatry. In fact, in the book of Isaiah, those who choose to worship idols are said to be themselves toeva. That is a person who chooses to go against God's law, whether it be in idolatry or in sexual behavior, is toeva in God's sight is an abomination.

And the law brings penalty to bear for those activities. And so in Leviticus 18 and 20, these things are brought out. Now, many people seem to dismiss the relevance of Leviticus because, well, that's just the old law.

But please notice something. This is the section of the Old Testament that the Lord Jesus quoted from more than any other. This is the section that says, you shall love the Lord your God. You shall love your neighbor as yourself.

And it is the only place in the Bible where we have prohibition against bestiality and incest. And so obviously these prohibitions were not merely cultural at the time. Jesus did not interpret them in that way.

He did not interpret the law in that way either. And neither did the Apostle Paul. For in Romans chapter 1, as you well know, when he addresses this issue mentioning first lesbianism and then male homosexuality, he does not do it in the context of saying, well, if you don't love God and if you turn your back on God, then these are bad things to do.

Folks, think with me for just a moment when we look at Romans chapter 1. Yes, there are many sins that are listed at the end of Romans chapter 1. It's been said, well, this isn't descriptive of me. I haven't hated my parents.

I haven't done all the stealing and the lying and all these things. And therefore, this is not descriptive of me. Please recognize something. Could we honestly say as we look at the descriptions of the sins, the idolatry, for example, could an idolater look at Romans chapter 1 and say, well, look, I don't hate my parents.

I love God. I just happen to love other gods as well. Therefore, this passage is not applicable to me. Well, of course not. That is atomizing the text and not allowing the text to stand as a whole. The fact of the matter is, Paul utilizes in Romans chapter 1, verses 26 and 27, this concept and he's illustrating what idolatry does.

It twists the creator-creation distinction. Man twists the relationship that is to exist with God. God is the one that defines what human sexuality is to be about. God is the one who defines who we are to be.

God is the one who defines what worship is to be, how we're to be related to everyone around us. And we choose to twist that because we are suppressing the knowledge of God. We do not have to do everything in the list of vices at the end of Romans chapter 1 for these things to be descriptive of us.

Because there's murder and there's lying and there's fornication and adultery. You don't have to be guilty of every single thing for this to be descriptive of each of us as an individual. And so Paul does specifically refer to male and female adult homosexual relationships in Romans chapter 1, verses 26 through 27.

And he does as well in 1 Corinthians chapter 6, verse 9 and 1 Timothy chapter 1, verse 10. Here, however, he uses a specific Greek term, arsenikoites. And it seems if we look historically at the situation that Paul actually possibly coined this very term.

Why do we say that? Well, because we don't see any specific reference to it prior to Paul's use in the history of literature. And where might he have gotten it? Well, Paul would very frequently use the Greek septuagint.

The Greek septuagint is the Greek translation of the Old Testament. And he would preach from that septuagint. And so what the apostle Paul would frequently do is he would take terms that were found there in the septuagint and he would combine them knowing that his audience would be drawing from the same source so that they could see the application he was making from the text of scripture.

And both of the terms that are put together, arsenikoites means men together in sexual relationship with one another. And both of those terms are found separately in the Greek septuagint. In Leviticus, it's 18 and 20.

The very section of the holiness code that says you shall not lie with a man as you lie with a woman. And so in both of those places, in 1 Corinthians written to the church at Corinth that Paul himself, he was involved in the planting of that church.

He had preached in that church. He knows they have the scriptures and then writing what? 1 Timothy 1 .10, writing to Timothy that he also knows would have the same background, same context. He uses this term that is descriptive of homosexual orientation and activity.

Now in so doing, he says in 1 Corinthians 6, verse nine, or do you not know that the unrighteous will not inherit the kingdom of God? Do not be deceived, neither fornicators, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor effeminate, nor homosexuals, nor thieves, nor the covetous, nor drunkards, nor revilers, nor swindlers will inherit the kingdom of God.