August 22, 2016 Show with Rosaria Butterfield on “Openness Unhindered: Further Thoughts of an Unlikely Convert on Sexual Identity & Union with Christ”

Live from the historic parsonage of 19th century gospel minister George Norcross in downtown Carlisle, Pennsylvania, it's Iron Sharpens Iron, a radio platform on which pastors, Christian scholars and theologians address the burning issues facing the church and the world today.

Proverbs 27 verse 17 tells us, iron sharpens iron so one man sharpens another. Matthew Henry said that in this passage, quote, we are cautioned to take heed whom we converse with and directed to have in view in conversation to make one another wiser and better.

It is our hope that this goal will be accomplished over the next hour and we hope to hear from you, the listener, with your own questions. Now here's our host Chris. Good afternoon. Cumberland County, Pennsylvania and.

The rest of humanity living on the planet earth who are listening via live streaming. This is Chris Arnson, your host of Iron Sharpens Iron, wishing you all a happy Monday. On this 22nd day of August 2016, I am so delighted to have back for the second time on this program Rosaria Champagne Butterfield, the wife of Pastor Kent Butterfield of First Reformed Presbyterian Church in Durham, North Carolina and she is an ex-lesbian and leftist professor from Syracuse University.

She's the author of the book, The Secret Thoughts of an Unlikely Convert, which we covered on our program and today we are going to be addressing her brand new book, Openness Unhindered, Further Thoughts of an Unlikely Convert on Sexual Identity and Union with Christ and it's my honor and privilege to welcome you back to Iron Sharpens Iron, Rosaria Champagne Butterfield.

Thank you so much, it's my honor and privilege to be with you today. And let me right off the bat announce our email address for any of our listeners who would like to join us on the air with a question of your own.

Our email address is ChrisArnson at gmail .com, that's C-H-R-I-S-A-R-N-Z-E-N at gmail .com. Please give us your first name, your city and state and your country of residence if you live outside of the USA.

And during a program like this, it is quite obvious that there are many people who may prefer to remain anonymous. Perhaps you yourself are struggling with the sin of homosexuality, perhaps you have a loved one who is and you just would be much more comfortable not identifying yourself publicly when you ask the question.

We will obviously respect your wishes and you may remain anonymous if that makes you feel more comfortable. So feel free to email us your questions at ChrisArnson at gmail .com, ChrisArnson at gmail .com.

And Rosaria, the last time you were on the program, we not only spoke about the secret thoughts of an unlikely convert, but we also got very heavily involved in your personal testimony. And even though we addressed that before, I would like to review some of that in capsulized form because obviously when we're speaking about your new book, we want our listeners to have some kind of a background.

So we could start where you would like to start off with. We could start off with your upbringing perhaps and when you first started to get involved in the activity known as homosexuality. And one thing that we cannot let slip by us though is how you met your husband because the last time you were on, we didn't even discuss that.

And that's a really remarkable part of the whole story. Oh, wait till you hear that,.

Wait till you hear that. You'll be surprised. I won't leave the suspense out. I'll tell you that. I'll answer that question. Well, you know, I would just want to say that I was raised in a very progressive home.

I was raised in a home that valued feminism, that valued planned parenthood, that really, as I was growing up, the name Planned Parenthood was associated with very good things, with progress and with taking care of women and with what distinguishes First World health from Third World health and things like that.

So my journey into lesbianism was not only a preference, just a kind of internal preference to be in the company of women and to find women a more safe and attractive presence, but also my feminist ideology and my gay and lesbian progressive political issue.

And I say that, I mean, I say that not because politics can make you gay, but because worldview really matters a lot and we see that especially today. So there's one way to talk about homosexuality and it's to talk about it in a kind of therapeutic way.

This is how I feel, this is why I feel this way, and this is why I need to convince you that it's okay. That's one conversation, but that's actually not the conversation that people have with me, because so many questions in life and even so many personal decisions in life come down to worldview.

So at a certain point in my life, specifically in my late 20s, I discovered that although I had been dating men, although I had had boyfriends and I even found some men attractive, that the whole time I had been dating men, I had been falling in love with women.

So at the age of 28, I came out as a lesbian. My lesbian lover at the time moved into my apartment and really life just came together for me and made sense. And I really didn't understand why, especially conservative Christians, would not leave consenting adults alone.

You know, for the following 10 years then, I was in serially monogamous lesbian relationships. And again, I was completely baffled by why this kind of nosy intrusion of religion that I don't claim suddenly had to be mine.

And so after my tenure book was written, I was a professor of English and Women's Studies, and after I finished the book that I needed to tenure, I started working on a book on the religious right, basically to figure out why folks like you were invading my time.

I mean, that's just the truth. I wanted to get inside your head and think, well, you know, why would a reasonably intelligent person do this? You think I'm kidding. I'm not kidding. In the process, amazingly, I met a friend and a neighbor who was a Bible-believing Christian and would go on to be my pastor, my mentor, and many, many years later, the man who would walk me down the aisle when I married my husband, Ken Butterfield.

And that's Ken Smith, who was, at that point, the pastor of the Syracuse Reformed Presbyterian Church. And over the course of two years, I met with Ken and Floyd, Floyd is his wife, his lovely wife, and they discipled me.

And you know, they discipled me, and I was fine with that, because I really was trying to read the Bible to understand why this book got so many good people off track and why this man, Jesus, persuaded so many people to follow him.

I mean, it was just an unthinkable, preposterous idea to me. But in the process, a number of things happened. I read the Bible for up to five hours a day, which might sound excessive, but I'm an English professor, and that's just what we do.

That gives the Holy Spirit a lot of time in the life of a person like me. It really gives the challenge to me, it convicted me, and some of my well-worn prejudices about it just didn't hold up. Now, my PhD is in English.

I'm what's called a whole book scholar. My job is to read a book and size it up. And God used those skills that I learned in secular universities powerfully for my own conversion. It didn't come easily.

It's a long story. I wrote about it in the book, The Secret Thoughts of an Unlikely Convert. It's a painful story, painful for me to think about, and I'm told painful for my readers to think about, too.

But at a certain point in this journey, I realized that even if my feelings never changed, even if my sexual desires for women never changed, that God was calling me to obedience, and that Jesus is who he says he is, and that actually, over time, my feelings did change.

Amazing and remarkable, and the fact that I am married to Terrence and the mother of my children, our children, is just daily proof that God redeems people like me. But I would say the real crux of my conversion was to discover that it was actually Jesus I had been persecuting the whole time, even as I considered myself to be on the right side of history, the compassionate side, the diverse side, the progressive side, and to all of a sudden discover that it was not just this historical figure named Jesus I'd been persecuting, but my Jesus, my prophet, my priest, my king, my savior, my husband, my friend changed everything.

Even though, yes, and even though really nothing in terms of my feelings changed immediately, when God saved me, turned my heart of stone into a heart of flesh, what did change was that I loved the Bible, and I couldn't get enough of it.

I don't know how any of this would have happened, quite frankly, if I hadn't had a neighbor and friend, Ken and Floyd Smith, who just hung in there with me, and all the messiness. I mean, this is not easy, this is not pretty, and I'm pretty sure I wore out pretty much everybody in my church.

But I praise God for them, for their perseverance and their faithfulness.

And the relationship began with this pastor through his writing a letter to you, was it in response to an article you wrote or something? Yes, yes, I had written a critique in a local.

Newspaper about the promise keepers having come to town, and one of the elders in the church apparently had set the op-ed piece on Ken's desk and said, Ken, we need to shut this woman up, she's trouble.

She co-authored the domestic partnership policy at Syracuse, she's an out lesbian feminist, she is a hater of the gospel, we've got to shut her up, and apparently Ken looked up and said, well, how about if Floyd and I invite her over for dinner?

And you know, especially now as a pastor's wife, you can just imagine the look on that young elder's face. I mean, you can just picture it, right? She's thinking, time to retire, right? And meanwhile, it was indeed a faithful act of Christian hospitality pursued over years and years that the Lord ultimately used in my conversion as the most powerful weapon of tearing down the.

Strongholds of my unbelief. Yes, we can all learn from that, we who are Christians, when we sometimes let our disgust, our self-righteousness, our anger, our frustration, our revulsion, whatever it is that we have towards a particular sinful activity of somebody else, we have to learn from the humility and compassion of this pastor who did not give up hope, who looked beyond anything that he was opposed in your life, and saw in that actually the greater need for you to get to know Jesus and to be saved.

And I found it interesting, I remember from our first discussion, that you initially were throwing out his letters, but then you went back to retrieve them. And I've heard other stories where people's lives were transformed by retrieving either the discarded book or letter or whatever it was that they initially got them angry that they threw away, or just threw.

And then they went, crawled on their hands and knees under dusty beds, grabbed the book or whatever it was that they threw. And so, now we have to hear how this introduction happened with your husband, which later became your husband, Kent Butterfield.

Right, right. Well, you see,.

This is why it's not nearly as exciting as you may be expecting. I mean, you know, I am just part of a very small denomination, and I think Ken Smith had me on every prayer list known, you know, to the Western world.

So I was not unknown to anyone in our denomination. And I was on a research leave after my conversion, studying whether Christians should profess at a Christian college or not. I was questioning, in some ways, my calling now as a professor.

And so I was at Geneva College, and I was also working at the Center for Urban Biblical Ministry, and that organization, which was an urban ministry program, met at the seminary, borrowed a room from the seminary where Kent was a student, the Reformed Presbyterian Theological Seminary in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

And so, I don't know if you know the ethics, the culture of a research library on a Friday night, but there are very serious rules about sitting at tables that you're not invited to. And I got to work that night, and I thought, well, why is that man sitting at my table?

That's my table. You know, that's been my table for the last, you know, six weeks. So Kent was an interloper at my table. Now, he will tell the story slightly differently. He thinks that was his table, but either way, Kent and I, we had met before we knew each other's names, but we, you know, we certainly developed our relationship starting with the great controversy of whose table that was at the library at RPTS.

Yeah, I happen to know some folks who graduated from that seminary. In fact, maybe your husband remembers my friend, Pastor William Malick. I don't know if he knows Bill, but perhaps we could find out later.

Bill is actually a Baptist,.

But he did go to that seminary. Will you allow that? Yes. Yeah, that's permitted.

Yeah, he's a Reformed Baptist. Well, you brought up a couple of things that I wanted us to touch on because they are pretty important and pretty profound, in my opinion. First of all, you said that you kept falling in love with women, and I think that it might be good for you as a Christian to define exactly what that really means as opposed to what many people think that means, because obviously, especially with the young, and not exclusively for the young, but especially perhaps for the young, they just think that they are really in love with somebody just because their hormones go wild.

They can't stop thinking about a particular person, and very often that leads a person down the wrong path. It has even led Christians down the wrong path into either abandoning the Christian faith or into cults sometimes when they meet the wrong person.

If you could define, what is it that you think?

Absolutely. Absolutely. Well, let me back us up even a little bit further and start from a Christian perspective. So from a Christian perspective, we know that it takes grace to love what God loves, and that's true whether you have a predisposition towards homosexuality or a predisposition towards alcoholism or a predisposition towards anger.

All of it has to go because it takes grace to love what God loves. None of us actually love what God loves by our own, but if you are not a believer and you've never read the Bible and you are absorbed into the Rousseauian philosophy of Rousseau, and that basically is that people are born free to do what they want, and if they only could do that, then everything would be great, but the chains are out there in the oppression of the world.

Well, the Bible flips that around and says, actually, man is born in chains and freedom comes through Jesus Christ. Now, I want to start here because I don't think this is just an issue about homosexuality, and that's where my new book, you know, that's where we're going in the new book.

This is not about a sectarian problem. This is about a worldview problem and a faith issue, and that problem is that without the love of Christ, you can't love what God loves, and those are very serious words and it's a very serious problem, and so my inclination was to develop very intense one-on-one relationships with women that became extremely codependent and that ultimately became sexual, and by no means would God call that love, but in the eyes of the world and in the eyes of the academy,.

That's what we called it. One of the other things that you brought up that was a very interesting way of phrasing things that reminded me immediately of Soul of Tarsus. You said that you were persecuting Jesus Christ, and it's interesting that when Soul of Tarsus, as you know, was stopped dead in his tracks on the road to Damascus, Christ did not say to him, Soul, why are you persecuting my people, although that's what he was doing.

He was rounding up men and women for execution, but Jesus Christ said to him, why do you persecute me? If you could.

Explain that a little bit further. Sure, absolutely. Well, I had read the Bible seven times before I was converted, and I had been studying it, and I had been trying my best to tear it apart, and during this time, I was doing my best to teach thousands of college students to despise the Word of God as well.

And then, when I became a Christian, when the Lord converted me, I realized that the Word of God and the person of God are inseparable, and that my attacks against the authority of the Bible were absolutely attacks against the Lord Jesus Christ himself.

And so, you know, when we look at the world that we see out here today, you need to realize that you have somebody on the line who is part of that machine. This is the world I helped create. The blood is on my hands, and I often think about what it was like to be Paul, because, you know, this is a pretty small little community, and I am sure that there were times when Paul was actually sitting across the table with a person whose mother he murdered, or father he murdered.

You know what I'm saying? I mean, he'd look in those eyes, and he'd see the same eyes, but somehow Paul was so powerfully delivered, not only from his sin, but even from the history of his sin, that he could have no condemnation.

And I think that there's a relationship between seeing how deep and how gruesome and how absolutely inexcusable our sin is that allows us to see our victory in Christ alone, and then to say we don't measure up, because Christ measures up for us, and that's the point.

I think there's a relationship between those two, and so I'm very uncomfortable when people talk about sin as if it's a therapeutic problem, as if it's a common mistake, taking a wrong exit on a highway.

Sin is treason against a holy God. It is a hateful act. It's a hate crime, is what it is, and it's specifically a hate crime against the person of the Lord Jesus Christ, who shed his blood for me. It's that personal, and until we get to that personal place, I don't think we can fully comprehend how to step into the world around us and share the gospel with people who hate us now, with a hatred that comes.

With the entitlement of the federal government. Yeah, wow, that's pretty powerful words there. We do have a listener who chooses to remain anonymous. In fact, she doesn't even want me to announce her city and state where she is writing from, so I'm going to respect that, obviously.

And this anonymous listener says, on Thursday, my grown daughter said she wanted to talk to me because I had been through something she was trying to help someone with. My daughter is a beautiful girl, was married and divorced, and to make a long story short, she began dating a girl last month.

I love my daughter with all my heart, and she knows how I feel about what she is doing, that I don't condone it. I saw something a long time ago that she doesn't know I saw. In it, she said she was bisexual.

I haven't told anybody and feel guilty telling you, but since you're interviewing Rosaria, I am hoping my daughter will be working and not listening so she may identify me. She lives in another state than me and will be home on leave at Christmas.

I have no idea how to handle this. She was raised going to church her whole life, and when I became a believer in the doctrines of grace, she read a lot of deep books and agreed with them. When her father left me and her sister, she went with him and was a few weeks from turning 16.

She is now 23. He was lost, and she hasn't had any spiritual exposure since that time. I am hoping this is a phase for her. I want to guard my identity because I would not hurt her for the world. I'm just trying to make sense of it all, and if you could respond as best that you could to this.

That's so painful. There's so much there,.

And I think one of the first things we need to remember is that the gospel is always ahead of us, and so it's always tempting to look back and say, you know, if only this hadn't happened or that hadn't happened or this did happen, things would be better, but that's not the Lord's economy.

It's a new day, and there are new problems, but there are new opportunities, and the Lord is always ahead of us. What I would say is this, that we... Homosexuality can show up in people's lives for different reasons.

I have some dear friends who found themselves in a same-sex attraction because they had been molested as children, and that had just been an experience that just, it just sort of stopped everything for them, understandably so, and then there are others, others of us who did, by God's grace, did not have that story, but for some of us, our homosexual desires, and I think when I heard that the daughter identified as bisexual, this may be part of it at 16, it just was Adam's thumbprint on our lives.

You know, Romans 1 has a lot to say about this. One of the things that Romans 1 does is it helps us define homosexuality. Homosexuality is an ethical outworking of original sin, and so, for me at least, I had to spend a good bit of time, a couple of years really, just wrestling with the question, am I a lesbian and are my sexual desires for women a reflection of who I am?

That's what I simply said. That's what I believe. That's what I said. That's what the world says, but the Bible has a different understanding of personhood, and so the Bible actually did not agree with me on this point.

The Bible put it this way, that my sexual desires for women were not a reflection of who I really am through the fall of Adam, the consequence of that fall, and so what's very, very hard today, I think, for almost everybody, but especially people who are struggling with any kind of same-sex attraction, is that we live in a world that is just vociferous in its anti-biblical understanding of personhood.

You know, personhood is very simple in the Bible. In the Bible, it's Genesis 1, 26 -27, and we are image-bearers of a holy God, we are born male or female, and we have a soul that will last forever and a body that will be glorified and redeemed in the New Jerusalem, but for the world we live in, homosexuality is the new true mark of personhood, and you see that in Facebook's 50 gender options and these movements in all the public schools at this point.

You hear this even when people say things like, I am gay, or when you have to go through a gender training workshop to to figure out which personal pronoun you're going to use. None of that is biblical.

All of that is cultural, and all of that is powerful, and so I think that the most important thing that this dear mother can do is continue to love her daughter and to continue to be very close to her daughter, to stay very close into these conversations, because the ultimate question for this daughter is not, um, the ultimate question for this daughter is, are my sexual desires for women who I really am?

This is who I really am. I need to act on this. This is all good. This is what the world says, or is the Bible true? And this is a distortion of who I really am in the fall, and Jesus is ahead of me, and in union with Christ, even if I don't get what I want, which is true for every Christian, by the way, I get something better.

I get what I need. Now, in order to have such a personal conversation with someone, this is not a brief conversation. This is not an off-the-hip conversation. This is not an adversarial conversation.

This is a long conversation, and this is the perfect conversation for a mother and a daughter to have, because ultimately, what this mother is going to be doing is shaking the gates of heaven for her daughter.

So I would just encourage her to stay close, to not worry. I mean, at this point, I don't think she needs to worry that her daughter will think that she's condoning her if she's kind to her. You know, most human beings really do make a distinction between acceptance and approval, and if we are honest, none of us approve of each other in totality about everything anyway.

And somehow we're able to manage to create, you know, communities and churches and families and relationships. So I don't think that you need to worry on that point.

Well, I just want to let this anonymous listener know that if you email me your full name and mailing address, you're going to get a free copy of Openness Unhindered, Further Thoughts of an Unlikely Convert on Sexual Identity and Union with Christ, Complements of Crown and Covenant Publishing, and you're also going to get the audiobook of The Secret Thoughts of an Unlikely Convert, thanks to Christianaudio .com.

That we could just email to you, but as far as the book is concerned, the paper book, please give us your full mailing address, and obviously we will honor your request. We're not going to reveal who you are on the air.

We thank you so much, and I think that you obviously could really use these resources, so we hope that you send us your mailing address. And we're going to be going to a break right now, and if you would like to join that listener with a question of your own for Rosaria Champagne Butterfield, our email address is chrisarnson at gmail .com, chrisarnson at gmail .com.

Please give us your first name, city, and state and country of residence, if you live outside the USA, if you're comfortable doing that. And obviously, just as we did with our first questioner, you may remain anonymous if it makes you feel more comfortable.

Don't go away. We're going to be right back with Dr. Rosaria Champagne Butterfield, right after these messages. Hi, I'm Chris Arnsen, host of Iron Sharpens Iron Radio, here to tell you about an exciting offer from World Magazine, my trusted source for news from a Christian perspective.

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See the Long Island Galleries display ad at ironsharpensironradio .com. Welcome back. This is Chris Arnzen, if you just tuned us in for the full two hours today. Our guest is Rosaria Champagne Butterfield.

This is her second time here in Iron Sharpens Iron, and I'm looking forward to many more visits from her and interviews. She is the wife of Pastor Kent Butterfield of First Reformed Presbyterian Church in Durham, North Carolina, and she is a former lesbian and leftist professor at Syracuse University who was redeemed and delivered and rescued and transformed by the power of the Holy Spirit and the saving blood of Jesus Christ.

She is the author of The Secret Thoughts of an Unlikely Convert, and we're discussing today her newest book, her latest book, Openness Unhindered, Further Thoughts of an Unlikely Convert on Sexual Identity and Union with Christ.

If you'd like to join us on the air, our email address is chrisarnzen at gmail .com. Chrisarnzen at gmail .com. Before I go to some of our listeners who are waiting to have their questions asked and answered, I just have a couple of announcements.

One of them involves our guest, Rosaria Champagne Butterfield. She is going to be one of the many speakers at the G3 Conference this January 19th through the 21st in Atlanta, Georgia, and I am so delighted that by God's grace and providence, I am going to be in attendance at this conference.

I'm going to have an exhibitor's booth. Thanks to Josh Bice of Praise Mill Baptist Church. He is the pastor there running this conference, and he was kind enough to allow me to have an exhibitor's booth there so I could promote Iron Sharpens Iron.

Among some of the other speakers joining Rosaria Butterfield at this conference as a speaker are Paul Washer, Stephen J. Lawson, D .A. Carson, Vody Balcom, Dr. James R. White of Alpha and Omega Ministries, Tim Challies, who's going to be on the program very soon on Iron Sharpens Iron.

In fact, he's going to be on Friday the 2nd of September, God willing. And we have Phil Johnson, who has probably been on Iron Sharpens Iron more than any other guest. He is the executive director of Grace to You Ministries, the media and publishing ministry of John MacArthur.

Conrad M. Bayway, who is probably one of the most powerful preachers on the planet Earth. Not probably, he definitely is one of the most powerful preachers on the planet Earth, and maybe the most powerful preacher on the planet Earth.

I've known Conrad since 1995 and have really been blessed by a long friendship with him and look forward to seeing him again and sharing fellowship face-to-face with him. And David Miller and Todd Friel, who was just on Iron Sharpens Iron last Monday.

John Kratz, who's been on this program as well before and many others. If you want more details on how to attend the G3 Conference, go to g3conference .com. That's g3conference .com and we hope to see you there.

If you come, please look me up at the Iron Sharpens Iron exhibitors booth and say hello. I'll be right next to the booth for the Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals. We are going to be working together as a team at that conference, helping to publicize one another's organization.

Hope to see you there in January. Before I even go to some of the listeners who are waiting, Rosaria, I do want you to explain a couple of things about the new book. Number one, if you could explain specifically, Openness Unhindered, what you mean by that title, and how this book specifically is different from The Secret Thoughts of an Unlikely Convict.

Yeah.

Well, in the NASB, which is my preferred Bible translation.

Well, thank you. They sponsor my program.

Yeah, I know. This is like a family reunion, isn't it? The last two words in the Book of Acts are openness unhindered. Paul was able, after being shipwrecked and beaten and tortured and persecuted, he was able to practice, of all things, hospitality in his new domain with all openness unhindered.

And that was not because all of a sudden things got to be really rosy for Paul.

No.

Because he had, and he was able to express to all of us what union with Christ means, and how union with Christ allows you, new believer, to not just withstand difficult circumstances, but actually thrive in the midst of them, because Christ is for you.

And because any persecution that you experience gives glory to God. And, you know, we are facing persecution right now. I mean, it hasn't happened yet, but it's going to. And we need to have, I believe, a greater grasp of how to function as Christians in an open and unhindered way, in spite of the hostility around us, and to continue to practice hospitality no longer as the host of this world, but as its unwelcome guest.

And so the book itself looks at specifically what is a worldview competition between personhood. Are we people defined by sexual identity? And that's what the world wants to tell you. That's even what some parts of the evangelical church want to tell you.

That's what anyone who identifies as a gay Christian wants to tell you. Or are we image-bearers of a holy God called to reflect that image in knowledge, righteousness, and holiness? And so the book goes through what conversion really means.

What identity in Christ really means. What repentance really means. How and when the category of sexual orientation was invented. It's about 100 years old. You'd think it's as old as Methuselah, but it's not.

Why self-representation is important. Why it's important that we understand that binarisms matter. Male, female. Why that matters. Also, how to engage in this world in an honest and truthful way without...

Well, I mean, sometimes you do have to lose friendships. That's just the case. How can we engage with people in genuine Christian love and genuine Christian integrity without losing our bearings? And so the book...

Actually, one of the chapters in the book is written by a person who disagrees entirely with me, and we dialogue back and forth. We disagree. How do we deal with people who disagree? It used to be that Christians could just kind of batten down the hatches, but ultimately, we are called to be good neighbors, and we are now still called to be good neighbors, even as the federal government continues to put millstones around the necks of image bearers.