The Same Sex Marriage Debate vs Codrington

Is how it is important for us to continue in conversation. And so it really is a privilege for me to welcome you here and it is a privilege with humility that we welcome this debate. So to Michael and to Rudolf and to those that bring us the debate, may God's peace be with us.

Thanks so much, Jackie. Thank you to Ben. I can't see you with the blinding light. Thank you also to Gary and for having us at Grace Point. I'm Michael and I'm from Truth Walk, which is a ministry that's dedicated to encouraging biblical scholarship and discipleship in South Africa.

The Purpose of the Debate and the Call to Biblical Conversation

So this is not the normal type of event that we get involved in. Normally what we do is we try and bring out leading biblical scholars to teach expositionally, work with local seminaries and churches and try to train people up in the knowledge and fear of the Lord.

It's a great privilege though to be involved from time to time in events like this, which are highly topical. And I wanna thank both speakers for being willing to do this publicly. Thank you to all of you for coming out here.

Truth Walk, our name comes from something that the Apostle John wrote where he said, I have no greater joy than to see that my children are walking in the truth. And the idea is that as believers in Jesus as Lord, we need to be learning truth and we need to be living it out.

So learn the truth, walk it out. And both of the speakers tonight claim to believe in the Bible, claim to believe that it is God's inspired word, but they come down on very different sides of this particular issue.

And I think the challenge to all of us in attendance today is to really look at what the Bible says, to listen carefully to the arguments that they present, and then to seek to conform our thoughts to what God says in his holy word.

In Acts chapter 17, when the Apostle Paul spoke to various thinkers in Athens, he said, in light of the resurrection of Jesus from the dead, God commands all men everywhere to repent. And in Acts 26, when Paul is speaking before Herod Agrippa and explaining what his message was, both to Jews and to Gentiles, he said that his message was fairly simple.

He proclaimed that people need to repent, turn to God, and prove their repentance by their deeds. And so it's important for all of us to know who God is, what he requires from us, what repentance means, how to come to him, and then once we profess Christ, how he expects us to live.

And so I wanna ask you to just join with me in praying that the debate would be done in a respectful manner, but ultimately that God's truth would be magnified and that we would be people who honor God's truth.

So I'm gonna turn to the Lord in prayer, and then I'll introduce our moderator for this evening. Our God and Father, we confess that you are holy and you dwell in unapproachable light. And Lord, what an immeasurable gift it is to know true salvation in Christ, to come to him in repentant faith, to be transformed, to be adopted into your family on the basis of his shed blood and his resurrection.

Lord, we know that this is a really contentious matter, but I pray that your truth would be made clear, that the audience would be receptive, and that the speakers would present good forms of their relevant arguments.

But ultimately, Lord, both speakers can't be right on this particular issue, and we pray that your truth would shine forth. Lord, as Jackie was mentioning, with humility may we come to your word, and may we be doers of your word, may our thoughts be transformed as we gaze at you, as we gaze into the face of Christ, and as we look into your word, and we trust that you will, by your spirit, reveal your truth to us.

In Jesus' name we pray, amen. Rudolf Bossoff is the gentleman keeping the warring parties apart from one another tonight. A great deal of the credit for tonight is due to him. He is the director of Adlusum, which is an apologetics ministry that helps to facilitate dialogue between different communities in South Africa.

He's also part of UNPWRT, which is a research apologetic ministry that entertains numerous international speakers. He lectures at Ramer Bible College and has moderated numerous public debates. He holds degrees in psychology at the University of South Africa, and has also completed his bachelor's in theology from SATS.

He's currently finishing up his bachelor's of theology honors at the same institution. Rudolf has been involved in full-time ministry since 2001. He's currently pastor of a multi-ethnic community in Soweto, happily married to Candice for the past eight years, and he has two rottweilers named Cody and Dub.

One of the things you'll notice is Rudolf's telephone number is going to flash up on screen. There will be a 10-minute break, during which time you can pose questions either via SMS to Rudolf's phone number, or you can write notes.

I have about four notepads up in the front, so you're welcome to write notes. We'll collate them, and then the questions will be posed to the various speakers. If any of you have insomnia at any stage, I'm sure Rudolf would also love to have midnight calls and answer difficult questions in apologetics any time of day or night.

And if any of you would like to come to the next event that Truthwalk is doing, it is a teaching conference with Dr. Robert Yarbrough, who will be teaching through John 13 to 17 at Medran Chapel. That event runs from the 22nd to the 24th of October.

You should have a brochure in front of you, and if you want to join our mailing list, then just send an email to the address that I've mentioned, or if you'd like to know anything further about Truthwalk.

Thank you, and over to Rudolf. Sorry, one last thing. I have two gifts, the same gift to each speaker. If you get lost during the debate, I didn't want one of you to have more info than the other. Thanks for that.

Moderator Introduction and Debate Format

Let me just start off by saying what an incredible opportunity this is at this day and stage of our country to have this dialogue. I don't know about you, but I think this is gonna be a wonderful exchange, and for Dr. Graham and Dr. James, I think in South Africa, the hardest thing to do is to find two people to come together and not to have a fight.

If you come to have a fight, Joshua, where are you? Can you just please stand? Joshua's quite big and he's strong, and he will also help me moderate the debate, so if you just feel inclined towards fighting tonight, we will organize it for you under us.

Let me just say to you, please, in all seriousness, that we are a Christian community coming together. Majority of us, I presume, and tonight, the discussion is not if Jesus is divine. We all can agree that Jesus is divine.

I mean, in John 15, verse one, he says, I am divine. So the question tonight, specifically, that we wanted to raise, and basically, the two gentlemen on my left asked for me to just inform you, is we wanna actually look at the central question tonight.

Does God affirm homosexuality? I wanted to sink in because I think that we as a community need to speak about this, and we need to speak about this honestly and openly, and therefore, we are looking forward to it tonight.

Just a few things that you need to keep in mind. There's a few house rules. The facilities are at the back if you need to go to the bathroom, et cetera, et cetera. Please, no eating, drinking in the auditorium except water, and again, the house rules, no lacquer while the authors and while the people are speaking on stage.

No dancing, no screaming, no jesting, no booing, no takbirs, I don't know if there's any Muslims here. Absolutely, please, not even applause. We will ask you when to applaud, and please just try to speak and just try to help us engage these gentlemen on the stage respectfully.

Let me just also say that if we look at tonight, and if we look at, specifically, the community that we are addressing and the topics that we are addressing, I need to say that we are gonna use the shorthand homosexual to refer to the entire LGBT community, and therefore, we need to understand that when these gentlemen speak, they're speaking with a consideration of respect and openness and honesty to their own convictions.

Therefore, I ask you to please just absolutely respect them and to give them ample time so they can speak from their perspectives. Graham, if I can just quickly give you a short biography of Graham, he's the founder of International Partner of Strategic Insights from Tomorrow Today Global.

He travels internationally, helping organizations of all types and sizes to understand the disruptive forces shaping the world right now. Graham is also a fully trained and qualified pastor, having completed theological studies to master's level, including biblical languages.

He was ordained in the Baptist Union South Africa, but left the denominations 10 years ago on matters of conscience, including the one that he's gonna be discussing tonight. He blogs about Christian faith issues at www .futurechurchnow .com, and Graham has been married to his wife, Jane, for 24 years, and they have three daughters, and Jane is a pastor in the Methodist Church of South Africa.

Now you can applaud. Okay. Welcome, Graham. Let me just say tonight as well, the partner that he will be engaging with is James White, who is the director of Alpha and Omega Ministries, a Christian apologetic organization based in Phoenix, Arizona.

He is a professor, having taught Greek, systematic theology, and various topics and fields of apologetics. He has authored or contributed to more than 24 books, including The King James Only Controversy, The Forgotten Trinity, The Potter's Freedom, and The God Who Justifies.

He's an accomplished debater, having engaged in more than 147, Dr. White, debates. When we end Durban on Tuesday, it will be 150, so that'll be incredible. Okay. So he has basically debated with a few people, critics like Barty Ehrtman, John Dominic Crossing, Marcus Borg, John Selby Spong, and in recent years, he has debated in such locations as Sydney, Australia, as well as in mosques in Toronto, London, and South Africa.

He's currently an elder of Phoenix Reformed Baptist Church, and he's been married to Kelly for more than 32 years, 33 years, this is outdated a bit, and has two children and one grandchild, Clementine, and you can welcome him with a warm welcome as well.

I'm just quickly gonna give you a short introduction of how this debate will work time-wise. We will obviously start the conversation with James going first for 25 minutes, and then after that, Graham will speak for 25 minutes.

Then what we will do is, again, in the same order, we will have obviously James or Graham speaking for 10 minutes, James for 10, and then, oh, Graham, sorry, for 10 minutes, James for 10 minutes. Then we're gonna have a 10-minute break, and during the break, we're gonna flash the number.

You can SMS your questions during sort of the conversation, or even in the 10-minute break, you can SMS it to that number, and I will make sure I'll jot it down because just after the break, we can have questions from the audience for 20 minutes.

Whatever questions you've written down or whatever questions you are gonna SMS, I'm gonna jot them down, and I'm gonna ask the individuals to answer them in their respective form. I can just ask you in your messages or even wherever you sort of write down your specific question to write down who it's specifically addressed to.

Please don't give me a doctoral thesis. Please just give me a very short question, and make sure that whatever you've written on the end, that there's a question mark. So please just keep that in mind, and then we will obviously have them ask each other questions and they'll give answers for about 10 minutes each.

We're gonna ask Graham to ask James questions first for 10 minutes, and then Dr. White to ask Dr. Graham questions for 10 minutes, and then we're gonna have our closing statements for approximately five minutes each, and that is it.

So have a lovely evening and enjoy this with us, and I give over to you, Dr. White, for your podium.

James White Opening Statement: Scripture, Creation, and the Sinfulness of Homosexuality

Well, it is an honor to be with you this evening. We have very little time and much to speak about. There has been much discussion of this subject over the past number of years. You might say, why even bother trying to get together and talk about it again?

Well, very rarely is the discussion with two sides that have a very strong belief. Very often, it is a monologue rather than a dialogue. Well, we have a dialogue this evening, and I hope you will listen and listen very carefully to what we have to say.

I believe that this subject fundamentally asks the question, has God spoken with clarity? Has God spoken with clarity? We believe, I hope we have, as a shared belief this evening as Christians, something such as the deity of Christ.

Have you ever thought about what you would need as far as revelation, clarity of revelation, to believe in the deity of Christ? It's an amazing thing to believe that God would enter into His own creation.

I've stood in mosques and defended that belief, and it takes a tremendous amount of faith in divine revelation to believe that that revelation testifies that the second person, the Trinity, entered into human flesh and lived amongst us 2 ,000 years ago.

That's an amazing thing. That's a scandal to many in the modern world. And so we have to believe that God has spoken with clarity on that. And we have to believe as Christians that God has spoken with clarity on the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, or we of all people have no hope whatsoever.

And so if God can speak with clarity on that, we all recognize there are other issues where God has not spoken with as much clarity. I mean, we have differences of opinion amongst believing people as to, for example, the exact timing of events surrounding the return of Jesus Christ.

We believe that Christ is going to return, but exactly the methodology, if we were to start having a debate amongst you all, we'd probably find out there are more opinions on that subject in the crowd than there are people in the crowd.

And so we recognize there are some things that are absolutely central, and then there are some things where men and women of goodwill within the body of Christ can disagree. Where does this subject come in that spectrum?

I am convinced that this is a gospel issue. I am convinced that if we cannot define what sin is, then we have a very hard time explaining the necessity of a savior. And when we come to this subject, I am convinced that the Bible nowhere at any time says anything positive about the subject of homosexuality.

And there are many homosexual scholars who would agree with me on that subject, by the way. And the reason it does not do so is because of the clarity of the positive case it makes for God's intention in creation and the creation of man and woman, the relationship that is to be theirs, their role in the continuation of the human species, and the fact that the Bible uses marriage and the relationship of man and woman as an example, as a paradigm of Christ's own relationship to his body, the church.

I do not believe that there is any question that the time of the writing of the New Testament, there was absolute 100 unanimity amongst all Jewish writers of the Second Temple period, Tanniatic Judaism, as to the interpretation of the Old Testament law on this matter.

There was no question, there was no debate about what Leviticus 18, Leviticus 20 actually mean, none whatsoever. And there is absolutely no indication that Jesus or any of his disciples rejected that 100 unanimous understanding that existed in Judaism in their day.

And as a result, when we come to the New Testament, when we read the writings of the apostles, we see a consistency. And you see, folks, in less than a week, I'm gonna be standing doing another debate, but I will not be wearing shoes because I will be standing in front of the Qibla of the second largest mosque in the Southern Hemisphere where I debated last year and defended the deity of Christ.

And they've invited us back for two nights this year. And I will be talking about war and peace and Christianity and Islam. And I will be talking about the synoptic gospels and parallelisms in the Quran in two night debates.

I would not do that if I did not believe that there is a Christian truth that is consistently testified by the Theanostos God-breathed scriptures. You don't find liberals standing in mosques defending the deity of Christ in debate with Muslims because they don't have a foundation.

They have nothing to stand on. They do not have a sufficiently high view of the consistency of scripture to be able to engage in that dialogue. And it is that conviction that allows me to defend the deity of Christ, the crucifixion of Christ, the resurrection of Christ, the doctrine of the Trinity, justification by faith that brings me here this evening because it is that consistency that forces me to say that there is only one consistent testimony given to us in scripture on the subject of God's view of homosexuality.

Now, people will say, well, there's only a few passages. Some would say as few as six. I think there's more than that, but let's say there are six fundamental passages that deal with that issue. If you think that that is why the Christian church down through history has held only one view until this last few decades, really, no matter what John Boswell had to say, you've missed the point because you see the reason we only need a small number of texts that specifically say this is not right according to God's creative decree is because of the positive testimony of scripture in regards to what God's purpose is in human sexuality.

Now, Jesus addressed that very subject in Matthew chapter 19. He did so in the context of the Jews trying to drag him into a debate. There was a debate raging between the school of Hillel and Shammai over the nature of divorce and hence over the nature of marriage.

And one side said, well, you can get a divorce for any reason in the world. If your wife burns the toast, if she's displeasing in your sight, for any reason, you can divorce her. The other school said, no, no, there has to be pornia.

There has to be some specific sin involved that would dissolve that marriage bond. And they were having debates. And so as often happened in the gospels, they decided to get Jesus involved with this particular debate.

And so they asked him about it. And Jesus' response was not to side with one side or the other. Jesus' response was to take us back to God's creative intention. He takes us right back to Genesis one and two.

And he says, have you not read? Have you not read? Do you not know from the beginning, he who created them made them male and female. May I comment that to question that is to question God's goodness in creation, that it is in fact an act of rebellion and it will not bring about life.

From God's perspective, maleness and femaleness are good things. And we live in a day, we live in a day where we've decided that we are absolutely autonomous creatures. We have no creator. We have no maker.

Therefore there is no law and I can determine what I am. God has no say in these things. As Christians, we can not go there. Not and affirm the Lordship of Jesus Christ. Because he said from the beginning, God made them male and female.

That was God's doing. And then he says, a man shall leave his father and his mother, there's your family, a father and a mother. Are we truly to the point as Christians, we no longer know what father and mother means.

Can anyone truly argue that the scriptures are insufficient to reveal to us and that God's very creation of us as human beings is insufficient to reveal to us what a father and a mother are? He shall leave his father and his mother and he shall be joined to his wife and the two shall become one flesh.

He goes back to the very purpose of God in that creation. And yes, there is more to the male female bond than just sexual union, but it's never less than that. And the very fact that he draws that out from the creation narrative, where God blesses that union of Adam and Eve, tells us very clearly that the Lord Jesus Christ would have had something to say to our debate this evening.

And one of the biggest questions I have to anyone who would affirm, quote unquote, gay Christianity is simply this, why didn't Jesus say something here? Because if He's our maker, He's our creator, then He would know that between 1 .6 and 2 of the people in front of Him were by their very creation, constituently homosexual.

And here was His chance. Here was the time for Jesus to be the great liberator. And instead He affirms what people today call a stereotypical view, a sexual binary. He in fact makes the law and the law's understanding of what marriage is even stricter than any Jewish interpretation of the day understood it to be.

So much so His disciples are like, well, then who should get married? And so my question for anyone who affirms, quote unquote, gay Christianity, was Jesus God? Did He know the hearts of men? Then why was He silent?

Why was He silent? I believe very clearly that Jesus said what He said because He is the God of the Old Testament. Those are His words and those were His actions. And He made man male and female. And everything that happened in the Old Testament, every time there was polygamy, that was a step down from God's creative intention.

Jesus never said a single word that would lead us to believe that we should reject the moral law of God in regards to the subject of human sexuality and adopt a new radical paradigm. He never said a word.

Well, then it must have been left up to His disciples. Well, there are a couple references to the subject from His disciples. In Romans chapter one, the apostle begins by explaining the bad news before he gets to explaining what the good news is.

And beginning in Romans 1, 18, he explains man's rebellion against God, going far deeper than anything that was written before him, including the wisdom of Solomon, contradicting the wisdom of Solomon in a number of places, and clearly giving us Paul's own understanding, paralleled in Ephesians and Galatians and elsewhere, to try to say that Paul is arguing against himself.

He's saying the Jews up is a radical rejection of the actual text of the book of Romans. And in that description of man's rebellion against God, in that description of man suppressing the knowledge of God, one of the examples that he gives of the result of that one who bears the image of God, rejecting His God and turning away and worshiping the creation, is to demonstrate that the result of that impacts every aspect of man's being, including his most innermost being, and he uses as an example of that, homosexuality.

There really isn't any question about it. It's not pederasty. It says that men burned with lust toward one another. It's not just excessive lust. It's clearly drawn, Romans chapter one's clearly drawn from Genesis one and two, from the creation narrative.

That's what fucis, that's what nature there is referring to. It's not about long hair in first Corinthians. It's drawn from Genesis, and Paul is saying, sin affects all of man. So much so that we have the only direct reference to lesbianism in the New Testament.

And I think what Paul is saying there is, is if even the strong maternal instinct of the woman toward having children and nurturing children, if even that can be impacted, then sin impacts all of man.

And that's his point in Romans chapter one. That's not the only place he addressed the subject, however. In first Corinthians chapter six, Paul gives us a vice list. It's not the first place he gave it to us, but he gives us a vice list.

And he uses two terms there. And one of the terms some people theorize, Paul himself coined. Maybe he may have drawn it from a Jewish source before him that we're not familiar with, a rabbi or something.

He certainly was deeply involved in that area. But the reality is, there's no question about what the term means. Because it's drawn from the Greek septuagint at Luke, I'm sorry, at Leviticus 18 and Leviticus 20.

It just takes the two words for men and bed, activity in bed, puts them together, arsenikoites, and it's what men do with men in bed. And for the apostle Paul, who is steeped in the law, for the apostle Paul, who in the very preceding chapter in first Corinthians five, had had to deal with incest in the church in Corinth.

And he said, you should have known this. Not even the pagans do this. Where did Jesus ever talk about that? Oh, Jesus didn't, but it's in Leviticus 18 and 20. He's clearly drawing from the holiness code.

He's making application in the new covenant. And so there in first Corinthians six, he says all these people, people who are slanderers and people who steal and adulterers and so on and so forth. And then he includes, and I think the ESV got it right here, the active and passive partners in a homosexual, a male homosexual relationship.

Now, no one would have been shocked by that because as I said, who in that century disagreed? It was a given. And if we want to know what Paul intended, we don't go to sources three and 400 years later and try to read them back into Paul.

We read Paul's use in the context in which he gave it. And when we do that, his meaning is very clear, very, very clear. And so we have a united testimony. We have the positive teaching that is found about marriage from Jesus.

This is continued by the apostles themselves. So much so, it's so central to Christian thought that Paul can liken the relationship of Christ the church to a husband and his wife. The very idea of covenant in marriage very clearly requires us to understand the male-female relationship.

You cannot talk about a covenanted monogamous relationship between two men and two women, not biblically. And that's why I said at the beginning, the real question here is, is the Bible sufficient to reveal to us the answer to this question?

Does God affirm homosexuality? Does God give it as a gift? How can we as Christians on the one hand say to the world that God has spoken with enough clarity for us to know that Jesus Christ was the incarnate Son of God, that Jesus Christ rose from the dead, that it is through faith in his name that a person has forgiveness of sins, while at the same time saying, but we're really not sure what sins are, despite the fact that there was absolute unanimity from Genesis to Revelation on that particular subject.

There is absolutely nothing that one can find anywhere that in an unbiased fashion you can say, oh yes, that positively reflects upon homosexual practice. There's just nothing there. You have to say, well, they just didn't know, and that is where we are today.

What we're being told now in the church today is that, well, okay, let's say everything you say is true there and those texts are about that, but none of this has anything to do with loving, committed, monogamous, homosexual relationships.

Now, let me just point something out. That's called arguing in a circle. That's called assuming what you have yet to prove. Now, I took the time. I know that Dr. Codrington has certainly taken the time to listen to some of my debates on this subject.

I took the time to read all of his blog articles as well. More than 25 times that phrase appeared. This has nothing to do with loving, committed, monogamous, homosexual relationships. It's called arguing in a circle.

That's called assuming that there is something that you haven't proven exists yet, because for Christians, we have to be able to demonstrate that God recognizes these things as a covenant, as being monogamous, it has a meaning to it, that this is somehow something we drew from Scripture, not something we're inserting into Scripture.

And yet, in my reading of book after book after book, that's exactly what the revisionist position does, is assumes, well, it can't have anything to do with this. He's talking about something else, trying to change the ground.

Now, I looked very carefully at the sources that Dr. Codrington has used in his presentation. By the way, I'm not sure if you've looked, but it was over 120 pages, and you're not done yet. 120 pages long, and that was full-size pages.

I imagine if I formatted them, it would be a pretty full-size book. The sources, Boswell, Vines, Scanzoni, Mollenkot, Scroggs. In other words, all the revisionists, there was a reference to D .A. Carson on how to do exegesis, but you're not gonna be quoting D .A. Carson on any of these references, because he's gonna disagree with you on every single one of them.

I believe that a fair, even semi-partial, and an unbiased examination of New Testament scholarship in regards to doing believing exegesis of the entirety of the New Testament will lead us to only one conclusion, and that is that God designed man and woman, and that the only proper avenue for that relationship to exist, a loving relationship to exist, is not with a mirror image of myself, but with one who is different than myself, male and female.

That's what brings about life. That's what affirms God's right to define human behavior to His own glory. And so what do we do as Christians in a society that has decided that there can be no rules? If you decide that this is how you are, well, that's just the way it is.

What are we called to do? Well, we're called to faithfulness to the Lordship of Jesus Christ. This is not a new thing the church is being called to deal with. Well, the subjects may be new, but every generation is called and tested in regards to its faithfulness to the Lordship of Jesus Christ.

And when Caesar says to us today, you will not repeat Jesus' words, we as Christians have absolutely no choice at this point, because to be a follower of Christ is to recognize that I have died with Him.

My life is no longer mine, and He can do with me as He wills. And so I have an authority, an authority to follow. And when I ask the simple question, what did Jesus teach? There is only one biblical answer.

Any revisionist answer requires us to fundamentally abandon the sufficiency of Scripture. And in my experience, all those who become involved in the revisionist movement eventually adopt positions where they abandon a previous belief in the sufficiency of Scripture by bringing other authorities in that end up determining their exegesis and their interpretation.

I do not believe that quote-unquote gay-affirming Christianity can maintain any kind of orthodoxy for any long period at all, because to arrive at this position requires such a fundamental abandonment of the very form of exegesis that gives us the deity of Christ and the resurrection and justification by faith that you can no longer maintain them.

You abandon that on this one issue over here, and you can no longer be consistent. That's the issue. Listen to both of us this evening and ask a simple question. Who utilizes the exegetical methods by which we derive our central doctrines and beliefs about who Jesus is and our purpose in this world?

And who abandons them? And why? That is the question this evening. Thank you very much for your attention.

Thanks, everyone. Now we can turn to Dr. Codrington. You can start with your 25 minutes.

Graham Codrington Opening Statement: Same-Sex Marriage, Temple Prostitution, and Covenant

Thank you very much, and good evening. Thank you for taking the time to come out. The question before us this evening is, is same-sex marriage biblical? Which obviously requires us to answer another question, and that is, does God affirm homosexuality?

Is homosexuality acceptable to God? To answer each of these questions is going to take a lot more time than we've got available this evening, and there's a lot of nuance to each of the positions that Dr. White and I are presenting, and we ask that you understand that, that neither of us can go into the detail we would probably prefer to go into to back up some of the bold statements that we're going to have to make.

But please know that both of us believe truly that we can back them up, and hopefully some of your questions will bring out some of that a little bit later. I want to start this evening by acknowledging that I don't think this debate is going to change anybody's mind.

I think that whatever you came in here believing this evening, you're going to leave believing the same thing. It's a highly emotive topic, and it's deeply entrenched in our psyche. For many Christians, this comes down to, as Dr. White referred to it, a gospel issue.

This is at the core of our doctrines, and if we were to change our mind on this issue of homosexuality and God affirming it, we are tripping away at some of the deeply entrenched positions of our Christian faith, and in fact, as Dr. White has suggested, are going to the heart of what it means to be a Christian.

This traditional view of homosexuality is the majority view. It's been held throughout scripture by the majority of Christians and the majority of Christian thinkers. Never unanimously, but the majority.

And we must not change this view lightly. We must not change a view that deals with the eternal destiny of people's souls, that deals with the heart of what it means to be either for or against God. We cannot deal with this lightly.

We cannot change our minds on a whim. We cannot change our minds because we want to, because we feel that it's necessary. I believe that the only valid reason that we could have for changing our position is that we come to understand that our interpretation of scripture was incorrect and inadequate in the past.

So what I ask of you here this evening, especially those of you who have come with the traditional view, who have come with the view that is opposed to the one I'm about to present, for those of you here this evening and those maybe watching the debate and the recording is just consider this.

In front of you this evening is a born-again Christian, formal theological training, including original biblical languages, who loves Jesus and who believes that the Bible is God's final word of authority.

God still speaks to us today, but he will never contradict what he has already said, and he is entirely consistent and has been throughout history. In fact, if you look at the stage, you'll see two of us who believe that, I think three actually, Rudolph, yeah.

The difference is that I've studied the Bible and I, on this topic, see that we have misinterpreted and misunderstood God's word for thousands of years. I believe that the prohibitions against homosexuality and same-sex marriage in the Bible are based on cultic temple practices, are based on abusive sexual situations, and that they still apply today, but do not talk to our topic, which is of homosexual marriage, loving relationships.

I'm not alone in these views, far from it. Increasingly over the last few years, more and more evangelical Bible-believing Christians have begun to change their minds on this topic, including our own Archbishop Desmond Tutu.

So, it's too simple to believe that we've all abandoned the truth. It's too simple for you to just believe that we've been blinded by the God of the sage. It's too simple to believe that we have been trapped by the devil's delusions.

You're welcome to test our lives against that theory. I hope we pass muster, but it's too simple for you to think that that's what's going on. Maybe there's something in what we're saying, and maybe we've seen something as we've studied the scriptures that is worth your time and attention.