Is Homosexuality Compatible with Christianity? (White vs Spong)

Debate Introduction and the Question of Biblical Christianity

This, of course, is the seventh debate that we've actually done in this area and in Seattle last year. It's a pleasure to have you here this year. Let me explain to you what our objective is and has been for the last few years.

Our objective is to have theological scholarly debate, and that between the two best participants or representatives from opposing or polemic sides. We hope that while we engage in this, though, that, of course, everything will be done from that manner.

With that, we understand that there are a number of people here that are both from a reformed Christian perspective as well as a progressive Christian perspective. All at the same time, we still ask that you behave as Christians during this debate.

You have come in and you have paid to hear both Dr. White debate and Dr. Spong or Bishop Spong to debate, and I would hope you would allow them to do the debating tonight. With that being said, it is my pleasure to thank you, to welcome you here tonight, and to enjoy the next three hours with you.

Let me introduce, first of all, our participants. On my left and your right, I have the director of Alpha Omega Ministries. It's a Christian apologetics ministry based in Phoenix, Arizona, professor, having taught Greek, systematic theology, various topics in a field of apologetics.

He is authored and contributed to more than 20 books, including The King James Only Controversy, The Forgotten Trinity, The Potter's Freedom, The God Who Justifies, and The Same-Sex Controversy, which you please welcome with me, Dr. James White.

On my right and your left, I have the retired bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Newark. As the author of 14 books, he is the most published member of the House of Bishops of the Episcopalian Church of the United States.

His bestsellers include Rescuing the Bible from Fundamentalism, Why Christianity Must Change or Die, and his latest release, The Sins of Scripture. Would you please welcome with me, Bishop John Shelby Spong.

I would also like to take the time to state my thanks. As many of you know, there was supposed to be a debate a couple weeks ago. Both Bishop Spong and his lovely wife, Christine, have been more than enjoyable and friendly and Christian in their attitude to work with in order to arrange this debate.

So I do thank them for doing that and being so easy to work with. Wouldn't it be great if all Christians could act and behave that way? Well, let's talk about the format of this evening's debate. First of all, tonight we will have 25-minute opening statements from either side.

We will then take a very brief break, okay? Then we will come back. We will have 20-minute rebuttals to either sides. Another quick five-minute break. Then we will have a series, and I'm going to make this 15-minute affirmative cross-examination, negative cross-examination, going back and forth.

There's four of those. So that's a total of one hour, okay? And then at the end, we will have 15-minute closing statements. Now at that time, folks, we will open it up for some audience questions. Let me explain to you about how this will work for audience questions.

First of all, when you do ask a question, please ask your question directly to the person that you need to ask the question to. Just don't make it a roundabout question. So if it is for Dr. White, please state that it is for him.

If it's for Bishop Spong, please state it as that being the case. If you would like to ask a question for Bishop Spong, there is a large flower right over here on the floor, and I'd like you to stand right in the middle of the diamond and make a line back if you have a question for Bishop Spong.

If you have a question for Dr. White, on this side over here and trailing back, and I will be in the middle and call each of you this way. Now once again, you are to ask a question. Please do not engage in debate.

These gentlemen are here to debate. Your objective is just to ask the question and want or expect them to answer it for you, okay? But after you ask that first question, please go back to your seat and allow them to answer the question.

If also, please no long rhetorical questions. Keep it brief, if possible, under 30 seconds. If you're going on too long or if you want to tell us about your life story, I will cut you off. Just to let you know that.

May I also state that there will be a special blessing by both of the men up here at the forefront of the stage, if anyone would like to get me some Starbucks coffee by the end of the night. And so with that, folks, if we could just observe a moment of silence.

Amen. And thank you. Well, let me first introduce tonight and the subject and the thesis of tonight's debate is, is homosexuality compatible with authentic biblical Christianity? And representing the affirmative side, Bishop John Shelby Spong.

Bishop Spong on Scripture, Prejudice, and the Love of God

Thank you very much and thank you for being here. I know that I'm delighted to be here. And I'd like to say that I appreciate very much the amazing hospitality that the Sovereign Cruises Group has supplied.

I'm also delighted they want to debate this issue. Because by and large, in Christian circles, this issue is either shouted about or ignored. It's never just debated. I'm also pleased to share the stage this evening with Dr. White.

I'd like to begin by finding out something about my audience. How many of you are from Florida? Raise your hands. How many of you are not from Florida? 30, 60, so maybe 30, 70, I guess, got to add up to be 100.

And how many of you came here tonight because you were sure that you would agree with everything I said? Raise your hands. And how many of you are here tonight because you're sure you would disagree with almost everything I said?

Raise your hands. I always wanted to know how Daniel felt before he went into the lion's den. My hope tonight is a very simple one. And I believe Dr. White shares that hope. Namely, that only the truth will be spoken and only the truth will be served.

I want to begin with an autobiographical word. I was raised in a Bible-quoting, fundamentalist, evangelical, Episcopal church in Charlotte, North Carolina. My mother died a fundamentalist. I was taught to honor and respect the sacred scriptures from the earliest moment of my existence.

I still do. I was also taught to read those scriptures, to read them regularly, carefully, and fervently. I suspect I've been through the entire Bible, word for word, at least 25 times. And even more, I was taught to interact with those scriptures so that they might inform my life with its expanding knowledge and engage my world as it constantly changed.

And that's really not easy. Many believers are told that they should not view the Bible critically or with scholarly insight. There was actually a time before the Protestant Reformation when people were not even allowed to read the Bible for themselves.

Indeed, there was a time when it was a crime to translate the Bible into a language that people could actually understand. In the 15th century, an Englishman named William Tyndall was burned at the stake for translating the Bible into English.

The fascinating fact of history is that about 80 of William Tyndall's translation was incorporated into the version of the Bible that you and I know as the King James Version. But if you read, study, and know the Bible, and also live in a changing world, the way you read and understand the Bible will also change.

Let me illustrate that. In my evangelical church in Charlotte, North Carolina, I was taught that segregation was the will of God. And the Bible was regularly quoted to justify that prejudice. My church also taught me that women were inferior to men, that that was God's design.

And the Bible was regularly quoted to justify it. My church taught me that it was okay to look down on and even to hate other religious traditions. Since in North Carolina we didn't know a great deal about the religions of the world, we'd never met a Buddhist or a Hindu, we mostly spent our energy hating Jews.

We called them Christ killers. They were rather conveniently present. I can remember that most of my prejudice against Jews was taught to me in Sunday school, not always overtly, but covertly. For example, I never met a good Jew in my Sunday school material.

Every time the phrase, the Jews, was used, it was a pejorative, hostile phrase. The people who bore Jewish names were Pharisees and Sadducees and scribes and Judas Iscariot. No good words were ever said about them.

Whenever I saw pictures of these Pharisees or Judas Iscariot, they were always portrayed as dark and sultry, ominous figures. The fascinating thing is that in my Sunday school, no one ever told me that Jesus was a Jew.

And when I looked at pictures of Jesus, he didn't look like a Jew to me. I thought he was a Swede. He was blonde and blue-eyed and fair-skinned. It's interesting that even our prejudice covered the image we had of this Jesus figure so that we could not see him as he really was in history.

Strangely enough, my church did not teach me much about homosexuality. Indeed, it didn't teach me anything about it. I cannot even recall hearing the word homosexual mentioned until I was 18 years old.

We just didn't have homosexuals in the South, or at least we didn't allow them to be visible. And when I did learn that there was such a thing as homosexuality, I, without any criticism, accepted my church's definition and my culture's definition, and that was twofold.

If you were a sort of liberal, kind-spirited person, you thought of homosexuality as a sickness, something which one could not really help. So they should be cured if possible, and if it were not possible, they should be pitied.

It was at least kind. But if you were a conservative or a more hard-line person, homosexuality was regarded as an expression of moral depravity. We even called it a lifestyle, deliberately chosen by evil or morally depraved people.

And conversion was the prescription for this diagnosis. And if conversion did not work, then attempts at repression, even persecution, were justified. Sometimes persecution reached the point of murder, as Matthew Shepard from Wyoming can attest.

And of course the Bible was quoted to justify this prejudice. The texts are all far too familiar to me today. The Sodom and Gomorrah story in Genesis. The two texts in the Book of Leviticus. Romans 1.

And some other scattered verses in the Pauline and Pseudo-Pauline corpus. And finally a couple of weird references, one in Jude and one in 2 Peter. It makes nine in all. As I grew and as my knowledge demanded that I engage these prejudices, that were so deeply planted in my heart by my church, undergirded by my Bible, that I had to challenge the way the Bible was read in order to rid myself of these debilitating prejudices.

Not only how the Bible was read, but how the Bible was interpreted. Sometimes I even had to challenge the accuracy of the Bible itself. Let me take you through that, if I can, for just a moment. In my church in North Carolina, there is a sense in which my life was a struggle to rid itself of these debilitating negativities.

Prejudice hurts your victim. Prejudice also hurts the prejudiced one because it diminishes your humanity. No human being can ever treat another human being as less than fully human without diminishing their own humanity.

It was my black friends and the civil rights movement that enabled me to challenge my racism. And I am pleased about two things. At one point in my life in Tarboro, North Carolina, I had the distinct honor of being named public enemy number one by the Ku Klux Klan.

I'd like it on my tombstone. The other thing that pleases me so much today is that in my church, the Episcopal Church in North Carolina, we have only one bishop today elected by our people. And that bishop happens to be an African American.

It was my four daughters that forced me to deal with my sexism. Daughters will do that to you. I remember telling one of the cardinals of the Roman Catholic Church that the only way the Roman Catholic Church will ever address the problem it has with women is for its priests to have daughters.

The cardinal told me that it would be a long time or a cold day, you know where, before that might happen. But daughters have a way of calling you to look at humanity quite differently. And they challenged my sexism.

My four daughters are today a managing director of a company called Investment Trust Co., which is a wholly owned subsidiary of an Orlando bank named Sun Trust. My second daughter is a lawyer who teaches in the law school at the University of Virginia, of Richmond.

My third daughter has a Ph .D. in physics from Stanford University and is in the high tech industry. My fourth daughter is a captain in the United States Marine Corps. She's a helicopter pilot and she has completed three tours of duty in the Iraq war.

Now, folks, you don't raise daughters like this and quote the Bible where Paul says, I forbid a woman to have authority over a man and expect to get away with it. Today, I am pleased that 40 percent of my church's clergy are female.

And I am particularly pleased that my church just this past summer elected a woman bishop to be the head of the Episcopal Church in the United States of America. My prejudices against other religions died when I had the privilege of doing dialogues, first with a rabbi in Richmond, then with a Buddhist monk in China, and then with three Hindu scholars in India.

And also when I invited a leading Islamic scholar in 1991 to lead my clergy conference so that he could teach our clergy about Islam, something they knew almost nothing about. Out of each of these other faith traditions, I found my own deeply Christian faith strengthened enormously, expanded.

I even found that Judaism, my study of Judaism, changed the way that I study and understand the Bible, for it is a deeply, deeply Jewish book. Now, my prejudice against homosexuality was challenged first by meeting whole, loving people who were gay or lesbian who didn't fit my stereotype.

They weren't mentally sick. They weren't morally depraved. And it was the relationship that I had with them that finally forced me to challenge my deeply held homophobia. And when I finally made sure that that's something I needed to do, I contacted some doctors in the Cornell School of Medicine in New York City, and I worked with them for about six months, reading every report that they had for me to read and talking with them constantly.

And it was in that process that I became convinced that homosexuality is not a choice. It is not evil. I don't even think it is unnatural, since it certainly is present in the world of nature. I think of homosexuality as only one more minority in the vast spectrum of our human experience, but so are redheaded people, so are freckle-faced people, so indeed are obese people.

They're only a minority, and that each of those minorities at some point begins to be made to feel different. I learned at Cornell that the overwhelming number of scientists and doctors are now convinced that people do not choose their sexual orientation.

They only awaken to it. And that was certainly true of me. I didn't choose to be heterosexual. I just woke up one day when I was 12 or 13, and suddenly girls did not seem obnoxious to me any longer. And so I began to do weird things like take baths more frequently, dress better, comb my hair, even use deodorant.

Never done that before I was 12 or 13. I wanted to do anything to make girls feel more comfortable around me. I didn't make a decision, and I don't believe that there's any gay lad who ever woke up one day and sat on the side of his bed and said, oh, I'll decide to be gay.

I really like to be disowned by my family and beat up by my friends, condemned by my church, run out of town, fired from my job, and all the other things we've done to gay and lesbian people. You don't choose your sexual orientation.

You awaken to it. So it's in the same category with gender, with being left-handed or right-handed. I also learned that homosexuals can, in the minds of these doctors and scientists, neither be created by any external event nor can they be cured by religious hysteria.

And that only suggests that most of us don't know what we're dealing with. When people act as if they can cure homosexual people, they're either badly misinformed, in my opinion, or they are seeking to practice medicine without a license for which they ought to be charged with criminal behavior.

Another thing I learned is the percentage of homosexual people tends to be the same in every part of the human population, at every place, at every time, in every culture, among all people. It can neither be created by having the culture accept it, nor can it be diminished by having the culture oppress it.

It might appear so, because in an accepting culture, they will come out of the closet. In a repressive culture, they will stay deeply, deeply hidden. I also learned, and these Cornell doctors were actually doing experiments with white mice to demonstrate it, that homosexuality is a fact in the world of mammals, in the world of nature, where no one seems to think they have the ability to choose.

I rejoice that when I retired as Bishop of Newark in the year 2000, that I had 35 open, out-of-the-closet gay and lesbian clergy serving congregations in New Jersey. 31 of them lived openly with their partners.

I never had a complaint about the sexual behavior of any of my gay or lesbian clergy. I cannot say that about my heterosexual clergy. I also am pleased that three years after my retirement, my church elected, confirmed, and ordained an openly homosexual man, living in a partnered relationship of at least 14 years' duration when he was elected Bishop, to be the Bishop of New Hampshire.

To me, that was one more sign that we had moved past another barrier. I also had to accept the fact that the Bible is no more competent to make judgments about homosexuality than it was when it declared that menstruation in women was something that demanded rejection.

It made them unclean. That epileptic people were really demon-possessed. That deaf-mutes were those who had had their tongues tied by the devil. Those were attitudes in a world that we know better about today, but they are deeply part of the Bible's understanding.

What the Bible does teach me, however, and by this I have to live, and that is that all people are holy, that all people are made in God's image. Whether they are like me or not is relatively unimportant.

That all people are loved, that to me is the essence of the Christ story. That's what Jesus means. No matter who you are, no matter what you do, you are loved by this gracious, loving Savior. And the Bible teaches me that all people are called to be not what I want them to be or my society asks them to be, but all that they most deeply are in the full integrity of their own very specific humanity.

What it means to me to live in the life of the Spirit is that you have the courage to become all that God intended you to be. And so the battle about homosexuality in the life of the Church is for me finally a battle between the love of God and human prejudice, nothing other.

And I have no doubt as to which of those will win in the long run. Thank you very much.

Dr. White on Monotheism, Revelation, and the Authority of Scripture

Dr. White now has 25 minutes for his opening statements. Well, thank you very much for being here this evening. It is an honor to get to address you on a very important subject, a subject that causes us this evening to look at the most basic levels of what we believe about what is right and what is wrong and how we can know what is right and what is wrong.

The thesis statement this evening asks us, Is homosexuality compatible with authentic biblical Christianity? That, of course, asks us to answer the question, What is biblical Christianity? Words have meanings.

Christianity has the right over its history to self-definition. There are certain fundamental aspects concerning the Christian faith that simply cannot be sacrificed, they cannot be compromised, and it still be the Christian faith.

If I were to dress as an Islamic imam and I were to say, I am progressive Islam, and yet deny that there is only one true God, Allah, deny that Muhammad was his prophet, and deny that Quran is the word of God, I could not honestly expect any Muslim to accept my profession to be a Muslim.

There are certain definitional aspects of what it means to be a Muslim involved in that type of terminology and language. In the same way, Christianity has certain basic fundamentals that define what Christianity is and set it apart from any other religious faith.

Without the ability to make that kind of definition, then we all just have one religious faith that really doesn't have any way of communicating anything special about itself. So for Christianity, we begin with the fact that Christianity is monotheistic.

There is only one true God. But the confession of Christians has always been that God is personal. God is a person. He is the creator of all things. And because he is personal and the creator of all things, he is capable of communicating with his creation.

We believe that God is triune, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. And as a result of this, when we talk about man, we can say that man is his creature created in the image of God. There is something about man that corresponds to God in his ability to worship God and, in fact, to communicate with God.

Man's ability to be communicative between ourselves, between ourselves and God, is reflective of the imago dei, that is, the image of God itself. Now, God, as the creator, has a purpose in creating. All of creation, the scriptures tell us, exists to glorify him.

Christianity, then, is theocentric. It is centered upon God and his purposes. It is not anthropocentric and centered upon the creature man. Man is very important, of course. Man is the one being redeemed through the Savior, Jesus Christ.

But the world misses the whole point of scripture when it focuses solely upon man as the central element rather than upon God himself. The scriptures tell us that God has revealed himself in creation.

He has written his law upon the hearts of men and women so that their conscience is not merely some cultural construct but is a part of God's own witness to himself. It is a part of that image that he has indelibly stamped upon us.

The more we learn of science, as long as we do not suppress the knowledge of God, reveals ever more the glory of God. In college, I was department fellow anatomy and physiology. In my senior year, my emphasis was a study of genetics.

I was just amazed at the beauty, for example, of the DNA molecule, the transcriptional complex, mRNA and tRNA, and the ribosomal complex that is involved in reading and transcribing this tremendously complex mechanism that simply defies the idea that this simply came about by some random chance, some developments from some primordial soup.

But God has not created us to be communicative with each other while remaining silent himself. Christians have always believed in God's word, in God's revelation, and scripturated in the scriptures themselves.

His ultimate revelation, of course, is the Incarnation, where the eternal second person of the Trinity, the divine Son, entered into his own creation in the person of Jesus Christ as radical as that claim is, there is no Christianity without a claim that God has entered into his own creation in the person of Jesus Christ.

Now, there is no question in my mind, and I don't think there can be any question in this debate, really, that every writer of the Gospels was united in recording for us Jesus's high view of scripture itself.

If believing the Bible is God's word is wrong, then there is no question of this. Jesus believed it, and if we follow him, we will believe it as well. While the scriptures of the Old and New Testaments were written over long periods of time in different languages and different contexts, surely no one will argue that a God with such power as to create this glorious creation cannot do, as Peter said, referring to scripture as men spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit.

This is the universal testimony of the writers of scripture and of Christians down through the centuries. The idea that God revealed himself in scripture is not new, and it is simply definitional of the Christian faith.

So the question tonight is fairly easily answered. There is no question to any unbiased reader of the scriptures who does not come to the text with a presupposition of rejecting their consistency, rejecting their author, and rejecting their authority of what they teach regarding the proper expression of God-given sexual desire.

But before I look at the negative text, let me start with something positive. In Matthew 19 we read, Some Pharisees came to Jesus, testing him and asking, Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife for any reason at all?

And 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. They said to him, Why then did Moses give to her a certificate of divorce and send her away? He said to them, Because of the hardness of heart Moses permitted you to divorce your wives, but from the beginning it has not been this way.

Now please note that according to the Lord Jesus, the male and female roles are creational. They are purposeful on God's part. They are not simply random results of an evolutionary process. Notice as well, the family unit from which the man comes and the woman comes is a mother and a father.

You have the God-ordained union of male and female becoming one flesh. There is a mutuality. There is a reciprocity that exists between the male and the female that does not exist between a male and a male and a female and a female.

A male and a male and a female and a female is a mirror image, not a mutuality. That union, then, is impossible between male and male and female and female. Those together are never one flesh, but always two.

Likewise, the Apostle Paul exalted marriage by likening it to the love Christ has for his church, the bridegroom for the bride, and commanded men in a radical way in the culture in which he was in, commanded men to love their wives and give their lives for them when writing to the church at Ephesus.

From the beginning, God protected marriage in his law. The departures even seen in men like David and Solomon were a step down from God's ideal revealed in his law, as Jesus himself explained. And so often the discussion of this particular subject focuses only upon a few passages, such as some of those that Bishop Spong mentioned, but in reality there is a tremendous positive body of teaching in the Scriptures regarding the nature of marriage that cannot be applied to any other kind of sexual relationship.

And so it is not just a couple of texts. It is the united testimony of the entirety of the written word of God. Now, in the Old Testament, Leviticus chapters 18, 19, and 20 presents what's called the holiness code, wherein both ceremonial and moral laws are given to God's people to protect them from the practices of the inhabitants of the land into which God was bringing them.

This is the same section, by the way, from which Jesus quotes, you shall love your neighbor as yourself. And it likewise contains the prohibition of such evils as bestiality, incest, and rape. The fact that it contains abiding moral law is unquestionable.

And clearly the Lord Jesus, inciting from this text repeatedly in light of his own teaching that not one jot or tittle shall pass from the law until all things are fulfilled, believed its moral imperatives had remained intact until his day and would remain normative for anyone who would seriously consider being his disciple.

In this context, we read these words, Leviticus 18, 22, you shall not lie with a male as one lies the female. It is an abomination. I want to give you just a section of the Greek translation of that. Why?

The Greek septuagint was the translation of the Hebrew scriptures used in the New Testament. And in that text, in Leviticus 18, 22, we have καὶ μετὰ ἄρσενὸς οὐ κοιμήθησαι κοιτὴν γοῖναι καὶ. Now hear those two terms.

Ἄρσενὸς, male, and κοιτὴν, bed, to lie with. Keep that in mind. Just remember those as we look at Leviticus 20, verse 13. If there is a male who lies the male as those who lie with a woman, both of them have committed a detestable act, they shall surely be put to death, their blood gildedness is upon them.

Once again, note the Greek translation, μετὰ ἄρσενὸς κοιτὴν. Ἄρσενὸς κοιτὴν. Keep those in mind because there is a reason for that. You see, the New Testament, in two places, uses a term that is really quite easily understood if one realizes that the one using the term, in this case, the Apostle Paul, taught the Gentile Christians using the Greek Septuagint translation of the Hebrew Scriptures.

They couldn't read Hebrew, and so when he's writing to the Ephesians or the Corinthians or whatever, they're going to be reading Greek, and so he's going to use the Greek Septuagint. He even quotes from the Greek Septuagint where it differs from the Hebrew at times.

And in 1 Corinthians 6, verses 9 -11, we read these words. 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.

Such were some of you, but you were washed, but you were sanctified, but you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and the Spirit of our God. Now, in that list, you have effeminate and homosexuals.

In Greek, oota malakoi, oota arsenikkoitai. Now, that term arsenikkoitai, in the plural there, arsenikkoites in the singular, is the term that entire chapters of books have been dedicated to, all to try to promote the idea that we don't know what it means.

John Boswell wrote a huge work on the subject of homosexuality. Everybody else just basically quotes him these days and puts their own spin on things. And amazingly enough, in scholarly works, wherein every other situation, you would automatically go back to the Greek Septuagint to look at the background of Paul's writings and look at what the sources are, especially since this is a term that is not used before Paul.

In this one instance, all of a sudden, their scholarship falters, and they don't bother to look at the fact that there in Leviticus 20, you have arsenos, you have koitai, and here Paul has put them together in one word meaning homosexual, men who lie with men.

No end of effort has been made to try to obscure the meanings of these words. But it is here where honest, non-political scholarship is seen in distinction from dishonest, politically motivated scholarship.

The two terms effeminate and homosexual refer to the active and passive partners in homosexual sex. Arsenos koitai comes from Paul's teaching from the Septuagint in Leviticus 18, especially Leviticus 20, verse 13.

And he says, such were, were, past tense, some of you. Now this is consistent with Paul's argument in opening the book of Romans where we read these words. For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men who suppress the truth and unrighteousness.

Please note, they have the truth, but they are suppressing it. Because that which is known about God is evident within them, for God made it evident to them. For since the creation of the world, his invisible attributes, his eternal power and divine nature have been clearly seen being understood through what has been made so that they are without excuse, without an apologetic from the original tongue.

For even though they knew God, they did not honor him as God or give thanks, but they became futile in their speculations, and their foolish heart was darkened. Professing to be wise, they became fools and exchanged the glory of the incorruptible God for an image in the form of corruptible man and of birds and four-footed animals and crawling creatures.

Therefore God gave them over in the lust of their hearts to impurity, so that their bodies would be dishonored among them. For they exchanged the truth of God for a lie and worshipped and served the creature rather than the creator, who is blessed forever.

Amen. Now let me stop right there. We have a coherent argument. We have an argument that says that God has revealed himself in creation, internally and externally, and that men, when they sin against his revelation, do so willfully, without an excuse and without an apologetic.

They are suppressing, katakanton, holding down the truth of God that is within them. And as a result, there is a twistedness that enters into the creation. They exchange the truth of God for a lie. They exchange what should be a gift and an honorable possession for a lie.

There is a twistedness in the creation. The argument is very clear. You may agree or disagree with it, but there is no reason to avoid what the elements of the argument are. Up to this point, it's very clear.

But he continues. Verse 26,. For this reason God gave them over to degrading passions. For their women exchanged the natural function for that which is unnatural. In the same way also the men abandoned the natural function of the woman and burned in their desire toward one another, men with men committing indecent acts and receiving in their own persons the due penalty of their error.

And just as they did not see fit to acknowledge God any longer, God gave them over to a depraved mind to do those things which are not proper, being filled with all unrighteousness, wickedness, greed, evil, full of envy, murder, strife, deceit, malice.

They are gossips, slanderers, haters of God, insolent, arrogant, boastful, inventors of evil, disobedient to parents, without understanding, untrustworthy, unloving, and unmerciful. And note the last verse.

And although they know the ordinance of God that those who practice such things What are such things? Everything that came before. Everything that came before. And although they know the ordinance of God that those who practice such things are worthy of death, they not only do the same, but also give hearty approval to those who practice them.

Now clearly, to isolate the condemnation of both male and female homosexuality contained in this section and dismiss it as the rantings of a repressed homosexual is to completely and totally miss the entirety of the point of the passage.

Suppression of truth brings a twisting of the creator-creation distinction. Homosexuality is a judgment wherein God gives over those who have already shown a rejection of His right to define their behavior and existence to the expression of their rebellion.

That is clearly Paul's teaching. And may I note something to you? This is the beginning of what we might call the bad news. When Paul writes to the church at Rome, he presents to us the entirety of his gospel.

And he starts with two and a half chapters of bad news before he ever gets to the good news. And when we skip the bad news, the good news becomes an empty cure because we don't understand why it is that God has to go to such lengths to make people right with Him.

Romans chapter 2, more bad news. Romans chapter 3 through verse 19. And only then, only after he's established the need of man for redemption and salvation and forgiveness of sin, for all of those sins, including gossips, people who are dishonest, disobedient to parents.

What a laughable thing in our society today. Everybody's disobedient to their parents, right? Isn't that the case? No, it's not a laughable thing. Not in God's sight, especially when those parents represent God's authority within one's life.

It's not a laughable thing, no matter what our society decays the point of calling it. That bad news must be understood, and God's wrath against that bad news must be understood before what He has done in Jesus Christ can be understood from the Christian scriptures.