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Homosexuality, Marriage, and the Church
Others in the current debate, coming from a postmodern perspec
tive, cite their personal stories in their pilgrimage with homosexual
ity. They describe being delivered from fear and frustration to free
dom as they embraced their homosexual orientation and moved to an
active homosexual lifestyle. Personal experience becomes the norm
by which we judge the appropriateness of a lifestyle issue.
Consider Eve at the tree of knowledge of good and evil in the
Garden of Eden. God’s word was plain: Do not eat of the tree. But
the serpent lisped his insinuations to doubt and his lies to Eve:
Did
God really say not to eat o f the tree? Don't you know that He does
not really mean what He says? He is trying to keep something good
from you. L ook at me, at my experience—I have eaten the fruit o f the
forbidden tree and I can talk. Imagine what would happen to you i f
you ate. You would become like God.
And the biblical record states:
“When the woman saw that the tree was good for food, that it was
pleasant to the eyes, and a tree desirable to make one wise, she took
of its fruit and ate” (Gen. 3:6,
n k j v ) .
She trusted the empirical evi
dence, the personal experience, and the seemingly logical reasoning
of the snake, rather than the Word of God, and the floodgates of woe
were poured out upon the world.
The same issue is before us today with reference to the issue of homo
sexuality and the Bible. What is at stake? The
sola Scriptura
principle.
THE TOTA
SCRIPTURA
PRINCIPLE
It is not enough to affirm the final authority of Scripture. Those
like Martin Luther, who called for
sola Scriptura
but failed to fully
accept the Scriptures in their totality, have ended up with a “canon
within the canon.” For Luther this meant depreciating the book
of James as an “epistle of straw” and despising other portions of
Scripture as presenting the way of law and not the gospel.
The self-testimony of Scripture is clear in 2 Timothy 3:16-17:
“All scripture is inspired by God and profitable for teaching, for
reproof, for correction, and for training
in righteousness,
that the