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Homosexuality, Marriage, and the Church
tendencies all their lives. The culpability is not in the tendencies, but in the acting upon
(either in imagination or actual practice) those tendencies.” For those heterosexuals
who insist that homosexuals must have changed their orientation before their status
is acceptable before God, I simply ask if they themselves can honestly say they no
longer experience heterosexual temptation. We all are fallen sexual creatures,
whether we are tempted by heterosexual or homosexual lust.
20. Robert A. J. Gagnon, “How Bad Is Flomosexual Practice According to
Scripture and Does Scripture’s Indictment Apply to Committed Flomosexual
Unions?”
, accessed January 2007, p. 12.
21. Ibid., 13.
22. Ibid., 15.
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23. Gagnon, “How Bad Is Homosexual Practice?”
24. Thomas E. Schmidt,
Straight and Narrow? Compassion and Clarity in the
Homosexuality Debate
(Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 1995), 172. Schmidt, 169—
175, has provided what I find to be a very balanced position on the appropriate stance
of today’s church and synagogue toward homosexuality, a position that upholds both
the biblical standard and divine grace.
25. “Seventh-day Adventist Position Statement on Homosexuality,” voted at the
Annual Council on October 3, 1999,
26. Nicholas Miller, attorney and professor of church history at the Seventh-day
Adventist Theological Seminary, has made the argument in a paper entitled “Why
Should Adventists Care About Protecting Traditional Marriage?”
27. For discussion of this larger biblical worldview, as set forth in the introduction
and conclusion to Scripture, see Richard M. Davidson, “Back to the Beginning:
Genesis 1-3 and the Theological Center of Scripture,” in
Christ, Salvation, and
the Eschaton
, ed. Daniel Heinz, Jiri Moskala, and Peter M. van Bemmelen (Berrien
Springs, MI: Old Testament Publications, 2009), 5 -29 .