Should Christians Use the Term “Gay Christian”?

In his new book God and the Gay Christian, Matthew Vines seeks to legitimate homosexual practice among evangelicals. I responded to this heretical teaching yesterday in my post about the new Southern Seminary eBook, God and the Gay Christian? I quoted a section from my chapter on the church’s historical teaching, a chapter that has now been posted in full over at the Council on Biblical Manhood & Womanhood.

 

Today I’d like to think a little more with you about Vines’s use of the term “gay Christian” (I also commend to you this excellent and stirring post from my SBTS colleague and New Testament expert Jim Hamilton). This is not a new descriptor, but Vines has infused new meaning into it. Authors who have previously used it have done so with the understanding that “gay Christian” is essentially equivalent to “born-again believer who experiences, to some degree, ongoing same-sex attraction and who willingly resists gratifying this desire.” Vines, however, uses the term to essentially mean “born-again believer who experiences same-sex attraction and indulges this desire in mutual, covenantal relationships to the glory of God.” There is a vast and unbridgeable gulf between these two definitions.  Continue at Owen Strachan

Building a Godly Community: an Excerpt from "Risky Gospel"

Here’s an interesting reality: lots of people want to love God today. That’s what they say. Check out the polls regularly printed in USA Today, for example, and you’ll find that most people are not in fact hardened secularists waiting to pounce like a hyena on any Christian they can find. You may pick up that impression from the news media or talking heads on TV, but that’s not how many people represent their desires. Many folks want to get in touch with God. Of course, they don’t know how, and many don’t really follow through. Without God’s redeeming grace, our sin gets in the way of our best intentions.

But the point stands: a good number of folks would at least say that they want to love God. I think you would baffle many people, though, if you extended the question to this: “Do you want to love the church—an actual, real, existing local church in your area?”

It’s at this point that a lot of people would drop out. They would argue that they’re “spiritual,” but not really religious. They believe in a living relationship with the Lord, not a ritualistic one. They can worship God anywhere, and they don’t need to be confined to a building.

Perhaps, in fact, this voices your perspective. Maybe you’ve been burned by a church. You don’t associate the local church with a place of joyful worship where you encounter the transcendent Lord of heaven and earth. In fact, there are so many people who have had negative experiences that I think it’s worth saying what the church is not:

1. The local church is not a social club for gossip, albeit with pews and a slightly odd smell.
2. It’s not a place where you go to observe a whole bunch of weird rules that have no connection to everyday life.   Continue at Owen Strachan

Can You Define the Relationship?

We are living in strange times — specifically, in the age of the abortion contracts, wedleases, and throuples.

In 2007, J.J. Redick launched his NBA career with the Orlando Magic. Much ballyhooed out of Duke University, Redick entered games for essentially one purpose: to hit three-point shots. This he did with enough panache — and game-winning success — to make opposing fans all over the country dislike him (it’s a Duke thing, too).

Though his on-court role was uncomplicated, it appears that Redick’s off-court life was anything but. In the course of “seeing” model Vanessa Lopez, Redick allegedly hired a legal team to draw up an “abortion contract.” Basically, the document required Redick to “maintain a social and/or dating relationship” with Lopez for at least one year as long as she agreed to abort a child she claimed had been conceived by the couple (Redick says no child was conceived). In addition, should Redick decide he couldn’t “maintain” his “relationship” with Lopez, he would pay her $25,000.   Continue at Owen Strachan

Read it to Believe it: Revival Is Happening in Maine