Yesterday I got a surprise response on Twitter to my article, “Five Reasons Not to Sign the Evangelicals for Marriage Equality Petition,” from the spokesperson for the group, Moody Bible Institute graduate Brandan Robertson.
It’s funny: during the interchange below I felt a bit like a beleaguered minority—but I shouldn’t have. I stand with the historic Christian tradition, with the great majority of Bible interpreters throughout time—and with the Bible itself. I’ve done the homework. Here I stand; I can do no other. I feel very sorry for Brandan and went to sleep praying for him last night.
Twitter “conversations” easily devolve into slogan-slinging. Could I have represented the Bible more accurately or winsomely? Should I have ignored this opportunity? Eager for your wisdom.
From Brandan: “No need to believe it.” That is a strange way of looking at moral issues. And the whole tweet was a weird exercise in listening to what appears to be a typical postmodern avoidance of defining terms.
Why does disagreement with this statement equal hate? How can everything in life be only black and white, with no gray areas (like real life)? But this is the world we live in nowadays.
And I loved the elephant hurling where he said there are thousands of evangelicals who can explain it. I wonder how many thousands of tweets it would take those thousands of evangelicals to actually explain the statement.
I know what Brandan thinks he’s going for in his effort to distinguish the moral and the legal. Not all sins are or should be crimes. And I’m not usually super picky about people’s use of terms, but in this case the real question is whether “marriage” is something defined by humanity or something discovered in the created order (and, more importantly, in special revelation). “Evangelicals for Marriage Equality” is taking a position on the moral issues at stake merely by using “marriage” in their title.
I do think we’ve got to climb out of a hole we dug for ourselves; some Christians really do appear to hate homosexuals. Or at least did. It has to be clear that “we love our neighbors” isn’t just rhetoric but reality. And that’s tough in this polarized world. I don’t have many opportunities to show my love to practicing homosexuals, and I’m frankly nervous to try because of the great tension in the cultural atmosphere.
Calling yourself an “evangelical” while supporting same-sex sexual activity seems to me to be doing the same thing Marcel Duchamp was doing when he flipped a urinal upside down, signed his name, and called it “art.” He was multiplying the extension of the term so greatly that it came to have no intension at all.