The Bible And Homosexuality
Dr. C. Adrian Thomas
Introduction
In 2014, The Evangelical Theological Society sent me a copy of the program-agenda for their 67th Annual Meeting, which was scheduled to be held on November 17-19, 2015, in Atlanta, Georgia. The focus of this meeting was “Marriage and the Family.” The opening paragraph of the “Letter from the then Program Chair,” Daniel Wallace, issues an urgent call. It states,
“The theme of this year’s conference is ‘Marriage and the Family.’ With the recent [U.S] Supreme Court decision about what constitutes marriage, our focus could not be timelier. Such a pragmatic topic needs rigorous academic and biblically grounded examination. The issues related to marriage, sex, gender identity, and the like have seen an almost unbelievable redefinition via political and social engineering in just a few years. Thoughtful, grace-and-truth imbued articulation from a thoroughly Christian perspective is desperately needed in our post-Christian world” (p. 4).
It is helpful to point out that the Evangelical Theological Society is the meeting of the elites of evangelical scholarship, whose focus is typically on biblical scholarship and academics. That an entire meeting of this kind should be focused on marriage, family, and sexuality indicates that Christians, especially evangelicals, are faced with a serious moral crisis. But beyond this, it also indicates that our first need is to articulate clearly biblically what we believe about these issues. This is critical because, within evangelicalism itself, there is a growing constituency that now affirms the alternative lifestyle. Indeed, there is a growing trend to play down the rhetoric, to accept the fact that there is such a category as “homosexual Christian brothers and sisters,” and to live with and accommodate the reality as it is in the world around us.