Top posts of 2013: #4 - Steve Chalke and gay couples

Prominent Christian leader Steve Chalke has declared himself in favour of accepting homosexual couples who are in committed same-sex relationships. In an article to be published in Christianity magazine Chalke says that after a long struggle, he has decided to announce his support for faithful same sex relationships. What are we to make of this?

If you’re reading this and you’re in (or would like to be in) a gay relationship, we’re so glad you’re here—and you could be forgiven for being a bit confused. Not about your own feelings, but about the church’s feelings towards you, and (much more importantly) God’s feelings towards you? Does He love you, or hate you?

So, before I begin responding to the Steve's announcement, and his article where he states his support of long-term same-sex relationships, here’s what, if you’re gay and if you’re wondering, you need to know about what God thinks.

Does He love me?

Yes, He does. He loves you just as much as He loves everyone else. He loves you by showing you the way to live which He knows is best for you (because He made you, and knows you better than you know yourself). And supremely, He loves you by giving His own life so that He can offer you the life He wants you to enjoy—one of contentment, satisfaction, assurance and freedom. His love is deeper and greater than any other love you or I will ever find—and (unlike any other love) it goes on forever.

Does He hate me?

Well, God hates it when any of us choose to stand in His shoes, deciding for ourselves (or rather, guessing for ourselves) what is best, and then acting upon it, and hurting ourselves and those around us. Sometimes we can see that hurt at the time, sometimes later, sometimes not at all—but God sees it all. He does not hate the people He made us to be—but He does hate the people we have become. So He hates adulterers. He hates those who steal. He hates those who get drunk, who gossip, who are only in it for themselves (1 Corinthians 6 v 9-10). I have been guilty of the last three of those things—the Bible calls them sins—so yes, God hates me. And another thing that God knows is wrong in His world is homosexual sex. So yes, God hates that, too—no more and no less than He hates any other ways we reject His loving rule.

And yet at the same time, He loves us so much that He came to earth as Jesus to bear the punishment, bear His own just hatred, so that He could offer us a life experiencing His love, now and forever. So God tells us that we are worse, and in more eternal trouble, than we would ever naturally think; and He tells us that we are more loved, and can have an eternal life, greater than we can ever really appreciate.

A peaceful struggle

All Christians are people who have turned to Jesus, to God, as their Life-giver and their Life-ruler. All Christians are people who don’t act on what they naturally feel, because they know that the true flourishing of human life is to found in acting on what God says. So the Christian life is all about peaceful struggling. Peace, because if we know Jesus, we are absolutely assured of God’s approval, favour, love and life, and nothing we do or don’t do can take it away from us. Struggling, because if we know Jesus, we love Him and want to please Him by obeying Him, and that means fighting our own wrong feelings in various areas of our lives.

Some of those struggles fade over time; but some of them last throughout this life until we die, are made perfect and enter God’s presence. In all of them, God gives His people His Holy Spirit, to assure them that He loves them, to assure them of forgiveness when they mess up and then turn back to Him, and to help them live His way and know real freedom.

If you’re reading this and you’re not a Christian because you’re actively gay—or you’ve never given Christianity a second look because you think Christians, and God, hate you—these are the things you need to know. God loves you and me that He bore His own just hatred at how we’ve used the lives, bodies, and world He gave us, so that we could know His love now and eternally.

And we’re sorry that often you don’t hear this. Because as you look in on an argument between people in the church, this message gets lost. We’re sorry that those of us who hold to what God says in the Bible about His love, and His righteous anger, and our value in His sight and our sin against Him, don’t preface all our debates with this message, so that you don’t hear it.

A change of mind

But there is a debate within the church about homosexuality. And the Reverend Steve Chalke, a prominent evangelical, has announced that he has decided to change his position and believe and teach that same-sex committed sexual relationships are part of God’s design for people in His world. Steve is very influential in Christian circles, so his explanation deserves careful reading, consideration, and a proper answer (if you think this post is long—his uncut version is 5,000 words!). I’ve summarized what Chalke says below, though it’s well worth reading his article before reading the rest of this post, in case I’ve misunderstood or mis-summarized his views. There’s a shorter version and a longer version.

The key issue is over what the Bible says. Steve begins by treading a well-worn path. Essentially, he takes each place where a “plain reading” of the Bible is that God says active homosexuality is sinful, and offers a much less obvious way of reading it, which makes it possible (not definite, or probable, but merely possible) that the Bible does not have all homosexual sex, for all time, in view.

Chalke is honest about where this gets him to, which is not to a position where same-sex relationships are clearly in line with what the Bible says: “it has to be acknowledged that nowhere does the Bible actually affirm same-gender relationships.” And he acknowledges that the Bible does clearly say (Romans 1 v 22-23, 1 Corinthians 6 v 9-10) that some sort of gay sex is sinful. And he’s also right that the Bible does not, word for word, rule out monogamous, stable, long-term homosexual relationships—though of course it doesn’t rule out, word for word, killing a rabbit for fun, either.

Three arguments

So how does Chalke get to affirming something the Bible doesn’t? Three ways.

First, he points out that sometimes we read the Bible wrongly—we make a mistake. Often, this stems from forgetting that the Bible was written in a time and a place (or rather, several times and places), and we don’t make allowance for that. We all have a “hermeneutic” for reading the Bible—a way we approach the text.

Second, Steve suggests that the Bible is quite clear that God reserves particular roles in marriage and in the church for men (though he doesn’t spell it out, he’s getting at the “complementarian” view that men and women are equal in value, but different in roles). Since many Christians, as he puts it, “attempt to soften or nullify what is the clear and uncompromising stand of Scripture”, why not do the same with homosexuality?

Third, he explains how he gets to his position. He wants to move beyond “unthinking comformity to either contemporary culture or ancient textual prohibitions”. He has a different (though not new) hermeneutic—the idea that there is a continuation of thought through the Bible, which is “the account of the ancient conversation initiated, inspired and guided by God with and among humanity … a conversation that … continues beyond [the time the Bible was written]”.

So, following the thinking of Karl Kuhn, Chalke (in a footnote) says the Bible is not “the solitary voice of God dictating a flawless and unified declaration of God’s character and will”. Instead, we have an “on-going conversation” in which we may discover that how to live as Christians today is very different to how God’s people were to live in obedience to Him in New Testament times. And so we are free to decide that Jesus wants to welcome people, that He definitely doesn’t like promiscuity but doesn’t mind long-term relationships of all kinds; and we can affirm and celebrate committed gay relationships.

A response

Here’s a response to these three points, each in turn.

On the first, Revd Chalke is absolutely right. We do make mistakes in how to read the Bible from time to time. We need to read God’s word humbly, and openly, listening to Him rather than to our own pre-suppositions or cultural assumptions or even church traditions. The question is: is this what has happened here? We can only know that if there are substantial and compelling reasons why we should change our views on what the plain meaning of the Bible actually is.

Sadly, this is where Steve's argument falls to pieces. Because points two and three don’t prove that our reading is wrong. In fact, they don’t deal with that question at all. In point two, Chalke is essentially saying: if you are “egalitarian” (all roles should be open to women as well as men) rather than “complementarian”, then you’ve already stopped sticking to the clear teaching of the Bible as it stands, and moved beyond it. So don’t be inconsistent when it comes to active homosexuality.

As a complementarian, I would like to answer simply: rather than disobeying God’s word in two ways, let’s disobey it in neither; let’s be complementarian, and hold to heterosexual, monogamous, lifelong marriage as the place for sex to be enjoyed. Put simply, if you make one mistake, rectify that mistake rather than making another one.

Further, I imagine that some friends of mine who are egalitarian because they believe in all conscience that that is what the Bible teaches, will be quite upset to be told that essentially, they have already given up on reading Scripture as their final authority, so they may as well become even more unbiblical.

The third point is the most important, and destructive—because it introduces a way of reading the Bible that is opposed to the way the Bible tells us to read it.

If the Bible is God’s revealed word—and Chalke says he believes that it is—then the place to find out how to read it is in the Bible. God is the best person to tell us how He wants us to read what He’s written. If we apply another way of reading it—another hermeneutic—we’re setting our authority over His.

And the Bible is not silent on what it is and how to read it. “All Scripture is God-breathed” (2 Timothy 3 v 16)—no part of it is just “man’s bit of the conversation”. It is “flawless” (Psalm 12 v 6; Proverbs 30 v 5), contrary to Revd Chalke’s assertion. And it is written “to make us wise for salvation through faith in Christ Jesus … so that the man of God may be thoroughly equipped for every good work” (2 Timothy 3 v 15, 17)—it tells us how to be saved, and how to live as saved people. A key word there is every. There is no part of life where the Bible does not tell me how to obey God, to do the “good work” He wants of me at that point. I never need to move beyond it.

Finally, “the word of God is living and active” (Hebrews 4 v 12). These words were written to a church in the first century, referring to some words quoted from a psalm written around a millennium before that. So words written in a different time and culture, to people long dead, are still just as “alive”—because they are the words of the eternal, unchanging God. This is absolutely fundamental. The word of God says that we are to read the words of God as sufficient not just for the time they are written in, but for all time—including ours. The Bible disagrees with the view that it contains “ancient textual prohibitions”.

Now, many people don’t believe the Bible is what it says it is—God’s word, about Jesus, sufficient in every circumstance and time for telling us how to live His way. But if you do think it is God’s word, you can’t then ignore the parts of God’s word where He chooses to tell us how we are to read it.

Steve Chalke’s position sounds very humble. But it says something not particularly humble about God, and about us. It says that God is incapable of communicating words which are true throughout the future of His world—it makes God smaller than He claims to be in the Bible. And it says something not particularly humble about us. Because if what the Bible teaches is not what God actually wants to teach us now, then who discerns what God is teaching today?

We do (or rather, the “experts” do)—it makes us considerably more important than we really are.

Who decides?

Further, who’s to say which bits of the Bible are not actually true for the world today? Chalke begins his article by saying that promiscuity is “always damaging and dehumanizing”. How does he know? From Scripture? But what if actually people decide that in the 21st century, Scripture needs to be “developed”? If not from Scripture, where does he locate the source of authority which tells us that promiscuity is, indeed, still wrong? Either he will find his authority in an “expert” (a survey, a theologian, a sociologist); but they make mistakes all the time. Or in what “most people know to be true”; which is very democratic, but would mean that three hundred years ago, there was nothing wrong with slavery.

Steve says he does not have “any disregard for the Bible’s authority”. And I don’t doubt that he believes this. The issue is that, in how he has chosen to read the Bible in his way, not the Bible’s way—in other words, to impose a hermeneutic that ignores the one the Bible gives us—he is undermining the authority of the Bible in practice. Chalke is absolutely correct to say that “it is the task of all those worldwide who take the Bible’s text seriously and authoratively to grapple constantly with what it means to recognise our neighbour and to love them as we love ourselves”. But he hasn’t managed to show that he really does take the Bible’s authority as seriously as the Bible, or Jesus, itself does—and so his understanding of what it “means to recognise our neighbour” has become very different from what God’s is.

And this is the crucial point, where Steve rightly ends up. This issue is about real people, real lives, real futures. “People’s health and safety as well as their lives are at stake”. Chalke says the church is partly to blame for propping up “anti-gay stigma” which has increased suicide rates among young people experiencing homosexual attraction. He may be right, but this is an assertion, and assertions like this rarely help when dealing with emotive issues.

If the Bible is true in what God claims for it—His word, showing us His Son and how we can trust and obey Him, in every circumstance and in every age—then active homosexuality is sinful, just as anger, gossip, stealing, adultery, and so on are. All are actions which display the same heart-attitude of rebellion against God—all of them leave us needing to repent—to turn away from living in rejection of God in that area, to make Him our Lord, and to enjoy His forgiveness eternally. Repentance is how we enter His kingdom—repentance is the continuing mark of belonging to it.

Growing in love - and truth

So how do Christians love their neighbour, since that neighbour is a sinner in desperate need of forgiveness from Jesus, so they can enjoy the blessing of life with Him now and eternally? By welcoming them, helping them, seeking to be a blessing to them, and by telling the truth. The truth that their sin is sin; that it is the greatest problem they have; that God loves them despite themselves, just as He loves us despite ourselves; that forgiveness, blessing and eternity are offered through faith in Jesus.

Our churches have failed those in homosexual relationships, and those who are struggling to shape their beliefs and feelings in this area. We haven’t been loving enough; we haven’t been thoughtful enough; we haven’t been supportive enough; we haven’t been careful enough in what we’ve said, how we’ve said it; we haven’t been clear enough that these are things which can be talked about without being shunned.

The answer is to be more loving, not less truthful.

You don’t love someone by telling them that all is well when it isn’t. You don’t love someone by moving away from what God says so that they can feel better about themselves. You don’t love people by enabling them to sit in a church pew Sunday by Sunday, thinking they are right with God when they are not. You don’t love “straight” people that way, and you don’t love “gay” people that way. You love them by telling them the truth—God’s truth—that He hates sin, and will judge sinners, and yet loves us enough to offer to bear that hatred and judgment Himself, so that we can know and enjoy the only inclusion that matters—inclusion in His people, for ever.