A WordPress Blog-THE CHURCH MILITANT Ephesians 5:11-"And have no fellowship with the unfruitful works of darkness, but rather expose them". This Christian News Blog maintains a one stop resource of current news and reports of its own related to church, moral, spiritual, and related political issues, plus articles, and postings from other online discernment ministries, and media which share the aims to obey the biblical commands to shed light on and refute error, heresy, apostasy, cults, and spiritual abuse. ALL CONTENT FROM HTTPS://RATHEREXPOSETHEM.BLOGSPOT.COM MOVED TO THIS NEW BLOG, MAY 2020
In this episode of Conversations with Jeff, Mike Gendron joins the podcast to discuss his experience coming out of the Catholic Church, as well as the theology behind the false Gospel of Catholicism. It’s important to not only understand our own faith, but also the theology of religions like the Catholic Church which uses a lot of the same terminology but different definitions. Mike Gendron explains this and more!
DEMOCRAT KAMALA HARRIS QUITS PRESIDENTIAL RACE AS JOE BIDEN’S CAMPAIGN COLLAPSES
★★★ A NEW CONSERVATIVE AGE IS RISING! ★★★
Kamala Harris is done while Joe Biden’s campaign is collapsing. We’re talking a really rough time for the Democrats. Kamala Harris is dead in the water and Biden’s campaign is on life support, and it looks more and more like there’s really nothing the Democrats can do to stop it. We’re going to look at what the pundits are saying about Harris, why they believe Old Malarkey Joe is imploding, and what it means for 2020; you’re going to love this!
republished below in full unedited for informational, educational and research
purposes:
YouTube is blocking President Trump’s paid political advertisements, but the video service won’t say which YouTube policies the ads violated.
YouTube has censored hundreds of the Republican president’s ads, CBS’ 60 Minutes reported on Sunday, news that is hardly surprising given revelations that surfaced over this summer.
As The New American reported in June, Google is reworking its algorithms to help defeat Trump in 2020.
CBS Reviewed Google’s “Transparency Report.”
The revelation about the censored Trump ads came in a longer interview with YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki.
“President Trump has been advertising a lot on YouTube lately,” 60 Minutes correspondent Lesley Stahl began. “Have you taken down any of President Trump’s ads at all?”
Replied Wojcicki, “There are ads ... that were not approved to run on Google or YouTube.... They’re available in our transparency report.”
“Kind of,” Stahl continued, noting that Google does indeed archive censored ads.
We looked at President Trump’s ads. Over 300 videos were taken down, mostly over the summer. But the archive doesn’t detail what rules they violate. There’s no transparency in the transparency report. The ads typically did run for a few days before they were taken down. And Google got paid for them.
Then Stahl asked how Wojcicki and YouTube answer the charge from conservatives that the social-media behemoth — users watch a billion hours of video per day, Stahl reported — censors views from the Right.
There are lots of very successful conservatives, creators on YouTube. Our systems, our algorithms, they don’t have any concept of understanding what's a Democrat, what’s a Republican. And we do hear this criticism from all sides. We also have people who come from more liberal backgrounds who complain about discrimination. And so I think that no matter who you are, we are trying to enforce our policies in a consistent way for everybody.
Stahl did not report whether YouTube kept the money it was paid for the ads.
“Training Algorithms”
Wojcicki’s claim that YouTube isn’t censoring Trump or conservatives doesn’t comport with revelations about its parent company, Google, from two employees. They revealed that the globe-straddling leftist corporation has it in for Trump in 2020.
“They have openly stated that they think 2016 was a mistake,” Google engineer Kevin Cernekee told Fox talker Tucker Carlson in August. “They thought Trump should have lost in 2016. They really want Trump to lose in 2020. That’s their agenda. They have very biased people running every level of the company. They have quite a bit of control over the political process. That’s something we should really worry about.”
Blocking Trump’s reelection is “a major threat,” he told Carlson.
Top Google exec Jen Gennai seemed to confirm that revelation in a PV surreptitious recording.
“We all got screwed over in 2016, again it wasn’t just us, it was, the people got screwed over, the news media got screwed over, like, everybody got screwed over so we’re rapidly been like, what happened there and how do we prevent it from happening again,” Gennai said.
So “we’re also training our algorithms, like, if 2016 happened again, would we have, would the outcome be different?”
Gennai said she’s only concerned about fairness to accredited victim groups. “My definition of fairness and bias specifically talks about historically marginalized communities,” she said. “And that’s who I care about. Communities who are in power and have traditionally been in power are not who I’m solving fairness for.”
Fairness at Google, then, would not include Trump or his white voters.
Search Results
Aside from blocking Trump’s YouTube ads, Google also manipulates search results, the former employees said.
“Hillary Clinton’s emails” will not autocomplete in Google’s search window, although the e-mails were a highly searched subject.
The social-justice warriors inside Google think “Clinton’s emails [are] a conspiracy theory and it’s unfair to return results based on her emails,” the whistleblower told PV.
To its credit, YouTube did not remove President Trump’s ad detailing the Biden-Burisma influence-peddling scandal.
Facebook refused to remove the ad despite a request from the Biden campaign.
Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey banned all political ads from his platform on October 30 because he did not think “political reach” should be purchased.
On November 25th, Lighthouse Trails received a link to a YouTube documentary titled “The Stain of Albert Mohler”(1) that documents how the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) passed a resolution (Resolution 9) this past summer (2019) which adopts “Critical Race Theory” (a theory that claims to be a solution to ending racism but according to critics is actually a theory enveloped in Marxism).
The largest Protestant denomination in North America, the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC), officially adopted “critical race theory” and “intersectionality” as “analytical tools” to be used in fostering racial reconciliation in the church. These key drivers of identity politics, however, are more likely to produce racial discord and strike at Christianity itself.
Critical Race Theory (often referred to as CRT) teaches that American culture is rife with white supremacy and baked-in racism, and is used—often subconsciously—to hold women and people of color back. According to pastor and talk-show host Abraham Hamilton III, it’s the philosophy behind identity politics and comes straight out of the Marxist playbook. “[CRT] doesn’t depend on your personal feeling, sentiment, [or] heart condition—it’s based on the group that you’re born into,” [Hamilton] explained recently on American Family Radio. “It completely eliminates individual responsibility, individual sin and expands it to corporate sin. And based on how you’re born, you are immediately ascribed into an ‘oppressor’ or ‘oppressed’ group.” . . . “Jesus articulated the primary commandments: love God with your heart, soul, mind and strength, and love your neighbor as yourself,” [Hamilton] concluded. “We don’t need these anti-Christ, unbiblical tools to teach us how to love our neighbors as ourselves—the scripture is sufficient for that.”
In “The Stain of Albert Mohler” documentary, Tom Buck, a SBC pastor who contested Resolution 9 at the SBC convention in June, noted that Resolution 9 acknowledges that Critical Race Theory and Intersectionality(2) alone were insufficient to diagnose and redress the root causes of the social ills they identified. Furthermore, Buck stated:
Critical Race Theory and Intersectionality are . . . not merely insufficient, they’re incapable of diagnosing man’s problem and incompatible with the biblical Gospel. Critical Race Theory is based upon Marxism, a godless intellectual foundation, and both include a praxis contradictory to the Gospel of Jesus Christ. These views do not complement the Gospel; they completely contradict it.
In his rebuttal statements against Resolution 9, Buck quoted Colossians 2:8, then added:
When it came to worldly philosophy and human tradition, Paul did not tell the Colossians to adopt or adapt but to abandon.
One SBC pastor announced after SBC adopted Resolution 9, that his church was withdrawing from the SBC:
At the last Southern Baptist Convention, the messengers from the churches voted to include Critical Race Theory and Intersectionality as tools to help us interpret the Bible. Now if you don’t know what Critical Race Theory and Intersectionality mean, among other things, it is the notion that if you’re born white, you’re already a racist; it doesn’t matter what you feel or how you act. You’re just a racist. All of the radical liberal progressive thought is in those terms in order to appease the culture and get along. (minute mark 3:20 of video)
Abraham Hamilton III, who has a podcast on American Family Radio devoted to exposing the dangers of Critical Race Theory, explained how some of these social justice “theories” have entered the church:
The way it’s getting into the church, you have people presenting these ideas – Critical Race Theory and other things—as something that they are not. . . . They’re not adhering to the traditional definitions and applications [so they can] get the foot in the door—and then once the foot is in the door, the applications return to the original definitions.
Albert Mohler
The documentary identifies Albert Mohler (president of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary) as one of the main proponents for bringing CRT into the SBC. It first shows Mohler addressing a group from a previous time and saying:
Critical Theory(3) of the Frankfurt School, coming out of the the left-wing of Marxism in Europe, was basically, and this is what is key, was a repudiation of consensual politics. So [in] this critical theory and all that came out of this horror, Marxism emerged from the idea that democratic politics won’t work. It’s not going to get to revolution. It’s not going to get to justice; therefore, there has to be a confrontation all the way down to the foundation, and that’s the critical means, taking it apart. And so they wanted to blow up the world basically ideologically. Basically it was a matter of identifying all the structures of authority and of order in society as repressive. (minute mark 5:32)
And yet, while Mohler condemned Critical Theory in the above quote, as the documentary shows through live footage, Mohler has actually embraced CRT which is an offshoot of Critical Theory. Critical Theory and Critical Race Theory are basically “cultural Marxism.” The documentary gives this definition of cultural Marxism:
Cultural Marxism is a broad term which refers to the advocacy and application of critical theory and more generally to the cultural political and academic influence of certain elements within the contemporary Left. . . . is the creation of interdisciplinary theories that might serve as instruments of social transformation. . . . Gender, sexual orientation, family, race, culture, or religion—every aspect of a person’s identity is to be questioned; every norm or standard in society be challenged and ideally altered in order to benefit supposedly oppressed groups. . . . Cultural Marxism is such a conflict as existing between the oppressed and the oppressors, between those with privilege and those without. . . . Majority groups are typically defined as privileged and oppressive with minority groups accordingly labeled underprivileged and oppressed. Heterosexuals are oppressive. Cisgender(4) people are oppressive. Whites are oppressive, especially white men. Christians are oppressive. Those that do not fit into these groups are thus considered oppressed. If whites are oppressors, the solution is racial diversity. If Cisgender people are oppressors, the solution is to encourage transgenderism. (minute mark 9:15)
Author and pastor David Platt, who was President of the SBC International Mission Board for four years until 2018, was quoted on the documentary as well, showing his affinity with CRT. In live footage on the documentary, Platt says that basically the evangelical church is propagating racism rather than helping to diminish it. The narrator of the film refutes Platt’s statements:
Platt’s sermon is not based in biblical truth but in the ideology of Critical Race Theory of cultural Marxism. His basic presupposition is that white Christians are not only immersed in racism but are actually increasing the racial divide. He exhorts churches to repent of racism and to set up multi-ethnic communities in order to achieve racial reconciliation, but Scripture teaches otherwise. All true believers are one in Christ so there is no racial divide in the true Church of God—for black Christians and white Christians are one in Christ; they are reconciled in Christ. (minute mark 56:06)
Voddie Baucham
The documentary draws to a conclusion with a statement by Pastor Voddie Baucham about true and legitimate racial reconciliation from a sermon he gave from Ephesians 2:
He [the apostle Paul] starts off talking about what the Gentiles didn’t have, and we end up talking about what Jews and Gentiles now have because of the Cross. Built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Christ Jesus Himself, being the cornerstone in whom the whole structure being joined together grows into a holy temple in the Lord. In him you also are being built together into a dwelling place for God by the spirit. That’s racial reconciliation, and it’s not something you and I have to achieve. It’s something you and I have to believe because Christ has already achieved it. It is done. It is real. We are one in Christ. You need to be reminded of your union; you need to strengthen your union . . . same thing with racial reconciliation—we are reconciled in Christ; we don’t need to achieve racial reconciliation, we just need to walk in the racial reconciliation that Christ achieved at the Cross. It’s ours. It’s real, and I don’t need sociology books in order to walk in this reconciliation. I need God’s book in order to walk in this reconciliation. (minute mark 57:00)
Countless men, women, and children, throughout the history of man, have been hurt and ostracized, sexually and physically abused, and even murdered by those who have hated and had evil and murder in their hearts. The answer in today’s world for this is socialism, social justice, changing views on gender and sexuality, New Age thought, radical feminism, and now cultural Marxism through CRT. But these are not the answers the church should embrace. These ideologies are powerless substitutes for the only viable and true solution—and that is the Cross. And any group that claims to represent that Cross (e.g., SBC) should have nothing to do with the world’s “solutions” that will never work but rather should be proclaiming the Gospel to an unsaved, lost, and hurting world. Those who embrace Critical Race Theory (which broadens the terms racist and white supremacist to include virtually all white people) believe CRT is going to help end racial tensions and create a more loving world. On the contrary, it is going to cause animosity, suspicion, anger, and all the things that are the opposite of God’s love that is described in 1 Corinthians 13 (the love chapter). Let us remember this too: Man’s adversary, Satan, does not care about anyone of any race, color, gender, or culture. He only uses people to propagate and accomplish his horribly wicked evil plans. And his ultimate goal is to keep people from Christ and His salvation. As utterly horrible as abuse, bigotry, rape, hate, and murder are, there is something even worse, and that is to be eternally lost without Christ. Promoters of Resolution 9 say there is a “massive” racism problem within SBC. If that is truly the case, then SBC should take Abraham Hamilton’s advice and realize this is not a corporate sin (that would be saying every white SBC pastor and leader is a racist); rather, the problem lies with individuals within SBC (or within any evangelical group) who hate, belittle, or devalue those of different races; and it would be hard not to wonder if such individuals have ever truly been born of the Spirit for it is that Holy Spirit who puts the love of God in our hearts, giving us the desire and ability to love God and love our neighbor. What’s more, to view any individual as less valuable and worthy of hate or disdain because of the color of his skin is going completely against the God of the Bible who created man (of all races) in His image and who loved each person so much He gave His Son to die on the Cross that any person who believes on Him will have eternal life. Thus, if SBC does have a racist problem, then they have a salvation problem with too many of its members, and that is what should be focused on because when that problem is solved, the other will begin to be solved also.
If a man say, I love God, and hateth his brother, he is a liar: for he that loveth not his brother whom he hath seen, how can he love God whom he hath not seen? And this commandment have we from him, That he who loveth God love his brother also. (1 John 4:20-21) We know that we have passed from death unto life, because we love the brethren. He that loveth not his brother abideth in death. (1 John 3:14)
APPENDIX Having written an article about such a sensitive and important issue, we did not want to include more commentary than needed. However, there is an important observation we feel we cannot leave out, though we know some readers will not like it nor agree with it. Calvinism (in particular what old-school Calvinists call neo/emergent Calvinism) has been overtaking SBC churches and seminaries to an alarming degree. J.D. Greear, the SBC’s current president, falls in this category as do many of the men who are promoting CRT. While Calvinists and Reformed would vehemently deny that Calvinism has anything to do with the infiltration of anti-biblical Marxist-leaning beliefs, we believe there is a definite connection. Many, many, many of the young men who were mentored and trained in Calvinism by the older seasoned Calvinists to become pastors have turned emergent. How did this happen? If the foundation upon which one’s “faith” is faulty to begin with, then the building itself will too become faulty. Calvinism presents a “God” who does not love every person and who wants to send the majority of people to Hell. Very likely, it’s because of this distorted unloving and unbiblical view of God that so many young Calvinists (and some older ones too) have become emergent, and maybe that’s even why they now are so compelled to turn to socialism and Marxism for solutions.
The Lord is not slack concerning his promise, as some men count slackness; but is longsuffering to us-ward, not willing that any should perish, but that all should come to repentance. (2 Peter 3:9)
Endnotes:
Documentary produced by Dr. E.S. Williams of London Metropolitan Tabernacle. Documentary Link .
Intersectionality is the idea that there are people who have overlapping oppressed and “oppressor” social identities (e.g., someone who is poor, uneducated, and homosexual; or someone who is white, male, and educated).
CRT is an offshoot of Critical Theory according to the documentary as is social justice and feminism.
Cisgender refers to people who identify themselves with the sex/gender to which they are born.
republished below in full unedited for informational, educational and research
purposes:
According to a November 2019 posting on the Salvation Army website titled, “World Leader of The Salvation Army General Brian Peddle meets His Holiness Pope Francis,” it appears that the Salvation Army is part of the growing ranks of evangelical organizations in the race toward unity at all costs. The post from the Salvation Army site states:
GENERAL Brian Peddle and Commissioner Rosalie Peddle visited the Vatican today for conversation with His Holiness Pope Francis. During the visit, the accompanying delegation – Commissioner Betty Matear, Secretary for International Ecumenical Relations, Lieut-Colonel Massimo Tursi, Officer Commanding Italy and Greece Command and Major David Williamson, Private Secretary to the General – met with Cardinal Koch, Bishop Farrell and Father Avelino Gonzales of the Pontifical Council for the Promotion of Christian Unity. . . .
It is intended that beyond this historic visit there would be a series of meetings, which will strengthen relationships and cooperation in areas of mutual concern and service. (source: https://www.salvationarmy.org/ihq/news/inr081119)
Thirteen years ago Lighthouse Trails wrote, “Salvation Army Joins the Contemplative/Emerging Ranks.” It is the “natural” course of those organizations that go contemplative to eventually go ecumenical, of which a large part includes unifying with the Catholic Church as you can see from some of our past headlines below. All of the ministries listed below first moved into the contemplative camp and then later the ecumenical camp with the Roman Catholic Church.
Pope Francis first met with a Salvation Army General in 2014 when André Cox led the organization.
SO OPEN YOUR HOME TO GAYS 24/7? FEELING GUILTY YET?
EX-CATHOLIC LESBIAN CONVERTS TO A LIBERAL, BIBLE TWISTING HERETIC WITH A “CHRISTIAN” LOVE GOSPEL FOR THE LGBTQ COMMUNITY THAT SOME PASTORS ARE SWALLOWING, DESPITE THE AGGRESSIVE
GAY ANTI-CHRISTIAN AGENDA
SHE WANTS YOU TO TRUST YOUR FEELINGS INSTEAD OF THE WORD OF GOD
“Rosaria Champagne Butterfield (born 1962) is a writer, speaker, homemaker, and former tenured professor of English at Syracuse University. Butterfield, who earned her Ph.D. from Ohio State University in English Literature, served in the English Department and Women Studies Program at Syracuse University from 1992 to 2002. During her academic career, she published a book, as well as many scholarly articles. Her academic interest was focused on feminist theory, queer theory and 19th century British literature. She achieved tenure in 1999, the same year that she converted to Christianity.
Butterfield is more widely known today for the autobiography she published, “The Secret Thoughts of an Unlikely Convert: An English Professor’s Journey into the Christian Faith,” in which she tells about her transformation from a postmodern lesbian professor to the wife of a Reformed Presbyterian Church pastor and homeschooling mother. Following her religious conversion to Christianity, Butterfield developed a ministry to college students and frequently speaks in churches and universities about her experience. She has taught and ministered at Geneva College. She now lives in Durham, North Carolina with her husband, Kent Butterfield, and their children
She does not identify herself as “ex-gay” and does not think any Christians should identify themselves as “gay Christians.” She notes that “The job of the adjective is to change the noun.”Butterfield has criticized conversion therapy for contending that the “primary goal of Christianity is to resolve homosexuality through heterosexuality, thus failing to see that repentance and victory over sin are God’s gifts and failing to remember that sons and daughters of the King can be full members of Christ’s body and still struggle with sexual temptation.” Butterfield suggests this is a version of the prosperity gospel.”
J.D. Greear, lead pastor of The Summit Church in Durham, N.C., (now president of the Southern Baptist Convention), said Oct. 29 during the Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission’s conference, “we have to love our gay neighbor more than we love our position on sexual morality.”
Whenever one mentions the topic of homosexuality around conservative Christians, he or she is usually met with “Have you listened to Rosaria Butterfield? She is holding the line on these issues.” Not being one who relishes an argument, I often sigh inwardly to encounter these comments. I get it. I followed Butterfield as a fan for a time, have read all her books, and have listened to dozens of her lectures and interviews. Over the past few years, however, I have grown increasingly disturbed by a closer examination of what Rosaria Butterfield is actually saying, and particularly by the overt and covert messages in her most recent and highly acclaimed book, The Gospel Comes With a House Key.
Before diving into the topic at hand, let me take a moment to introduce myself and give a road map for this lengthy article. Like Rosaria Butterfield, I am Reformed, a homeschool mom, and a reader. I am simply a Bible-believing sister in the pews, concerned about a movement that I see creeping into churches stealthily and incrementally, which I have named the Same-Sex Attracted (SSA) Movement. The organizations and leaders that have pushed this paradigm-changing movement for the past 5 years are The Gospel Coalition (TGC), The ERLC and Russell Moore, Living Out, Sam Allberry, and the SBC’s JD Greear, all of which Rosaria has partnered with consistently as an integral spokesperson and writer from the movement’s beginning up until today.
In this article, I will examine Rosaria Butterfield’s core teachings on Same-Sex Attraction (SSA) and highlight the overt problematic teachings in her latest book, The Gospel Comes With a House Key. Then I will show the blasphemous queer theology and occultic teacings this book promotes subversively. Because Rosaria is a skilled, tenured professor of English, and because she repeats the same slogans, again and again, I will rely heavily on quotes in this article to let her speak for herself. It will not be short.
If you know Rosaria Butterfield, you know her conversion story, that she was a lesbian Women’s Studies professor who came to faith through the friendship of her neighbor, pastor Ken Smith. Pastor Smith and his wife Flo showed Rosaria hospitality and “accepted without affirming” her. Pastor Smith never confronted Rosaria’s lesbianism and instead enfolded her into his home and church, where she was converted to faith after a period of years. Rosaria universalizes this approach as the correct way for churches to evangelize and disciple the LGBTQ, and this is the central thrust of her message.
A commonly held misconception is that Rosaria Butterfield has a more careful theology of SSA than her friend Sam Alberry. In fact, Rosaria promotes the very concept of life-long, ‘godly’ SSA celibacy that Sam Alberry seeks to model. This TGC interview, posted at Living Out, is an excellent primer on how similar their teachings actually are.
The interview is just under 20 minutes but includes Rosaria’s key slogans that summarize her message and those of the SSA movement. There is much problematic content in this interview, more than space allows to relay, and discerning readers will want to view it in its entirety.
Born this way—“Because of the fall, we are all born some way”
Rosaria teaches that the fall means we are each born with a particular sinful inclination, and homosexuality is such an inclination. “Homosexuality is an ethical outworking of original sin. Do you know what that means? We’re born that way.”
“We are all messy”—All sins are equal (except unbelief is worse)
Rosaria Butterfield discounts the idea that any sin is more heinous than another: “We should not think of our gay and lesbian neighbors as struggling with something that is different. It is part of the human condition.”
While it is true that any sin is sufficient to merit an eternity in hell, the Bible calls some sins abominations (Lev. 18) and some affections vile (Rom. 1:26). We glorify God when we recoil from those sins according to how they are treated in his word. That is something intolerable in a mindset that believes in the sin of homophobia.
Rosaria wishes to remove the detestable factor from vile affections and instead focus exclusively on unbelief: “Don’t assume that for your gay and lesbian neighbors the worst sin in their life is homosexuality. Maybe their worst sin is unbelief; in fact, that is the higher sin.” “Homosexuality is a fruit of something else. It is symptomatic. If all you do is repent of a sin at it’s surface, it makes it worse.”
Note that at the 5:40 mark Rosaria uses large gestures to mock any believer who would be so ignorant as to harp upon the ‘surface’ sin of vile affections: “What if you are neighbors to lesbians who have been in a committed ‘marriage’ for 50 years and haven’t had sex in twenty years? (Laughter).”
She continues, “You will look like an idiot when you rebuke them for their homosexuality.” (On the subject of humor, also check out Rosaria’s glee while recounting a blasphemous statement she and her lesbian lover displayed at a gay pride march at 1:20.)
Life-long celibacy because “Reparative Therapy is the Prosperity Gospel”
Rosaria Butterfield states, “I do not believe sexual orientation changes are a gospel imperative. I’m on record for saying Reparative therapy is the prosperity gospel. Reparative therapy is a heresy… on this earth God will give one person 10 crosses to bear and another person one.“
She continues, “And I think the prosperity gospel is to say ‘No, no give your life to Jesus and all will be well’… what the gospel promises is that if God gives you a heavy cross to bear, the Lord himself will uphold the heavier part, but God forbid Christians weigh on that cross and I think that when we look at orientation change as proof of the gospel we’re actually weighing on that cross… There is a vital need for single, celibate Christians in our churches, in our families, in our world.”
Here is a question for all those who think these slogans wise: Is it the ‘prosperity gospel’ to expect converted KKK marchers to grow out of their desire to lynch? Are we weighing on the ‘cross’ of pedophiles if we expect that at some time in their sanctification they will no longer want to fondle toddlers and instead want a wife? What about those oriented to have sex with barn animals or murder their wives? Wait, what’s that you say? No, of course not, because those are heinous sins out of the norm of mature Christian experience? Abominations? Oh, just checking.
Christians have “deeply oppressed” this victim group—the LGBTQ community must disciple us on this.
Rosaria says, “The gay and lesbian community is a real community and, you know what? The Christian Church has a lot to learn… about standing with the disempowered, accompanying the suffering and being good company for the suffering.
Rosaria came to faith during the AIDS epidemic and has strong memories of “standing with the disempowered.” She says, “I often say to parents who have lost covenantal children to the gay community, ‘You will have to work very hard to love your son and daughter better than the gay community.’”
This is a point that Rosaria stresses to extreme lengths in her recent book and will be touched on more below.
Rosaria Butterfield regularly states she is against the term ‘gay Christian’ because it denotes an identity. But, taking the above points together, if SSA is something one is born with, something God does not necessarily remove for one’s entire life, is a God-given “cross to bear,” and qualifies one to membership in an oppressed “real community,” how is this not an identity, and a God-honoring one at that?
The “Ground Rules of the New Game”
So, what are the implications of this SSA doctrine? What exactly are, to use the words Rosaria used in the above interview, “The ground rules of the new game”? One of the hallmarks of Rosaria’s interviews is that her interviewer is always most curious for her advice to parents and pastors. In this 6 minute interview (also posted below) Rosaria provides her usual advice. She reminds churches that “heterosexuality is not the answer to homosexuality” and that there are people who will struggle with “all manner” of sin, maybe their entire lives.
Rosaria: “Homophobia” is a sin
As you can see in the clip above, Rosaria tells parents that if a child comes to them and says they are gay and have adopted that lifestyle they should respond “In original sin we are all born ‘that way’ whatever ‘that way’ means.”
Her advice to elders and pastors is they must “understand that homosexuality is a sin, but so is homophobia.” What about church members who are living in a gay lifestyle? These brothers and sisters are to be gently taken aside and reminded that their witness needs to be consistent with their profession.
Rosaria: Do not preach against homosexuality (which can be ‘vitriolic’), but reach them by “personalized hospitality.”
What does Rosaria Butterfield say about preaching God’s Word against abusers of themselves with mankind and vile affections? She believes the best way for us to reach our “LGBTQ neighbors” is through personalized hospitality.
She believes “the strength of our words must never exceed the strength our relationships (Housekey 55)” and that believers are often “vitriolic in the worship of God about what is right and what is wrong.”
Rosaria states, “We need to share the gospel and we need to stop adding to the gospel. And what I mean by that is we need to share the gospel of hope in Jesus, not rant about anal sex… that can be very distracting” (source).
(Elsewhere I have discussed the SSA movement’s push to remove the revolting image of male sodomy from our minds.)
But how does one preach from the Bible on this sin without mentioning sodomy? Rosaria is Reformed, yet she states that “We need to stop making moral proclamations instead of gospel invitations.”
Has she forgotten that the Holy Spirit uses the law of God to pierce stony hearts and drive desperate sinners to the cross? Has she forgotten that to the ones whom God gives regeneration the law of God is sweeter than honey? Why would she mute God’s moral law? Does she not love sinners?
Lest pastors be tempted to preach from Biblical narratives, Rosaria Butterfield frequently explains that Sodom and Gomorrah were destroyed by God not for sodomy but for their greater sins of “neglect of the poor and needy.”
In her recent book, Rosaria states that many who have crossed over to fully embrace the LGBTQ do so because they are “sick and tired of seeing their friends and family members who identify as LGBTQ made into straw men or women” or treated as “political enemies or caricatures in conversations after the sermon, or, even more horrifically, in the sermon. They wish to be an ally… they want their friends to have the same rights they do. They don’t wish to be a bigot or associate with bigots… the job of an ally is to make the cross lighter (Housekey 57).”
Rosaria Butterfield reminds us that the Bible “does not condone bigotry. It does not condone gay jokes, which are never funny.” By the way, this is a good time to recall from the above interview that Rosaria does permit and enjoy jokes against the idea of a God who judges and against Christians who rebuke vile affections. She continues, “It (the Bible) does not condone talking about people instead of listening to them. Our lack of genuine hospitality to our neighbors-all of them, including neighbors in the “LGBTQ community” is a violent form of neglect for their souls (Housekey, 57).
Rosaria: Hospitality requires following “community rules”—like “wife” for lesbian partners and “husband” for gay partners, etc.
Rosaria states that with her LGBTQ friends she treads carefully and respects the “community rules.” She is sure to “know who is mommy and who is momma” (the way a child with two lesbian parents refers differently to each one) and teaches her children to respect that distinction as well. She speaks to her neighbors with ‘respect’ asking “are you wives or partners?” (Housekey 53)
As an example of “hospitality evangelism,” Rosaria Butterfield describes a conversation with a lesbian neighbor who was crying to her because her partner finds her ugly. Rosaria’s response? “Jesus would never treat you like this. Jesus treats his daughters perfectly.” She adds, “Do I have the grace to say this little or do I always have to say all there is to say on a subject? If so, I have become a brute and a boar” (Housekey, 54).
If you have read Sam Alberry’s The Living Out Audit, all of this mandated sensitivity will have an eerily familiar ring. Because I move in circles where Rosaria’s sensitivity training holds sway, when I first read Audit, I immediately recognized it as a codification of all she has already been scolding us about for years.
Rosaria has not yet “counted as loss” (Philippians 3:8) her lesbian past. Rosaria is normalizing and glorifying what the church has for millennia considered to be an abomination and vile affections. Nowhere is this more vivid than when reading her most recent book. One rarely encounters a page that does not have a glowing endorsement of the “LGBTQ community” and a vilification of any believer who would do things differently than “the ground rules of the new game” (see the first video, linked above for source).
Sounding like Lot’s wife
Rosaria Butterfield’s The Gospel Comes With a House Key is a book about what she calls “radical hospitality.” In it, Rosaria promotes the kind of hospitality she enjoyed back in her “LGBTQ community” days. She presents this hospitality as the way for churches to evangelize and disciple our LGBTQ neighbors. Over and again she boasts of “the LGBTQ community I belonged to.”
For example, Rosaria wrote, “The idea that our houses are hospitals and incubators was something I learned in my lesbian community in New York in the 1990s. We knew that our traditional, so-called Christian neighbors despised and distrusted us and regarded us as abominations. So we set out to be the best neighbors on the block. We gathered in our people close daily, and we said to each other, ‘This house, this habitus, is a hospital and an incubator, we help each other heal… we duplicated many house keys and made sure that everyone had one. We meant what the key implied: you have access anytime (94).’”
Therefore, Rosaria Butterfield says if we want to evangelize our LGBTQ neighbors the gospel must come with a house key. Dozens of times, Rosaria repeats the mantra “Radical hospitality seeks to make strangers neighbors and neighbors the family of God.”
She also speaks of “Christian brothers and sisters who struggle with unchosen homosexual desires and longings, sensibilities and affections, temptations and capacities… some people have more to lose than others…. people who live with unanswered questions and unfulfilled life dreams” and asks, “What is your responsibility toward those brothers and sisters? The gospel must come with a house key” (95).
A defiant substitute for family
Of course, for Rosaria’s much admired “LGBTQ community”, this sort of all-access hospitality was a defiant substitute for God’s idea of family. Yet she sets this up as the Christian standard. In one interview she mentions the very real possibility of someone dying of loneliness (clip below) and urges every Christian family to devote a spare room in their house for live-in celibate LGBTQ friends as a way to help them shoulder their “cross.”
This whole message is anti-family and corresponds neatly with Sam Alberry’s “idolatry of family” message. In fact, Alberry’s presentation at the ERLC conference, The Church as the Family of God, borrowed extensively from Rosaria and was based on her book.
Rosaria Butterfield describes in detail her pattern of “checking her privilege” and having a “no-invitation,” open home 7 nights a week and all day Sunday. Strangely, she also reports holding nightly prayer meetings at her home with unsaved neighbors participating. Her book teaches that every meal for a Christian should be one of either giving or receiving hospitality and compares this to tithing (Housekey, 37). She describes “radical hospitality” as our spiritual armor allowing us access to people’s broken hearts (Housekey, 40), and mandates daily open homes for every Christian family (Housekey, 36). Where is Rosaria getting these ideas?
Not so transparent
Before moving on to answer that question, I need to pause for a minute to comment on the stark contradiction of Rosaria Butterfield’s endless applause for “the tenacious, consistent and sacrificial work of the LGBTQ community (Housekey, 94),” her invariable portrayal of lesbian monogamy, and her laments for the SSA brothers and sisters that must ‘leave all the love’ to become Christians. This is the part of the article makes me want to cry…
In the middle of Rosaria’s last book she writes of her abusive and sexually traumatic childhood, a subject far removed from her usual themes. Here she describes two alcoholic parents who kept Playgirl and Playboy in the bathroom, a domineering mother, a heroin addict brother who masturbated on the family room couch, and a beloved gay cousin who posed for Playgirl and opened a gay bar. It was this bar where Rosaria was dragged as a young girl and where she recounts seeing drag queens, sodomites in cages, and a lesbian embrace that made her experience a tingling in her whole body that “took her breath away.” She recounts “these images shocked and seduced me. I longed to recapture them, and shuddered at the possibility. I knew one thing about this place. It was dark and it was drawing me” (Housekey, 71).
Now that is the LGBTQ community hospitality at work. Who could wonder why Rosaria Butterfield grew up to be a lesbian and why oh why is this snake pit of child abuse and horrors not front and center to her message? Why does she continuously portray Sodom as a loving, nurturing, relational, place and pity those who must leave it and pine for the lost love all their days?
Furthermore, this account is not consistent with Rosaria Butterfield’s typical testimony, such as the one she gave at Ligonier, that describes “what I believed to be a completely heterosexual adolescence. In college, I met my first boyfriend and it was a heady experience. And at the same time, this strange and slightly indiscernible undercurrent of longing inserted itself in my intense friendships with women. I didn’t make much of this at first and so from the age of 22 until 28, I continued to date men. And at the same time, I felt a sense of longing and connection that simply toppled over the edges for my women friends.”
Note the relational, organic, and benign description of Rosaria’s lesbian temptations here compared to the more pornographic origins recounted above. But of course, the top story doesn’t fit so well with “we are all born some way” and “reparative therapy is the prosperity gospel.”
Concentric circles, mysticism, and the horrific list
Reading Rosaria Butterfield’s The Gospel Comes With a House Key was a disorienting ride for me, and not merely for the category confusion and the radical indoctrination. There were also regular mentions of mysticism, contemplative prayer terminology, and the use of strange mantras.
In the opening chapter of the book Rosaria states “In the morning I pray in concentric circles.” Chapter two is heavily loaded with unorthodox terminology (“The Jesus Paradox,” “The Contagion of Grace”) that swirl in circles not clearly defined. The title of the chapter is “The Jesus Paradox,” and when I did a google search I found that to be a technical term for Contemplative Prayer and Zen meditation. For details, see this contemplative prayer site run by Franciscan Priest Richard Rohr.
Rosaria writes strange lines such as, “Only in the Jesus paradox do these incongruous ideas come together (Housekey, 35),” “Jesus can set in motion a contagion of grace,” “The Jesus paradox manifests contagious grace (30),” “hospitality is image-bearer driven because Christ’s blood pumps me whole” (Housekey, 64). She also repeats the high and holy name of the second person of the trinity like a mantra in this chapter.
In chapter three Rosaria praises Henri Nouwen, “the late and gentle Catholic priest” who ran a center for disabled persons and “regarded hospitality as a spiritual movement, one that is possible only when loneliness finds its spiritual refreshment in solitude, when hostility resolves itself in hospitality, and when illusion is manifested in prayer (62).” Twice in the book, Rosaria recommends to her readers the wisdom of Henri Nouwen.
When one reads to the back of Rosaria Butterfield’s book they will encounter a list of books she recommends to her readers, and what a ghastly brew it is.
Rosaria’s reading list begins with Sam Alberry, includes John Calvin, and has contemplative gurus, occult feminists, and queer theologians sprinkled in the mix. In this list Henri Nouwen is again introduced. Henri Nouwen can also be found in Sam Alberry’s Living Out Curriculum, a curriculum that also incorporates Rosaria Butterfield’s teaching.
The Nouwen quotation displayed there is from a letter he wrote to a young gay man and reads, “Thank you so much for the expression of your desire and hope. You know already that the young, attractive, affectionate, caring, intelligent, spiritual and socially conscious gay man has only one name: God!” (Henri JM Nouwen, Love, Henri, p.346).
Blasphemy. Heresy. It’s as bad as anything at Revoice. Worse. After reading both the Nouwen book Rosaria Butterfield recommends (Reaching Out: The Three Movements of the Spiritual Life), and the book from which the above quote is drawn, the mist has lifted and I am now able to fully answer the question “Where is Rosaria getting all this?” Rosaria Butterfield’s hospitality theology, many of her themes and mantras, the framework for the entire SSA celibate queer movement as well as many of the talking points over at Living Out and Russell Moore’s ERLC SSA panels are regurgitations of that blasphemous Roman Catholic priest, Zen guru, Marxist, queer theologian, Henri Nouwen.
So who is this man?
Nouwen on homosexuality
Henri Nouwen was obsessed with loneliness due to unfulfilled homosexual longings and cravings for affection and friendship. He was thought to have perhaps “died of loneliness.” At the same time, he stated he was not ashamed of these longings as “my demons are not really demons but Angels in disguise” (Love, Henri,xv).
Nouwen was interested in helping others find a new way of thinking about sexuality that was based neither on the church, fundamentalism, conservatism, or progressivism (Love, Henri, 105). He engaged in male relationships that were intensely emotionally charged while submitting to a cross of “withholding” that “could be beautiful” (Love, Henri, 125).
At the same time, Nouwen wrote many affirming letters and enjoyed visits with married homosexual friends—gushing about the beauty of their love for each other and his love for them (Love, Henri 74, 104, 138).
Nouwen on spirituality, hospitality, and social justice
Henri Nouwen’s book on spirituality which Rosaria Butterfield recommends is an excellent road map to the pit of hell. It is full of Zen Buddhism and advice like “Delve into yourself for a deep answer (Three Movements, 363), “If we stop telling ourselves the world is such and so it will cease to be so (Three Movements, 801),” and “The mystery of spirituality is that God in us speaks to God” (Three Movements, 251). The book provides many explicit directions for utilizing mantras as a way to enter into “union with God and experience the illumination of enlightenment” (Three Movements, 96).
Nouwen was a universalist Zen master and instructor. This is the spirituality path Rosaria Butterfield recommends to the little lambs.
Fascinatingly, Nouwen also wrote extensively on hospitality. His definition of hospitality is a state of acceptance which is the “polar opposite of hostility (Three Movements, 106).” He describes, “Our vocation is to turn the enemy into a guest and to create a fee and fearless space where brotherhood and sisterhood can be fully experienced” (The Three Movements of the Spiritual Life, location 681). Does that sound familar?
Very much like Rosaria, he repeats the slogan that hospitality “renders strangers as guests…” This is the hospitality theology Rosaria Butterfield pretends to have drawn from the scriptures. It echoes the instructions of a blaspheming, Roman Catholic, Zen priest.
Marx, Freud, and the Bible
Henri Nouwen proudly kept a Bible next to Freud and Marx on his bookshelf (The Three Movements of the Spiritual Life, location 1100). Like Rosaria Butterfield, he was very involved as an advocate for AIDS victims. He was a popular speaker for youth social justice conferences, two of his favorite authors were Jim Wallis and Richard Foster, and he was a frequent contributor to Sojourners (Love Henri, 77). Who is that other Sojourners contributor who wrote the forward to Rosaria Butterfield’s latest book and has platformed her consistently since 2015? Russell Moore you say? What a very small world it is, indeed.
Mary Douglas, witchcraft scholar
Yet another dark book Rosaria Butterfield recommends in her book list is Purity and Danger, an Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo by the feminist anthropologist Mary Douglas. Here is an excerpt to summarize Douglas’ interests:
“As dirt represents power and creativity, purity stands for rigidity and lack of change. Pollution and dirt form power that can only be harnessed through rituals. Despite the rejection of dirt and pollution by most religions, primitive religions unveil that through paradox and contradiction dirt is needed as part of replacing what has been rejected, incorporating the process of renewal. The necessity of death requires both its rejection and confrontation. These practices expose a realistic approach to life by primitive cultures, who view the world in a unified way where cosmic forces preserve and maintain the social order as part of nature (source).
In the beginning of her book, Douglas relays a wonderful ceremony where a pagan tribe extracts a woman’s pus into a bowl, everyone bows down to worship said pus, then passes the bowl around for each member to drink. Douglas is famous for her unique analysis of Levitical taboos. I could maybe relay more of Mary Douglas’ work, except my conscience forbade me to read past the first chapter: “Do not turn to mediums or seek out spiritists, for you will be defiled by them. I am the LORD your God” (Lev. 19:31). Mary Douglas has written another book, Witchcraft Confessions and Accusations and a quick google search reveals she is an esteemed writer in the “occult community.”
Mary Douglas is one of only two authors in Rosaria Butterfield’s recommended book list who contributes two books. How does Rosaria Butterfield recommend this author in the body of her book?
Rosaria writes, “When I was in graduate school we all devoured Mary Douglas. Her book Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo was formative to my thinking about insiders and outsiders… Douglas’ essay ‘Deciphering a Meal was instrumental in developing the radical hospitality that knit the lesbian and gay community together…” (Housekey 33).
And later, “I think a lot about Mary Douglas these days as table fellowship is a daily way of life for me” (Housekey, 34).
How can this be?
So an author on the dark arts and a New Age mystic, gay-God priest will now disciple Christians on “radical hospitality?” These are the authors Rosaria Butterfield recommends to the little lambs with nothing but praise? And in the back of a lovely teal book that has graced every conservative catalogue, conference table, and conference circuit in the Reformed world for the past year? How can this be? If this does not qualify as setting an offense before the little ones, what does?
Here at the close of my expose on Rosaria Butterfield I must set forth a final critique so simple yet so needed. She is a woman. Does her past life as a lesbian Freudian Marxist and dabbler in the occult blind us to the obvious? She ought not to be teaching snippets of scripture to women and men. Her ideas do not start with the Bible, and yet she sounds them forth in lectures and interviews as authoritatively as if they were the very oracles of God.
It is painful to relay Rosaria Butterfield’s twisted teachings, but she must be exposed.
God, purify your church and send men unafraid to thunder your holy word from pulpits once more. Amen.
[Contributed byDiane Gaskins]
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SEE ALSO:
WAS HOMOSEXUALITY THE REASON FOR SODOM’S TOTAL DESTRUCTION BY GOD IN GENESIS?
Christians are called not just to a single instance of repentance. Rather, they’re called to repent throughout their lives, trusting Christ for life every day. Dr. Rosaria Butterfield has a unique perspective on repenting and trusting Christ. In this session, Dr. Butterfield describes her conversion, and explains her experience in following Christ in order to encourage and challenge listeners to live as a light in this dark world.
This message is from our 2015 National Conference, After Darkness, Light:
How do I tell you about my conversion to Christianity without making it seem like some alien abduction or a train wreck? Truth be told it felt a little of both. The language normally used to describe this odd miracle does not work for me. I did not read one of those tacky self-help books with a thin coating of Christian themes, examined my life against the tenets of the Bible the way one might hold up one car insurance policy against all others and cleanly and logically make a decision for Christ.
While I did make choices along the path of this journey, they never felt logical, risk-free, or even sane. Neither did I feel like some victim of an emotional earthquake and collapse gracefully into the arms of my Savior like some holy and sanctified Scarlett O’Hara having been claimed by Christ’s irresistible grace. Heretical as it might seem, Christ and Christianity seemed eminently resistible.
My Christian life unfolded as I was just living my life, my normal life. And in the normal course of life questions emerge that exceeded my secular feminist worldview. Those questions sat quietly in the crevices of my mind until I met a most unlikely friend, a Christian pastor.
Had a pastor whose name is Ken Smith not shared the gospel with me for years and years, over and over again, not in some used-car salesman way, but in an organic, and spontaneous and compassionate way. Those questions might still be lodged in the crevices of my mind and I might never yet have met the most unlikely of friends of all, Jesus Christ himself.
I had a normal childhood. Somehow I always feel like I have to start there. I was raised in the Catholic faith. I’m actually named after the rosary. And I attended predominantly liberal Catholic schools. My liberal Catholic all-girl high school discipled me in the life skills that I use today. I learned there to read deeply and well, to diagram a sentence before I even dare to interpret it, and to look out for the unloved and the unlovely, and draw them in.
I had what I believed to be a completely heterosexual adolescence. In college, I met my first boyfriend and it was a heady experience. And at the same time, this strange and slightly indiscernible undercurrent of longing inserted itself in my intense friendships with women. I didn’t make much of this at first and so from the age of 22 until 28, I continued to date men. And at the same time, feel a sense of longing and connection that simply toppled over the edges for my women friends.
The repetitious sensibility rooted and it grew. I simply preferred the company of women. But in my late 20s enhanced in part by feminist philosophy and my LGBT political advocacy, my homosocial preference morphed into homosexuality. The shift was subtle not startling. My lesbian identity and my love for my LGBT community developed in sync with my lesbian sexual practice and life finally came together for me and made sense.
Once I met my first lesbian lover, I was hooked. I studied Freud. I cheered that the DSM had long since removed homosexuality from its list of disorders, thus rendering homosexuality in the eyes of the world and the academy normal. With no prohibitions or constraints by the time I had graduated from Ohio state with my PhD in English Literature in critical theory, I left the Buckeye State with my first lesbian partner.
We moved to New York for me to begin a tenure-track position in the English Department at Syracuse University. Well, my life is a lesbian seemed normal. I actually considered it an enlightened chosen path. Lesbianism seemed like a cleaner and even a more moral sexual practice, always preferring symmetry to asymmetry, I believed I’d found my real self.
What happened to my Catholic training? I believed now that it was anti-intellectual and superstitious. The name Jesus, which had rolled off my tongue in a little girl’s prayers and then rolled off my back in college, now made me recoil in anger. As a professor of English in Women’s Studies, I tired of students who believed that knowing Jesus meant knowing little else.
Christians seemed like bad readers to me. Ironic I thought given that they believe that the Bible was the true truth. Christians use the Bible in a way that Marxists would call vulgar to end a conversation rather than to deepen it. But the most frustrating thing about Christians, for me at this time, was that they simply would not leave consenting adults alone.
I cared about morality and justice and compassion. As a 19th century scholar fervent for the worldviews of Freud, Hegel, Marx, and Darwin, I strove to stand with the disempowered. And my life was happy and meaningful and full. My next lesbian partner and I shared many vital interests, AIDS activism, children’s health and literacy, Golden Retriever rescue, our Unitarian Universalist church just to name a few.
And it was hard to argue that she and I were anything but good citizens and caregivers. We cared about feeding the poor, housing the homeless and teaching reading to the illiterate. Indeed the LGBT community that I come from values hospitality and applies it with skill, sacrifice and integrity. I honed the hospitality gifts that I use today as a pastor’s wife in my gay and lesbian community.
I began researching the religious right and their politics of hatred against people like me. Well, to do this, I began reading the Bible and looking for a Bible scholar to help me wade through this complex book. I took note that the Bible was an engaging literary display of literally every genre and type. It had edgy poetry, deep and complex philosophy and compelling narrative stories.
It also embodied a worldview that I hated: sin, repentance, Sodom and Gomorrah? Absurd! Well, at this time the Promise Keepers came to town. And they parked their little circus at the university. While, I was on a war against stupid, and so I wrote an article published in a local newspaper. It was 1997.
The article generated many rejoinders, so many that I kept a Xerox box back before the technology days — remember those Xerox boxes? Kept one on each side of my desk one for fan mail, one for hate mail. I’ve never been a fan of distraction, so you’ve got to get through your inbox quickly. But one letter that I received completely defied my filing system.
It was from Ken Smith, a pastor then of the Syracuse Reformed Presbyterian Church. It was a kind and inquiring letter. Ken did not argue with my article rather he asked me to defend the presuppositions that undergirded it. In his letter he shared his love for the Bible, his concern that college students were not reading the Bible as part of our literature curriculum.
And he described Jesus as someone who entered into history, not someone who emerged from it. I thought that was insane. I believe that people proceed from history and are shaped for good or for ill by the culture that molds them. I did not know how to respond to this letter, so I threw it away.
And later that night I fished it out of the departments’ recycling bin and I put it back in my desk where it stared at me for a week, confronting me with the worldview divide that demanded a response. As a Postmodern intellectual, I operated from a historical materialist worldview. But Christianity is a supernatural one.
And I realized that if I was going to understand how this book, the Bible, got so many people off track and how this man Jesus persuaded so many people to follow him, Ken’s letter showed me that I needed to understand Christianity from a supernatural point of view, as a supernatural idea.
Well, at this point in my life, the category of the supernatural was exclusively reserved for Stephen King novels, who was a big donor to the English Department so, I became quite good at those. With the letter, Ken initiated two years of bringing the church to me, a heathen. Oh, I had seen my share of Bible verses on placards at Gay Pride Marches.
The Christians who mocked me at Gay Pride Day were happy that I and every one I loved is going to hell was as clear as the sky is blue. But Ken’s letter did not mock, it engaged. And so when he invited me to his home for dinner to discuss these matters more fully, I accepted. You see, my motifs at the time were perfectly clear. Surely, this would be good for my research but something else happened.
Ken and his wife, Floy, and I became friends. They entered my world. They met my friends. We did book exchanges. We talked openly about sexuality and politics. And they did not act as if such conversations were polluting them. They did not treat me like a blank slate.
When we ate together, Ken prayed in a way that I had never heard before. His prayers were intimate, vulnerable. He repented of his sin in front of me. He thanked God for all things. Ken’s God was holy and firm and yet full of mercy. And at their first meal in their home, Ken and Floy also omitted two important steps in the rule book of how Christians should deal with a heathen like me. Number one, they did not share the gospel with me. And number two, they did not invite me to church.
So it made me wonder if I was chopped liver or something. I mean, I knew what they’re supposed to do. But because of these omissions to the Christian rule book as I had come to know it, I felt that when Ken extended his hand to me in friendship, it was safe to close mine in his. You see, I was not Ken’s project. I was Ken’s neighbor. This wasn’t friendship evangelism.
This had the beginnings of friendship. I started meeting with Ken and Floy regularly, reading the Bible in earnest with pen in hand and notebook in lap. At the time, I met a man in the church who had also had a long history of sexual sin much like my own, but who had become a follower of this God-man, Jesus. He also encouraged me to dig deeply into the Bib
le. So I simply started to read the Bible the way that I was trained to read a book. Examining it’s textual authority, authorship, canonicity, internal hermeneutics. I read the way a glutton devours. And slowly and overtime the Bible started to take on a life and a meaning that startled me. Some of my well-worn paradigms no longer stuck.
And I had to at least ponder the hermeneutical claim that this book was different than all the others because it was inspired by a holy God and inherently true and trustworthy. Well, this led me to go through the presuppositional truth claims just to check my sanity here in this moment. And the logic claims go like this.
Number one, if this book was written by men who were inspired by the Holy Spirit, then its admonitions about sin were not applied cultural phobia. Indeed, prior to reading the Bible for myself, I believe that the whole category of sin was merely applied cultural phobia. And, but if God is good then his goodness is unrestrained by time and it anticipates and guards against the ill-treatment of people.
I noticed as I read the Bible that its admonitions about sin were often followed by offers of grace. And that struck me as odd. You mean the God of the Bible deals differently with people when people deal differently with Him? And number two, if God is the creator of all things and if the Bible has his seal of truth and power then the Bible has the right to interrogate me in my life, not the other way around.
You see even as a Postmodern reader, I understood the idea that authority could only depend upon that which was higher than itself. Who is higher than God? I wondered. My friends knew I was reading the Bible and, this was a bit of a concern. First the dean of the chapel took me out to lunch and shared his belief that the Old Testament was completely dispensable and, with it, any prohibition about sexuality or immorality.
But I had been reading and studying the three different narratives of the Old Testament. The ceremonial law, the judicial law, and the moral law. And it seemed to me that you couldn’t really dispense with the entire old testament without violating a universal rule about canonicity, no creating canons within canons.
In fact, I had just gone over this rule in my graduate seminar in Queer Theory that week, and it’s a universal rule. And it made me wonder if the chapel dean ought not sit in my graduate class, and, you know. The chapel dean’s position seemed like a hermeneutic of convenience conforming the text to my experience and not a hermeneutic of integrity where the text gets the chance to fulfill its mission.
You see, even a Postmodern reader-response critic, like the person I used to be, knows that each text has a kind of internal mission. The internal mission of the Bible is to transform the nature of humanity. Any heathen knows that, that’s why it’s so scary. So even non-believers, of course, know that this is a dangerous text.
And I was puzzled that the chapel dean seemed to have such little understanding of the book that he had studied longer than I did. Next, at dinner gathering that my partner and I were hosting, my transgendered friend Jay cornered me in the kitchen. She put a large hand over mine and said, “Rosaria this Bible reading is changing you.” I felt exposed. She was right. I said, “But what if it’s true?”
“What if Jesus is a real and risen Lord?” “What if we are all in trouble?” Jay exhaled deeply and sat down on the chair across from mine, her eyes looked wise and sad and she said, “Rosaria, I was a Presbyterian minister for 15 years, I prayed that the Lord would change me but he didn’t, if you want, I will pray that he will heal you.” Well, this encounter gave me secret tacit permission to keep reading the Bible.
After all, my dear friend Jay had also read it cover to cover many times and routed around in it for life purpose and help. But the bomb she dropped also enraged me. Who is this Jesus, who heals some, but not others? No peace and social justice activist want some unequal opportunity god.
The next day when I returned home from work, I found two large milk crates spilling over with theological books, Jay’s books from seminary. She was giving them to me. In Calvin’s Institutes, in Jay’s handwriting was a warning: “Watch Romans 1.” Oh, you laugh. I didn’t laugh. Romans 1:21 through 27, “For even though they knew God they did not honor Him as God or give thanks but they became futile in their speculations and their foolish heart was darkened.”
“Professing to be wise, they became fools and exchanged the glory of the incorruptible God for an image in the form of corruptible man, and of birds, and of four-footed animals and crawling creatures. Therefore God gave them over in the lusts of their hearts to impurity so that their bodies would be dishonored among them.”
“For they exchanged the truth of God for a lie and worshiped and served the creature rather than the creator. For this reason, God gave them over to degrading passions, for their women exchanged the natural function for that which is unnatural.” I found the verb clauses here to be particularly arresting.
“Did not honor God, did not give thanks, engaged in futile speculations, became fools, exchanged the incorruptible for the corruptible”; God gives us over our lusts, and when we look at the world through our lusts, we dishonor our bodies and worship the world. This verse seemed to provide a haunting literary echo to Genesis 3, where Eve’s desire to live independently of God’s authority made perfect sense to me.
If I were Eve I would have done the same thing. And at the same time the seemingly innocent sin, intriguingly to me at this time attributed to Adam because of headship, served as the leverage for the whole world to come tumbling down fierce and fast, bloody and brilliant. The two verses (one in Genesis and one in Romans) stood out as bookends of my life, not just my life that’s the rub.
If the Bible is, as its internal testimony purports, an eternal frame relevant and responding to the needs of all of humanity, then Genesis 3 and Romans 1 stood out as the table of contents of what ails the world. Indeed Romans 1 does not end by highlighting homosexuality as the worst and most extreme example of the sin of failing to give God the glory for creating us.
Here is where this passage finds its crescendo. “Being filled with all unrighteousness, wickedness, greed, evil, full of envy, murder, strife, deceit, malice, they are gossips, slanderers, haters of God, insolent, arrogant, boastful, inventors of evil, disobedient to parents without understanding, untrustworthy, unloving, unmerciful. And although they know the ordinance of God, that those who practice such things are worthy of death, they not only do the same but also give hearty approval to those who practice them.”
You see this last line grabbed me by the throat. He told me that if we cannot receive a blessing from God, we will demand acceptance from man. And as the faculty advisor to many LGBT student groups on campus, this got my attention.
But I also took note of the theological diagnosis. Homosexuality in the Bible is not the endpoint of the problem, not for God or for the world. Homosexuality is not the unpardonable sin nor is it the worst of all sins, at least not to God, but it is presented here as one step in the journey. Homosexuality then seemed consequential not causal.
Homosexuality from God’s point of view is this, an identity routed, ethical outworking of original sin. And therefore it seems solidly biblical to say that some people are born this way, because truth be told we’re all born this way, distorted by sin in one way or another.
By failing though to rigorously relinquish my identity to God’s story and failing to understand that the fall rendered even my deepest and most primal feelings untrustworthy and untrue, I had added to my ledger of original sin by creating for myself a category of personhood that God did not. Well, I had taught, studied, read and lived a totally different notion of homosexuality. And for the first time in my life I wondered if I was wrong.
This stopped me in my track. You see, somehow it was easier to hate the Bible and keep reading it when it squared off against me. But now that it was getting under my skin it became a foe of a different and a more menacing kind. So I did the only natural thing. I tried to toss the Bible and its teachings in the trash, I really tried.
But Ken was my friend at this point, and he encouraged me to keep reading, and only because I trusted him did I do this. As I read and re-read the Bible, I kept catching my wings in its daily embrace. I was fighting the idea that the Bible is inspired and inerrant that is that its meaning and purpose has a holy and supernatural authority that has protected it over the years of its canonicity and that it was the repository of truth.
How could a smart cookie like me embrace such things? I didn’t even believe in truth. I was a Postmodernist. I believed in truth claims. I believed that the reader constructed the text, that a text’s meaning found its power only in the reader’s interpretation of it. Without the reader, a book is just paper and glue I told my students over and over again.
How could this one book lay claim to a birthright and a progeny totally different from all the others? That this book was supernatural, was becoming more and more evident to me and my hermeneutical bag of tricks had no system of containment for it. As I was reading and discussing these things with Ken, he pointed out to me that Jesus is the Word made flesh and that knowing Jesus demands embracing the Jesus of the whole Bible not the Jesus of my imagination.
Not the Jesus that would get whatever leftovers my flesh would permit. And after years and years of this something happened. The Bible got to be bigger inside me than I. It overflowed into my world. And then one Sunday morning, two years after I first met Ken and Floy and two years after I started reading the Bible for my research, I left the bed I shared with my lesbian partner and an hour later I showed up in a pew at the Syracuse Reformed Presbyterian Church.
I say this not to be lured, but to remind us that we never know the treacherous journey that some people take to share the pew with us Lord’s Day after Lord’s Day. Conspicuous of my appearance, I reminded myself that I came there to meet God, not to fit in. The first sermon that I heard Ken preach was intended for children and I was greatly relieved.
I thought this is just my speed. Ken started to talk about the narrow gate and the wide gate and made some big deal about some silly prop that was in his pocket that some kid was going to get later — I never got that part. Actually, I did not get most of the sermon. I didn’t. My mind kept wondering to last year’s Gay Pride March of all places to go, right? In church.
Wide as it was with people just like me. And that made me wonder why does my mind keep travelling to the wide path. I kept going back to church to hear more sermons. I had made friendships with people in the church by this time and I had really appreciated the way that they talked about the sermons throughout the week, how the Word of God dwelt in them, and how they referenced it in the details of their days.
You should know that English professors even radical tenured Postmodern ones simply love cross texting. It was just so exciting to me that people are actually quoting a book and making sense of it in the context of something else. But it also made me very worried for these people. You see, I wondered cross-referencing the Bible with your life? You see that places you inside God’s story, inside God’s ontology. Is this safe? Is this deadly?
I pondered these matters. Ken at this time was preaching through the gospel of Mathew with its totally bewildering cast of characters and problems. Unsuspecting folks separated unto the gospel, seeds choked by the world, feeding thousands with some poor and nameless kid’s bread and fish.
I always felt so sorry for that kid. And then Jesus’ cutting question to impetuous Peter, “Do you still lack understanding?” Well, one Lord’s Day, Pastor Ken just stopped right there, left the podium, came out, turned to steel blue eyes on us and said, “Congregation, did Christ ever say this to you?” Well, this startled me because this had been my question. This question was for me.
I had read the Bible seven times through at this time. I had been studying this for two years. Do I still lack understanding? And I wondered, who is speaking here? That old man behind the pulpit or the God-man behind the foundation of the world? You see there was something about the hermeneutic of preaching that disarmed me. And truth be told it still does.
The image the crashed like waves in a raging sea of me and everyone I loved suffering in hell, vomited into my consciousness and gripped me in its teeth, not because we called ourselves gay but because we are proud. We wanted to be autonomous. We rejected the Bible’s interpretive authority over our sexuality, our sexual identity and our sexual practice. It was our hearts and our minds first.
Our bodies followed and I heard it finally. I counted the costs and I did not like the Math. This was my crucible and this is my crucible. You see, if the Bible is true I was dead and if the Bible is false I am simply the biggest fool on earth. But God’s promises rolled in like another round of waves into my world. And one Lord’s Day, Ken was preaching on John 7:17.
“If anyone wills to do God’s will, he shall know concerning the doctrine.” This verse exposed the quick sand in which my feet were stuck. I was a thinker. I was paid to read books and write about them. And I expected that in all areas of my life understanding came before obedience not the other way around. I wanted God to show me on my terms why homosexuality was a sin.
I wanted to be the judge not the one being judged. Perhaps I thought like Eve in the garden, I wanted to eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil so that I could become and replace God. And I wondered, hadn’t I already done this, hadn’t we all? If my consciousness fell in Adam’s sin, as the Bible purports, no wonder I couldn’t think my way out of this quandary. This wasn’t a game of thinking and matching of wits.
Could I echo God’s call for obedience? That was the question. Could I will to do God’s will just this once? The stakes were so very high because they always are. But the verse promised understanding after obedience and I wrestled with the question, did I really want to understand homosexuality from God’s point of view? Or did I just want to argue with him?
I prayed that night that God will give me the willingness to obey before I understood. Starting with my own sexuality was too scary. It was too impossible. So I’d started with Jesus. I prayed that God would be pleased to reveal his Son in me. I prayed that I would be a vessel of Jesus. And then I moved to gender.
I don’t know why but I had a driving somewhat oxymoronic desire to make biblical sense of my place in this world as a woman defined and covered by God. And so I prayed that night that God would make me a godly woman and then I laughed out loud at the insanity of this prayer. I prayed that God would give me the faith to repent of my sin at its root.
And what is the root of my sin? I wondered. You see I did not then and I don’t now think that homosexuality was the root of my sin. According to the Bible, homosexuality is a fruit of a larger issue. It is an ethical outworking of a state of mind, the practical outworking of original sin. Perhaps because I was an old Marxist at heart, the concept that ideas have a material force always seemed quite on target to me.
But it left me pondering, could original sin be for real? I mean I’d heard about this my whole life, but, is it for real? And could it really distort me like this? Is what I love a reflection of the real me? Or is it a distortion of it? How does one repent of a sin that doesn’t feel like sin at all but rather not bothering another soul kind of life?
How had I come to this place? What is the root of the sin of sexual identity? Is it the sex or the identity or both? I was a jumble of emotions, but I prayed that the Lord would help me to see my life from his point of view. I just prayed that he would give me eyes to see. And the next morning when I woke up and I looked in the mirror, I looked exactly the same.
But when I looked in the mirror of the Bible I wondered, am I a lesbian or am I an atheist, am I the master of my own destiny, am I exempt from blame because what I do and what I do in bed is self-contained and does not affect anyone but my lover, or has this all been a case of mistaken identity?
If Jesus could split the world, asunder, divide the soul and the spirit, judge the thoughts and attentions of the heart, could he make my true identity prevail? Who am I? Who will God have me to be? You see I still felt like a lesbian in body and heart, that was, I felt my real identity. But what is my true identity?
You see the Bible makes clear that the real and the true have a troubled relationship on the side of eternity. For many people in the Bible their true identity and calling comes only after a long struggle with God, with wilderness, and with dreams and hopes and plans. The Bible makes clear that my future and my calling will always echo an attribute of God, obedience constrains.
What is bigger? I wondered. My lesbian identity or God’s authority over me? Who is this Jesus? Did I know Him? Did I still lack understanding? Could I trust him? And then one ordinary day I came to Jesus. There are no altar calls in Reformed Presbyterian Church, so no fanfare or manipulation. The guy whose back of the head had stared at for years, you know, gets a haircut every five weeks.
He had no idea. We were singing from Psalm 119, line 56. “This is mine because forever all Thy precepts I preserve.” After saying these words I checked them in the Bible just to make sure the Psalter didn’t have some wacky misprint in it. And the Bible used a helping verb and noted the verse like this: this has become mine. Something about that helping verb really bothered me.
Two weight bearing walls seemed to collapse in my mind. The first wall came crashing down because I had just sang condemnation onto myself and I was actually in tune enough with the Holy Spirit to feel his convicting rebuke. You see the Bible was not mine. I have scorned it, and cursed it, and despised it and I was studying it so that I could tell you to do the same. But I had been reading and re-reading this book.
And the use of the helping verb here ‘has’, and ‘has become’ really got to me. See, two years of laborious reading embodies the helping verb ‘has’; it shows process, journey, pilgrimage and danger. But I was not in Christ and therefore I could not possibly keep these precepts, God’s law not in word or heart-change or deed. And here was the shattering of the second wall.
I had read the Bible many times through and I actually saw for myself that it had a holy author. No matter what I was saying to everybody else at the time. I saw for myself that it was a canonized collection of 66 books with a unified biblical revelation. I heard for myself that when the words, this is mine, came out of my mouth in congregational singing, I was attesting to this one simple truth.
That the line of communication that God establishes for his people required this wresting with Scripture and that I really and truly wanted to hear God’s voice breathed into my life and I wanted God to hear my pleas. The fog burned away. The whole Bible, each jot and tittle was an open highway to a holy God. My hands let go of the wheel of self-invention. I came to Jesus alone open handed and naked.
I had no dignity upon which to stand. As an advocate for peace and social justice, I thought I was on the side of kindness, integrity, and care. It was a crushing revelation to discover it. It was Jesus I had been persecuting the whole time, not just some historical figure named Jesus, but my Jesus, my prophet, my priest, my king, my Savior, my Redeemer, my friend, that Jesus.
In this war of worldviews, Ken and Floy were there. The church who had been praying for me for years was there. Jesus triumphed and I was a broken mess. I lost everything but the dog. And he was a nice dog and you would have liked him. Of course, there’s only one thing to do when you meet the living God. You must fall on your face and repent of your sins.
And I could only think of one sin from which I dared repent at that point in time, and that was pride. My life was filled with pride, really 10 years of gay pride post, of Gay Pride Marchers. I had pride posters, pride t-shirts, pride coffee mugs, I had a rainbow flag, my dog drunk out of a pride doggie bowl. You know, sometimes the marketing of morality can just really slap you upside the head, even if you’re an old Marxist.
So I repented of my pride. The pride that led me to believe that I could invent my own rules for faith and life and sexual autonomy. The pride that said I was entitled to live separately from God. The pride that led me to believe that self-worth was self-invented. Repentance is bitter sweet business. Repentance is not just a conversion exercise. Repentance is the daily and hourly posture of the Christian.
Repentance is our daily fruit, our hourly washing, our minute by minute wake up call, our reminder of God’s creation, Jesus’ blood and the Holy Spirit’s convention — comfort. Repentance is the only no shame solution to a renewed Christian conscience because it proves only the obvious: that God was right all along. Conversion was a train wreck. I did not want to lose everything that I had to gain Christ, but I had to.
Softly the voice of God sang a sanguine love song into the rubble of my world. I weakly believed that if Jesus could conquer death then he could make my world right. I drank from the means of grace that God provides: Bible reading, prayer, Psalm singing, fellowship of the saints, and then later church membership and the Lord supper. I took respite in private peace and then Christian community.
And eventually God placed me in a covenant family as a wife and a mother, and a teacher and a writer. And God has blessed me richly. God radically changed me from the heart. And the proof of conversion is a heart changed by Jesus. We do not look to ourselves to see if we measure up. We do not use our personal feelings as some kind of proof of gospel life. We do not look to ourselves because we don’t measure up. That’s the point.
Jesus measures up for us. What about homosexuality? Did I ever get some private special email from the Holy Spirit as to exactly why it’s a sin? Did I ever feel that unnaturalness that Romans 1 outlines, or as someone recently asked me, “Rosaria when did the yuck factor about homosexual sex finally hit you up upside the head?” This should be a warning that you asked me those questions you’ll end up in a book.
Well, that’s not quite what happened. The sinfulness of sin unfolded for me in the authority of the Bible alone. And the growing sweetness of my union with Christ and in the sanctification that this births. At a certain point in my life, I knew that I had to turn the wheel over to God a little like an Alzheimer’s patient, who in a flashing moment of mental lucidity signs over his rights to an able-minded caregiver.
A believer signs over rights of interpretation to the God of the Bible. I learned in that crucible no matter how I felt in my body or my heart, that it was not right to love or cherish anything that God calls sin. Psalm 66:18 put it this way. “If I’d cherished iniquity in my heart, the Lord would not have listened.” And the verb that I really noted there was cherished.
I mean at this point of life, I, you know, of course — when I first came to Christ I broke up with a girlfriend. It wasn’t about what I was doing in bed but my heart was not in this. My heart was not in this Christian life, because I cherished my sin. And this verse told me that when we cherish sin, we are separated from a holy God. This verse told me that when I defended my right to a particular sin, I’m cherishing it.
Isaiah 59:1-2 declares this. “Behold, the Lord’s hand is not shortened, that it cannot save, or his ear dull, that it cannot hear, but your iniquities have made a separation between you and your God.” When we cherish sin, we build a wall between us and our maker. We are deceived to believe that sin is not sin. We call God a liar and we use our personal feelings as proof.
All our personal feelings prove is that original sin and the deceptiveness of sin are inseparable. As 1 John 1:10 puts it, “If we say we have not sinned, we make him a liar and his word is not in us.” Indeed I came to believe that no matter how I felt at this time, homosexuality is a sin, but it seemed powerfully important to me that so too was homophobia.
And homophobia from the perspective of a Christian is this, the fear and loathing of people who identify as LGBT and the wholesale writing off of their souls. But that still left the question unanswered. Well, what is the sin of homosexuality, the feeling, the practice? Where’s the line that divides between desire and lust. This is what I came to understand.
Homosociality a comfort level deep and abiding, for keeping company, exclusively with people of your own gender is not a sin, neither is it by the way, gay. But once that comfort level shifts to lust, you’re sinning. So yes depending on what we do with them, feelings may be sinful even feelings that seemed to leave consenting adults alone.
To God, what makes the feeling safe is not consent between people but submission to the Word. The question though is this, what should we do with all of this? What was I going to do with all of this? For me I discovered that the root of my lesbianism was pride. I did not want any man to have any authority over me or my body and that is the sin of pride.
For others the root of homosexuality may be sexual addiction or lust. And some sins are harder to battle than others. But for God when we call sin sin and repent of it, we honor God’s authority. So for those in this room who do struggle with unwanted homosexual desires this is a hard and a heavy cross to bear. And I get it.
I also know, though, that if you are in Christ, Jesus will carry the heavier part of this burden. But please, to the Christians who do not struggle with gay or lesbian temptations, please do not add unbearable weight to this burden by thinking that the sin of homosexual practice and identity is somehow bigger or different than all the others or even that its solution is heterosexuality.
The solution to all sin is Christ’s atoning blood. In Christ we are new creatures. In Christ we have a new will, heart and affections for God’s Word and his will. We are redeemed men and women who have been buried with Christ through baptism into death. Romans 6:4, “We are no longer slaves to the sin that once defined us,” although it likely still knows our names and addresses.
So what does a person like me do with her past? Well, I have not forgotten the flowing contours of my past. Body memories still know my name. Details intrude into my world somewhat unpredictably, when I’m home schooling my children or even kneading the communion bread that I make every week. And I take every ancient token to the cross for prayer, for more repentance, and for thanksgiving that God is always right about matters of sin and grace.
I think about what it means to live within the story of the Bible how repentance is a fruit of my new life in Christ. Paul’s question in Romans 6:21 is one I ask myself daily. What fruit did you have then in the things of which you are now ashamed? The layer of my life in Christ always unfolds in this double directional way, praying for sins of the past, repenting for sins of the past that the Lord is bringing to mind, and repenting about sins of today.
And I’ve come to understand that this is part of what it means to have a soul that will last forever. God saved me but he didn’t lobotomized me. In this entire process, I learned that repentance is the threshold to God. If you love your neighbors, you would never deny them this threshold. Repentance is, as Thomas Watson says, “It makes way for the solid comfort that can follow.”
And he quotes from there in Psalm 126 line 5, “They that so in tears shall reap in joy.” Thank you very much.
