By Bob Allen
A Southern Baptist seminary president says American Christianity lacks credibility to confront same-sex marriage because of its own failure to model marital fidelity and life-long commitment in churches.
Albert Mohler
|
“We have to understand that where we have fallen short of biblical fidelity on marriage, we have no credibility to say that we’re going to address marriage now because some kind of fire break has appeared,” Albert Mohler, president of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, said in an interview at the recent Together for the Gospel Conference in Louisville, Ky.
“We have been very slippery on all kinds of issues in terms of accountability in marriage and about marriage,” Mohler said in audio posted on the Together for the Gospel website. “It’s going to take a comprehensive recovery of the Christian church’s conviction that marriage is a gospel issue, a biblical issue, an ecclesiological issue, a church discipline issue, a human flourishing issue.”
With one American in six now living in a jurisdiction where gay marriage is legal, Mohler said sooner or later the issue will affect every single local church.
“We’re going to have very significant specific challenges such as what do we do with people who show up and think they are married and we don’t think they are married?” Mohler said. “What happens when someone presents themselves not only for say membership but for admission to a Christian college or to a seminary or for employment at a Christian school? What rights do Christian churches and Christian denominations and organizations have to say, ‘No, we can’t recognize that as marriage?’”
Mohler said congregations with lax membership standards will especially get a wake-up call. “People who say ‘we don’t really need church discipline,’ well a lot of people are going to be convinced to the contrary in short order.”
Mohler said churches have erred by viewing sexual sin as a problem for people “out there” while failing to acknowledge that in their own power everybody’s sexuality is “broken” in some way, and by responding to homosexuality with ridicule and scorn rather than biblically.
“I’ve gotten in a little bit of trouble for people deliberately misconstruing my words, but I’m going to repeat them again,” Mohler said. “We are guilty of our own form of homophobia. We are guilty of our own form of ridiculing rather than acting with redemption.”
“We have written books of which the evangelical movement needs to repent,” Mohler said. “We have preached sermons which should be an embarrassment to us. We should recognize that one of the responsibilities of a gospel people is to speak accurately and truthfully.”
Mohler said Christians “sin against people who are struggling with same-sex attraction” when they tell them, “You just chose this.”
“Well, they know good-and-well they didn’t choose this,” he said. “The problem is this is how they’ve come to know themselves. Do we tell them that’s because of Genesis 3, or do we tell them it’s just because that’s who they are and they need to celebrate it?”
Mohler said churches must adopt a “biblical worldview” that says, “We’re the people who cannot act as if sin is not sin, but also we’re not the people who can act as if sin is somebody else’s problem.”