The Living Instance (3 of 7)

The women's ordination argument proves the opposite of what it is deployed to prove. That debate — a real one, conducted for a century — is an argument between people who share the same view of Scripture's authority. The egalitarian case is built from texts: Deborah judging Israel, the daughters prophesying in Acts 2, Phoebe the deacon and Junia in Romans 16, women praying and prophesying in the assembly in 1 Corinthians 11. Whatever one concludes, both sides are doing exegesis of a canon that contains genuine material on both sides, and both submit to the Text as the authority that settles it. The sexuality question has no counter-texts. There is no passage that blesses the practice; every passage that speaks of it, speaks one way; and the marriage structure of male and female runs unbroken from Genesis 2 to the wedding feast of Revelation 19. The most honest affirming scholars concede exactly this. Luke Timothy Johnson — a serious New Testament scholar who holds the affirming position — has written openly that the biblical texts say what the church has always understood them to say, and that his position rests not on a better reading of them but on granting the authority of contemporary experience the standing to overrule them. Respect his honesty, because it clarifies the whole dispute: the argument is not about what the Text says. It is about whether the Text rules. And that is not a hermeneutical debate. That is the oldest question in the garden.

The divorce argument is true, and the traditionalist church should say so without flinching. A generation before this war, large portions of the evangelical world went quiet on Jesus' words about divorce and remarriage, accommodated the culture's practice, and stopped exercising any discipline about it. That was the buffet, operated by the same churches now holding the line on sexuality. The inconsistency is real, it forfeited credibility, and it is fair for the affirming side to name it. But an earlier failure to submit to the Text is not an argument for a second one. It is an argument for repentance, and repentance runs backward as well as forward. The church that recovers Jesus' seriousness about divorce has answered the charge. The church that answers it by abandoning the second teaching too has simply widened the buffet.

The trajectory argument — that Scripture points beyond itself along a redemptive arc the church must follow past the page — fails at one question it cannot answer: by what instrument is the arc's destination discerned? The answer, every time it is honestly examined, is the interpreter's own culture. And the arc, by remarkable coincidence, always lands exactly where the interpreter's culture already stands. That is not a hermeneutic. That is a mirror. Scripture does contain movement — but the movement Jesus models on marriage runs toward the creation ordinance, not away from it. A trajectory method that must overrule the only trajectory Jesus Himself drew on this subject has left the Text entirely, whatever vocabulary it retains.

The appeal to the Spirit doing a new thing fails the Spirit's own job description. Jesus said of the Spirit of truth: "He will not speak on His own authority, but will speak whatever He hears... He will glorify me" (John 16:13–14). The Spirit does not freelance. He does not contradict the Word He inspired, and a new thing that reverses the Text fails the oldest test in the canon — Deuteronomy 13, where even the prophet whose signs come true is to be rejected if he leads away from what God has commanded. Luther fought this exact move against the enthusiasts of his own day, who invoked the Spirit against the Scriptures: the Reformation's answer was that the Spirit speaks in and through the Word, never over its dead body. A church that claims the Spirit against the Text has not heard a new word. It has stopped testing the spirits, which is itself a command (1 John 4:1) — from the same apostle whose Gospel this book keeps returning to.

And Acts 15, the favorite precedent, proves the opposite of what it is cited for. James does not overrule Scripture at the Jerusalem Council. He grounds the Gentile decision in Scripture, quoting Amos: the prophets had already said the nations would be gathered. The council read the Text and found the welcome inside it. And the same council, in the same letter, retained exactly four requirements for the incoming Gentiles — and one of them is abstention from porneia, sexual immorality as Scripture defines it (Acts 15:20). The council cited as the model for revising the sexual ethic is the council that reaffirmed it while opening the door.

The flattened word.

Underneath every argument in this chapter sits one more word, and it is not a word about sex. It is the word believe — and it has been flattened in modern English to something the New Testament never meant by it.

Ask what the flattened version sounds like. To believe, in the modern church's working vocabulary, is to assent — to agree that certain statements are true, to have prayed the prayer, to hold the membership. Under that definition, believing and living are two separate compartments, and a person can believe fully while holding any practice indefinitely, because the believing happened once, in the mind, and the living happens elsewhere. That definition is the load-bearing wall of the revision. It is what allows "I believe in Jesus" and "I will keep what He named as sin" to sit in the same sentence without collision.

Now look at the word John actually used. The Gospel of John — the Gospel this whole book is built on — never once uses the noun faith. Not one time. The verb pisteuō appears close to a hundred times, and only the verb, because in John believing is never a possession a person holds. It is an act a person is doing, or is not doing, right now. And John's characteristic construction is pisteuō eis — to believe into — an entrusting of the self into a Person, the way weight is entrusted to a bridge. That is why John can write a sentence like this:

"The one who believes in the Son has eternal life. The one who rejects the Son will not see life, but God's wrath remains on him." — John 3:36 (NET)

Look closely at the second half. The Greek word behind rejects is apeitheō — literally, the one who disobeys. John sets believing and obeying as parallel opposites in a single verse, because in his vocabulary they are the same motion viewed from two sides. The entrusting that is real produces following, the way the sheep in John 10:27 hear the voice, are known, and follow — one unbroken sequence. Jesus pressed the same point as a question that has never stopped being uncomfortable:

"Why do you call Me 'Lord, Lord,' and don't do what I tell you?" — Luke 6:46 (NET)

And John, in his letter, removed the remaining ambiguity:

"Now by this we know that we have come to know God: if we keep His commandments. The one who says 'I have come to know God' and yet does not keep His commandments is a liar, and the truth is not in such a person." — 1 John 2:3–4 (NET)