The Living Instance (6 of 7)

Second, for the traditionalist side. Rome's practice carries the same wound as the traditionalist Protestant mirror, at global scale and across decades. The abuse crisis was the officer standard selectively applied — the communion that could not bless a union shielded predators in the lampstand, moved them, silenced the wounded, and protected the institution, on every continent, as a matter of documented record. Correct doctrine did not produce protected children.

So the Catholic examination lands exactly where every examination in this book lands: the doctrine held without poverty of spirit did not produce the knowing, and the failure of the officers was never a failure of the Text. It was the failure of men holding a true Text with proud hands — the one failure equally available to every communion in this chapter, and to the reader holding this page.

Taught to look away.

One more mechanism must be named, because it explains how entire congregations arrived at the vote sincerely believing the historic reading was obsolete. Chapter Two described the buffet — the believer loading the plate with confirming verses and walking past the rest, while the algorithm surrounds him with agreement. In the denominations that changed their teaching, the buffet operated from the pulpit, for a generation, before any vote was taken. A congregation can sit under a decade of preaching and never once hear Romans 1 preached through to Romans 2:1, or 1 Corinthians 5 preached at all, or Matthew 19 preached as if Jesus meant it. The texts are not argued against. They are simply never served. And texts that are never served become foreign objects — so that when they are finally quoted, in the season of the vote, they sound like the intrusion, and the reclassification sounds like home. That is formation by omission. The congregation was not persuaded out of the historic reading. It was trained, plate by plate, into never having held it.

And here the decision leaves the denomination and lands where it was always going to land: in the heart of the individual believer, coram Deo — before the face of God, where no General Synod, no General Conference, and no presbytery vote can stand in for you. A believer who treats God's word like the Golden Corral — eating only where he chooses, passing over every text that would cost him something — has not actually submitted to an authority at all. He has made himself the authority over the menu, and at the end of that buffet line there is a mirror, not a throne. It does not matter which direction the plate is loaded from. The progressive who walks past Romans 1 and the traditionalist who walks past Romans 2:1, the one who skips 1 Corinthians 5 and the one who skips its last two verses — same line, same mirror. Poverty of spirit receives the whole counsel of God with open hands, including the texts that fall heaviest on the reader's own appetites, or it is not poverty of spirit. There is no third option, and there never was.

The persons in the frame.

None of this chapter is finally about votes and denominations, because the Text is not finally about votes and denominations. It is about persons, and two of them must be seen before this chapter can close.

The first is the believer who carries this temptation and has surrendered it. They exist, in numbers the shouting on both sides makes invisible — Christians who experience same-sex attraction and hold the full historic teaching, at a personal cost in loneliness that most married Christians have never been asked to imagine, bringing the desire to the cross daily and abiding. They are the living proof against both camps' favorite claims. Against the affirming claim that the Text cannot be lived: they are living it. Against the traditionalist reflex that the temptation itself defiles: they are the poverty of spirit this book keeps naming, practiced at a depth most of their critics have not been tested at. The affirming side calls them self-hating. The traditionalist side eyes them with suspicion. Both sides are wrong about them, and some of you once lived this way, but you were washed is written across their lives in the present tense. The distinction that governs everything in this chapter is the one between the struggler and the enthroner — between the person bringing the battle to the Vine and the person crowning the desire and demanding the church bless the coronation. Collapse that distinction toward permissiveness and you lose the Text. Collapse it toward suspicion and you lose the sons and daughters. The church has spent forty years collapsing it in both directions.

The second is the teenager sitting in a youth group tonight who has told no one. What he has mostly heard from the church, if he attends the traditionalist kind, is that people like him are the enemy in a war — and he has quietly concluded that the church and Christ are the same thing and that both are closed to him. What he will hear from the affirming kind is that there is no battle at all — which is its own abandonment, because it hands him a blessing in place of the washing. What he has almost never heard from either is the actual gospel of 1 Corinthians 6:11: named honestly, loved entirely, washed completely, welcomed into the same daily war against the flesh that every disciple at that table is fighting on some front. Whether he ever comes to the knowing of John 17:3 may turn on whether one church in front of him can hold the Text and hold him at the same time. Most have managed only one at a time. That is the grief of this chapter, and it is the same grief as the whole book's.

And grief extends one place further, where the traditionalist reader may not want it to go: to the gay pastors themselves. Many of them were baptized, catechized, confirmed, and ordained by the very denominations that now present their ordination as courage — formed from childhood by churches that had already stopped serving the whole counsel a generation before they arrived. They were failed by shepherds long before they became shepherds. That does not change what the Text says about the office. It changes what the reader is permitted to feel while saying it. Christ prayed for them in John 17 the same night He prayed for you.

Pruned for fruit: compassion that does not endorse.

The assignment the church keeps failing in both directions was never a paradox waiting for a committee. It was performed once, perfectly, in a single scene, and recorded by the apostle this book keeps returning to. A woman is dragged before Jesus in the temple courts, caught in adultery, the law quoted at her, the stones already in hand. He stoops, He writes, the accusers leave oldest first, and then the only one present with the right to throw a stone says the whole assignment in one sentence:

"I do not condemn you either. Go, and from now on do not sin any more." — John 8:11 (NET)