The Living Instance (1 of 7)

Sexuality, Ordination, and the Church This chapter stands on its own, and the reader deserves to know why before it begins. The twenty cases of Chapter Three examined man-made frameworks laid on top of Scripture and defended as Scripture. What this chapter examines is different in kind and larger in consequence: the fracture of the reader's own generation, the question that has split more churches in the past twenty years than every other case in this book combined, and the one place where the pattern this book diagnoses is running in both directions at once — a tradition of revision on one side, a tradition of contempt on the other, and the Text standing where it has always stood between them. This book will not hide the question in a paragraph, because the churches have been hiding it in a thousand ways for a generation, and the hiding is part of what this chapter has to name.

The fracture.

Over the past two decades, the question of homosexuality — and specifically the ordination of practicing gay clergy and the church solemnization of same-sex marriage — has fractured the historic Protestant denominations of America at a scale nothing else in this book approaches.

The numbers are not in dispute. Between 2019 and the end of 2023, more than 7,600 congregations left the United Methodist Church — one in four of its American churches — in the largest American denominational schism since the Civil War, with the Global Methodist Church forming in 2022 to receive many of them. The Presbyterian Church (USA) opened ordination to practicing gay clergy in 2011 and redefined marriage in its constitution soon after; hundreds of congregations departed to the Evangelical Presbyterian Church and to a new denomination, ECO, formed in 2012 for the exodus, and the PCUSA's membership now stands at roughly a third of its peak. The Reformed Church in America — the oldest Protestant denomination in North America, worshiping since New Amsterdam — reached the same impasse in 2021 and adopted a plan of separation; dozens of congregations left on New Year's Day 2022 to form the Alliance of Reformed Churches, with more following. Before all of these, the Episcopal Church's 2003 consecration of a partnered gay bishop set off the Anglican realignment, and with it years of property litigation between Christians in secular courts — brothers suing brothers over buildings, before unbelieving judges, which is not a gray area. Paul addressed exactly that in 1 Corinthians 6:1–8 and called it a total defeat before the case is even heard. The watching world watched all of it.

This instance must be handled differently than the twenty cases, and the reason must be stated plainly. Every case in Chapter Three examined a man-made framework laid on top of Scripture — Ussher's arithmetic, Darby's chart, Parham's classroom conclusion. The historic Christian teaching on marriage and sexuality is not that. It is in the Text. This book spent pages earlier insisting that Mark 10 and Matthew 19 are marriage passages, not cosmology passages — that Young Earth Creationism imports into them something they are not offering. The same standard now binds in the other direction. A marriage passage cannot be forbidden from saying what it says about marriage.

"Have you not read that from the beginning the Creator made them male and female, and said, 'For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and will be united with his wife, and the two will become one flesh'? So they are no longer two, but one flesh. Therefore what God has joined together, let no one separate." — Matthew 19:4–6 (NET)

Jesus, asked about marriage, reaches back to the creation order: male and female, one flesh, joined by God. And Paul, writing to Corinth, names the practice in a vice list — and then says something the church on both sides of this war keeps forgetting to finish reading:

"Do you not know that the unrighteous will not inherit the kingdom of God? Do not be deceived! The sexually immoral, idolaters, adulterers, passive homosexual partners, practicing homosexuals, thieves, the greedy, drunkards, the verbally abusive, and swindlers will not inherit the kingdom of God. Some of you once lived this way. But you were washed, you were sanctified, you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and by the Spirit of our God." — 1 Corinthians 6:9–11 (NET)

Some of you once lived this way. But you were washed. There were people in the Corinthian congregation who had come out of this practice — and out of greed, and out of drunkenness, and out of verbal abuse, all named in the same sentence — and they were sitting in the assembly, washed. The verse names the sin and the verse names the rescue, and any use of the verse that keeps one half and drops the other is the buffet again.

What the Scriptures actually say.

Before the arguments for revision can be weighed, the reader has to see what is actually on the pages being revised — spelled out, in order, without flinching — because in many congregations these texts have not been read aloud in years, and a person cannot honestly surrender or honestly defend what they have never been shown. What follows is the inventory of the texts most often called obsolete. Read them and decide whether obsolete is the right word for any of them.

Begin where the Text begins, because the Bible's teaching on this subject does not start with a prohibition. It starts with a design.

"God created humankind in His own image, in the image of God He created them, male and female He created them. God blessed them and said to them, 'Be fruitful and multiply!'" — Genesis 1:27–28 (NET)

"That is why a man leaves his father and mother and unites with his wife, and they become a new family." — Genesis 2:24 (NET)

Male and female, in the image of God, joined into one flesh, blessed toward fruitfulness — a new family. The order is not arbitrary and it is not incidental packaging. The union of husband and wife is the one human institution built before the Fall, and it is the delivery system God appointed for carrying life and the knowing of Him to the next generation — the parents teaching the children diligently, at home and on the road, lying down and rising up (Deuteronomy 6:6–7). That is why this question is not a private matter of individual liberty, whatever the surrounding culture concludes. The redefinition of the union is the dismantling of the carrier. What is destroyed is not an abstraction called traditional values. It is God's stated design for how the knowing crosses generations. Every prohibition that follows in Scripture is downstream of that design and protective of it.

Now Sodom, because a specific rereading of Genesis 19 has been widely taught and the reader deserves to see it examined rather than asserted. The claim is that Sodom's sin was inhospitality — the violent abuse of strangers — and not the sexual practice at all. The prooftext offered is Ezekiel 16:49: pride, excess of food, prosperous ease, neglect of the poor. Those words are in the verse, and they are convicting — Sodom's sin catalog indicts comfortable churches of every kind. But the citation stops one verse short. Here is the passage with its next sentence attached:

"‘See here – this was the iniquity of your sister Sodom: She and her daughters had majesty, abundance of food, and enjoyed carefree ease, but they did not help the poor and needy. They were haughty and practiced abominable deeds before Me. Therefore when I saw it I removed them." — Ezekiel 16:49–50 (NET)