The bottom line is about identity.  Are we fundamentally people who are still to be known by our past habits?  Or are we fundamentally persons who are joined to the Messiah of Israel and by that union are freed from slavery to those habits? The Bishops are right.  Christ has set us free from slavery to our sinful habits.  To call ourselves by those habits is to denigrate what the Messiah has done.  And who we are.

It is easy to be led astray theologically when trying to be pastoral.

You could say that was the mistake that the Episcopal Church made.  Starting in the 1970s its leaders said that in order to heal the hurts of the same-sex attracted (SSA) we must let them live out their sexual desires.  Later, that meant marriage for gays.

It didn’t matter, for TEC, that the plain sense of Scripture and the whole Christian tradition were against these moves.  Scripture makes plain that “from the beginning God made them male and female” (Matt 19.4) and the emerging catholic tradition taught that SSA is “disordered.”

But TEC leaders were convinced that certain new findings of the social sciences—contradicting a previous consensus in the social sciences—showed that the biblical authors and Church tradition were benighted.  If only they knew what was now being revealed about human nature, they would see that the SSA were made that way by God and thus deserved the same sexual freedom that heterosexuals supposedly enjoyed.

This was an appropriate pastoral response, TEC said, because it is our calling as Christian ministers of the gospel to bring compassion to those in pain.

Now some ACNA Anglicans are making a similar argument.  Not the same argument, for they do not endorse gay marriage, or even sexual relations for the same-sex attracted.  But they say that their fundamental identity is in being “gay Christians,” not just “Christians.” 

They wish the ACNA would recognize their pain and accept their identity as “gay Anglicans,” not just “Anglicans.”  To accept their self-designation as “gay Anglicans” would be the “pastoral” thing to do.  It would acknowledge the pain they have experienced from “destructive reparative/conversion therapies” that allegedly promised elimination of same-sex desire.

Read More