Homosexuality is not only “sinful,” but, as Paul says in Romans 1:26, it is “unnatural.” It is not “unnatural” just because most people don’t understand it or don’t identify as homosexuals. It is unnatural because it is out of order with the physical cosmos as God made it. It is thus both a rejection of the natural world and of God himself, who is both moral judge and intelligent Creator of all things. The Revoice Conference, which provoked the calling of the Study Committee, raised a number of important issues, but, as part of the church, claiming essential orthodoxy, it reveals an appalling lack of Creational theology for expounding the biblical teaching on sexuality.

The Ad Interim Committee Report on Sexuality for the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church in America set itself two tasks: a “pastoral task” and an “apologetic task.” Overall, we must thank the committee for its rich pastoral discussion of marriage as reflecting Christ’s love for the church; in its wise treatment of issues of terminology and identity; and in its careful analysis of the doctrine of concupiscence. In “apologetic task,” however, it fails to present any serious theological discussion of sexuality in the light of the biblical doctrine of Creation, which incidentally, was also the weakness in the Baptistic Nashville Statement on Sexuality—which I nevertheless gladly signed—centering as it did with a virtually exclusive appeal to the Gospel.

To be fair to the study committee, creation was mentioned a few times (pp. 4, 6, 26 and 27), essentially via biblical references, but, alas, without any serious exposition. Without a significant description of creational biblical apologetics there is a great danger of making this important subject for the church depend almost entirely on the logic of soteriology, which causes this deeply human question to become a very inner-focused ecclesiastical conversation in which we talk only to one another. It hardly helps us as we talk to non-believers, for surely the culture is watching us and listening to us to see if we have something crucial to say to all God’s creatures using all that God says on this important subject.

Our silence in this area could be seen as defeatist or as a fearful withdrawal from engagement with unbelievers on the one volatile subject (LGBT+ issues) that daily overwhelms the news media and leads many institutions, both legal and cultural, to deny Christian citizens the right to free speech and to responsible action. Our silence could be judged as a desire to avoid harmful criticism or serious opposition. Whatever our motivations, we cannot be silent! Can we not make a case for divinely created human sexuality in a culture that still claims in its Pledge of Allegiance to be “one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all,” in its motto, “In God we trust,” and in its Declaration of Independence speaks of “inalienable rights” given to all humans by their Creator—rights that our government is obliged to protect?

These political documents invite us as Christian believers to defend the biblical doctrine of the divine creation of humanity as male and female in God’s image, which is the first touchstone of the Bible’s apologetic regarding sex. The Gospel, though inherent in the Old Testament creational narrative comes to flower in the ultimate revelation and expression of Jesus Christ.

Should an unbeliever who does not know the Gospel be left in ignorance by a church that only speaks to itself in Gospel terms about the beauty of sex? Does not the unbeliever need to know the truth regarding the blessing of his/her created sexual being and the positive implications of that for living via common grace even in this fallen world? Can this truth of God the loving Creator eventually bring the unbeliever to an embrace of God the Redeemer? At the very least, seeing the evidence for God the Creator, “clearly perceived, …in the things that have been made,” including in the “natural” sexuality of the human person (Rom 1:26), will indeed remove any excuse (Rom. 1:20), and make known the essence of sin.  What is more, could that understanding eventually bring that person to “worship and serve…the Creator, who is blessed forever!” (Rom 1:25)? Meeting the divine Creator, who is the essence of otherness and of the ontological binary between the Creator and the creation, could then bring a person to see the Creator reflected in the otherness of the male/female distinction and in the sexual binary, made in the image of God, and ultimately revealed in the otherness-love of Christ for the church.

Without the creation, the Gospel makes no sense. Christ who loves the Church is the Creator of all things (Col 1:16), including marriage (Gen 2:24, Matt 19:4, Eph 5:32). Herman Bavinck, in 1899, affirmed this succinctly: “Creation as a work of God is not inferior to recreation: nature is not a lower order than grace; …the creation is absolutely no more the work of the Son than the Father.”^[1]

The biblical view of sexuality is firmly grounded in the Bible’s cosmology—what I call Twoism. God structured the cosmos on a principle of distinctions within unity, reflecting the very nature of the Trinity. The Bible presents a heterocosmology, not a homocosmology—a created universe based on “otherness,” not “sameness.” That primary “otherness” is between God and his creation. Within the creation there are many distinctions that witness to that ultimate distinction – between animals and humans, for example, and (supremely) between male and female persons. This cosmic fact is true for everyone.

In that sense, the Bible’s view of sexuality is not motivated by small-mindedness, unloving moralism, discrimination, violence, and bullying, as its critics claim. Biblical sexuality comes from a theistic understanding of the universe, deeply rooted in the being of God Himself, which is the ground zero of existence. We are made in his image, male and female, to reflect his image of unity in distinctions, as ultimately expressed in the Trinity. Homosexuality is not only “sinful,” but, as Paul says in Romans 1:26, it is “unnatural.” It is not “unnatural” just because most people don’t understand it or don’t identify as homosexuals. It is unnatural because it is out of order with the physical cosmos as God made it. It is thus both a rejection of the natural world and of God himself, who is both moral judge and intelligent Creator of all things.

The Revoice Conference, which provoked the calling of the Study Committee, raised a number of important issues, but, as part of the church, claiming essential orthodoxy, it reveals an appalling lack of Creational theology for expounding the biblical teaching on sexuality. Greg Coles, who has been given an influential role in the Christian world, by leading the worship at Revoice and by publishing his book Single, Gay and Christian with the well-respected Intervarsity press. Yet Coles fails to see the fundamental importance of the Bibles binary distinctions between Creator and creature, male and female. He says he doesn’t know if he is in favor of same-sex marriage and states: “I’ve never been fluent in the language of binaries.”^[2] With this lack of “fluency,” he creates his own account of creation:

My orientation before the Fall was meant to be a gift…within God’s flawless original design there might have been eunuchs…What if God dreamed homosexuality for me, wove it into the fabric of my being as he knit me together, … I believe that God could have possibly said over me, as he did over all creation, “It is good.”^[3]

How can IVP publish this? Are they, as the author they took on, ignorant of the fact that paganism throughout time and space has used homosexuals as shamans? Why?  Because paganism mixes male and female sexuality just as pagan religions mix the human and the divine.^[4] Pagan religions believe in one way or another that the divine is within us, part of us. These animistic shamans express the fact that the divine is not a distinct other, like the God of the Bible. Christian liberalism makes the same move. For instance, Fr. Richard Rohr, the Buddhist-“Christian” guru who believes homosexuals are non-binary, thus believes that homosexuals express perfectly his own pagan spirituality.^[5]

This failure to see the pagan religious significance of homosexuality in overturning the doctrine of creation, means the Revoice founder, Nate Collins, naively encourages Christians to affirm the reality of the gay community as a suffering minority, and that “Christian” gays like him feel a strong rapport with the larger gay community. He fails to see how gay ideology as a pagan theology is taking over Western culture, as it did in ancient times. That ideology is already seeking to muzzle the church from speak truth about both sex and the Gospel.^[6] Al Mohler warns us that the “horrifying new challenges” in the constant redefinitions of what is normative sexuality “seek to destroy any semblance of our creational identity.”^[7]

Scott Lively, a long-time Christian warrior in the vast international debate regading homosexuality, makes this stunning warning:

The Cultural Marxists have… stolen and repurposed formerly benign words like “gay” and biblical symbols like the rainbow,…while “Conservative” leaders have failed miserably at training our people to recognize the elements and assumptions of “sexual orientation” theory and how they are distinct from the truths of hard science and natural law,…shaping a new mainstream consensus on sexual matters that rejects the natural order in favor of their artificial reality. It is Orwell’s nightmare becoming “reality”: government-enforced groupthink through culture-wide psychological manipulation and control of the language we use.”^[8]

This is a timely warning of which our church people, young and old, need to be aware. We need all the help we can get, especially a strong apologetic based on the whole counsel of God, to the glory of God both Creator and Redeemer.

Dr. Peter Jones is scholar in residence at Westminster Seminary California and associate pastor at New Life Presbyterian Church in Escondido, Calif. He is director of truthXchange, a communications center aimed at equipping the Christian community to recognize and effectively respond to the rise of paganism.  This article is used with permission.

^[1] Herman Bavinck, In The Beginning: Foundations of Creation Theology (Baker Books, 1999, orig 1899), 44.

^[2] Greg Coles, Single, Gay and Christian (IVP Books, 2017), 105.

^[3] Ibid., 4, 6–7. I cite this in my article on Revoice, “Sliding into Heresy”— https://truthxchange.com/2018/08/revoice-sliding-into-heresy

^[4] https://www.academia.edu/19702703/Androgyny_The_Pagan_Sexual_Ideal_Peter_Jones_

^[5] https://www.newwaysministry.org/2017/11/13/fr-richard-rohr-sexuality-gender-identity-christ/

^[6] https://truthxchange.com/2018/08/slouching-to-ancient-rome/

^[7] Al Mohler, The Gathering Storm: Secularism, Culture and the Church (Nelson Books, 2020), 115.

^[8] https://www.wnd.com/2019/12/tragedy-gay-adoption/