As we noted earlier in the week, the subject of gay marriage is back in the news. Last time, I discussed the subject of homosexual marriage as an assault on the principles of religious liberty, and how I don’t believe this is a battle we will win politically. We must however, be aware of the nature of what homosexual marriage is really about – it is about exercising economic pressure to force Christians to capitulate to the decay of our culture.

But why are they seeking to use force and compulsion? Ultimately it is because they have failed to do so on the basis of persuasion and so gay marriage has been tied to the misguided utopian ideals so many are embracing in America today.

So why have they failed to make the argument? The answer is quite simple, the entire basis of their argument is that Christians should simply reject the Bible’s teaching on homosexuality – after all, why listen to God when the liberal establishment is clearly wiser and more intelligent? What does God’s opinion have to do with our lives anyway?

The other major argument raised is the use of questionable scientific studies to claim homosexuals are born this way – in most cases on very dubious research. The weakness in this approach is that, even if a scientific proximate cause could be demonstrated (and I do not believe one has been – to date the theories suggested are either refuted by twin studies since to prove biological causation would need a correlation well over 90% and no study even comes close, or the theory is based on excessive use of conjecture), to accept that homosexuality is morally acceptable would require the assumption that man is basically good. It would require us to abandon not only the belief that the Bible is the final authority of the faith, and therefore of Christian morality, but also the central doctrine that man is basically evil, whether the preferred terminology is original sin, total depravity, the old man or the sin nature, Scripture is plain – man is born corrupt.

If it could ever actually be demonstrated that biology actually determines sexual orientation (or that it is a factor at all) at best, from a Christian perspective, it would merely mean that we would accept that there is a biological component to the imputation of sin.

To be clear then, what should it take for Christians to abandon the Christian position on gay marriage? While most Christians will be appalled at the question, this is in line with my previous discussion about what it would take to abandon the Christian faith itself, which, in fact be one of the two legitimate arguments that could be made: as noted if one wants to persuade me that Christianity is untrue, that evolution is true, or that there is no God they must simply find the body.

The other possibility would to prove that the Bible does not in fact teach that homosexuality is sinful. This has been tried, but all such attempts are failures, either because they ignore the context of the passages or they try to compare the Koine Greek to obscure Attic references in Plato and other writers – this would be like my demonstrating that computers were simply calculators based on the way the verb “to compute” was used by Francis Bacon. The reason why these interpretations are reject is because, in fact, the reasoning is poor.  A basic discussion of the Bible’s teachings on this subject are available in sermon form.

In all cases, then, Christians have no basis for abandoning the Bible’s teachings on this subject.