Identity and Obedience in Revoice 2021
I fear that rather than establishing a faithful path for Christians, Revoice is precipitating a grievous division in the American church. They do this first by grounding their reading of the Scriptures in secular ideology, second by insisting the disagreements about identity are purely semantic, and third by claiming to uphold a biblical sexual ethic while at the same time embracing those who reject this ethic, calling them Christian brothers and sisters.
Revoice 2021 Together met in October 2021 in Dallas to encourage what they call “sexual minorities” within the church to obedience, to reach out evangelistically to LGBTQ people, and to minister to “sexual majority” Christians. The conference featured Eve Tushnet, Preston Sprinkle, Greg Johnson, Misty Irons, Greg Coles, and many other speakers, as well as panels on gender minorities, racial minorities, and women. With an emphasis on community support (reflected in the theme “together”), the speakers called the gathered assembly to be obedient to a biblical sexual ethic, as well as acknowledging the pain that the church has caused to those who identify as LGBTQ.
Revoice 2021 positions itself in the theological mainstream, as if the controversies surrounding the conference and movement are purely semantic. The wider evangelical church, for example, by policing the language of people who identify as LGBTQ, are said to erect artificial barriers for entrance into the kingdom of God, akin to those of New Testament era Judaizers. Revoice, as a movement, is prepared to forgive and reach out to those in the church who are complicit in this grave sin, but the church should repent and move on from these kinds of debates for the sake of mission and the witness of the gospel.
Rather than a purely semantic disagreement over whether or not to use the word “gay,” the language applied to self-hood and identity by Revoice points to underlying philosophical and theological assumptions that Christians should identify themselves by sexual behavior and inclinations, grounding this identification in a secular gender ideology rather than the Scriptures. Furthermore, by framing the semantic issues as Side A and Side B — referring often to “Side A brothers and sisters” — they make the question of sexuality, both behavior and identity, to be adiaphora, a non-essential issue that Christians are free to disagree about. Rather than a “slippery slope,” both the ideology and language that Revoice is embracing will eventually take them over a spiritual cliff.
“The Gospel is for men as they are and as they think they are,” writes John Taylor in The Primal Vision: Christian Presence amid African Religion. He wrote in the middle of the last century, half a world away from the debates and controversies surrounding Revoice — an “annual gathering for Christians who are sexual minorities” seeking to “flourish in historic Christian traditions.” Taylor asks, “What has the Christian, present in such a world, to share or to learn about the self?” He posits one answer to that question — which is ours as well — with a line by Dr. J. H. Oldham: “The individual self has no independent existence which gives it the power to enter into relationships with other selves. Only through living intercourse with other selves can it become a self at all.” As if to take up that very work, Revoice’s 2021 theme was “Together.” That word encompasses, for them, the extraordinary communion they share because of their various sexual identities. Though they cannot engage in the actions associated with those identities — sex — experiencing sexual identity provides a deeper and richer sense of what it means to be human in relationship to other people. Their LGBTQ posture toward the world offers a baptism of affirmation to those of every sexual orientation.
With calls to be fabulous, to worship and adore Christ, but overall to be obedient, the speakers at Revoice, though at times defensive in their articulation of frustration and pain, positioned themselves as the new theological mainstream. Rather than continuing a protracted and contentious argument with critical voices in the church, they see themselves both as forging a way forward that reaches out evangelically to a world soaked in LGBTQ assumptions, and as uniquely called to minister to a too long ascendant Christian sexual majority culture.
I was by turns heartened and troubled as I watched the Revoice21 Together conference, the fourth conference since its founding in 2018. To stand publicly for sexual fidelity in celibacy and marriage and to proclaim the universal need for repentant belief in the gospel in a decadent time such as this is, to understate it, courageous. And, from that exposed and isolated position, especially when considering the grief represented in a room full of people who also feel rejected by other Christians, it is understandable that the leaders and speakers of Revoice would say that purely semantic matters of identity are settled. Continued disputes threaten to destroy the witness and mission of the whole church.
Nevertheless, I fear that rather than establishing a faithful path for Christians, Revoice is precipitating a grievous division in the American church. They do this first by grounding their reading of the Scriptures in secular ideology, second by insisting the disagreements about identity are purely semantic, and third by claiming to uphold a biblical sexual ethic while at the same time embracing those who reject this ethic, calling them Christian brothers and sisters.
If Revoice were to listen, however painfully, to what their critics are trying to say, it might be possible for the fissures to be mended and unity in the church to be restored. However, from the murky theological and philosophical assumptions articulated by many speakers, as well as the repeated reference to people who call themselves “Side A Christians” (people who believe that God has created and blessed monogamous homosexual relationships) as “our Side A brothers and sisters,” I fear it will not be so.
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Remembering to Believe
As the psalmist remembers the details of the Exodus, his own troubled soul is calmed and the storm of questions raging inside his mind is quelled. He remembers the power and glory of God and is assured that God is greater than his troubles and worries. He remembers God’s faithful love and is able to find peace knowing that neither wind, nor wave, nor enemy army, nor human weakness, nor anything else in all creation can separate us from the love of God.
The Book of Psalms is, among other things, an instruction book for how to speak to God. The psalms give us just the right words to speak when we are at a loss for words, or when we are stuck in the common rut of repetitive prayers. But even more than allowing us to borrow God’s own language, they demonstrate the appropriate way to approach God in prayer.
This is especially helpful in those moments in life when we struggle to make sense of what God is doing. Moments such as when our present affliction and uncertainties about the future don’t align with what we know God has promised in the past. Or moments that require far more than the trite phrases and overworn cliches we so often hear. “God is good, all the time” is most definitely true, but that can ring hollow in the dark valleys of life and leave us grasping for words that truly express what we are feeling.
Psalm 77 is one of those honest psalms that refuses to settle for easy answers to complex questions. The psalmist opens his song by expressing his desperation and bringing it before the Lord. He knows that when the soul is tormented and no comfort is to be found, the only place to go, the only One to turn to, is God.
The psalmist is so troubled that he cannot speak.
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The Shattering of Evangelicalism
Must Christians renounce political and cultural power in order not to lose sight of the fact that heaven is their true home? Many evangelical leaders believe so. C.S. Lewis, in Mere Christianity, recognized that it is entirely the other way round: “It is since Christians have largely ceased to think of the other world that they have become so ineffective in this.”
Last week we took a look at the debates over whether the elites in charge of evangelical colleges, seminaries, and other institutions, in their desire to gain a hearing in the world, have compromised key Christian convictions in the process.
This week we dive into a related topic making the rounds, the current fracturing of the evangelical world. Peter Wehner, a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, wrote a much cited article in the Atlantic entitled “The Evangelical World is Breaking Apart” in which he contends that the evangelical churches are fracturing because they have become politicized and tribal “repositories of grievances.” David French (unsurprisingly) agrees.
Wehner and French’s contention can be boiled down to this: Christians who are politically active, more often than not, have exchanged Christian faithfulness for the resentful rage that defines the contemporary political scene.
A slightly different angle is found in Collin Hansen’s recent article about the final Together For the Gospel conference, to be held in 2022, where he laments the fact that “many pastors find more in common with even unbelievers who share their political and cultural assumptions than with believers who affirm the same doctrine.”
Unlike Wehner and French, Hansen doesn’t throw every politically right-leaning Christian under the bus, but he is also troubled by the same basic dynamic: those who would strongly insist that evangelicals should adhere to certain cultural and political priorities. Russell Moore shares Hansen’s concern, although he places those he criticizes in the category of heretics.
Wehner, French, and the myriad other writers churning out slightly different forms of the same basic claim, of course, always have only one group of evangelicals in mind: those on the right. While they may throw in a brief comment here or there about how this is a bipartisan issue, they never really examine left-leaning evangelicals at all. When Wehner mentions a pastor who has recently resigned his pulpit and left the ministry altogether because “he felt undermined by people in his congregation…who, it turned out, were less animated by spiritual matters than by political agendas” you know he isn’t talking about supporters of President Biden. Trump and evangelicals who support him are the problem. They are the ones who angrily denounce, ridicule, persecute, slander, and hound pastors from their pulpits. Crickets regarding those on the left.
One of the main ways this comes out is the anecdotes and quotes these authors choose to highlight. There will be a lengthy litany of abuses coming from those on the right, with an equally lengthy recounting of how mistreated and abused those are who righteously stand apart from politics, simply feeding God’s people with the unadulterated truths of Scripture. No doubt such mistreatment does occur. It should be opposed. But the selectivity of these authors is not accidental. It builds up a one-sided picture meant to send shivers of revulsion down the spine of any decent human being: “That kind of evangelicals, they are the problem. They have made an idol of politics. They must be stopped.” The recent special on CBS is a particularly egregious example of this kind of intentional selectivity. Those who, it is claimed, are politically neutral, are always carefully portrayed as being above the fray, their hands unsullied by worldly affairs. Instead, such pastors and leaders—so we are told—simply want to show us how the gospel shapes our understanding of race, gender relations, immigration, and more. Nothing political in that, right?
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The Shadowy Nature of the Theocracy
Written by Nicholas T. Batzig |
Tuesday, November 22, 2022
Those who have been swept up with various forms of theonomy (or Christian Nationalism) should reflect deeply on the redemptive-historical role of the Old Covenant civil law as well as on how the Apostles spiritually applied it to the New Covenant church.With a burgeoning interest in the idea of Christian Nationalism, the Christian Church in America has seen a renewed interest in modified versions of theonomy. Theonomy was a politico-theological movement that arose out of Reformed theological circles in the 1970’s and 1980’s. The central figures in this movement were R.J. Rushdooney, Gary North, Greg Bahnsen, Ken Gentry, and Gary DeMar. The various forms of theonomy have commonly been denominated by both adherents and critics, “dominion theology,” “Christian reconstructionism,” or “general equity theonomy.” While differences certainly exist in the specific way in which the theonomists packaged their proposals, there is a common commitment to emphasize that God desires the implimentation of the Old Covenant civil laws into the governments of the world in the New Covenant.
Legion are the problems with the theonomic proposals–not least of which is the fact that the Apostles never taught the fledgling New Covenant churches to labor for the implementation of the Old Covenant civil law into the government. Theonomy is utterly dependent upon the embrace of a postmillennialism that inevitably demands the implementation of a Christian theistic ethic into the fabric of every society. This makes nearly every form of theonomy a present non-reality that is dependent on a misconstrued eschatological hope. However, there are two other overarching hermeneutical reasons why theonomy is built on a defunct understanding of the role of the civil law in redemptive history.
In his chapter, “The Mosaic Theocracy,” in Eschatology of the Old Testament, Geerhardus Vos explained the unique place of the theocracy in redemptive history. He wrote,
“The eschatological idea influencing the constitution of the theocracy becomes dependent on the interaction of the type and the antitype. The future state imposes its own stamp on the theocracy, an actual institution of Israel. The theocratic structure projects its own character into the picture of the future. Heaven reflected itself on Israel and Israel became part of the future. . .There is somewhat of the shadowy, inadequate character of the prefiguration that passes over into the description of what the eschatological will be like when it comes. The antitype impresses its stamp upon the theocratic structure and imparts to it somewhat of its transcendent, absolute character. The theocracy has something ideal or unattainable about it. Its plan, as conceived by the law, hovers over the actual life of Israel. The theocracy in the idea transcends its embodiment in experience.”1
Vos proceeded to explain that this “unattainable” ideal of the eternal rule of God stamped on Old Covenant Israel served its purpose until the coming of Christ, who, in turn, spiritualized or eternalized everything about the theocracy. He explained,
“Israel fell short of the ideal at all points. This theocratic organization of Israel had something ideal about it from the beginning. It could not be attained. It hovered over the life of the people. . .The great principles and realities of theocratic life were embodied in external form. This was the only way to clothe the essence of the theocracy in a way that the Israelites could grasp. In order to keep the future eschatological picture in touch with Israel’s religion these forms had to be maintained. The prophets had to give the essence in particular forms. Eschatological revelation is presented in the language of the Mosaic institutions.
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