Written by Robert A. J. Gagnon |
Thursday, August 3, 2023
Your change of position will not change God’s position. It will just lead to self-deception and deception of others. Face the fact that Jesus is the very last person in the world who would have given up a male-female prerequisite as foundational for sexual ethics. There was no more rigorous applier of the standard of a sexual binary for sexual ethics in the ancient world than Jesus. Don’t mistake Jesus’ loving outreach to the lost as an embrace of their immorality.

A FB friend has notified me that he is no longer in “the same theological space or belief” on the issue of homosexual practice. This is what I have written to him:
You identify yourself as “gay” (presumably self-affirming) in the Tik Tok video linked to on your FB page. There you mourn the breakup of your family that presumably resulted from this self-identification. Your self-identifier on your FB page uses the hashtag “faithfully lgbtq.” You are doubtlessly faithful to that cause, but you cannot be simultaneously faithful to Jesus.
An assured result of historical study of Jesus is that Jesus based a limitation of two persons to a marriage (and thus of any sexual union) on the God-ordained male-female binary, which he viewed as foundational for all sexual ethics. For Jesus (and for the writers of Scripture generally) God intentionally designed two, and only two, sexes to be sexual counterparts or complements.
Your shift of position is to a view that Jesus would have treated as heretical. It also treats your masculinity as only half-intact in relation to other males, which in Paul’s view was an act of self-dishonor and self-degradation (Rom 1:24-27).
I notice also your presenting FB page photo of a billboard that states “You are not going to hell” with “John 3:17” written underneath that claim. You have entirely misinterpreted John 3:17.
True, Jesus did not come into the world in order to condemn people. He could have stayed “home” if that was the purpose of his mission on earth. His atoning death on the cross and life-giving resurrection were all designed to save people, but only for those who believe in him so that Jesus can live his life in them (John 3:16, 18). Those who choose not to believe in him remain condemned and in darkness (3:18-21).
It is essential that you not “proof text” so as to hear only what you want to hear, but rather that you read in context. I recommend to you that you not treat Jesus as little more than a cipher into which you impute your own ideology irrespective of what the text of Scripture actually says.
Your change of position will not change God’s position. It will just lead to self-deception and deception of others. Face the fact that Jesus is the very last person in the world who would have given up a male-female prerequisite as foundational for sexual ethics. There was no more rigorous applier of the standard of a sexual binary for sexual ethics in the ancient world than Jesus. Don’t mistake Jesus’ loving outreach to the lost as an embrace of their immorality.
There will be people saying that their love for you is demonstrated by their approval of your decision to live a “gay” life. They will be lying, possibly to themselves, certainly to you. Love “does not rejoice in unrighteousness but rejoices together with the truth” (1 Cor 13:6).
Anything that promotes behavior contrary to God’s will is by definition unloving. For they do not love you more than the Father and the Son, and the Father and the Son are warning you not to head down a path that leads to destruction.
If you would like to discuss these matters further, with an aim to a better understanding of the Jesus of Scriptures, I would be happy to talk to you.
Robert A. J. Gagnon is Professor of Theology at Houston Christian University; copied from his Facebook post.

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I am in the process of writing a commentary on 1 Timothy (for the Zondervan Exegetical Commentary Series). When I came to 1 Timothy 1:18, I noticed that the phrase “fight the good fight” is composed of a verb (strateuō) and a noun (strateia) that is a cognate word with the verb. The use of the noun “fight” after the verb “to fight” in this phrase is a figure of speech whereby there “is a repetition of the same basic word with the same sense” to underscore the meaning of the redundant wording. The redundant wording had a ring to it, so I decided to see if this repeated wording was used elsewhere in the Greco-Roman world, since it did not appear anywhere else in the New Testament or the Greek Old Testament. What I found after many hours of research surprised me and encouraged my faith very much. I hope what you are about to read will not only surprise you but also encourage your faith amid the trials of this world.
A Patriotic Warfare Idiom Underscoring a Reputation of Good Character
To my amazement, when I looked at the standard online concordance to the literature of the ancient Greek world, I found that this redundant wording was used very often (from the fifth century BC up to the third century AD and onward). I began to study the meaning of the redundant expression in all their various contexts. The expression can be translated as “battle the battle” or “serve as a soldier in warfare,” or more generally as “perform military service” or “serve in a military campaign.” The wording typically is a patriotic warfare idiom for good character revealed by persevering through not merely one battle but military campaigns extending over a period of time. We need further to see how this idiom is used in the ancient Greek world before we can understand how it is applied to Timothy and Paul and to Christians in general.
In the Roman military system, in times of danger from foreign powers, citizens who enlisted in the army were “obligated to serve as soldiers in warfare service [strateuō + strateia] for twenty years,” though only ten years were required for being “eligible for any political office” (Polybius, Histories VI.19). The point here was that an extended period of military service was a requirement for political office, since it demonstrated a person’s honorable character as a loyal citizen, willing to persevere in service in order to protect the home country. A military commander named Astyphilus “fought first at Corinth, then in Thessaly and again throughout the Theban war, and wherever else he heard of an army being collected, he went abroad holding a command.” Afterward, “he was fighting in other war campaigns [strateia + strateuō] and was well aware that he was going to run risks on all of them.” Then “he was about to set out on his last expedition, going out as a volunteer with every prospect of returning safe and sound from this campaign” when he finally died in battle at Mytilene (Isaeus, IX. On the Estate of Astyphilus 15,). His patriotism is expressed both through his amazing perseverance in fighting for his country until death and his religious and civic commitments (for these commitments, see 13, 21, and 30).
Similarly, the Roman commander Pompey affirmed that he had received “the greatest honor” as a result of “the battle campaigns he had fought” (strateia + strateuō; Dio Cassius, Roman History XXXVI.25). On another occasion, while dying, a Jewish martyr executed by the Greek king Antiochus IV Epiphanes encourages his brothers to persevere in their faith and to be “of good courage” and to “fight [strateuō] the sacred and noble fight [strateia] for godliness.”
In a Greek papyrus from the second century AD, a father writes a letter to his son who was “persuaded . . . not [to] enlist to fight [strateuō] at [a city called] Klassan.” The father “grieved” over what appeared to be his son’s lack of patriotism. The father said, “from now on, take care not to be so persuaded . . . not [to] enlist to fight, or you will no longer be my son. You know you have every advantage over your brothers, and all the authority. Therefore, you will do well to fight [strateuō] the good fight [strateia]. . . . Therefore, do not transgress my instructions and you will have an inheritance.” The son’s willingness to “fight the good fight” will certainly enhance his reputation before his father (enough to receive the father’s inheritance) and likely in the eyes of others. “Good fight” refers here to a war in which it is “honorable” to participate in fighting for one’s country (or city) because fighting for one’s country (or city) and overcoming the enemy is “good.” Once again, the idiom demonstrates a person’s good character as a loyal citizen to his king and kingdom.

Natural law thinking profoundly shaped the way American and British leaders approached issues involving rights, sovereignty, and constitutional government. However, the imperial authorities and their colonial opponents often appealed to different, and even conflicting, strains of the natural law tradition.

This essay explores the role of natural law philosophy in the imperial crisis between Britain and the American colonies in the twelve years leading up to the Declaration of Independence in 1776.  Both the British governments and the colonial champions during the crisis were the inheritors of a complex tradition of natural law philosophy dating back centuries.  At its core, this tradition revolved around the proposition that there is a standard of natural justice that exists independently of human contrivance, and that acts as a measure for the legitimacy of civil laws and political institutions.  Natural law thinking profoundly shaped the way American and British leaders approached issues involving rights, sovereignty, and constitutional government.  However, the imperial authorities and their colonial opponents often appealed to different, and even conflicting, strains of the natural law tradition. The tension between the various understandings of natural jurisprudence involved in the imperial dispute would have serious implications for the evolving, and ultimately incompatible, British and American conceptions of the Empire.
In order to understand the intellectual context surrounding the imperial crisis, it is important to appreciate the pervasive influence of natural law philosophy in early-modern Europe and America.  Educated Britons and Americans were the products of a rich intellectual heritage spanning from medieval to modern times.  St. Thomas Aquinas founded the Christian natural law tradition in the 13th century by articulating a conception of natural justice rooted in reason and God’s rule over the created world.  By the 17th century, natural law philosophy had developed into a multifarious body of thought with distinct conservative and radical strains.[1]  The conservative natural law school exemplified by such thinkers as Hugo Grotius, Thomas Hobbes, and Samuel Pufendorf drew decidedly authoritarian political implications from the natural law principles of natural liberty and equality.  They tended to emphasize a strong, and even absolute, version of political sovereignty and generally rejected popular self-government and the right of revolution.  For their part, radical natural law theorists such as John Locke, Benedict Spinoza, and Algernon Sidney built an argument for popular sovereignty on the bedrock principles of individual rights, especially the right to property and the right of conscience, as well as a natural right of revolution.  It was to this complex natural law inheritance that both Britons and Americans appealed in their quarrel during the imperial crisis.  However, their different interpretations of this philosophic tradition are what account in large measure for their divergent arguments and attitudes throughout the crisis.
Eighteenth-century Britain witnessed the emergence of conservative natural law principles adapted to the unique conditions of parliamentary rule.  In the decades following the Glorious Revolution, the British political nation adopted a conservative interpretation of the events of 1688–89, which emphasized continuity, the legal fiction of King James’s “abdication,” and most importantly asserted the institutional sovereignty of the tripartite Parliament including king, lords, and commons.  The radical principles of popular sovereignty and individual natural rights were for the most part rejected.  By the middle of the eighteenth century, the doctrine of parliamentary sovereignty was the dominant political and constitutional ideology in Britain.  This hardening of the orthodoxy of parliamentary sovereignty can be seen in the influential writings of Sir William Blackstone published at the start of the imperial crisis.  With clear echoes of the conservative natural law conception of sovereignty championed by Grotius, Hobbes, and Pufendorf, Blackstone insisted that in every constitution there had to be a “supreme, irresistible, absolute, uncontrolled authority in which . . . the rights of sovereignty reside.”[2]  The implications of this commitment were obvious.  British efforts to tighten control over the colonies through taxation rested on the philosophical premise that Parliament is the highest law-making body in the empire and is thus in the legal sense absolute and irresistible inasmuch as colonial legislatures are subordinate vis-à-vis Westminster.  The depth of the British commitment to this conservative conception of sovereignty was crystallized in the Declaratory Act of 1766, which followed the repeal of the Stamp Act.  While the Ministry repealed the stamp tax on prudential grounds, the Parliament asserted its right in principle to legislate for the colonies “in all cases whatsoever.”[3]  As parliamentary sovereignty was the governing philosophy of Britain, so too by extension must it logically be the organizing principle of the British Empire.
The colonial position in the imperial crisis was also informed by natural law philosophy; however, supporters of the American cause interpreted this tradition rather differently from the British.  Most importantly, the radical natural law theory of Sidney and Locke, long déclassé in Britain, flourished in the colonies alongside typically conservative philosophical commitments.  With the radicals, Americans insisted that some element of popular control over government was vital to secure liberty—a condition impossible in a distant parliament in which the colonies were not represented.  Thus, Americans defended the principle that only the colonial legislatures could legitimately tax the colonists.  However, in the early stages of the crisis most supporters of the colonial cause also expressed deep admiration for the British balanced constitution produced in the Glorious Revolution and its replicas in the colonial governments (in which the Crown appointed governors who shared rule with the elected assemblies). Moreover, many early colonial champions conceded the British point that Parliament is sovereign in the empire, although they disputed the rightness of its taxing the colonies directly as opposed to merely regulating imperial trade policy.  While accepting the theoretical principle of parliamentary sovereignty, Americans had not actually experienced their political life as being subject to Parliament in the century of benign neglect prior to 1764.  In practice, they felt that assertions of parliamentary sovereignty were a dangerous innovation in imperial relations.
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