Change of sexual orientation or conform to the image of Christ?
Are you aware of how the apostle Paul’s logic goes against the cultural logic of his day and ours: What we desire or do sexually is not who we are. When Paul addresses a catalog of sins in the Corinthian church, including “the sexually immoral” and “men who practice homosexuality,” he says—with emphasis on the past tense—“And such were some of you. But you were washed, you were sanctified, you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and by the Spirit of our God” (1 Cor. 6:11, ESV).
Today many Christians interpret that process of repentance (metanoia) through the framework of sexual identity categories, as if the decisive change is one of sexual orientation rather than conformity to the image of Christ. What matters is not whether a person can boast of being an “ex-gay”—a bizarre appellation—but whether, after undergoing burial and resurrection with Christ, he or she “[walks] in newness of life” (Rom. 6:4, ESV). The gay self—and its binary opposite, the straight self—is not a true self. Let us, then, baptize Polonius’s advice to his son inHamlet: “This above all: to thine own self—in Christ—be true.” That self tells stories about growing, however messily, in grace (2 Pet. 3:18), not about “coming out” of the closet or switching orientations.
