Apostate Uniting Church Australia perform gay marriage

The chaos and confusion which are the inevitable products of the Sexual Revolution continue to expand and the challenges constantly proliferate. The LGBTQ+ revolution has long been the leading edge of the expanding chaos, and by now the genuinely revolutionary nature of the movement is fully apparent. 

The normalization of the behaviors and relationships and identities included (for now) in the LGBTQ+ spectrum will require nothing less than turning the world upside down.

This revolution requires a total redefinition of morality, cultural authority, personal identity, and more. The revolution requires a new vocabulary and a radically revised dictionary. Ultimately, the moral revolutionaries seek to redefine reality itself. And this revolution has no stopping point. The plus sign at the end of LGBTQ+ is a signal of more challenges sure to come.
Now the Uniting Church in Australia has fallen into this trap.  

But what is worse is the leader of the Uniting Church movement has chosen to deny biblical authority by permitting homosexual marriage or fake marriage. 

What perhaps is even more disturbing is the justification is wrapped in biblical words. The Uniting Church may sound, look and smell like a church but is now apostate.

Diedre Palmer has issued a call for unity. But what does that mean? It that the majority must accept and approve sin as being central to the church.

“In the light of the Assembly’s discernment to allow our Church to affirm two equal and distinct views on marriage, I have seen the grace of God reflected in many of our interactions with each other,” she wrote. “Uniting Church congregations, individual members and leaders have sought to truly listen to each other, and seek to understand how we can live in community with one another while seeing the Biblical witness and our theological foundations through different interpretive lenses. Passionately disagreeing with one another is not unusual in the church. If we are to grow in maturity, as a follower of Jesus in the 21st Century, we will be deeply engaged in reflecting on Scripture and theology with others who may express their Christian discipleship in ways different to ourselves.”

Several issues press for immediate attention. One is the identification of people as “LGBT Christians” or “gay Christians.” This language implies that Christians can be identified in an ongoing manner with a sexual identity that is contrary to Scripture. 

Behind the language is the modern conception of identity theory that is, in the end, fundamentally unbiblical. The use of the language of “sexual minorities” is a further extension of identity theory and modern critical theory and analysis. In this context, “sexual minority” simultaneously implies permanent identity and a demand for recognition as a minority. As Kevin DeYoung rightly noted, the use of this language implies a political status.

The larger problem is the idea that any believer can claim identity with a pattern of sexual attraction that is itself sinful. The Apostle Paul answers this question definitively when he explains in 1 Corinthians 6:11, such were some of you. But, writes Paul by inspiration of the Holy Spirit, “you were washed, you were sanctified, you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and the Spirit of our God.”

There have been Christian believers throughout the entire history of the church that have struggled with same-sex temptation and who have come to know that pattern of temptation as what we now understand as a sexual orientation. Whatever the language we choose to use, Christians do understand that some people come to know a pattern of temptation and sexual attraction that is directed toward others of the same sex. 

In his book, All But Invisible, Nate Collins argues that the most important element in same-sex orientation is its “givenness.” By that, he means that it is an orientation or pattern of attraction that is not chosen but discovered.

But “givenness” in a fallen world does not mean that the orientation — the same-sex attraction itself — is not sinful. The Bible identifies internal temptation as sin. 

As Denny Burk and Heath Lambert argue, “same-sex attraction, not just homosexual behavior, is sinful.” We are called to repent both of sin and of any inner temptation to sin. Why does the Uniting Church ignore this? 

The issues here are bigger than sexuality. As Denny Burk and Rosaria Butterfield rightly explain, we confront here a basic evangelical disagreement with Roman Catholicism. Ever since the Council of Trent (1545-1563), the Roman Catholic Church has insisted that involuntary incentive to sin is not itself a sin. 

In the most amazing sentence, the Council of Trent declared: “This concupiscence, which the apostle sometimes calls sin, the holy Synod declares that the Catholic Church has never understood it to be called sin.” Don’t miss the acknowledgment,  that the doctrine of Trent is contrary to the language of the apostle. Furthermore, remember that Catholic theology includes both infant baptism and baptismal regeneration — meaning that evangelicals and Catholics have fundamentally divergent understandings of both justification and sanctification.

John Calvin referred to concupiscence as “depraved” and “at variance with rectitude.” In this verdict, Calvin was joined by other Protestants — and the New Testament. Just think of the language of the historic Book of Common Prayer, praying in repentance for the “devices and desires of our own hearts.”

Surely, the mortification of sin required of Christians would demand that we put as much distance as possible between ourselves and any temptation to sin (Romans 8:12-13).

In the interview with Christianity Today just prior to the conference, Nate Collins attempted to respond to criticisms by insisting, as he does in his book, that sexual orientation and same-sex attraction are not always erotic, but can be celebrated as aesthetic and relational. He affirms that same-sex sexual attraction is sinful, but he argues that sexual orientation is actually not necessarily erotic, but centered in “the perception and admiration of personal beauty.” In his book he refers to this as an “aesthetic orientation,” a term he concedes is his own.

Wesley Hill is also a major proponent of “spiritual friendships” within LBGT identity. He has written: “Being gay is, for me, as much a sensibility as anything else: a heightened sensitivity to and passion for same-sex beauty . . . .”

Same-sex attraction is not limited to sexual attraction, but it strains all credibility to argue that this “aesthetic orientation” can be non-sexual. 

Considered more closely, the “aesthetic orientation” actually appears to be even more deeply rooted in a sinful impulse. Aesthetic attractions are as corrupted by sin as the sexual passions. To put the matter bluntly, are we to affirm that an “aesthetic orientation” towards the same sex is pure and blameless and non-sexual? This would be severe pastoral malpractice. The Uniting church somehow has forgotten this?

Pro-gay Uniting people always point to Ruth and Naomi and David and Jonathan as biblical examples, but in both cases, the relationship was clearly and definitively neither erotic or aesthetic and references to them in this light are deliberately misleading. 

The “spiritual friendship” model, related to LGBTQ identity, is just not compatible with an evangelical biblical theology, even if Catholics can eagerly affirm the idea.

Nate Collins recently read from Jeremiah 15 at an LGBT conference and then asked:

“Is it possible that gay people today are being sent by God, like Jeremiah, to find God’s words for the church, to eat them and make them our own? To shed light on contemporary false teachings and even idolatries, not just the false teaching of the progressive sexual ethics, but other more subtle forms of false teaching? Is it possible that gender and sexual minorities who have lived lives of costly obedience are themselves a prophetic call to the church to abandon idolatrous attitudes toward the nuclear family, toward sexual pleasure? If so, we are prophets.”

Idolatry of the nuclear family? Here we see the destabilizing power of the sexual revolution and modern critical theory at full force.

It is, of course, possible for human beings to idolize anything, but that is not what is really at stake in Collins’s comment. 

He really claims that gay people are called to a prophetic role to correct the church for believing in the normative nature of the nuclear family.

Before pressing further, we should note that the term “nuclear family,” referring to a father and mother and their children in one household is a fairly recent term, dating back only to the twentieth century. The family, of course, is as old as Genesis. The more accurate term for describing the family is not “nuclear” but “natural” or “conjugal.”

And right there is the issue. What the Bible reveals, from Genesis 1 onward, is the fact that God created human beings as male and female, both made in his image, and made for the conjugal relationship of marriage and procreation which is the very first divine command to humankind (Genesis 1:28). Marriage, the conjugal union of a man and a woman, is revealed as God’s creative purpose, from the beginning.

Even those men and women who do not marry are defined by the conjugal union that brought them into being and by the normative nature of the natural family (both “nuclear” and extended) that is honored throughout Holy Scripture. 

The subversion of marriage and the family has been one of the most devastating results of modernity, and this very subversion is central to the ambitions of the sexual revolutionaries of those within the Uniting Church of Australia.

In his book, Collins identifies “heteronormativity” as a central problem in both secular society and the church: 

“It’s one thing to say that the only kind of sexual expression permitted by Scripture is the heterosexual pattern. It’s another thing to say that heterosexual orientations as they are embedded in our fallen world are not sinful in themselves because they match the general creational pattern.”

That is simply wrong. Every human being past puberty is a sexual sinner of some form, but the attraction of a man to a woman, completed in the conjugal union of marriage, is PRECISELY “the general creational pattern.” Furthermore, in Romans 1:26-27 the Apostle Paul refers to same-sex passion and activity as “contrary to nature” — thus the rejection of the “general creational pattern.”

After the Fall, all human beings are born sinners and fall short of both the glory of God and the clear testimony of creation (Romans 1:18-32), but the creational pattern itself is not sinful. 

The New Testament presents the church as the family of faith, made up of all those adopted by God through Christ. Thus, all believers are brothers and sisters in one household of faith. 

Furthermore, the New Testament explicitly honors celibacy (which by the way, only makes sense against the background of normative marriage and family life), but that celibacy is chaste in form and directed toward gospel deployment (1 Corinthians 7:1-8). Collins rightly calls on congregations to leave no member without inclusion in family life — a searing indictment of many congregations, to be sure. Similarly, Rosaria Butterfield has underlined the priority of gospel hospitality among Christians.

But denouncing “idolatrous attitudes toward the nuclear family” as a claimed prophetic role for those who identify as LGBTQ+ Christians reveal just how far the ideology of the sexual revisionists has reached even within Christianity. 

The relativizing of the natural conjugal family represents what Malcolm Muggeridge called the “great liberal death wish.” It stands in direct contradiction to the mandate given by God in Genesis 1:28. The Great Commission expands that mandate; it does not reverse it.

The Uniting Church and its leaders should repent, and resign immediately.