Comparing the Nashville Statement and one response from the Gay Christian perspective.

Sep 9, 2017 by

by Michael Davidson, Core Issues Trust:

To be straight with you: when ‘celibacy’ replaces ‘abstinence’ in the promotion of a ‘same-sex attracted’ category of human existence. Comparing the Nashville Statement and one response from the Gay Christian perspective.

David Bennett’s response to the Nashville Statement, “Why I call myself a gay celibate Christian – and say ‘no’ to Nashville” provides a helpful perspective on the new Biblical anthropology promoted by ‘celibate gay’ Christians. Appealing to scriptural authority, theological accuracy, the prophetic, the Christian identity, and the need to be reconciliatory, strategic, and evangelistic, Bennett invites his readers into his special call to minister to the gay community. In line with Wesley Hill, Andrew Marin and their supporters, Bennett grapples with the laudable aim of loving the community he is called to serve, and pointing them to the sexual purity of holiness. This he does as a precursor to his forthcoming publication:  A War of Loves: The Story of a Gay Rights Activist Who Finds Jesus Christ, anticipated in 2018.  The occasion of his writing is the release of the evangelical Nashville Statement which he counterpoints with an LGBT “Denver Statement” – to neither of which he is a signatory.

The article is important because it reveals a particular anthropological perspective that is faulty, in my view.

It is also important because it highlights one consideration that perhaps the Nashville Statement neglects to consider: how to respond to a same-sex attracted or gay self-conception when an individual who had previously taken this identity no longer finds it to be a helpful categorisation of their current experience. What is the role of identity or self-conception change in the Christian world view the document presents?  How does such change happen and how may it be facilitated?  Nashville focuses on enduring same-sex attractions, (also a self-construction like ‘gay’ and ‘transgendered’) that are intractable. The document advocates   what might be described as “sexual redemption” enabling this group to live in holiness. Whilst the document is wise and careful to avoid the term “orientation” and thus a reification of this notion as a category of human existence, it nevertheless isolates the category of “same-sex attracted” persons as a distinct, and apparently enduring group within humankind. I would have thought this contradicts Bennett’s claim that the Nashville document employs an “over eschatological” view of those being redeemed. The question is, why does it not consider those for whom the same-sex attracted category is no longer helpful? Has an opportunity to point to the role of professional help to reduce same-sex behaviours and feelings been missed? More importantly, why is it that Nashville, along with the vast majority of biblically grounded churches, give psychological therapeutic interventions a wide birth?

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