Evangelical responses to the ‘Nashville Statement’
by Ian Paul, Psephizo:
The ‘Nashville Statement‘ is a ‘manifesto’ comment on the issues around same-sex relations, transgender and the debate on sexual identity issued by the so-called Council on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood (CBMW), which argues that God intends that men should have authority over women in all spheres of life. It provoked a wide range of reactions, some of which were predictably reactionary in support and against. My favourite summary came from my friend Michael Lakey on Facebook:
In the news this week, some Christians were in Nashville for reasons other than country music (which is always a pity) and other Christians whose favoured moral theological axiom is “judge not” condemned them for it, but without irony!
But there were also some significant responses from evangelicals, raising serious concerns with the approach of the Statement. Scot McKnight was the most terse:
Those we can’t trust for orthodoxy on the Trinity can’t be trusted when it comes to morality.
He is referring here to the argument that the submission of Jesus to the Father in the Trinity implies something about submission within human relations, advocated by CBMW but rejected by most as a return to the heresy of Arianism.
More striking is the extended rejection of the statement by Matthew Anderson—striking because (unlike Scot) Anderson is theologically much closer to some of those who did sign and agrees with many of the premises, but sees the statement as deeply flawed because it does not attend sufficiently either to the underlying issues nor to the problems that evangelicalism itself is struggling with.
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