” ‘Gay love’- Roman decadence & Christian virtue – a response to Steve Chalke.”

Jul 19, 2017 by Jill

by Gavin Ashenden:

Steve Chalke is a Baptist minister and an admirable campaigner for social justice.

He founded a the Charity Oasis. A few years ago he adopted a progressive and liberal theology of sexuality. Recently he launched a video that was widely reported (see this link for the Church Times – in which he believes that an understanding of Graeco-Roman sexual culture requires that we abandon the teaching of marriage and sexual ethics as Christians have universally understood them. This essay is an answer to the issues he raises.

Steve Chalke has been doing some research into the Classical world of the Greeks and the Romans, and has come up with some discoveries that have startled him. He has found a world that as he describes was “utterly saturated with sex.”

Perhaps Mr Chalke may have led a sheltered life in his reading. But this description of classical culture comes as no surprise to many. Tom Holland, in his recent book on the Romans called ‘Rubicon’, documents how even Julius Caesar put in his time as a ‘rent-boy’ to some elderly lascivious ruler, King Nikomedes of Bythinia. The shame, such as there was amongst the Romans, was not so much in the homoerotic sex; It lay more in being the ‘receptive’ partner; effeminate; humiliating.

But this has come as news to Steve Chalke. He treats us to the fruit of his research: –

“Because of widespread ignorance of the ancient world and Graeco-Roman culture in churches across the West, we throw Bible verses around without understanding their context.”

Actually, if it is he who did not understand the historical context, then perhaps he should have been a bit more honest and up front about it, rather than just assuming others didn’t either.

Read here