Christian Doctrine, Sex & Nashville Statement
by Mark Tooley, Juicy Ecumenism:
Any public declaration, if effective, will provoke wide controversy and indignation. So the recent Nashville Statement from scores of Evangelical leaders affirming traditional church teaching on marriage and gender has been a big hit.
Some conservative Christians have chided its omission of divorce, pornography and contraception. But most critique of course comes from religious and secular liberals upset by the reminder that Christianity in all its major branches traditionally affirms sex only between husband wife and understands gender as physical reality, not self-identity.
The Nashville Statement, whose content differs little from the Catholic catechism on these issues, is mostly unexceptional in its conventional assertions about Christian belief and practice. Most denounced among its tenets is its assertion that dissent on sexual morality and the immutability of gender is “an essential departure from Christian faithfulness and witness,” as these questions are not a matter of “moral indifference.”
Some critiques, with rhetoric bordering on the hysterical, have portrayed this clause as placing dissenters outside divine grace and salvation. But it does not do so. It simply warns dissenters that when they stray from settled Christian teaching they are perilously leaving the consensus of the faithful across millennia and cultures.
Such dissent, especially for persons in authority, should never be treated lightly. Each of us, proportional to the influence allowed to us, will be held in judgment regarding our fidelity to the church’s teachings. The church does no one any favor by enabling or winking at disciples who stray asunder to the edges without technically crossing the line. Instead the church always pleas for ardent faithfulness to core teaching, its aspirational goal being not laxity but, as John Wesley stressed, perfection and holiness, without which no one can see the Lord.
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