Homophobic or just biblical?

By Joel Miller

If the disco band The Village People were formed today, the lineup might bump the Indian costume and add a priest’s frock and collar. And if Rev. Scott Landis weren’t staying behind the pulpit of his church in Cherry Hills Village, Colo., he might join the group, complete with rainbow-colored vestments.

According to a Jan. 14 story in the Denver Post, “Pastor Comes ‘Out,’ Church Cheers,” Landis told his congregation at First Plymouth Congregational Church that he is homosexual.

Did the assembled saints scold, chastise, boo, or blow wet razzberries in the general direction of the pulpit? One could conceive of such a response. Scripture is rather down on “abusers of themselves with mankind” (1 Cor. 6:9 KJV). Such abuse is considered an abomination (Lev. 18:22), and such folks are excluded from the kingdom of heaven (1 Cor. 6:10). Given that, you’d think that a pewster-packed parish might show the irreverend to the door.

Not so, according to the Post. “He received a standing ovation from the 600 people present. Many lined up afterward to hug him and shake his hand,” recounted reporter Virginia Culver.

“It was a risk,” said Landis, 46, father of three and saboteur of a 25-year marriage. “But this is a remarkable congregation. They showed me compassion, love and support beyond my wildest dreams.”

Unfortunately, this isn’t a dream. If it were, we could wake up from this nightmare in which the church endlessly makes concessions and accommodating lurches toward the world and away from the Word. Increasingly the churches of America adopt the post-Reformation doctrine of sola infide, regularly chucking the faith so diligently preserved by our forebears the moment it becomes uncomfortable or too abrasive to fit snugly within the confines of our secular age.

Heaven forbid we’d ever call a man like Landis to account. After all, he’s such a nice man. Such a good pastor. Last week he preached all about how God is love and how we should be nonjudgmental about others – tolerant to a fault.

Isn’t he a peach?

The only thing the church has going for it is God’s Word. If we tear out a page here and there to rid it of the unpleasant parts as circumstances fit, we won’t have much Scripture left in a few years.

The same month Landis came out, World magazine reported plans for an all-“gay” cable TV network. Apparently Viacom’s MTV and Showtime are now tossing around the idea. The two networks are, according to TV Guide’s J. Max Robbins, “pioneers in bringing gay storylines to television, long before ‘Will & Grace’ became prime-time players.”

How, pray tell, is the church supposed to confront such efforts when the one doing the talking from behind the pulpit is bucking for a “gay” televangelist slot on the new network?

Critic, wit and wag H.L. Mencken, far from a believer, wrote a very favorable obituary for Presbyterian stalwart Rev. J. Gresham Machen, in the Jan. 18, 1937, Baltimore Evening Sun. Though Mencken nearly made a career of blasting Christians, he had a great deal of respect for Machen because the minister, “Dr. Fundamentalis” as Mencken called him, stuck to his guns, or sword, to use Scripture’s metaphor for itself. He mentions in particular Machen’s battle for the true, unadulterated faith.

Here’s the Sage of Baltimore’s description of the foe: “Claiming to be Christians … they endeavored fatuously to get rid of all the inescapable implications of their position. … In particular, they essayed to overhaul the scriptural authority which lay at the bottom of the whole matter, retaining what coincided with their private notions and rejecting whatever upset them.”

On to our gallant hero: Machen, said Mencken, “denied absolutely that anyone had a right to revise and sophisticate Holy Writ. Either it was the Word of God or it was not the Word of God, and if it was, then it was equally authoritative in all its details, and had to be accepted or rejected as a whole.”

Also: “He saw clearly that the only effects that could follow diluting and polluting Christianity in the Modernist manner would be its complete abandonment and ruin. Either it was true or it was not true. If, as he believed, it was true, then there could be no compromise with persons who sought to whittle away its essential postulates, however respectable their motives.”

People who dilute and whittle away Scripture’s strong injunctions against sexual immorality, among which is homosexuality, may have grand motives: love, fellowship, not wanting to hurt a brother’s feelings. But grand motives are not enough. Being pleasant is not enough. Being comfortable is not enough. Being happy is not enough.

Being honest is enough, and if we are to take God at his Word, that means condemning homosexuality, not standing up and cheering. This may not sound nice to some people, but the Scriptures make no bones about being nice, only true.


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