I recently gave a talk about CLS v. Martinez (the Hastings case) at Cornell Law School. I explained that the Supreme Court found that Hastings had created a forum for student groups to “promote tolerance.” The Court then held that derecognizing CLS (which required its leaders and voting members to be Christian) was “reasonable” in light of that purpose, and thus constitutional.
During the Q&A at Cornell, a student asked, “given that the Court essentially said that CLS was ‘intolerant,’ isn’t it time for CLS to reconsider its beliefs?”
In my presentations about the conflict between religious freedom and the homosexual legal agenda, I usually point out that virtually every theologically conservative Christian body holds that sexual intimacy outside marriage is morally impermissible. This inevitably prompts someone to ask, “what if same-sex ‘marriage’ were recognized by the state?”
In my recent presentation about free speech on campus at the University of Illinois College of Law, a student asked whether Christian groups would change their mind about the morality of homosexual behavior if science proved the existence of a “gay gene” that caused same-sex attraction.
All three of these questions raise a deeper issue: from whom should the church take its cues?
The student at Cornell appeared to suggest that CLS and other orthodox Christian groups ought to acknowledge that the culture, the educational establishment, and/or the Supreme Court called them “intolerant” and that they should therefore change their beliefs and practices. Others imply that the church ought to adopt the state’s definition of marriage in assessing the morality of sexual behavior, i.e., that it should deem moral sexual behavior within a same-sex “marriage” recognized by the state. The student at Illinois suggested that potential future scientific discoveries about the causation of same-sex sexual attraction ought to change the church’s views about the morality of homosexual behavior.
In short, all were suggesting or implying that the church ought to take its cues on doctrinal and moral questions from someone or something other than God and His revelation of Himself. In all of these questions and suggestions, I detected a lack of understanding that the church ought to and does honestly look to the Bible and general revelation to find truth about God, man, and the world. To many, this seems at best to be an utterly foreign idea and at worst a cynical ploy. I fear that the church, in all its efforts to be “relevant,” has failed to communicate that it strives to take its cues from God Himself — that its epistomology (way of knowing) often differs from the empiricism and naturalism that dominates the modern mind.
This is not to say that the church should ignore the truths generated by scientific discovery and human reasoning. After all, as Arthur Holmes rightly declared, “all truth is God’s truth.” But this hardly means that the church should jettison its doctrines and morals when they get out of step with the Supreme Court, Hastings law school, or the editorial page of the New York Times.
