Category Archives: Christian ethics

The Wicked Bible

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In 1631, a London printer reprinted the King James Bible. Unfortunately, the typesetters made the glaring mistake that gave the Bible its name. Instead of reading “Thou shall not commit adultery” the seventh commandment reads “Thou shalt commit adultery” (Ex 20:14). In today’s essay, we will examine, not an unfortunate typo, but a determined strategy of interpretation that intentionally leaves out many “shalt nots.”

In the previous seven parts of this study, I described the scientific, philosophical and theological developments that made plausible the thesis that LGBTQ+ identities and ways of living are consistent with the moral and religious teachings of the Bible. I am not addressing non-believers; they don’t care what the Bible says. Nor am I speaking to progressive Christians; they reduce biblical authority to a mousey “me too” to the spirit of the times. I am writing to Christians who say that they accept the Bible’s authority for faith and morality but argue that the church can affirm LGBTQ+ identities and ways of living without compromising this stance.

In my recent book The Choice: Should the Church Affirm LGBTQ+ Identities and Ways of Living (Los Angeles: Keledei Publications, 2024), I analyzed and critiqued a book by Karen Keen: Scripture, Ethics, and the Possibility of Same-Sex Relationships (Eerdmans, 2018). In this book, Keen defends a thesis of the kind I am most concerned for my audience to understand and reject, that is, biblical moral teaching is consistent with LGBTQ+ affirmation.

Keen, along with other authors who defend the same thesis, begins with the tacit admission that, according to a plain reading of the biblical texts and the near universal consensus of the Jewish community and the church for more than 3000 years, the Bible appears unequivocally to condemn same-sex sexual activity. See Genesis 19:1-11; Lev 18:21-24; 20:13; 1 Cor 6:9-10; 1 Tim 1:8-11; and Rom 1:22-28.

In speaking to an audience that believes in the authority of the Bible and reads the Bible within the traditional church, Keen begins with the disadvantage of having the burden of proof. How can she hope to convince this audience of the affirming view? Clearly, she must (1) convince them that the “plain” meaning of the texts is not so plain as they first thought, and (2) if possible, she needs to shift the burden of proof from the affirming to the traditional side. Her book sets about to achieve both of these objectives.

As I come back to her book two years after I wrote my reply, I can now place her argument into the larger framework I’ve developed in this series. In sum, to achieve objective (1), she makes use of the kind of modern historical criticism I discussed in the previous essay under the rubric “Historical Study that Rejects Authority.” As you will see below, her interpretive strategy focuses our attention, not on the texts themselves, but on something behind the texts, that is, on the unspoken motives or aims of biblical moral rules. She moves from the objectivity of the text to possibilities about which we can only speculate. To achieve objective (2), she makes use of the view of reality that Galileo, Descartes, and Locke first proposed and Rousseau, the Romantics, Nietzsche, Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir developed to their logical ends, that is, that human beings possess no created or natural, self-revealing essence, identity, or self. Individuals choose and construct who they become. Though Keen does not appeal directly to this postmodern idea, she invokes the private, internal experience of gay and lesbian people as a moral authority that must be respected—an idea that would have made no sense before modernity. Though Keen deals with gay and lesbian issues only, her arguments apply equally to the transgender experience as well.

In the first chapter (“The Plan”) of my book, I outlined the complete argument of her book along with its conclusion. On a macro level, the success of her argument depends on our acceptance of three interpretive principles and acknowledgement of three experiential facts. They are as follows:

 Interpretive Principle #1

The Bible’s positive moral teachings provide a vision of justice, goodness, and peace; they are intended to promote human flourishing.

Interpretive Principle #2

The Bible’s moral prohibitions are intended to forbid things that cause harm to human beings and the rest of creation.

Interpretive Principle #3

To apply the Bible’s moral teachings appropriately, we must deliberate about whether or not applying a biblical rule to a situation prevents harm and promotes human flourishing. Applications that harm people must be rejected.

Experienced-based Fact #1

Gay people do not choose to be gay, and the overwhelming majority cannot change their orientation.

Experienced-based Fact #2

Faithful, loving gay relationships do not cause harm to those involved or to the human community. To the contrary, they can display all the fruits of the Spirit listed in Scripture.

Experienced-based Fact #3

A large majority of gay people do not have the gift of celibacy and find that state deeply painful.

Conclusion

Because covenanted same-sex relationships embody justice, goodness, and human flourishing, do not cause harm to the people in the relationship or the human community, and unwanted celibacy causes great unhappiness to gay people, faithful deliberation must conclude that the Bible allows covenanted same-sex relationships.

The Wicked Bible

The chapters Keen devotes to defending the three interpretive principles aim at achieving objective (1), that is, creating doubts about the traditional interpretation of the anti-gay texts. The chapters that narrate the three experiential facts aim at shifting the burden of proof from the traditional interpretation to the affirming interpretation. Apart from the developments I explored in parts one through seven in this series—Galileo, Locke, and biblical criticism—Keen’s arguments make no sense at all. I can’t imagine anyone even thinking of them.

Such interpreters as Keen read the Bible’s “shalt not” as “it depends.” The Holy Bible becomes The Wicked Bible without changing a word.

Biology and The Nature of the Sexes

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I write this post to recommend a new book recently published by my colleague and friend Tomas Bogardus: The Nature of the Sexes: Why Biology Matters (Routledge, pp. 156). Bogardus has been publishing for the past six years in the areas of the philosophy of sex and gender. In an era when expression of feelings, language manipulation and political rhetoric dominate public discussion of sex and gender, Bogardus calls us back to biological reality and rational rigor.

Overview

In Chapter 1, “Introduction,” Bogardus explains the significance of the debate and whets our appetite for the book’s argument. In Chapter 2, “What the Sexes Could Not Be,” he surveys four unacceptable proposals for specifying the differences between the sexes. All four views take sex to be “complex” in a variety of ways: (1) the word “sex” is an ambiguous term, (2) the meaning of sex depends on the research context, (3) the word “sex” is indeterminate and can apply to a range of things, (4) according to the “property-cluster hypothesis,” there is no one property necessary to the definition of sex. Bogardus examines and rejects each of these views.

In Chapter 3, “What the Sexes Could Be: The Gamete View,” Bogardus builds up to his understanding of the defining characteristics of the sexes. (Just so we are clear, a gamete is a reproductive cell, sperm or egg, that when united form a zygote.) The gamete view in general, defines males as organisms capable of producing sperm and females as organisms capable of producing eggs. Bogardus surveys three views within the umbrella of “the Gamete View” and finds weaknesses and strengths in each one. Combining the strengths of the surveyed views, Bogardus defines the sexes this way:

Put simply, a male is an organism with the function of producing sperm, and a female is an organism with the function of producing eggs. Put more carefully, the sexes are particular kinds of functions—activated higher order functions—of entire organisms, coded in master programs specifying the development, organization, and maintenance of components themselves programed to produce (and transport, etc.) some type of anisogamous gamete, for example, sperm or ova (p. 68).

Chapter 4, “Gender is Defined in Terms of the Sexes,” argues that “gender” should be defined in terms of biological sex. Gender talk cannot be disengaged from reference to biological sex or it becomes meaningless. Bogardus explains why: “To understand what gender identity is, one must understand what a gender is, and to understand that, one must understand the sexes” (p. 104). To say, “I am a woman trapped in the body of a man” uses the word “woman” in a confused way. It fuses typical “feminine modes of presentation of women” with the female sex. Although simultaneous hermaphroditism is a reality in simpler organisms, humans are never both male and female in the biological sense of “activated higher order functions” capable of producing both sperm and ova. Bogardus recommends avoiding the word “gender” altogether and using such “sex-based alternatives” (p. 104) as “biological sex,” “norms of the sexes,” ‘roles of the sexes,” “adult sexes,” “juvenile sexes;” or one can continue to speak about man and woman, boys and girls.

Chapter 5, “When Biology Meets Politics,” addresses the thorny issues circling around the politicization of sex and gender. Bogardus argues that we should defer to biologists in the matter of defining sex, and he refutes those who wish to enforce linguistic norms designed to engineer a new understanding of sex that better conforms to the political aspirations of certain groups. As an example, suppose we attempt to enforce the rule that “a person is male only if he identifies as male.” The circularity of such expressions is glaringly obvious. How can maleness be something that exists only because of an act of identification unless maleness is something objective one can identify as? Apart from reference to biological reality, how could we know what the expressions “is male” and “as male” mean?

In Chapter 6, Bogardus defends using pronouns that track with biological sex. Among other reasons for this contention, Bogardus points out that in our social relations there are good reasons to know the sex of the person we are speaking with. Compelling examples include finding a mate and keeping female spaces safe from predators, who overwhelmingly tend to be males.

Recommendation

The Nature of the Sexes cuts through the linguistic fog and political posturing that plague public and academic discussions of sex and gender. It calls us back to common sense and biological reality. In contrast to talking heads on cable news and ideologues in academia, Bogardus sounds like the voice of reason itself. I learned something new on every page! I recommend this book highly!

Bogardus Podcasts

If you listen to podcasts, you may enjoy these three presentations by Bogardus. Very informative and entertaining:

Here’s a talk from September summarizing the main arguments of the book: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KI6g5iuRL14

Here’s a recording of a lecture Bogardus gave at the University of Maine a couple years ago, with a Q&A from students: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KGYI4sWhAfI

Here’s a popular level debate Bogardus did a few years ago with a popular left-wing Youtube influencer who goes by the name ‘Vaush’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NHxHSD4qWEM

The Abolition of Creation and the Gender Revolution (Part One)

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Why This Series?

Recently a group of ministers from one of the most secular regions of the United States asked me to present a series of lectures on the challenges contemporary secular culture poses to the church, specifically the popular hostility toward the moral vision of life taught in the New Testament and treasured by the church for 2000 years. Some of them had read my 14-part critical review (September and October 2021) of Karen Keen, Scripture, Ethics, and the Possibility of Same-Sex Relationships* and wanted me to follow up with a more comprehensive treatment. I proposed to address the topic under four headings:

The Abolition of Creation

The Abolition of the Biblical Text

Reclaiming Creation

Reclaiming the Biblical Text

In the next few posts, I want to develop these topics in preparation for my presentations. Perhaps readers can help me refine my thought.

The Darkening of Creation

From July 22 to August 6, 2021, I wrote a five-part review of Carl R. Trueman, The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self: Cultural Amnesia, Expressive Individualism, and the Road to the Sexual Revolution (Crossway, 2020). Trueman explains the origin and agenda of his book in this way:

“The origins of this book lie in my curiosity about how and why a particular statement has come to be regarded as coherent and meaningful: “I am a woman trapped in a man’s body” (p. 19).

Like Truman, I am curious about how this change occurred. What factors led people to abandon the moral significance of the order of nature? How could so fundamental a distinction as the biological difference between male and female be completely disengaged from human identity?** Truman began his study with Jean Jacques Rousseau and traced the sexual revolution from the 18th to the 21st century. I will interact with some of the same thinkers as Truman did, but instead of beginning with Rousseau I will begin with Galileo and the scientific revolution. Truman did not describe extensively the premodern understanding of nature and natural law. But I think it is important to explain how Plato, Aristotle, and later Christian philosophers understood and experienced nature. Only then, I think, can we understand what forces led to the abolition of creation as a source of moral guidance and spiritual inspiration. This essay will be devoted to describing the view of nature’s moral order that modern thinkers dismantled and replaced with subjective human feelings.

The Way Things Were

Before 1500, people saw nature as a unity containing different kinds of things, living and nonliving, plants and animals of different shapes and colors. Each individual thing is an organic whole, a unity, an identity. And this inner unity—a mystery in itself—reveals itself in its outer manifestations: that is in the total impact of its color, shape, smell, texture, taste, sounds, and for animals, also in their behaviors. This way of experiencing nature is a matter of common sense, which everybody possesses. Such philosophers as Plato and Aristotle, however, asked theoretical questions about our common-sense experience: what is the inner basis of the distinct identities of things? What accounts for their unified, spontaneous, and purposeful activity?

In common sense we perceive unreflectively the unity of the being and activity of living things, but stop at that unexamined perception. Practical necessity demands no more. Plato and Aristotle—each in his own way—designated the inner principle of identity “form.” And they named the power for unified, spontaneous, purposeful action “soul.” Designating the inner principle of identity as “form” assures us that this principle is intelligible or mind-like; for that is the only way to make sense of the perceptible differences among things. Matter alone cannot account for the order and qualities that differentiate one kind of thing from another.

Even though forms are too complex for us to grasp in one act of understanding in the way we can grasp a simple mathematical idea, they must be intelligible, if only to the divine mind. Likewise, the inner power for unified, spontaneous, purposeful action (soul) must be nonmaterial. Note here that the doctrine of forms and souls postulates a likeness between our inner world of mind, will, and life and the inner world of things in nature. To anticipate future posts, the scientific revolution shattered this likeness and drove a wedge between the human reality and nature.

Admittedly, giving the names “form” and “soul” and “nature” and “substance” to the inner principles of things adds nothing to our common-sense understanding of things. For what information does it add to the appearances of things to postulate a hidden cause of those appearances? But it does articulate our confidence that our ordinary perceptions of the distinct identities of things are perceptions of something real in itself, that is, the invisible reality in things that shows itself through the appearances. The appearances of things are revelations of the inner reality of things. They are not deceptive.

The Christian thinkers Augustine of Hippo and Thomas Aquinas took up the concepts pioneered by Plato and Aristotle and incorporated them into the Christian doctrine of creation. The creation as a whole and all creatures within it embody ideas and purposes that find their archetypes in the mind of God. Augustine and Aquinas used such concepts as ideas, forms, souls, and natures to designate and explain our common-sense perception of the inner unity and reality of things and of their inner power for spontaneous, purposeful action. Like the forms and souls of Plato and Aristotle, their Christian adaptations add nothing to our perceptions of the appearances of things. Nevertheless, they assert our confidence that through the appearances our minds make contact with the intelligible inner reality of things.

There is more, however, because the Christian doctrine of creation also assures us that in knowing the forms of things through the appearances, our minds also contact the mind and will of God. Thereby, our ordinary common-sense experience of nature is drawn into the religious and moral sphere. The glory of God and the nature of the good is at least partially revealed in the appearances of creatures.

Observations and Anticipations

1. Hence, we can see clearly why people living before scientific revolution of the seventeenth century would find the statement “I am a woman trapped in a man’s body” (Truman, p. 19) not only false but incomprehensible. Laughable even. For if a human being appears to the senses as male, we can be certain that his inner reality (or form) is male. Forms do not deceive us by appearing in bodies as something they are not in themselves.

2. The traditional Christian doctrine of creation adds another dimension. Because the forms that give each creature its identity find their archetypes in God’s mind and embody God’s good will, they demand our respect. They are revelations of God’s wisdom and goodness. It would have struck a person living 400 years ago as impious, ungrateful, and irrational to reject one’s sex.

3. Before the modern era, common sense, the doctrine of forms, and the Christian doctrine of creation together provided a strong foundation for the conviction that a moral law is woven into the fabric of creation. Some activities are good and some are bad. Some are right and some are wrong. And these moral distinctions can be discerned by reason and common sense. For Augustine and Thomas Aquinas or any of their contemporaries, it would have seemed as irrational as it is wrong for a human being to live as an animal or a male to live as a female or a female to live as a male.

Next Time: We will see how the architects of the scientific revolution—Galileo, Bacon, Descartes, et al.—destroyed confidence in the reality of forms and souls and replaced them with atoms, space, and machines. The appearances no longer reveal the reality of things. Creation is emptied of spiritual reality, meaning, purpose, moral law, and beauty, all of which are transferred to the inner subjective world of the human mind.

*Subsequently published in revised form as Ron Highfield, The Choice: Should the Church Affirm LGBTQ+ Identities and Ways of Living (Keledei Publications, 2024).

**If you want to think about the true nature of the biological distinction between the sexes, I recommend reading Tomas Bogardus, The Nature of the Sexes: Why Biology Matters (Routledge, 2026). Bogardus is a philosopher colleague of mine. I will say more about this book in a later post.

Christian Stoic or Social Justice Christian?

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The Stoics

Like all philosophical schools in the ancient world—Platonists, Epicureans, Academics, et al—the Stoics sought the truths, attitudes and conditions that would facilitate a good human life. They observed that such negative emotions as fear, desire, and anxiety are generated by thoughts about attaining or avoiding that over which we have no control. Clearly, these negative emotions are incompatible with the good life. The best life is one of undisturbed contentment with the gift of existence in our inner being wherein we are always in the immediate presence of good things that cannot change. For the Stoics, there is only one thing and one place over which we have control, that is our own free will. It is the only thing that we can have purely by willing it. The external world, including our bodies, operates under other laws over which we have no immediate control and to which we must adjust. And the free will of other human beings is completely beyond our control because it is totally under their control. To banish negative emotions, we must refrain from desiring to control that over which we do not have immediate and total control. Stoics determine to accept the flow of the events that happen in nature as their lot. These external events cannot threaten or even touch the inner world of free will unless we allow it to do so.

Social Justice Christians

There is a kind of Christian ethics that in effect proposes that we ought to remain in a state of discontent and outrage until we right every injustice done in the world. And because we cannot accomplish such radical changes in the world by appealing to the free will of others by doing good, speaking truth, and setting good examples, these same Christians resort to using force: intimidation, insults, rudeness, disruption, legal action, and, yes, even violence.  Apparently, these social justice Christians think that the coming of the kingdom of God depends on our human efforts to establish their ideal political order that includes everybody, believers and non-believers, saints and sinners. They turn the Stoic understanding of a good human life inside out. What matters most are the external conditions of life: equal access to bodily pleasure, equality of material goods, equality of social respect, and equality of external freedom. Because this level of control over the external social, political, and natural order is impossible, these social justice Christians ensure that everyone is angry, unhappy, fearful, and offended all the time. Not a happy life.

The Christian Stoic

There are, of course, great differences between Stoic metaphysics, cosmology and theology and the Christian view of God, creation, salvation, and providence. Jesus’s teaching concerning God’s providence and against the need for anxiety, however, bears some resemblance to the Stoic doctrine of limiting our concern to the place where we have immediate control, our free will. Jesus tells us to trust and align our wills with God’s will. Also, neither in Jesus’s teaching nor in the rest of the New Testament is there the slightest hint that Jesus’s disciples ought to seek to remake the world into a social justice paradise by political means. That day is an eschatological hope dependent completely on God’s power. To attempt to control the world in the name of God in a way only God can produces only tyranny and rebellion. The only community in which there is a little hope for an approximate realization of the kingdom ethics taught in the Sermon on the Mount is the church, that is, the community of those truly converted to Jesus Christ in their inner being. But history demonstrates that this kingdom community has never become a concrete reality even in the church, the community divinely commission to become such. Much more is it a vain dream that it will be realized in a society of the unconverted!

What is the Christian Stoic to do? First, we must understand that apart from God’s grace in the Holy Spirit our free will is not free in the most radical sense, that is free to know and love the true God above all things. Only God can make God present to our minds so that we can know and love him in this way. But given God’s grace, we can love God in return for his love for us. In loving God above everything else we live free from anxiety about all those things over which we have no control. Moreover, we know that the God who loves us possesses power to control all things for our good.

Christian Stoics know they cannot right every wrong and transform the world into a social paradise. This task is not under their power and therefore is not their job. Their main job is, with the help of God’s grace, to allow themselves to be transformed into the image of Christ. From that transformed inner world they can turn outward to do good, speak truth, and love neighbor and enemy. God may use their good works and words to transform others.

Christian Stoics refuse to be unhappy because the external world does not submit to their control. We have come to know that our primary task in life is purification of our own souls. That in itself is a dauting task and the work of a lifetime.

“Dignitas Infinita” (Infinite Dignity) A Recommendation, Part Three

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In this post I will conclude my reflections on the just released declaration of the Roman Catholic Church’s Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith on “Dignitas Infinita” (Human Dignity). Below is the outline of the document. Today I will address the bolded point #4.

Presentation

Introduction

1. A Growing Awareness of the Centrality of Human Dignity

2. The Church Proclaims, Promotes, and Guarantees Human Dignity

3. Dignity, the Foundation of Human Rights and Duties

4. Some Grave Violations of Human Dignity

Conclusion

Some Grave Violations of Human Dignity

Under this heading Dignitas Infinita addresses several violations of human dignity:

poverty, war, mistreatment of migrants, human trafficking, sexual abuse, violence against women, abortion, surrogacy, euthanasia and assisted suicide, marginalization of people with disabilities, gender theory, sex change, and digital violence.

In each subsection, the Declaration draws on the theology of human dignity articulated in sections one and two as well as the secularized form stated in the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights (1948). [For this story, see the first essay in this series.] In my view, these abuses of human rights fall into two classes, although a few embody elements of both: (1) abuses wherein individuals or groups violate the inherent dignity of other individuals or groups; (2) abuses in which individuals violate their own dignity sometimes encouraged or aided by others.

Class One: Violations of the Dignity of Others

In this class we can place poverty, war, mistreatment of migrants, human trafficking, sexual abuse, violence against women, surrogacy, marginalization of people with disabilities, and digital violence.

As I said above, the Declaration draws on the biblical anthropology common to the ecumenical church. But it also wants to speak to those more at home with the secular language of human rights. Except for surrogacy—in which the genetic child of one couple is artificially placed in the womb of another woman, carried to term, and surrendered to the genetic parents—Western secular societies also view the items on this list as violations of human rights and dignity. The declaration condemns surrogacy as violation of the dignity of the birth mother and the child. Both parties as persons of infinite dignity should not be made the objects of a commercial transaction. Children should not be for sale. As for the other abuses of human dignity in Class One, many societies that formally condemn these violations overlook them in practice.

Class Two: Violations of One’s Own Dignity and Borderline Cases

In this class fall abortion, surrogacy, euthanasia and assisted suicide, gender theory, sex change, and digital violence. I will make comments on abortion, euthanasia and assisted suicide, gender theory, and sex change.

Abortion is a grave offense against the dignity of the mother and the destroyed child. Abortion is most often justified as the prerogative of the woman, who supposedly has a right to control her own body. Ironically, this assertion appeals to the very principle of infinite dignity under discussion in the Declaration. It perverts an objective, ontological characteristic into a subjective, arbitrary right. And of course, the child is treated as a non-person that possesses no dignity or rights. However, the legitimate right to control one’s body has in view only violation and coercion by another person. But in relation to God, the Creator and one’s ontological dignity as the image of God, no one has a right to use their body as they wish; it is just as wrong to violate one’s own dignity as it is to violate another person’s dignity. Moreover, a woman carrying a child is not dealing merely with her own body. She is responsible to the Creator for the life of another. To treat her unborn child as a disposable thing is a grave violation of human dignity and an offense to the divine Giver of life. It not only robs a human being of life, it also sears the conscience of the mother. Additionally, it involves the assisting medical personnel in serious sin. The Declaration quotes Pope St. John Paul II:

Among all the crimes which can be committed against life, procured abortion has characteristics making it particularly serious and deplorable. […] But today, in many people’s consciences, the perception of its gravity has become progressively obscured. The acceptance of abortion in the popular mind, in behavior, and even in law itself is a telling sign of an extremely dangerous crisis of the moral sense, which is becoming more and more incapable of distinguishing between good and evil, even when the fundamental right to life is at stake (Encyclical Letter Evangelium Vitae (25 March 1995), no. 58).

Advocates of euthanasia and assisted suicide often appeal to the concept of dignity as if human dignity consisted of autonomy and independence. But identifying dignity with independence robs dignity of its inherent and ontological status and makes it dependent on a quality that can be lost, gained, or augmented. Suicide, whether self-inflicted or assisted, is not asserting one’s dignity but violating it. Like life itself, human dignity is a gift of God. No one has the right to destroy it.

Gender theory, which makes gender—an infinite scale of gradation of male to female characteristics—completely independent of biological sex. Gender, not biological sex, becomes central to one’s identity. Instead of embracing our God-given bodies as foundational to our personal identities, gender theory disengages personal identity from the created structures of reality. As the Declaration points out,

Desiring a personal self-determination, as gender theory prescribes, apart from this fundamental truth that human life is a gift, amounts to a concession to the age-old temptation to make oneself God, entering into competition with the true God of love revealed to us in the Gospel.

Attempting to change one’s sex through surgery or hormone therapy rejects God’s creative will. It mutilates and destroys the body, which shares in the dignity of the image of God. For the image of God applies not to the soul alone or the body alone but to the union of body and soul. Pope Fransis asserted that “creation is prior to us and must be received as a gift. At the same time, we are called to protect our humanity, and this means, in the first place, accepting it and respecting it as it was created” (Apostolic Exhortation Amoris Laetitia (19 March 2016), no. 56).

Reflections on Dignitas Infinita

I hesitate to make any comment that sounds like a criticism. For this document is a brilliant and timely piece of practical theology. Allow me respectfully to make two observations that could be perceived as mild criticisms. (1) Like many Papal documents, Dignitas Infinita attempts to bridge the divide—or at least engage in dialogue—between Christian theology and ethics and secular anthropology and ethics. The Declaration’s several references to the UN Declaration on Human Rights (1948) witnesses to this desire. Hence the Declaration betrays an interest in influencing public policy at national and international levels. But the demarcation between what can be known about human beings’ nature and destiny through reason alone and what can be known only in faith in divine Creation and the Incarnation and Resurrection of Jesus Christ is not clearly drawn. Hence many arguments, especially those concerning surrogacy, abortion, gender theory, and sex change seem less persuasive, because it’s not clear to which norm the document is appealing: to a self-evident natural law that can be known by reason alone or to norms grounded only in faith in divine revelation.

(2) My second mild criticism derives from the confusion described in the first. The concept of dignity, that is, infinite dignity, makes sense only within the biblical framework; for apart from a relationship to God nothing about humanity can command infinite respect. When cut loose from its grounding in Christian faith, dignity loses its precise meaning and can easily be perverted into the autonomy of the self. The moral force of assertions of human dignity is very persuasive when applied to respecting other people, but in application to oneself they become subject to confusion. The concept of dignity, then, needs to be supplemented with a concept of obligation to God. We are obligated to the Creator to be thankful and respectful of his gift of ourselves, body and soul, and the bodies and souls of others.

Cafeteria Catholics and Cafeteria Protestants: Different Denomination, Same Hypocrisy

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In the March 31 episode of CBS’s Face the Nation, Roman Catholic Cardinal Gregory Walton of Washington DC spoke of President Joe Biden as a “cafeteria Catholic.” The Cardinal explained to the audience that cafeteria Catholics pick and choose which church teachings to believe and practice based on expediency and preference. Walton hastened to add that Mr. Biden is “sincere,” which to my mind strains credulity. For I can’t square flagrant disobedience and direct contradiction of the Church’s clear teaching with sincerity. What stands out in the cafeteria Catholic mentality is the lack of a spirit of obedience. They want the advantages of being known as good Catholics without actually having to live like one. And so, they add the sin of hypocrisy to the sin of disobedience. A “sincere” cafeteria Catholic is an oxymoron, like a square circle or married bachelor.

Cafeteria Protestants join their Catholic counterparts in the same spirit of selectivity and hypocrisy. Cafeteria Protestants treat the Bible the way cafeteria Catholics treat the teaching authority of the Roman Catholic Church. For them, Jesus’s teaching can be summed up in two commandments: (1) don’t judge the choices of others, and (2) do what makes you happy. They quietly pass over Jesus’s teaching forbidding divorce, lust, and greed. They soften Jesus’s warnings about the narrow and the broad ways. They practice injustice, abortion, fornication, and adultery. The only cross they bear is the one the wear around their necks. Of the spirit of obedience, they know nothing. Sincerity means purity of heart. You can’t be a sincere hypocrite!

In the Bible, especially in the New Testament, the test of sincerity is your willingness to suffer for the faith. Faithfulness unto death is the mark of a true disciple of Jesus. Willingness to confess Christ as Lord before hostile audiences is the proof of faith. The words of Peter expose and condemn in the clearest terms the hypocrisy of “cafeteria” faith in both its Catholic and Protestant forms:

Therefore, with minds that are alert and fully sober, set your hope on the grace to be brought to you when Jesus Christ is revealed at his coming. As obedient children, do not conform to the evil desires you had when you lived in ignorance. But just as he who called you is holy, so be holy in all you do; for it is written: “Be holy, because I am holy.”

Since you call on a Father who judges each person’s work impartially, live out your time as foreigners here in reverent fear. For you know that it was not with perishable things such as silver or gold that you were redeemed from the empty way of life handed down to you from your ancestors, but with the precious blood of Christ, a lamb without blemish or defect. He was chosen before the creation of the world, but was revealed in these last times for your sake. Through him you believe in God, who raised him from the dead and glorified him, and so your faith and hope are in God (1 Peter 1:13-21).

“Alert and fully sober,” “obedient children,” “holy,” “reverent fear”? These are not terms that come to mind when I think of cafeteria Christians. Like all hypocrites, cafeteria Catholics and cafeteria Protestants possess no real consciousness of God, that is, of the “Father who judges each person’s work impartially.” They seek only “to be seen by others” as virtuous. Jesus says of them, “Truly I tell you, they have received their reward in full” (Matthew 6:5-6).

The Choice…Now Available

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I shall have more to say later…but I wanted to announce that my new book The Choice: Should the Church Affirm LGBTQ+ Identities and Ways of Living? is now available in paperback and Kindle. It will soon also be available in AI audio.

You can read the first 6 pages of the Introduction on Amazon.com.

More later.

Coming Soon–The Choice: Should the Church Affirm LGBTQ+ Identities and Ways of Living?

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My new book, The Choice: Should the Church Affirm LGBTQ+ Identities and Ways of Living? will be published and available within a week from today!

Here is what my good friend Rubel Shelly said about it:

Ron Highfield has made a significant contribution to the present-day discussion of LGBTQ+ claims by a tight focus on the work of Karen Keen. Highfield’s The Choice is a careful and erudite analysis of Keen’s work that uncovers a species of argument being offered from many quarters. First, he lays bare Keen’s postmodern substitution of feeling and rhetoric for Scripture and sound reasoning. “From the postmodern perspective,” he notes, “autobiography is argument.” In such a case, Scripture can be displaced by personal desire. Second, he skillfully explains the implications of such an approach to an orthodox view of the Bible. If only those historic demands of Scripture that pass muster with one’s self-defined notions of kindness, justice, love, secular psychology, and minimal human suffering (i.e., inconvenience, restraint of desire) are obligatory to Christians, we are back to the ancient times in Israel when every individual is a law to her/himself. Contrary to Keen’s claim to show how evangelicals can defend an “affirming” case for same-sex marriage, Dr. Highfield demonstrates that her case abandons an orthodox view of God-breathed Scripture in order to read into the Bible what our postmodern culture otherwise could only wish it had said.

Rubel Shelly

professor, writer, minister, and author of Male and Female God Made Them: A Biblical Review of LGBTQ+ Claims (Joplin, MO: College Press, 2023).

If you are a church leader, teacher, or an individual believer who is seeking help with answering the question voiced in my subtitle, Should the Church Affirm LGBTQ+ Identities and Ways of Living? I wrote this book for you. Soon, if not already, every denomination, every local church, including the congregation where you attend, will be faced with The Choice, the choice I address in this book. Are you ready?

Can Fifty-Seven Percent of the People of Ohio Transform Evil into Good?

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On Tuesday, November 07, 2023, the people of Ohio voted by a margin of 57% to 43% to enshrine the right to abortion in their state constitution. What does this act mean? First, let me be clear right up front: A state possesses no power to transform an immoral activity into a moral one. A state can declare that black is white, up is down, evil is good but it cannot make them so. And a person may engage in an activity that incurs no guilt according to legislated law—or even garners praise—but that incurs profound guilt according to moral law and condemnation according to God’s law. Abortion is profoundly immoral, irresponsible, and sinful. And no rationalization can justify it. But Ohio declared it to be a constitutionally protected right. And that makes it so; that is, it really does make it a constitutionally protected right. But to make use of that humanly invented right is as immoral and sinful today as it has always been. And the divine Judge does not care in the least what the constitution of the State of Ohio asserts.

Why a Constitutional Right?

I am sure I am oversimplifying it. But I see a difference between activities that a state declares (1) illegal (2) obligatory, (3) matters of positive right, and (4) matters it leaves unregulated. In a just state, the legislative authority makes illegal only those activities it considers seriously deleterious to the common good (e.g., armed robbery) or obligatory only those activities it considers necessary to the common good (e.g., paying taxes). The state leaves the vast majority of life’s activities unregulated (4). To leave an area unregulated assumes that no serious threat to the common good is at stake one way or another. Or, another way to put it is that leaving certain areas unregulated is itself advantageous to the common good.

But what about (3) positive rights? If the State of Ohio did not want to make the immoral act of abortion illegal, it could have left it unregulated or regulated it within specific limits. Instead, however, it made abortion a positive right. What does giving abortion this particular legal status say about the State of Ohio’s understanding of abortion in relation to the common good? A positive right is a freedom for a certain activity that a person may make use of or not. Like activities the state leaves unregulated, engaging in the privileged activity is left to individual discretion. Moreover, it is assumed not to damage the common good. But unlike unregulated activities, it is specifically named. Naming a right—rather than lumping it in with other unregulated activities—indicates that protecting this right has been recognized as of great value to the common good. Making it a constitutional right reinforces this conclusion. For no state legislature can make a legitimate law contravening the constitution of that state. Think of other positive rights: freedom of religion, assembly, and speech. These rights must be protected because their exercise enhances the common good.

How does exercising the constitutional right to abortion enhance the common good in analogy to exercising speech, religion, or assembly? Do fifty-seven percent of the people of Ohio believe that aborting a child is a good thing? Perhaps fifty-seven percent of the people of Ohio are utilitarian in their ethics and think that limiting population or reducing poverty by way of abortion is a good thing. (Utilitarianism asserts that whatever produces the most good for the greatest number is also good.) But I doubt that very many of the good people of Ohio are self-conscious utilitarians. I don’t think Ohioans, believing that abortion itself is a good thing, wanted to maximize the number of abortions in their state. What, then, is the good the fifty-seven percent see produced by their action? I think they take the freedom to choose as such, without regard to what you choose, as a higher good than minimizing the number of children aborted. Apparently, they were willing to make that trade, which is a very Utilitarian thing to do! What they may have lost sight of is that exercising freedom in an immoral act is itself an immoral act. And freely cooperating to grant a positive right to commit what you know is an immoral act (as opposed to leaving areas unregulated) is itself an immoral act.

The LGBTQ+ Question: Debated or Debatable?

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“In the beginning was the Word…and the Word became flesh and lived among us.” (Jo 1:1-14). This Word could communicate the truth about God because “the Word was God.” God’s Word is truth by nature because it is God by nature. In contrast, our words are not by nature God and hence not by nature truth. We are subject to error. At best, words communicate accurately the fallible thoughts of the human mind from which they come. I say “at best” because the process of choosing the right words to communicate our thoughts is also fallible. Often, we are not clear on what we think, and even if we possessed inner clarity of thought, experience teaches us that words cannot perfectly reproduce our thoughts in the minds of others. Not only so, others hear our words through the filters of their own vocabularies and experiences.

Given these challenges many thinkers have observed that open-ended, personal conversation is the best way for two minds to achieve mutual understanding. The back and forth, trial and error, proposal, correction, and counterproposal method of dialogue gradually creates mutual understanding. Writing, podcasts, public speaking involve one-way communication. They are highly subject to misunderstanding, distortion, and caricature. Ideally, we would engage in conversation with everyone we wish to understand. Because the ideal is unachievable, we have to learn to read and listen carefully, analytically, and critically to one-way communications.

An author whose book I read recently drew an inference I think is unwarranted. They based that inference on the verbal similarity between two words. This author observed, quite correctly, that over the last 10 years traditionally evangelical publishers—Eerdmans, Zondervan, and Intervarsity—have started publishing books on both sides of the debate about the Christian acceptability of LGBTQ+ identities and ways of living. So, the subject is debated among self-identified evangelicals. But the author inferred from the fact that the moral status of people who identify as LGBTQ+ is debated that the subject is now debatable within Bible-believing, evangelical churches.

I do not think this inference is warranted. To say that an issue is debated is to make a statement of fact apart from any judgment about its status in relation to Christian doctrine. To say that a subject is debatable is to make a claim about its legitimacy as a viewpoint that may be held under the umbrella of Christian faith. For sure, to label a matter debatable takes no position as to which side is correct. But it envisions a state in which churches must tolerate and listen to both parties in the dispute with an open mind.

Within the history of the church many issues have been designated debatable, disputable, or indifferent matters on which believers may disagree without breaking fellowship (See Romans 14 and 15; Acts 15). But which matters were debatable was itself debated! This debate (about which matters were debatable, disputable, or indifferent) turned on the distinction between matters that were essential beliefs, scruples, and practices and those that were in some way adjunct. In the end, however, the church had to make judgments, come to consensus issue by issue, and enforce those decisions as community standards.

With regard to the debate over the Christian acceptability of LGBTQ+ identities and ways of living, it will take more evidence than the mere existence of a debate to prove that it is now a debatable matter within Bible-believing churches. This change from a settled to a debatable question would overturn a consensus that is unanimous in the Bible and the universal church until recently. The mere presence of a few authors that dispute that consensus does not warrant breaking with that settled teaching. They would need to convince the church that it has misread the Bible and held to a false, cruel, and destructive teaching for 2,000 years.

In my view, the claim that the issue of LGBTQ+ acceptance is a debatable issue because it is now openly debated within evangelical circles is a rhetorical ploy designed to grant legitimacy and gain a hearing for a viewpoint that has not earned that legitimacy the hard way. Hence the debate today is not only about the Christian acceptability of LGBTQ+ identities and ways of living, it is a debate about this issue’s debatability. And the “debatability” of an issue cannot be decided by a few authors’ assertions but is a judgment that only the church can make. In the meantime, the church—given the prima facia teaching of Scripture and the 2,000-year consensus—has every right (and in my view is obligated) to debate with this new teaching as it does with other error and heresy.