I want to broach a topic that will get me in trouble. It shouldn’t get me in trouble among Christians, particularly so called ‘conservative Reformed’ Christians; but it will these days. The topic is so called: ‘Gay Christian,’ and its possibility as an actual concept and reality before God.

I just watched a video featuring folks like Wesley Hill, Matt Jenson, and some other lesser knowns where they were discussing types of ‘singleness’ as Christians. For Hill, and one other panelist, their singleness is driven by their self-identified homosexual orientation. They were on a panel being hosted by Hope College in Holland Michigan; an undergraduate Christian school associated with Western Theological Seminary. For all intents and purposes, this represents a very conservative Dutch Reformed conclave of Christian people. What is striking to me, though, is that Hill’s message continues to have traction in such environs. Hill ‘came out’ as a gay Christian some years ago, and has helped propel a movement, of sorts, wherein the idea of being gay and Christian can, at some level, be coterminous. The qualification for Hill’s project is that while he identifies as a homosexual, he keeps that lifestyle at bay by remaining celibate. He calls the movement he is a propellant for: ‘Spiritual Friendship.’ Here is how a co-editor, of Hill’s, at their blog, describes the entailments of SF:

Reading Aelred of Rievaulx’s little treatise On Spiritual Friendship as an undergraduate was a life-changing experience for me. Aelred, a 12th-century Cistercian abbot, insists that we need to test our beliefs about friendship with Scripture. The treatise is a series of dialogues in which three monks join Aelred to examine their ideas about friendship in light of their Christian faith.

One of Aelred’s insights made a big impact on me. He points out that friendship is based on shared goals, and distinguishes between different kinds of friendship: carnal friendship, based on shared pursuit of pleasure; worldly friendship, based on mutual advantage; and spiritual friendship, grounded in shared discipleship.

The dialogues helped me to see that although Christian discipleship is costly, it need not be lonely. Our culture has become very fixated on sex, but sex and romance are not the same as love. Nor is Christian love the same as the kind of casual friendship that is common in our culture (Facebook informs me that I currently have 554 “friends”).

Aelred insists that, contrary to the transitory nature of so many contemporary friendships, a friend in Christ “loves always” (Proverbs 17:17). He and the other monks discuss how to select and cultivate lasting and Christ-centered friendships.

Growing up as a gay teenager, the only messages I heard from the church were negative. Most in our culture—including many Christians—uphold romantic and sexual love as the most important form of love. But God forbade the sexual and romantic love I desired. Was I just to be left out in the cold?

Aelred helped me to see that obedience to Christ offered more to me than just the denial of sex and romance. Christ-centered chaste friendships offered a positive and fulfilling—albeit at times challenging—path to holiness.[1]

Clearly the focus is not on sexual orientation, so much as it is on what serves as the surrogate for his ‘natural’ romantic affection, which would be for another man. It seeks another form of love, not one that has eros associated with it, but a love that is deeply rooted in developing bonds of friendship with other Christians. This seems like a noble alternative to living out the homosexual lifestyle. Hill, and others like him, recognize that the Bible teaches against living out homosexual desires as sinful; which of course is why they pursue a life of celibacy, and find repose in developing friendships with other Christians in lieu of fulfilling romantic relationships with others of the same-sex.

The problem I continue to have with this is this: The Bible is clear that we all will struggle with a variety of sinful impulses and desires. For some the impulse will be for same-sex erotic relationships; for others it will be for heterosexual and adulterous or fornicating relationships; for others it will be thievery; and the list of sins goes on and on. But as the Apostle Paul writes:

⁹ Do you not know that the unrighteous will not inherit the kingdom of God? Do not be deceived. Neither fornicators, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor homosexuals, nor sodomites, ¹⁰ nor thieves, nor covetous, nor drunkards, nor revilers, nor extortioners will inherit the kingdom of God. ¹¹ And such were some of you. But you were washed, but you were sanctified, but you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus and by the Spirit of our God. –I Corinthians 6.9-11

As a Christian God’s Grace is always already, moment-by-moment, an apocalyptic and refreshing reality that breaks into our lives and disrupts our various sinful orientations from the inside/out. This is what is happening to each and every one of us as “we all, with unveiled face, beholding as in a mirror the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image from glory to glory, just as by the Spirit of the Lord.” (II Cor. 3.18) We are “a new creation; old things have passed away; behold, all things have become new.” (II Cor. 5.17; cf. Gal. 6.15) If this is so, if “he who is joined to the Lord is one spirit with Him” (I Cor. 6.17), then what value is there in identifying with the sinful orientation, whatever that might be for the respective Christian, that God in Christ, on a continuous, second-by-second movement, is redeeming us from, and alternatively is calling us to be identified with Him in the resurrected and justified (and glorified) life that He is for us at the right hand of the Father?

I see Hill’s Spiritual Friendship model, while a noble attempt, as a capitulation to ‘the spirit of the age.’ I see it as an attempt to bring comfort to people who struggle with a particular sinful orientation that our culture has elevated to the status of an actual socio-moral, and even ontological status. But the Christian’s ontology, or being, contradicts this cultural status, this ‘sexuality construct’ at its very core by shining the light of God’s Kingdom on this world’s darkness.

⁸ For you were once darkness, but now you are light in the Lord. Walk as children of light ⁹ (for the fruit of the Spirit is in all goodness, righteousness, and truth), ¹⁰ finding out what is acceptable to the Lord. ¹¹ And have no fellowship with the unfruitful works of darkness, but rather expose them. ¹² For it is shameful even to speak of those things which are done by them in secret. ¹³ But all things that are exposed are made manifest by the light, for whatever makes manifest is light. –Ephesians 5.8-13

By identifying as a gay-Christian, how can someone like Wesley Hill expose the homosexual lifestyle as sinful; not just to the world, but to himself? By keeping himself, and themselves tethered to an orientation that Christ put to death in His death at the cross (cf. Rom. 8.3), how can who they have become and are becoming existentially (and ontically) on a daily basis in Christ, be a known reality to them? They continue to find at least a significant aspect of their identity tied into an orientation and reality that is dead; indeed, that is death and destruction.

Beyond this, at a witness level, it gives viability to a construct that in the Kingdom of Christ, in the new creation, is what Karl Barth calls das Nichtige (nothingness). It keeps a topos or ‘place’ open in the adherent’s life that God in Christ has given us the power to mortify; not just the act, but the conceptual orientation and identity itself.

As far as people who continue to struggle with same-sex attraction, even as Christians, this is no different than others who struggle with issues of sexual lust and adulterous fornication. In what way are these sins different than the homosexual direction; other than the fact that our society has created a construct wherein ‘homosexuality’ has become an actual socio-psychical identity? How does identifying as a gay-Christian help the person who struggles with these impulses, as a Christian, from creating distance, as far as the east from the west is, from these desires? It constantly keeps such Christians tied to a sinful orientation as their identity, rather than grounding them in the triumphant and resurrected humanity of Jesus Christ as their new orientation. It also suggests to other Christians, ones who might have fleeting impulses in this direction, that they might in fact be gay, when in fact these impulses otherwise might have remained fleeting and ones that would have passed away save the fact that this category of ‘gay-Christian’ now has concrete traction in the conservative and traditional Christian world.

Clearly, I stand against the concept of gay-Christian, because I think the new creation instantiated in the resurrected and vicarious humanity of Christ directly contradicts such thinking at an ontological and/or theological-anthropological level. As Christians we are called to find our orientation and identity in and from the reality of the risen Christ. It is in this sort of union that our witness to other Christians, the elect angels, and the whole wide world has power; insofar that they all can recognize that we were once x or y, but now we have been ‘washed, we have been sanctified’ by the blood of the Lamb of God who was slain for the sins of the world.

[1] Ron Belgau, “Spiritual friendship in 300 words,” accessed 10-23-2019.

*Also check out the Revoice Conference in affiliation with The Gospel Coalition and the Presbyterian Church of America (PCA).