Given this is ostensibly a blog about parenting, and that I soon have a book about parenting to be published, and we live in the 21st century, I can’t escape commenting on homosexuality. As you know it is ubiquitous in our culture, and if you have children you won’t be able to escape addressing it with them either. We’re confronted with it all the time. Just recently we were watching a new TV series called Manifest. It’s interesting because it has a Lost-like premise, and it’s always good when mystery is inserted into popular culture, but the writers just had to introduce homosexual characters into the plot. I turned it off. The same happened with the Amazon show Man in the High Castle, and off that went as well. Yes, I know, that’s narrow-minded and judgmental of me, but I serve a narrow-minded, judgmental Savior (just read the gospels carefully, and you’ll see lovey-dovey, affirm everyone Jesus is a figment of wishful thinking, and popular cultural imagination).
Christian parents have the responsibility to teach their children about right and wrong, good and evil. This is obvious. What is not so obvious is the way this should and can be done. Of course, there is no one way because we’re all different, and our children are all different, but one way it’s done not often enough is in an apologetics way. What do I mean by that? I will use homosexuality as an example because nowadays that topic must be added to the birds and the bees conversations we eventually have with our kids.
Skeptics (and our secular culture at large) who reject Christianity think the Bible is an arbitrary set of morals, of dos and don’ts, that constricts life, and leads to guilt and repression. So in this view, things are right or wrong because the Bible says so. That’s all. Many Christians believe this as well. I would argue that has it backwards. The Bible says things are right and wrong because they are right and wrong, not just because it says so.
I’m currently reading a biography about the flamboyant 19th century writer, bon vivant, and raconteur, Oscar Wilde. I had to learn more about him after reading The Picture of Dorian Gray, his most famous work (he mostly wrote plays and poems). Wilde was a genius, and was as notorious in late Victorian England, as conservative Christians are (to cultural elites) in early 21st century America. He would have been right at home in “the 60’s” because his pursuit of pleasure and self-fulfillment was the sin qua none of his life, as it was and is for the adherents of the sexual revolution. Although he had a wife and two children, he basically abandoned them to pursue homosexual relationships with young men. He eventually ended up in prison because of it, a broken and bitter man.
As I’m learning about a man like Wilde, I use that for conversations with my family. Here is someone who rejected the Christian society, and its mores, in which he lived because he thought they choked the life out of existence. And in a way he was right. Moralism and legalism, the obsession with morals, can indeed do that. The Bible says it, end of discussion. But the God revealed to us in Scripture is much more nuanced than that. He created man, male and female, in a certain way, just like anyone might create a car or software program or washing machine, to work a certain way. The analogy helps us understand why Paul says this in the first chapter of Romans:
26 Because of this, God gave them over to shameful lusts. Even their women exchanged natural sexual relations for unnatural ones. 27 In the same way the men also abandoned natural relations with women and were inflamed with lust for one another. Men committed shameful acts with other men, and received in themselves the due penalty for their error.
To say that homosexuality is “unnatural” is impolite in 2018, and for many downright offensive and intolerant. Those on the secular left would consider it “hate speech” and bigotry. It is neither. Even many Christians are uncomfortable saying such a thing, but a careful, or even not so careful, analysis of human anatomy makes it obvious that homosexuality is not what the human body was created for. Sex between a man and woman is “natural” in that the human body was designed specifically, very carefully, for it. As a contrast, I recently read an article about the unhealthy consequences of homosexual sex. I will not link to it here because, frankly, it’s disturbing. Anyone can do a search and find such information.
One of the most important concepts bequeathed to Western civilization came from a pagan, the ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle. In Greek the word that embodies this concept is telos, or the purpose or end of a thing. The Jewish religion did the same thing from a transcendent perspective: God is the creator of all things, thus they have a purpose. So we know without a doubt from revelation in both Scripture and creation that telos in nature is real, and thus a guide to human flourishing. The concept is so central to human existence, that the whole of Western philosophy is a battle between those who accept, and those who reject this idea. As Christians we fully embrace that the created order has “natural” ends, and when they are frustrated or worked against, human beings suffer. Thus, heterosexual sin outside of marriage is a sin even thought it’s “natural,” whereas homosexual sex is sin and unnatural. It goes against the ends in our nature for which our bodies were created.
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