'Evangelicals' Who Support Gay Marriage Are 'Intellectually Dishonest,' FRC VP Says
Evangelicals who support gay marriage are not "intellectually honest" and are unfaithful to the biblical teachings on sexuality and marriage, Family Research Council Senior Vice President Rob Schwarzwalder said Tuesday.
The 2,800-member Evangelical Theological Society, a prominent group of leading Evangelical scholars, theologians and professors, adopted four resolutions last week at its annual meeting in Atlanta, Georgia, which affirm the Bible's teaching on marriage and sexuality.
Schwarzwalder, one of the co-drafters of the resolutions, told The Christian Post that although the ETS very seldom adopts resolutions, the resolutions were passed in an attempt to debunk the mainstream media's notion that there's a divide amongst Evangelicals on gay marriage and sexual morality.
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Among the four resolutions the society adopted are the affirmations that marriage is viewed by Evangelicals to be the "covenantal union of one man and one woman, for life," and that sexual intimacy is to be reserved for marriage between one man and one woman and "excludes all other forms of sexual intimacy."
Additionally, the ETS adopted a resolution affirming that God created men and women with distinct and unchangeable traits of manhood and womanhood.
"I think that some in the secular media are licking their chops over the idea that there is a big division within Evangelicalism," Schwarzwalder, a CP op-ed contributor, said. "For the ETS to go forward and to make the kind of endorsement they did sends a signal, I think most specifically, that biblical orthodoxy within Evangelicalism has not changed and those who claim to be Evangelical and want it changed are a tiny minority and their arguments are not accepted by the vast majority of Evangelical scholars, teachers, professors and so forth."
"So, you have seen the four resolutions and those leaders have taken a very strong public stance, saying, 'This is what we believe and we are not going to compromise on it,'" Schwarzwalder added.
As the vast majority of the ETS members are socially conservative, Schwarzwalder argued that left-leaning Evangelicals who claim that the Bible doesn't specifically say that two people of the same sex can't get married are overlooking the biblical truth.
"The truth that it articulates are not controversial unless you are seeking to deny them, which is what some people professing to be Evangelicals on the left seek to do," Schwarzwalder said. "You don't have to agree with them, nobody is putting a gun to somebody's head and mandating a certain kind of faith, but to claim that you are a person of the Scripture and of the Gospel and to deny those things is simply not be intellectually honest and it is not faithful to what the Bible teaches."
Schwarzwalder explained that the Bible is clear in Genesis that God created male and female. In Matthew, Jesus explicitly states: "For this reason, a man shall leave his father and his mother and cling to his wife."
"There is no ambiguity [in the Bible] about human sexuality in marriage. It is clear. You can accept it or you can reject it," Schwarzwalder asserted. "That's a choice, but you cannot call yourself a Bible-believing person of the Gospel, an Evangelical, if you deny something that the Scripture is very clear about. I don't say that with hostility. It is a statement of truth. It is a statement that has always been affirmed by Evangelicalism."
The resolutions that the ETS adopted last Thursday are not unique, Schwarzwalder stated. The resolutions only affirm what orthodox Christians have historically understood about marriage and human sexuality.
"If you were to ask the Apostle Paul, these are the affirmations you'd find in his letters," Schwarzwalder contends. "These are the affirmations articulated by Moses and affirmed by Jesus. There is nothing new here. We are simply affirming what has always been but now it is under challenge by some."
