Homosexuality and the Theology of Ravi Zacharias: A Prophetic Think Tank
See the video here.
Homosexuality? Ravi Zacharias?
Well, he doesn’t talk that much about it, and he’s sure not of that persuasion. But when he does say about it gives me pause today. I not being gratuitous in choosing my topic. There really is something very, very important to say here.
I have always loved Dr. Zacharias, but if I were pressed to give a reason why I would have to think about it. I’m not with him on several things, especially his whole approach to apologetics.
Of course, he is learned and articulate, uses interesting personal anecdotes as well as great lines of reason that a lot of others don’t. His professional demeanor is powerful in a lot of ways, and I think his Indian heritage adds to that. But when I put it all together I think that what most attracts me to him is that he seems to be a genuine believer who on the whole boldly defends biblical truth instead of tearing it down, while also just being so intelligent, well-spoken and dignified.
But when I think about it, it seems that my affection is being led more by a need for a powerful style instead essentially of substance, since the latter, strangely, does not usually come to mind in a Zacharias calculus. And that scares me about me.
The one thing we must understand about traditional orthodox apologetics is that it is more apologetic for a kind of flattened epistemology that is engineered for wide acceptance than it is one only for the service of giving a biblical reason for taking the claims of Christ seriously for the few who really want to know. I am always disturbed by the feeling that the kind of faith they are looking for is the same way liberals have of science, who have the same broad subject focus with matter apologetics does with the idea of “God.” That faith in the singular substance of matter or the idea of God is awakened and strengthened through the instrumentality of a wide range of propositions and evidence since it is assumed that the human mind/spirit has the same multi-dimensionally as that which is to move it.
For Christians, the danger of this is twofold: One, the coming to an unconscious and rather unapologetic assumption that this human spirit is the one that God wants to attract by an apologetic that became at some point smashed and spread-out instead of specialized, and two, the threat of a biblically de-centralized argument becoming in time one that has the potential of leaving out Christ entirely, with no need to the one apologetic that could be said to be Christ himself. To essentially rely instead only upon an argument that leads with an appeal to the reason, principle, and emotion of a person instead of appeal to one revealed person.
The danger then is in a seduction of the heart by another, by a revered informational image, which is one that appears on its face something good, but with very little inside. What is then adopted to instill, inform and bring up faith is informationally a thing made and maintained, or can be so done, exclusively with the world we know and not necessarily from the world outside of ours.
Assuming that which supports and gives reason for our faith is biblically supposed to be our object of faith, how easy it would be to just change the supernatural informational object of faith by changing the reason for that faith? A change into something other than its real object. This would be a more stealthy approach than an open assault on that object, but just as sure.
Getting to the point, I ask if Dr. Ravi Zacharias makes a good argument for the Christian opposition to the practice of homosexuality. I arbitrarily choose this one subject just because I found myself on YouTube today and listening to his lecture, but I could raise the same kind of objection to classical apologetics with a host of other things as well. I do think Ravi makes a good argument, but only if we take the “Messiah” out of the meaning of “Christ,” which is what traditional apologetics essentially does in practice.
I know, you don’t get it. But you will.
You have in classic evidentialist apologetics a Messiah that looks at something like homosexuality as a sin only because God commanded people not to do it. Because homosexuality makes no sense to the general revelatory instrument of reason and, without emphasizing a single, overarching one, various and sundry reasonable propositions from the whole corpus of scripture. This is what I am hearing here? Yes, its what I’m hearing.
What you get in the human mind that there is really no revealed supernatural reason for homosexual practice that can be said found within the Bible that is identical, informationally, to Christ. There is no need, in this form of argument, to be compelled exclusively by anything in that document that is of the same origin as the non-transcendent human ability and consciousness that is now being exclusively served and which functions very well, independently and soundly within the material vacuum of mind and matter.
If this God of Truth really inserted himself into human history and left something for us to believe in Him, one thing, with all other things for its mere circumspectful service, then this is information is itself transcendent truth and is to faith acting as the power of God. The claim is its proof. The symbol is its signification. The object is the same as why you believe in Him: One is the conclusion, the other the premise, and both are supernatural.
Not that there is not a crucial distinction. “God,” that idea, as said, has always been and is now an idea that originates and is supported exclusively within the insular, entropic world of matter and mind. But there is a difference between a symbol and a symbol which is an idea. The first is merely an effect of a cause, the other is the impression of the effect as it pertains to the cause which either aligns with the cause or does not. This is voluntary and moral.
There is no such thing as a moral idea that about a cause which is moral, or about a moral person who believes that an effect flows from a cause because we say that it does. About can be any number of things. What we are talking about if we are about an ultimate morality and object is something in a supernatural thing, not about it. What is moral is when you have an idea that, because of the manifestation of the cause in an effect which is a supernatural display of that cause. It’s because of the degree in which the effect evinces a cause which has such power in manifestation that it so makes the choice for us, in respect to its foreign influence, that it can become a benchmark expression of what we call morality, spiritual morality, in that we choose to relinquish our will in making spiritual things artificial, and about instead of in.
It’s not enough that the God idea is a supernatural proposition, unless, of course, you’re a practitioner of pedestrian religion, and you want to worship that idea talismanically and supply its demonstration as truth by another reason that also could only have come within the same material box. That way you won’t be disturbed that your faith is in any way badly grounded. But the supernatural person must be the same to faith as the reason for believing in Him which is of supernatural origin, or else you have but a notion of just something out there in the ether, and so will your faith be.
Yes, homosexuality is a sexual aberration that we can’t justify, as much as we cant justify adultery and a host of other temptations and behaviors that are equally aberrant to natural law. But the idea and philosophy of natural law did not need God to come into the world, being proposed and operational long before Christ. If homosexuality is a sin and you wish to argue this from a Christian perspective, it’s not because of natural law, a logical calculus, a principle, a feeling, or because of anything you find in the Bible that seems to make it so, or any source which is anti-supernatural. It’s only going to be because its an image of carnal human behavior shown to be antithetical to the image of the supernatural Christ, and therefore antithetical in relation to his supernatural revelation which proves him as Christ.
Look at it this way. Morality is the difference of a choice of two possible ideas, both of which are artificial, but symbols of transcendence. Call one AO, artificial opaque, and the other AT, artificial transparent or transcendent.
God’s manifestation of himself in immanence is a symbol, not an idea. An idea is made by us in our minds and hearts. A symbol is an effect of a cause. What is moral is us allowing ourselves to be exposed to this effect, this manifestation of God, and creating an artificiality in an idea that we can use to understand God through that effect. An idea that is grounded in objective supernatural phenomena. The idea, because it is produced exclusively by this supernatural phenomenon or effect, is a supernatural idea because of what produced it, not a common idea through a natural influence of production.
What is not moral is creating this artificial idea not in anything which has a connection to phenomena which could have been produced by our minds, our hands and within and about the resources of the world. Encompassing this category is then primarily ideas that need not have a power on the mind and heart from an exclusively transcendent, objective, supernatural, public, evidential source.
Homosexuality? AO, because it is an artificial form of sex. If God created sex then such a belief that it is adequate in representing God is a belief in the power of desire, not God, and is opacity for representing him. An opaque idea reflects back onto the bearer because it shows nothing of transcendence A transcendent idea is partial transparency between the bearer and the T object, simultaneously allowing the view of God and oneself, neither perfect but adequate to show his nature and our own. It can do this because the human power of idea making is modified by the symbol of God, diminished and reformed by the supernatural phenomena of God which precipitated the creation of this AT symbol.
Alcoholism? AO, because a modification of this moral awareness God can only be destroyed by the addition of a drug. Pornography? AO, because it’s an artificial substitute for the desire that was ordained to come directly from a woman. It’s for the service of self. New Age? AO, because it posits a revelation that is unattested as supernatural publically and objectively, reflecting back more on the subject than the supernatural object. Deism? AO, because it ignores presuppositionally that God could have produced a revelation of himself. It’s again a gratuity for the sake of one’s own emotional attachment to the power of exclusively human ideas. Homosexuality is OK in Christianity? AO, the same bad idea, built only for the service of the “little head.”
God is again, essentially, if he is conceived, is conceived through and about God, not in God. A faith in God which is based upon propositions, traditions, feelings, ideas, syllogisms, persuasion, fear, love of “spiritual things,” and any panoply of reasons one so desires? AO, if there is one supernatural effect applied directly to the conscious senses given by God to ground faith in Him. This would be AT, and all the rest is AO, including a certain conception of apologetics which is fitted to the attraction of quantities of opaquely inclined people, not qualities of transcendently includes ones.
Homosexuality, alcoholism, and porn don’t represent this AO sin properly, fully. It is possible to be a Christian and involve yourself in them. That because their antithesis could not possibly be demonstratively, independently shown effects of God, but only believed so, which can be corrected. But when you get to beliefs, however, and talking about the place and objects which demonstrate ultimate morality, you are talking only about whether or not faith is justified by supernatural facts, and if you have AT. Get that wrong you will end up wishing that your greatest problem as a Christain was being a man or woman and sinning with he same sex.
Of course, Christians who want the Church to bless their homosexuality are also expecting them to essentially drop all external standards on the basis of our desire to express without shame all our heartfelt desires. But a proclivity does not justify its expression as right.
They want their insular feelings to justify their sexual object of choice. I’m not saying that this kind of apologetic is inadmissible. But classical and presuppositional Christian apologetics thinks its perfectly fine for you to say you believe “God” because of, well, your feelings and intuition, and also OK to think homosexuality is a sin or not because of a good line of reasoning, no matter what kind of evidence it’s working with. Just make sure, as they would have it, you believe or disbelieve in a “God” idea in doing so, that conceptual object that can sit undisturbed as a wholly man-made and opaque, left so because you accept that the idea is justified a reality or hoax by your subjective experiences. But this is way, way far out for real, 1st century Christianity.
Its a seduction of truth that does not need Christ at all to be true. Its a line of reason that was just as true and used long before Christ, and was always the kind of thing that the world wanted to go on without him as a kind of reason for faith in all things transcendent. Conservatives, if they are really interested in a conservation about something original and not from here, should seek to recover a messianic epistemology and, no matter how much more resistance they get over abandoning that which they were used before, come to realize and accept that larger numbers of people into your fold is not an evidence that you are doing something right.
Listen, sex, homosexuality as well as heterosexual, is a symbol. One is created by man, the other by God. The “God” concept is man’s symbol, and God’s revelation is his symbol. One is fashioned to represent either the inbreeding of ideas by a univocal group back into their own group, the other is the reconciliation of the natural extremes of right and left-handed thought that results in new life. But that one of God’s it’s not capable of doing this on its own, and God did not leave his symbol without it pointing to a special kind of signified demonstration which is not of the same origin. If you read any of my articles on liberalism and conservatism, particularly that which deals with the male and the female, I need to say nothing else but the following.
It’s a new world, one that began 2000 years ago, whether we think it is or not, whether we want to carry on and act as it is or not. A new religious and epistemic paradigm was established by Jesus’s fulfillments of the sacred Word of the Prophets. The old world, of unfulfilled, superficial immanent symbolism, that was the only means of representing the ineffable yet realized and apparent, was smashed and replaced by a new spiritual symbolism, to function exclusively in the heart, in the mind and affections. The once unfulfilled revelation of the words of the prophets, being the seed of that coming revelation, replaced them after they proved themselves, not just claimed themselves by human artifice and effort, to be their rightful replacement. Now, it is all about thought, spiritual action, how one handles with justice, equity and fairness spiritual truth claims pertaining to Christ’s claim. The old world symbols of male and female, right and wrong, good and evil, adultery and faithfulness, serpents on poles, altars of sacrifice, blood, and flesh, live on with great power and relevance, but only as past promises to be realized in a perfect fulfillment that has now come. This is out apologetics.
This does not mean that homosexuality and heterosexuality are not to be made issues that are irrelevant any more than stealing, murder, and pedophilia are irrelevant. It means that what we do in the body is no longer a standard in any sense as to God’s acceptance of you. It’s a human symbol of a bad symbolism of something original. That is why we say its forgivable with repentance, a change of mind, but repentance only by a confession that it points to that original thing God ordained for it. You might think that this excuses aberrant behavior, but it does not any more than good behavior excuses your crummy spiritual state.
What we do, as acts that are carried out by our bodies, are supposed to be either good or bad symbols of what is going on inside of us, that is all. We choose now one kind of symbol over another, one kind of action over another, only because it is supposed to be in total service to our beliefs, which are entirely spiritual, which means they come from another world and objectively prove themselves so.completely outside of the priority of the symbolic mediation of transcendent things that are not yet known to be real. We don’t put the symbol as the leader but the servant of the spirit and the truth that demands a symbolic representation.
Homosexuality is an aberration, but it is not be to condemned simply because of some line of reason, but shunned only because it is a very poor, very insular kind of human example of a kind of faith that is antithetical to that of Christ and his revelation, a revelation which reconciled the transcendent and the immanent to produce a new hybrid creature who can spiritually move in one as easily as he does the other.
You can be a believer and practice homosexuality, but you can’t be comfortable or proud of it any more than you can feel justified in being comfortable with being a Christian apologist that expresses justification for a belief in Christ through methods that would be instantly accepted by pagan philosophy and religion. You can practice homosexuality and be a Christian, but not the more time goes on if you are growing in understanding. It will become in time too much for you to bear. You also can’t be a Christian apologist and preach a reason for your faith by pulling any number of weapons from an arsenal that was made entirely from human hands, but not for long, as it will, if you are growing, become too much to bear. In the end, it all comes down to nothing but your reliance on Christ and the prophets.
I know I’m not being very specific, but that is what the rest of the posts on this site already do. Take it from this angle.
The fight, which has been going on for centuries, between, for example, orthodox and Sabbatarians over which day we are supposed to meet. One side says that the day of worship is on the last day, the other says it is on the first day. One says that it is inconsistent to say that we are obligated to obey the Law, but when it comes to the Sabbath we are to violate it. The other side says that the first day of the week is the day Christ rose from the dead, and the NT and the early church clearly met on the first day, not the Sabbath. Who is right?
If you want the short answer, I am calling BS on the whole thing. I call BS on it the same way I do in our crazy way of handling homosexuality.
What both parties fail to recognize is that the Law that we are to obey is a symbol of spiritual law, and its to be taken to that signification when we speak about it. The OT Law is a law of performance of the coming of the Messiah to fulfill the messianic oracles. Once he has come, we are not obligated to physically perform anything if we are not obligated to preach the performance symbol as the fulfillment by Christ first, that is, messianic prophecy. That, again, is our apologetic duty.
Whatever day on which you worship should be on the day that best signifies the reality of Christ’s rest of the spirit through the assurance that he fulfilled the prophets, and that is supremely important and will become more important as time goes on for you, but it is not your first concern, just like the issue of homosexuality at hand. If you get it wrong, you will be responsible for it, but since its a choice that is about a certain quality of expression, not a certain essential quality of substance, the only conceivable thing that you will be charged with if you get it wrong is spiritual immaturity when it should not have been so, perhaps being placed in a lower caste or vocation in a Kingdom in which you have been saved (I am not making a statement. I said “conceivable,” so don’t freak out you Preterists). You cant be damned for the symbolic stuff, only for the substantive, meaningful stuff, and it’s not anything where your body is or will end up.
I have a strong opinion on the Sabbath, but so what? It’s not our main concern, it’s not my main concern, and if its a concern is only so way down the road. The spiritual Sabbath rest and how to get there, within the heart, is the main concern, which is equal also to that of Christ Himself, and Christ himself is scripturally nothing if not the fulfillment of the prophets.
When Jesus said “if you remain in my word you are my disciples indeed, and you will know the truth, and the truth will make you free,” I am interested in this “truth” that will make me free. It’s not about how you perform the Law, sexually, or even theft and malice or murder, nor about how you carry yourself. It’s all about him, Christ, and your confession of him, and how and why you confess him, not about you, your feelings, your rational principles, Van Till or Aquinas, or those that could care less. My first interest is not how I will tell you about it or do it, my concern is knowing it myself so that I can tell it properly to others. If that is the main concern, your expression is then first in speaking to people about how they can also know it, and you do that with the same thing, not another thing which can only be a product of this world. You do it by the prophets that foretold him. Sorry, but its that simple.
In the end, Ravi Zacharias is right on when he says that you cant make an aberrant proclivity justify your expression of the proclivity. We also try to always make it clear that homosexuality is not more sinful than adultery, and no matter who you are you need to confess, no matter how attached you are to your behavior, that if it’s wrong it’s wrong. How true. Would that we are able to do the same by the way we engage the world for our faith by apologetics.
Of course, there is a lot to be accounted for here. This is just a short little jaunt. Just stay with me, and keep reading and absorbing the site.
