Tony Campolo, one of the best-known speakers on the modern American university-seminary circuit, has come out of the closet: he has called for a tectonic shift in American church life: “Christian gay couples” he says, should now enjoy “full acceptance into the Church.” One may be certain he means the entire LGBTQ “community.” Who believes his concern for sexual “openness” extends only to gay couples.
Actually, it’s not quite “tectonic.“ For decades Campolo has walked at the edges of theological and ecclesiastical orthodoxy. We may expect a raised eye-brow here and there, but little shock. This is his MO, his penchant, his schtick.
Campolo knows “gays” have the megaphone of western civilization, and he, with a keen sense of cultural shift and historical context, shouts a loud “Amen” to their small but vocal band.
Questions bristle:
1. What took him so long to come out? Hypocrisy? Fear? Political incorrectness? Homophobia? The one excuse he can never offer, given his educational background, is ignorance. He could not possibly not have known what the Bible teaches on the subject which, previously, he often admitted and accepted. The screaming fact is that the new Campolo makes absolutely no reference to scripture in defense of his sexual about-face.
2. Why at this specific moment does he choose to come out? Does it have anything to do with the upcoming vote of the Supreme Court which may clarify marriage to include same sex unions? Did he want to get on the right side of history before the court does? (The odds are, we are told, that even if the court leaves the matter to the states, in the long run, it will all come to the same thing.)
3. What new revelation(s) might we expect from Campolo? That marriage may include any number of people? If two members of the same gender, why not six? Bestiality? Remember the PETA spokesperson saying recently, “Animals are people too!”? Will abortion be the next morally permissible act? Everybody being saved in the end? Those anti-biblical positions already have their defenders in the name of tolerance and are becoming increasingly popular. To put the question another way: does God have the right to say no? And does He ever need to? Many forces produced Jesus’ death, one of which was His capacity to say no. Would the Romans ever have murdered him if He agreed often enough with them?
4. Is the church ready for the fall-out? That assumes Campolo is in the flow of what is, or will one day become, the cultural norm. It is easy to imagine local churches saying, ”Pastor, we love and admire you, but look, the feds say we lose our tax exemption or you have to go. No hard feelings, but happy trails!” Sound wild? Hang on! (Such possibilities must never dictate our theology or ecclesiology; it is but to toss out a warning.)
5. What do we do if we find one day that God really did mean what He said, and explicitly said, about homosexuality, as Campolo admitted for decades? Does one imagine Him saying, “Tony, I am so happy that you revised what I said and made it more palatable in your historical context. Your new message is so much more humane than what I said. Thanks a million for making Me more believable!”
6. What if, the Bible aside, we find that aberrant forms of sexuality (i.e., non-biblical sexuality) do in fact—as we have believed for centuries—produce lethal results to humans—mentally, physically, emotionally, spiritually, relationally, societally, etc.,? Shall we then stand against such practices, not because we are biblically informed, but, are simply being pragmatic? Put otherwise, will functionality trump God?
7. Do you remember Jesus’ word, spoken on the way to the cross, “If these things be done in the green tree, what shall be done in the dry?” If this in good times, what in evil times? Surely, modern American church morality is at least a part of what He had in mind. How do we say no to anything or anyone now?
We all remember a horrifically demonized man in Gadara who, touched by Jesus, was found “sitting (not running about in a graveyard frenzy), clothed (true redemption inevitably produces modesty, a sexual matter) and in his right mind (not a psychopathic demoniac).” That event is a mother lode of spiritual (and societal!) gold for a lifetime of study.
First-century Christianity, as every serious student knows, was an island of sexual sanity in an ocean of sexual insanity. The waves are getting higher.
Alas: so much for the church being the conscience of the culture. It appears at times that the last footholds of moral order are being dislodged in our culture; we have a right to expect the darkness.