Journal: Southern Baptist Journal of Theology
Volume: SBJT 26:3 (Fall 2022)
Article: God And Gay Christian Hermeneutics
Author: Brian W. Powell

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God And Gay Christian Hermeneutics

Brian W. Powell

Brian W. Powell is the Pastor of Vision at Holy City Church in Charleston, South Carolina. He earned his PhD in Systematic Theology and ThM in Biblical Theology and Exegesis from The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, Louisville, Kentucky, where he has also served as an Adjunct Professor. He lives on James Island with his wife and six children.

The normalization of same-sex behavior in United States’ popular culture has been both rapid and decisive. The 2015 US Supreme Court’s decision in Obergefell v. Hodges ruled that same-sex couples have the fundamental right to marry.1 Both chambers of Congress have recently been working to codify same-sex marriage into federal law through the Respect for Marriage Act.2 Moreover, a 2018 survey noted that 41% of LBTQ+ individuals identified as Christian.3 Arguments for the normalization of same-sex relationships have been advanced for years in theologically-liberal denominations, but over the past decade, an increasing number of professing (or formerly professing) evangelicals have proposed revisions to the church’s historic understandings of marriage, sexual ethics, and Christian identity. Two revisionists, in particular, have exerted considerable influence in evangelical scholarship and on the Western church—James Brownson and David Gushee.4 What makes these two men unique is they also argue that the primary interpretive issue in this debate is biblical theology, particularly as it relates to same-sex attraction, same-sex behavior, and Christian ethics.5 These revisionists contend for both a traditional view of Scripture and the untraditional view of monogamous same-sex marriage (a “new Christianity”).6 Each man’s conclusion is that the church should affirm “gay Christians”—i.e., professing Christians who enter into monogamous same-sex relationships. Against these revisionists, I have argued elsewhere that the Bible, read intratextually, defines marriage as

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a covenantal and exclusive male-female union created until the end of time by the triune God for a variety of purposes, but ultimately as a created institution it is typological of Christ’s relationship to his people and thus in the new creation it reaches its fulfillment and telos in the Christ-church covenant relationship.7