“Debate: ‘An Evangelical’s Theological Meltdown’, Tapia Poses Questions (by Andres Tapia) and Offner Offers Answers (by Kevin Offner)”, re:generation Quarterly, Spring 1995.
by Dr. Ralph Blair
To get to our western EC summer conference, I flew out of New York City at 8:00 AM, scheduled to land in San Francisco at 11:04 the same morning. After takeoff I settled back in air-conditioned comfort with pillow, CD, breakfast and Robert Louis Stevenson’s journal of his 11-day ordeal crammed aboard emigrant trains between these two cities 116 summers earlier. I was going to California in support of love and lovers condemned by conservatives today. RLS was going to California for love of a still married though abandoned older woman that was condemned by his conservative parents and selfish friends back in Victorian Edinburgh. Technology has changed; human nature has not. Commenting on the attitude of his “fellow Caucasians towards our companions in the Chinese car”, he wrote: “They seemed never to have looked at them, listened to them, or thought of them, but hated them a priori”. That was true, too, of the attitudes of his parents and friends on the subject of “Fanny”. That’s true today of attitudes of conservative Christians on the subject of “homosexuals”.
But instead of getting stuck in an abstract a priori, evangelical journalist Andre Tapia looks and listens and thinks compassionately with his friend, Scott, a Christian homosexual who tried for years without success to change through prayer, church and therapy, “finally decid[ing] that God had created him gay and that this was nothing to be ashamed of or that needed to be changed”. Tapia’s testimony is in the second issue of the new re:generation Quarterly which seeks to foster “a robust yet graceful dialogue on the theological, cultural, and political issues of the day [with] the historic Christian faith [as] the foundation of our discussions”. (Among members of the Editorial Advisory Board: Thomas Howard, James W. Skillen, Stanley Hauerwas, Richard John Neuhaus, Max Stackhouse, Nicholas Wolterstorff.) But that all-too-cocksure litmus test, “the historic Christian faith”, insists that even though a self-critical evangelical is permitted to pose questions, only a voice of the evangelical establishment “offers answers”. Tapia’s questions are good enough, though, that for any Christian reader who would listen realistically, they answer themselves. Given his personal experience with Scott, Tapia asks: “What good is evangelical theology if it leaves us without real answers for much of the world’s pain? Is it true if ‘saved’ Christians … find liberation of their souls in theologically incorrect answers?” It’s the dishonesty of the “theologically correct” that rightly disturbs Tapia. He sees the terrible harm it does. “What especially caught me off guard”, he notes, “was that [Scott’s] relationship with God became more real and intimate, though less orthodox. … basic presuppositions of my evangelical theology …simply went out the window. My belief system had no way to accommodate his experience. … nothing in evangelicalism’s triumphalism prepared me for Scott’s story”. Sadly, such “evangelicalism” fails to prepare any of the Scotts for their own stories. Tapia asks: “What is the essence of our faith?” His good, gospel response: “Jesus and his sacrificial love and death.” It’s that to which Christians are called to give up self-serving agendas in order to love as Christ loves – laying down, if not our lives, at least our over-precious systematics on behalf of people who really are hurting.
InterVarsity Christian Vellowship staffer Kevin Offner admits that much of Tapia’s cautious, compassionate questioning is appropriate. “Why is it”, he wonders, “that we find it so difficult to hold fast to truth and to intimately care for people?” But he fails to see that, in part, it’s because it’s easier to hold on to our prejudices (called “truth”) than to hold people we don’t understand or dislike; easier to rationalize our own agendas and vested interests in terms of “the truth” than to reach out to those we fear will add to our problems and upset our settled worldview; easier to stereotype impersonal “homosexuals” than to live with them in everyday life. Offner proposes what he calls “incarnational orthodoxy”, forgetting that the true Incarnation was, himself, provocatively unorthodox. By contrast, what has passed for “truth”, “orthodoxy”, or, indeed “the historic Christian faith” has included insistence on circumcision for gentile faithers, advocacy of slavery among Southern Baptists, condemnation of interracial dating and marriage among fundamentalists, Christianity Today’s editorializing against racial integration in the 1950s and 1960s, disfellowshipping church members for taking out insurance policies, watching TV, drinking beer, and practicing birth control, etc.
Offner insists on telling a caricature of Scott that his “homosexuality is a perversion, a disordering”. Deaf to Scott’s won witness and long history at prayer and therapy without change – not to mention growth in grace since accepting his homosexuality – Offner pushes a cruel promise that God “will begin the process of change the minute we begin letting him have his way with us”. But Scott’s not the own who’s been refusing to be changed!