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Studying Homosexuality for the First Time
Dean Thompson was faced with a problem.
As pastor and head of staff at the Pasadena Presbyterian Church, Dean (as he was affectionately known by his congregation) was confronted with an issue that he would rather have avoided. In the spring of 1993, a gay man, who had earlier been elected a deacon, wrote to the session,1 the local governing body, of the Pasadena Presbyterian Church. He asked the session to initiate a program of study and, at the end of a year, formally consider designating Pasadena Presbyterian Church a More Light Churchâa congregation that was willing to ordain gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender people to all offices in the church, despite a denominational prohibition against it.2 The gay manâs action was supported by the deacons and a number of elders.3 Consequently, the session asked the three pastors on the staff to establish a task force to create an educational program that would sensitize the whole congregation to gay and lesbian issues.
Dean had grown up in West Virginia and earned both an MDiv and a PhD in American church history from Union Seminary in Richmond, Virginia. He served pastorates in West Virginia and in Austin, Texas, before accepting the call to Pasadena Presbyterian Church in California. A genial and humble person, he was known for loving his congregation and for preaching biblical sermons, grounded in the Reformed tradition.
Pasadena Presbyterian Church was older than the city itself. It had a history of great preachers. It had been a leading voice in the community during the civil rights struggle.
Now Dean was in a no-win position. If the task force recommended in favor of becoming a More Light Church, several more traditional families would surely leave the church. If the task force recommended against becoming a More Light Church, members who supported equal rights for people who are gay and lesbian, including openly gay members and their families, would feel alienated and possibly leave. To his credit, Dean assembled a diverse task force that included a broad representation of different people and viewpoints.
Dean knew that I was opposed to the ordination of gay and lesbian people. He asked me to be a member of the task force.
I said no.
I thought I had a perfect excuse. Although I worshiped regularly at Pasadena Presbyterian Church, as an ordained Presbyterian minister, my membership was not in the local congregation, but in the presbytery, the regional denominational governing body.
Then Dean put his request on a personal level: âIf you are my friend, you will do this.â I probably had many reasons for resistance, but they all came down to my not wanting to be involved in studying the issue of ordaining gay and lesbian people to church office. It just was not a problem that I wanted to take on. Reluctantly, I acceded to Deanâs request and agreed to serve.
The three pastors on the church staff appointed a task force of fifteen members who, among them, covered the whole range of opinions. It included the gay man who had requested the task force and the mother of a lesbian young woman who had grown up in the congregation. One more-conservative couple on the task force left the church when we began to look at more than what they considered the only biblical perspective. A retired missionary also on the task force said he would stand in the church door to bar a lesbian evangelist, Janie Spahr, from entering the building.
After nearly a year of study, the task force presented a twelve-week adult education course at Pasadena Presbyterian Church. More than one hundred people attended each class meeting. We devoted three sessions to biblical interpretation and three to psychological and sociological perspectives. We heard from gay and lesbian members of the West Hollywood Presbyterian Church and looked at videos on different responses by family members. We spent one session discussing what was in the best interests of children. We listened to people who said that sexual orientation or behavior could be changed. We studied the denominationâs form of government to see how it affected this issue. And we designed the final session with two opposing speakers, again to balance the viewpoints. We tried very hard to be balanced and fair to every perspective, but invariably some thought we had not given their view enough support.
As an educator, I thought the curriculum was excellent, but the results of the study were mixed. The congregation as a whole did seem more comfortable with the issue.4 The session did not vote to become a More Light Church. The gay man who had initiated the process was disappointed and left the church. And for the first time in my career, I had been forced to study the issue.
During this period I did not change my Reformed theology or my method of biblical interpretation. For the first time, however, I had to apply them to the issue of homosexuality. That has led me on a journey that in many ways has been uncomfortable. In other ways it has resulted in growth and satisfaction. I want to share that journey with you. I hope it will encourage you in your own journey.
MY FORMATION AS AN AMERICAN EVANGELICAL CHRISTIAN
Let me begin by putting my own life experience in context. In 1934 my devout, Christian parents had a healthy, white, male baby. In Nebraska, at the state fair each year, there was a judging, not only of pigs and calves, of apple pies and bread-and-butter pickles, but of children. My parents entered me in a contest. I donât know what the criteria were, but I do have a silver trophy inscribed â1935, NEBR STATE FAIR, MOST PERFECT BOY.â When I looked at that trophy many years later, it was a visible confirmation for me of what most white, American males experienced. We knew that in some intangible but very real way we were superior. As I grew older and became aware of an attraction to girls, I subconsciously added another element to my personal list of male superiority: I was heterosexual.
The culture of the 1940s and 1950s reinforced that stereotype of superiority. The jokes, the ways teachers related to us, the opportunities we were givenâall made us know that boys were better than girls, that whites were better than coloreds, and that straights were normal and queers were not.
It took the civil rights movement of the 1960s to begin to crack the facade of white racial superiority. In the 1970s, the womenâs movement forced a grudging acknowledgment that women were of equal value to men. In the late 1980s and the 1990s, the first awakenings began to come for many people that gay and lesbian people were different in some respects, but of no less worth than people who were heterosexual.
During all of this time I was also an evangelical. I was baptized a Methodist. I became a Presbyterian by geography after my father was drafted into the Navy in World War II and we were forced to sell our car. There was a small neighborhood United Presbyterian church just a block and a half from our house. We began to attend there and continued after the war. I grew up in that church until I left home to attend seminary.5
The old United Presbyterian Church of North America (UPCNA) was a small denomination (about 250,000 members). It was conservative but not fundamentalist.6
The pastor under whom I joined the church was named Harold (Shorty) Irwin. I was about twelve years old and was impressed that, as a former cheerleader, he could walk on his hands. He also made us study and memorize large sections of the Bible. Those of us in his communicants class understood that we were lost in sin and that Christ had paid the penalty for our sins and that by trust in Christ we received our salvation. I believed it then, and I believe it now. As I grew older, I also sometimes attended the local Youth for Christ meetings. I went âdown the aisleâ several times, confirming my sense of being saved.
That small church gave me many opportunities for leadership. I was the president of our presbytery youth organization. I also had the opportunity to attend several national youth conferences. My first was at Lake Geneva, Wisconsin. There I met attractive young people and capable pastors who encouraged me in my Christian growth. One summer I won the national Bible reading contest. The speakers at these conferences were often professors from our one denominational seminary, Pittsburgh-Xenia. I was drawn to their message as I was drawn to them personally.
Those national youth conference experiences were a significant factor in my feeling called to the ministry as a sophomore in college. During Christmas break I counseled with my pastor about my sense of vocation. His advice was, âDonât go into the ministry if you can be happy doing anything else.â That did it. I decided that I couldnât be happy doing anything else. The most dramatic moment for me came one evening when, after praying, I got up off my knees, walked into my parentsâ bedroom, and announced that God had called me into the ministry. The conviction of that calling has never left me.
Given my background, it was natural for me to head to Pittsburgh-Xenia Seminary when I graduated from the University of Nebraska. I knew that I was a conservative Christian. At seminary, I learned that in the larger Christian culture we were called evangelical.
At seminary I learned a particular Anglo-Saxon, American, Presbyterian tradition that was presented as Christian orthodoxy. This orthodoxy was defined confessionally by the Westminster Confession of Faith, and the Westminster Confession was interpreted theologically in the tradition of Charles Hodge and Benjamin B. Warfield, of nineteenth-century Princeton Seminary.7 Practically, orthodoxy was defined as the most adequate understanding of life and reality. Our task was to defend it reasonably and to preach it using interesting illustrations and practical applications.
My view of orthodoxy was that it had come down in an unbroken line from the apostle Paul to Augustine to Calvin to the Westminster Confession to Warfield and then to my professors of theology and church history. I believed that all of them were treating Scripture in the same way. I always felt that the key to the Christian life and a better world was understanding and interpreting Scripture. The doctrine of Scripture was always my chief academic interest.
When I graduated from seminary, I wanted to go on to study for a doctorate in theology, and I had the good fortune to receive a modest scholarship for one year of study overseas. One of my seminary professors, John Gerstner, urged me instead to go to Harvard, as he had, where I would be confronted with liberal theology and become stronger by fighting against it. That didnât appeal to me. I wanted a deeper understanding of the Reformed tradition.8 I consulted with Cary Weisiger, the senior pastor of a large church where I was interning. He suggested that I study with G. C. Berkouwer at the Free University of Amsterdam in the Netherlands. Dr. Weisiger felt that Professor Berkouwer was deeply Reformed and also fair in his assessments of others. Berkouwer was engaged in writing a series of volumes on the main topics of theology. That sounded like just what I wanted.
I identified with Abraham! One of my favorite verses in Scripture is, âAnd he set out, not knowing where he was goingâ (Heb. 11:8). Since my wife and I were going overseas, I requested ordination by my presbytery on the grounds that if I had an opportunity to serve while I was in the Netherlands, I couldnât come running back to Nebraska. So they ordained me as a traveling evangelist!
Four years in the Netherlands were transformative in our lives. I did my course work and comprehensive examinations. In our second year, my wife, Sharon, got a job teaching school for English-speaking children of Dupont engineers in Dordrecht. I became the organizing pastor of an English-speaking congregation for the Dutch Reformed Church, serving the same English-speaking community. Our first son, Matthew, was born. Then we moved to New Wilmington, Pennsylvania, so I could teach at Westminster College (one of the six UPCNA colleges).
After two years there, I took an unpaid leave of absence to finish my dissertation. Sharon and Matthew and I spent the summer in Princeton, where I made use of the Speer and Firestone libraries. Then we flew to London for six months of research at the British Museum Library. I took twelve metal boxes, each with a thousand quote cards, back to Holland, where I could work with my doctoral professor. After another ten months of writing, I graduated in January of 1967 with a printed dissertation entitled Scripture in the Westminster Confession and returned to teaching at Westminster College.9
TEACHING AT FULLER THEOLOGICAL SEMINARY
Four years later, I received a call to teach philosophy of religion at Fuller Theological Seminary, a multidenominational, evangelical seminary in Pasadena, California. I was then engaged in translating and editing G. C. Berkouwerâs two-volume work on Holy Scripture, so in my first quarter at Fuller I gave a seminar on Berkouwerâs doctrine of Scripture.10 My memory is that four students signed up. We had a good time and I was continuing to pursue my longtime interest in interpretation of the Bible.
As a professor of philosophical theology at Fuller I was immersed in the culture of the evangelical world. The struggle to develop an evangelicalism distinct from its formation in fundamentalism was played out at Fuller Seminary.11 In the late 1940s, Billy Graham, Harold John Okenga, Carl F. H. Henry, and others developed a movement called evangelicalism, which was distinguished from the militant fundamentalism that separated from the mainstream churches and stood against changes in American society.
I would define an evangelical theologically as someone who accepts three propositions: (1) People can and should have a personal relationship with God through trust in Jesus Christ. (2) The Bible is the final authority for salvation and living the Christian life. (3) Godâs grace in Jesus Christ is such good news that everyone should hear about it. If you add something to these affirmations, you are becoming denominational or fundamentalist. If you take away one of these affirmations, you could still be a Christian, but you would not be an evangelical.
Sociologically, evangelicalism was a movement, not a church. It was a loose coalition of people within the mainstream churches, independent associations of Christians, and parachurch organizations. Fuller Seminary was founded as its intellectual center. Christianity Today was its magazine. Billy Grahamâs revivals were a source of its members.
I am an evangelical theologically and have always been so. I am not, and never have been, completely comfortable in the evangelical subculture. I am distrustful of movements. I prefer established organizations where there are clear lines of responsibility and accountability. I need to be in a congregation that is related to other congregations in a denomination with publicly known processes for handling problems. I believe in representative democracy, where there are clear procedures and checks and balances so that the majority may move forward while the minority is able to continue to advocate for its view. I am distrustful of selfappointed leaders and of informal organizations, held together by commitment to charismatic individuals. I want equitable processes for dealing with disputes, rather than some individual guru acting as arbitrator.
Too often the media lump together evangelicals and fundamentalistsâleaving the general public confused as to the distinctions between these two groups. Within evangelicalism there are a right, left, and middle regarding political and cultural issues.12 Fundamentalism is more politically monolithic and more theologically conservative than evangelicalism. Fundamentalists like Jerry Falwell know that.13 But the confusion serves the fundamentalistsâ purpose by making it appear that they have a larger constituency, and thus influence, than they do.
The doctrine of inerrancy was and is a hallmark of fundamentalism.14 For some of its proponents, inerrancy is a symbol for the authority of the Bible and simply affirms that the Bible is true. For others, inerrancy is a particular theory about the interpretation of the Bible. Inerrancy holds that the Bible gives accurate and up-to-the-minute information, not only on religious matters, but also on all things that the Bible addresses, including science and history. It encourages a literal reading of Scripture.15
Shortly before I joined the faculty at Fuller, the faculty had removed a clause in the seminaryâs statement of faith referring to the Bible as inerrant. The Fuller faculty preferred to use the word âinfallibile,â which had historically been used in the church to mean that the Bible accomplishes its purpose of bringing people to a saving knowledge of God and guiding them in liv...
