THE NASHVILLE STATEMENT’S RELEVANCE
You may have heard a little about the “Nashville Statement,” a document on human sexuality released in Tennessee’s capitol city last week by more than 100 evangelical leaders.
If you heard about it at all, you probably know that Hollywood types, critics of any and all that is Christian, and liberal Nashville Mayor Megan Berry hate it.
The statement was released by the Council on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood after a meeting with evangelical leaders and scholars held in conjunction with the Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission’s annual conference.
If you were raised in a Christian faith that adheres closely to scriptural teachings, the document — which contains 14 articles — contains no surprises: Marriage is a lifelong union of one man and one woman, sex and sexual immorality outside of marriage are not justified, same-sex attraction is not part of God’s original creation, and physical anomalies and psychological conditions do not nullify one’s birth gender.
The statement’s preamble states evangelical Christians in the early 21st century find themselves in “a period of historic transition” and in a Western culture that is “increasingly post-Christian” and seeks “a massive revision of what it means to be a human being.”
No argument there.
“It is common,” the document also states, “to think that human identity as male and female is not part of God’s beautiful plan, but is, rather, an expression of an individual’s autonomous preferences. The pathway to full and lasting joy through God’s good design for his creatures is thus replaced by the path of shortsighted alternatives that, sooner or later, ruin human life and dishonor God.”
You’ve heard the corresponding modern litanies: “If it feels good, do it.” “If it’s right for me, it’s right.” “My life is nobody’s business but mine.”
Those who adhere to or support that type of lifestyle, naturally, were critical. Some attempted to link those who would support the statement to President Trump, others tried to connect adherents to the recent violence in Charlottesville, Va., and still others criticized the timing of its release with the catastrophic flooding in Houston.
“Jesus has been hijacked,” one response said. “The God I know does not support the Nashville Statement,” another tweeted. A third called it “the most unChristian piece of garbage I’ve read in a long time.”
The Nashville mayor, though? She didn’t like the name of the document, adding that it “does not represent the inclusive values of the city & people of Nashville.”
Conservative political commentator Ben Shapiro, though, tweeted that it was much ado about nothing and should be filed in the same category as “Pope Condemns Abortion.”
“Did I miss the part of the Nashville Statement where any serious Christian doctrine changed in the slightest?” he wrote.
While we don’t believe the document alters any narrowly focused scriptural teachings, we do believe it goes beyond the “thou shalts” and “thou shalt nots” and is sensitive to those living out “an individual’s autonomous preferences.”
Where evangelicals in the past were criticized for only condemning alternative lifestyles, the Nashville Statement also emphasizes the capability for all to find “a fruitful life in joyful obedience to Christ,” that “people who experience sexual attraction for the same sex … like all Christians, walk in purity of life,” that “the grace of Christ” is sufficient “to forgive all sexual sins and to give power for holiness to every believer who feels drawn into sexual sin,” and that people can “forsake transgender self-conceptions … and accept the God-ordained link between one’s biological sex and one’s self-conception as male or female.”
Best of all, we think, is the last line of Article 14, which reads, “We deny that the Lord’s arm is too short to save or that any sinner is beyond his reach.”
Many people living homosexual or transgender lives already consider their lives “God-ordained,” but many others are confused and say they don’t want to feel like they do or live like they are living. For those, we believe this document, while not shying away from condemning what it is says are biblical sins, emphasizes the love God offers freely to all.
The statement’s preamble adds that “God’s design for his creation” serves to “bring us the greatest good,” that “God’s good plan provides us with the greatest freedom,” and that “he is for us and not against us.”
As we live in what the document calls “the secular spirit of our age,” we salute the boldness of a statement that asks the Christian church not to lose its “biblical conviction, clarity and courage, and blend into the spirit of the age.” It’s important and relevant, though, that’s its authors also saw fit to ground biblical moral teachings with the biblical truth, as stated in Proverbs 10:12, that “love covers over all wrongs.”