Introduction
Sodomy has always been associated with creativity. This is because creativity is priestly. And priesthood is submissive authority. Priestly creativity is inescapable. Men will create. Men will serve and guard creation. The only question is submissive to what? To whom? And fundamentally, the only options are God or man. Will you submit to God or will you submit to man. The former results in true glory, that extends and magnifies the glory of God already embedded in creation. The latter offers a faux glory, that seeks to magnify the hubris of rebellious man. The former is fundamentally heterosexual, the latter is essentially homosexual.
Pagan Priesthood
In the Old Testament and ancient world, sodomy was closely related to pagan worship. In Hebrew, the word for sodomite is “holy man” (Dt. 23:17, 1 Kg. 14:24). The sodomites were frequently male temple prostitutes. This has led some queer eye exegetes to argue that the precise sort of homosexuality prohibited in scripture was the pagan ritual kind, but that God never intended to prohibit loving, committed sodomite relationships. Right, but that’s like arguing that God never intended to prohibit theft, it was just Canaanitic theft, the kind done in the name of Baal that God prohibited. Or God never intended to prohibit the veneration of carved or painted images just images of false gods. Um, no. The reason why pagan priests do these things is because of the paganism. Paganism hates God and hates the way He made the world, and it fundamentally wants to remake the world into the image of man and they glory in that shame (Phil. 3:19).
But paganism is parasitic. It is a leech, a tick on the back of God’s good world and His truth. And it picks up steam because it sucks the blood of reality. It vehemently objects to reality, but it does so while stealing many of the basic building blocks of reality, things like meaning, language, rationality, justice, truth, and morality. But if the world is a cosmic mosh pit, with chemicals and debris gurgling in chaos, then where did you get that meaning? What do you mean with words like dignity or human rights or justice? Who cares? And while we’re at it, language is just one more bit of floating flotsam. Words can’t mean a damn thing in that worldview. Language only has meaning if there is a transcendent lexicon, a truth that is fixed and meant by the Creator. So one form of priesthood ministers God’s truth, while pagan priesthood is necessarily committed to making it up as it goes along while shoplifting armloads of contraband truth.
Creativity & Authority
And this is why creativity is always an act of authority — or an attempt at authority. To create is to be an author. To exercise authorship is to exercise authority. It is to look at the world and say, this would be better like that. It is to take some part of the created order and rearrange it. A woman who walks into a house and begins rearranging the furniture is either a nutcase or a tyrant, unless she is the rightful homemaker. You may rearrange a plot of ground and pile a bunch of wood and stone together and build a house. You may rearranged ones and zeros and write a computer program. You may rearrange words and write a story or a poem. And this authority and creativity is either exercised in submission to reality and the authority of Jesus Christ or else it is in rebellion to Him and various elements of the world He has established.
But the association of creativity with the queer eye is — like all sin — a twisting, a leeching off the truth. In truth, creativity is an act of submission to God. It is priestly. When a man submits to God, receiving his assignment from his Creator to live in this world in a masculine way, and to build and invent and create based on the pattern of God’s creation within the limits of His Word, this results in true glory. But rebellious man, hating to submit to God, must mimic this pattern. And since rebellious man wants to glorify man, it is inherently homosexual. It may not always act out that homosexual impulse, but it is flaming gay through and through. This is because man must submit to God or man. And if a man submits to another man, sexually or otherwise, we have the makings of sodomy in principle if not in fact. And this is why God’s word clearly requires pastors and elders to be robustly masculine men. Those who lead God’s people must be men with backbones and calloused hands. They must have soft hearts and hard heads and not soft hands and soft heads and hard hearts.
The Authority of The Feels
This is why, for example, Nate Collins and others involved in the Revoice conference want to be seen as prophetic voices in the wilderness. They may not be acting on their sodomite impulses, but they absolutely do want to carve out a space for “queer treasure” to bring into the New Jerusalem. What is that “queer treasure” we may wonder? It is the authority to pronounce on morality, theology, and Christian sensibility. This is kosher; that is not. This is beautiful; that is not. That is so gauche; this is so shabby chic. This is woke, this is loving, this is inclusive. This is pastoral. And the goal (conscious or no) is to bring this gay authority into the church. And what is this gay authority based on? The authority of human experience. They repeat as a mantra what they have felt, what the world looks like to them, what it feels like to them, what they have been attracted to since before they can remember, how they have been treated, and so on. It is not the authority of God’s word that clearly identifies these things as “degrading passions” and “unclean desires” and “abominations” and things to be hated and repented of. No, they rise up with pursed lips and limp wrists insisting that many of them must remain single and burn with lust — for this is their self-assembled cross they just built out of balsa wood and matches, and they demand to be heard, demand to be ordained, and invited to speak at conferences because of how they feel. But this is nothing less than smuggling pagan authority into the Church. This is the faux authority of hard hearts and soft hands.
Conclusion
It is true that all authority comes via some sort of humiliation. It is either the humiliation of the cross and loyalty to Christ and His plain words or it is some faux humiliation dreamed up by the soiled imaginations of man. You cannot serve two masters. You will either love the One and scorn the other; or else you will ultimately hate the One and submit to the other. But you cannot be utterly divested of priesthood. You will minister something; you will create something, build something, say something. But you will do so either in submission to the Creator or you will submit to a man. But you cannot stand for long between those two stools. You cannot be Christian and gay.
Photo by Nicole Harrington on Unsplash
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