I am not sure how to write about the things that I believe God has laid on my heart today. I will start, though, by explaining the combination of things that give rise to my thoughts, and I will try my best, relying on the leading of the Holy Spirit and whatever wisdom I have, in humility and full reliance upon the grace of God, to address these things that weigh on my heart today

My thoughts rise out of a combination of my daily scripture reading and regular podcast listening. I have been reading through the New Testament on a year long plan created by the Bible Project. I am in Romans 14 today. These are some excerpts from Romans 14 that stand out:

“Now receive the one who is weak in the faith, and do not have disputes over differing opinions….
“Who are you to pass judgment on another’s servant? [speaking of followers of Christ as servants of God]….
“But you who eat vegetables only – why do you judge your brother or sister? And you who eat everything – why do you despise your brother or sister? For we will all stand before the judgment seat of God….
So then, let us pursue what makes for peace and for building up one another.”

Romans 14:1,4, 10, 19

I have not reproduced the entire Chapter here to be efficient with space, but I encourage anyone who wants to dig in deeper to read all of Romans 14. I have added emphasis where the text has spoken to me.

Paul’s example of eating meat vs. not eating meat is one that doesn’t divide people in churches today, though it might divide vegans and vegetarians from “meat eaters” in our contemporary secular society. (What we eat and our religiosity about it has divided people, I guess, for 2000 years.)

“One person believes he may eat anything, while the weak person eats only vegetables. Let not the one who eats despise the one who abstains, and let not the one who abstains pass judgment on the one who eats, for God has welcomed him.”

Romans 14:2-3

Frankly, people tend to become divided over just about anything and everything. Paul uses the example of eating and of sacred days to illustrate his point about not despising and not judging each other when we have disagreements:

“One person esteems one day as better than another, while another esteems all days alike. Each one should be fully convinced in his own mind. The one who observes the day, observes it in honor of the Lord. The one who eats, eats in honor of the Lord, since he gives thanks to God, while the one who abstains, abstains in honor of the Lord and gives thanks to God.”

Romans 14:5-6

Paul says that each of us must give account to God for our own lives. Each of us must follow our own consciences that guide us with the help of the Holy Spirit, and we need to allow space with an attitude of grace for other people to work out their own salvation with fear and trembling in the same way.

Of course, we also have the Holy Spirit to guide us. How our own consciences and the Holy Spirit guide us is a bit of a mystery, though. They are not the same things. We have the Holy Spirit, but we also have our individual consciences. Paul references them both in his writings, and each plays a part in the way we understand and follow Christ in our lives.

The Holy Spirit, of course, is infallible, but our consciences are not.

And, that is the rub. We have this treasure in earthen vessels. We are finite beings, and our individual (and collective) perspectives are limited by the age we live in, the country and culture we are born in, our own abilities, experiences, and myriad factors that influence and shape us. How we internalize and process what the Holy Spirit “says” to us is going to vary from person to person and from people to people.

I recently heard someone say that we each approach Scripture from where we sit. People sit in difference “places” in respect to the Gospel at different times in history, in different cultures, and in different areas of the world. Experts in missions warn of the danger of unwittingly smuggling in our own human perspectives when we take the Gospel to different people groups.

The differences in perspective are not just factors for disparate people groups in far flung regions of the world. People in the seemingly homogenous sphere of the United States of America in the 21st Century are not so homogenous – even among Bible-believing, Jesus-loving people.

I’ll give you an example that stopped me in my tracks in 2016. Polls report that about 80% of people who identify as evangelical (which means white in political polls) voted for Trump, while 80% of blacks who attend church on a regular basis and are theologically conservative did not vote for Trump.

These are people who would largely agree with each other on traditional Christian values, but they “sit” in different places in respect to how they live out following Jesus politically. For white evangelicals, abortion is the political benchmark. For churchgoing blacks, racial and minority issues are paramount.

I should not have to say that God grieves all injustice and all sin. It’s easy to label each other “white supremacists” or “woke progressives” and miss the obvious fact that we all claim Jesus as our Lord and Savior. We all have the Holy Spirit to guide us, and we do the best we can from where we sit to follow the Spirit and our consciences.

Having listened to many black voices since 2016 (because I realized I was missing something), I learned that most black Christians believe that abortion is wrong. They believe in traditional family values, and they are at odds with the Democratic party on those issues. I also learned that a large segment of those “white evangelical’s” in political polls don’t even attend church more than once or twice a year, if that.

Another less controversial example from my own life illustrates what Paul talks about in Romans 14. I grew up in a family of responsible social drinkers. Family gatherings included a “cocktail hour” before meals, but I never observed family members getting drunk.

During my rebellious youth, and before I became a believer, however, I was a reckless, irresponsible drinker. I drank often and to great excess. When I became a Christian, I didn’t touch alcohol for many years, and I was tempted to believe that no one else should either.

My views on this subject have been tempered by the wisdom that comes with age and experience and the gentle grace of the Holy Spirit. Paul would say I was weak in my faith, and I admit that I became judgmental over it because I projected my weakness onto everyone else.

Paul says in Romans 14 that people who are weak in their own faith become judgmental. The danger of people who have a strong faith and a secure conscience is to despise those who are weaker. Paul urges us to resist both tendencies.

But, let me get to my point. I am increasingly concerned with judgmental attitudes over issues on a par with eating, drinking, and sacred days are doing damage in the modern Church. Paul would say that we need to focus our attention on “pursu[ing] what makes for peace and for building up one another.” Unfortunately, we spend far too much energy judging each other and tearing each other down.

This is nothing new, of course. Paul wrote an entire letter to the Church in Corinth that he led off with this exhortation:

“I urge you, brothers and sisters, by the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, to agree together, to end your divisions, and to be united by the same mind and purpose.”

1 Cor. 1:10

These thoughts arise out of a specific context. As a regular podcast listener, I listen to a variety of people. Among them are people such as Preston Sprinkle (Theology in the Raw) and Alisa Childers (The Alisa Childers Podcast). In a recent Theology in the Raw podcast, A Response to Alisa Childers and Christopher Yuan, Sprinkle reacted to a podcast by Childers, Is Same-Sex Attraction a Sin? The dangers of Side B Theology with Christopher Yuan. I am putting the link to the Childers podcast here first.

---

Childers and Yuan focused their discussion on Preston Sprinkle as a representative of what they find wrong about a certain approach to sexual sin, and they paint with very broad brush. Sprinkle responded publicly to clarify what he believes after reaching out privately to them and getting no response.

I have spent time listening to both Sprinkle and Childers, and I have a good idea of what they both say. Sprinkle doesn’t shy away from the controversial topics of our day, race, gender, transgenderism, the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, and so on. Childers focuses on protecting the Church from progressive Christianity that threatens to water down the Gospel to the point of meaninglessness.

Sprinkle’s educational roots begin with John MacArthur in very conservative Christian circles and include a long time association with Francis Chan (because they pastored a church together). Childers was a Christian rock star, literally. She also came from a conservative background, but she went through a period of “deconstruction” as a member of a progressive church in Nashville. After her experience with in that church, Childers came back to her orthodox Christian roots and focuses her attention now on fighting against progressive Christianity.

My first comment about the Childers and Yuan critique of Sprinkle is that they obviously did not spend any appreciable time researching what Sprinkle actually says. Both of them are sincere. I believe both of them are a brother and sister in the Lord, but they really miss the mark in their criticism of Sprinkle.

They focus on what other people say about Sprinkle. They never quote Sprinkle or reference what he has written or demonstrate any evidence of trying to discern directly from Sprinkle what he believes. They didn’t even attend the conference or talk with people who did. In fact, their podcast aired two weeks before the conference was even held.

They made assumptions, jumped to conclusions, and accepted uncritically negative statements and characterizations other people have made about Sprinkle. At one point, Yuan criticized the idea of nuance in Christians beliefs, and claimed that nuance is just a “red flag for progressive Christianity”.

I was frankly shocked to hear him say that. He carries the title “Dr.” before his name, which suggests some intellectual rigor in his background, but neither Yuan nor Childers seem to have any room or any grace to consider nuance on issues of sexuality, gender, and transgenderism, which were the focus of their criticism.

They broad brush Sprinkle more or less as a heretic who does not subscribe to biblical sexual ethics, but they are wrong about that. Sprinkle clarifies his actual beliefs in the response podcast, and what he says is consistent with the many Theology in the Raw podcasts I have listened to. (Including Does the Bible Affirm Same-Sex Sexual Relationships? Dr. Rebecca McLaughlin published less than two weeks ago as I write this.)

What Sprinkle does, though, is try to reach across the gap and engage people who hold to a different ethic and to encourage the church to do the same. Unlike the Pharisees who wanted to stone the woman caught in adultery, Sprinkle tries to get to know people tangled in the morass of modern sexual confusion and love them and encourage the church to love them.

I am reminded of the way the Pharisees criticized Jesus for hanging out with “tax collectors, prostitutes and sinners”. Sprinkle is being criticized for the people he engages with. He is being criticized for treating them as people Jesus loves and died for, rather than the sin they have embraced.

Sprinkle appears to me as a person who is very strong in his belief. He doesn’t shy away from holding to traditional Christian sexual mores. If you listen to people who attended the conference that Childers and Yuan criticize, they will confirm that. At the same time, Sprinkle is trying to take seriously the admonition that Jesus came for the sick, not for the healthy. He came for sinners, not for the righteous.

The whole point of this dichotomy is that we are all sinners! No one is righteous. We all have our weaknesses, and we all need Jesus!

We can’t spend all our time drawing lines in the sand, criticizing the world, judging the popular sins of our day, and driving wedges between us and our neighbors. The relentless focus on distinguishing what the church should believe from what the world believes and attacking other Christians for crossing the lines we draw is exactly what I believe Paul was urging us not to do in Romans 14 and 1 Corinthians and elsewhere in his writings.

Paul told the Corinthians, that he came to them advocating only Christ, and him crucified because they were divided over many things, and Paul needed to focus them back on the foundation of the faith – God’s self-sacrificial act in Christ offering Himself up for sinners (us!). Everything else must be built on that foundation.

The death of Jesus on the cross is the ultimate sacrifice of love by God for his sinful, rebellious creation. If Jesus, who was perfectly holy, was not above associating with tax collectors, prostitutes, and sinners, who are we to judge someone who feels called by God to do the same? (And who among us is not a sinner?!)

Of course, I cannot judge the hearts of Childers or Yuan (or Sprinkle). I can only listen to the words they speak and how they act. I have no relationship with them, so I do not know the fruit of their lives.

In fact, this is the topic that weighs on me today. That is the question Paul posed to the Romans: Who are we pass judge another master’s (God’s) servants?

I wade into this discussion with the concern that I, too, might be guilty of the very thing I am concerned about. I admit that I have listened to Childers enough to know that I don’t care for the thrust of her podcast, but I understand her issues. She almost abandoned her faith through the influence of progressive theology. She was unwittingly sucked in by it, and she knows the pull of that progressive vortex.

She now focuses her energy on fighting those powers and principalities. In my opinion, though, she needs to be careful about how she does it. Perhaps, the pull of progressive thinking is a weakness for her, but she must not become judgmental in the process of protecting herself from that weakness.

I am reminded of another example of Jesus. He seemed to go out of his way to heal people on the Sabbath. He even healed people in the Temple on the Sabbath, raising the ire of the Pharisees everywhere he went.

It’s hard for 21st Century Americans to appreciate how sacred the Sabbath was to 1st Century Pharisees. They were so concerned about failing to observe the Sabbath, that they built up a huge catalogue of rules to define what a person could do, and could not do, on the Sabbath, for fear that someone might cross the line.

In the process, they missed the forest for the trees. In their zeal to observe the Law and to avoid a misstep, they missed the central purpose of the Law – which is to love God, and love their neighbors. In their focus on not breaking the Sabbath, they ignored the weightier matters of justice, mercy, and faith.

In similar manner, the focus on “protecting” the church against progressive Christianity often casts a net too wide and too far. It is reductionist, reducing Christianity to set of rules and a rote set of beliefs. The danger is that they leave no room for the Holy Spirit to work in individual Christians to shape their consciences to live out the Gospel with intimate personal integrity.

I don’t know enough about Christopher Yuan to comment, but I am posting the thoughts of a Bible professor in the postscript below on Yuan (and heresy). I know more about Childers because I have listened to her. It seems to me that, perhaps, Childers went so far down the road of progressive thinking that she now fears stepping too far away from black and white, orthodox Christian beliefs. I get that, and I have grace for her.

I am concerned, though, about the tendency I see in many Christian spokespeople who see “progressive Christianity” everywhere and focus their attention on calling it out and labeling people who seem to have transgressed the lines they draw. They make enemies of friends of the Gospel and fellow servants of the Lord.

None of us are prefect in our doctrine or in our understanding of God, the Law, the Gospel, and how to live out the Christian life faithfully. Paul suggests in Romans 14 and elsewhere that the way we each live out our faith is going to be different, depending on our own weaknesses and strengths – the places where we sit – and we should not judge or despise each other in our differences.

I do not agree with all the things that Sprinkles says, all the positions he takes, or all the ways he goes about doing what he does. Frankly, I struggle with trying to make sense of how the church deals with gender, LGBTQ and transgender issues myself, and I am far from confident in sorting these things out.

This is not to say that I have any doubt about orthodox doctrine on sexuality, the value of the family, the biblical concept of marriage (between a man and a woman), etc.  Those things are pretty cut and dried. BOTH Sprinkle and Childers agree on that!

At the same time, I am keenly aware that Jesus was most critical toward religious people who focused on the Law to the exclusion of loving people (and loving God, which is intimately connected to loving people). The way that Jesus handled the woman caught in adultery and the Samaritan woman at the well are examples of how it should be done. The Pharisees who tithed down to grams of mint and dill, but ignored “the weightier matters of law” (Matthew 23:23 (justice, mercy, and faith)) is not the way to do it

How we navigate these waters is the subject matter of almost all that Preston Sprinkle and Alisa Childers focus on. Sprinkle’s focus is outward facing – how do we love the world around us that is given over to sin, blind, and desperate for Jesus? Childers’ focus is on not allowing the world to infect the church, guarding against “wokeism”, CRT, and maintaining a Christian ethic in a world that is throwing Christianity to the wind

I resonate with these concerns myself. These are difficult things to navigate. How do we reach the world with the gospel without becoming tainted by the world? How do we operate in the world while maintaining our integrity as people who are citizens of another kingdom?

In this struggle, we need to keep Paul’s exhortation to believers in mind: “Let us pursue what makes for peace and for building up one another.” Let us stop tearing each other down. Let us listen to and understand each other before we express our differing opinions!

We will have differing opinions. We will weigh Scripture differently and differ on how we should live out the life of following Jesus. Paul and Peter had to wrestle through the extent to which Gentile (and Jewish) believers should express their faith in light of the Law of Moses.

This isn’t a new problem, and the way we should do life together hasn’t changed either. Certain things, like whether Jesus rose in his body from the dead, are not up for debate. Most of what we argue about, however, and the issues that have lead to a panoply of denominations are just “differing opinions”.

We each need to be true to what each of us believes is the way to live out our faith. We each need to maintain integrity of conscience before God and to remain yielded and sensitive to the voice of the Holy Spirit as we are able to hear Him and respond. We also need to give grace to each other, as finite and imperfect beings, who are all trying to do the same thing.

I am posting below the full response video, but I would recommend you read the postscript below if you don’t have the time or energy to watch the podcast and read the postscript:

~~~~~~~~~~~~

POSTCRIPT: In this postscript I am offering verbatim a comment made by a Bible professor to the Sprinkle response podcast adding some helpful clarity to the discussion, especially on the topic of heresy:

“As a Bible professor who is uber-conservative by every available THEOLOGICAL (i.e., not culture-war) metric, and as someone who uses both Sprinkle and Yuan to help students see the historic Christian sexual ethic — I think there are two issues that might not be resolvable here without Yuan, Childers, or Butterfield being willing to have an actual dialogue (Yuan would be the best option, as Sprinkle seems to know):

1. Preston has a PhD in biblical studies, so he values primary sources. Yuan has a DMin–a professional doctorate, not a research doctorate–and Butterfield has a PhD in a discipline related to her former days as an English and feminist studies professor. I do not know, or assume, that Childers is formally theologically trained. Butterfield and Yuan look at peripheral sources (e.g., conference marketing materials), sometimes out of context (see Preston’s previous responses to Butterfield), and run with them to make their stand. Preston demonstrates his academic honesty in this podcast by charitably looking at their entire episode IN CONTEXT, rather than making blanket statements about Yuan and Childer’s [sic] arguments. He could do this, but he does not, because his academic training allows him to not be intellectually insecure and to make sure he gives his interlocutor the best possible reading/hearing. Yuan, Childers, and Butterfield simply have not underwent the kind of training that would have demanded those intellctual [sic] virtues in theological discourse. Sprinkle’s training did not allow him to potshot like his opponents do.

2. “Heresy” needs to be more clearly and historically defined. Heresy has historically been understood as a brand of biblical misinterpretation that subverts a core Christian doctrine (i.e., issues related to the nature of God and the nature of salvation). To jettison an historic sexual ethic would be heresy because of its denial of repentance as an ingredient of faith in Christ unto salvation (cf. 2 Pet 2:1-3, 14).[1] To delineate inner temptation and inner desire as sin is a worthwhile exegetical-theological debate, but because both sides maintain the need to repent of what the Bible calls sin, this does not fit the definition of heresy. You would be hard pressed to find a professional theologian who would call Preston’s positions heresy, because they realize the term’s freight. SOMEONE OUT THERE needs to write a book in the spirit of Gavin Ortlund’s work on theological triage and specifically apply the categories to elements of the current evangelical debate on sexuality. One final thought that might make this debate unresolvable. I hope anyone reading this reads it charitably. What do Yuan and Butterfield have in common? They once lived gay lifestyles. Could this be why they are unflinching, sometimes at the expense of intellectual virtues, and do not want “nuance” to play into their debate with Preston? I do not mean this pejoratively. Try to debate the merits of moderate alcohol consumption with former alcoholics, or those hurt by former alcoholics, and you will find a similarly unflinching stance. So much current intraevangelical culture-warring comes down to contextualization. Who is more willing to reckon with systemic racism? Christians whose life or ministry has more proximity to those affected by racism. Who does not want to grant that systemic racism exists? Christians whose life and ministry are further removed from those affected by racism. I think something similar is going on here. Who is more willing to reckon with nuance regarding the particulars within an historic Christian sexual ethic? Christians whose life and ministry have more proximity to people in or wrestling with those lifestyles (i.e., Preston). Who is not willing? Christians whose life and ministry is mainly to resource culture warriors or pastors engaging the issue with distance from people affected by it (i.e., Butterfield and Yuan). History will judge our moment, and I think it would be wise especially for Yuan to be a bridge-builder here.

[1] This was articulated well by J.I. Packer in “Why I Walked: Sometimes Loving a Denomination Requires You to Fight” (see https://www.gafcon.org/resources/why-i-walked-sometimes-loving-a-denomination-requires-you-to-fight).