Does Scripture whisper about some matters and shout about others?
In recent years, I’ve heard prominent evangelical teachers suggest that God’s Word “whispers” about issues like homosexuality and gender confusion, but shouts about sin and salvation.
I agree that certain themes like human fallenness and God’s redemptive plan dominate Scripture, but I don’t think it’s helpful to relegate some issues to a “whisper” category. I want to assume the best motives in the brothers and sisters who teach this unique hermeneutic, that by “whisper” they mean we should handle matters of gender and sexuality with grace and care, sentiments with which I utterly agree.
And, of course, the writers of Scripture spend vastly more ink on some topics than others. However, even one mention of an idea in God’s Word is enough to make it important.
One tacit entailment of “whisper theology” seems inescapable: Since matters of gender and sexuality do not dominate Scripture, they should be minor themes in our ministries as well. When I first surrendered to ministry nearly 30 years ago, the pastor of my home church offered me a piece of sage advice I’ve never forgotten and have worked to apply: Never, ever apologize for God’s Word.
“Whisper theology” seems, however unintentional, to do just that. But is gender and sexuality really a minor note in God’s Word?
God’s Word: Clarity
A more excellent way to talk about Scripture is by a historically venerable doctrine seldom taught often in local churches today: the clarity or perspicuity of Scripture. Perspicuity derives from the Latin word perspicuus and means transparent or clear.
The 16th century Protestant Reformers taught the doctrine of perspicuity over against the Roman Catholic Church, which kept the Bible out of the hands of the laity for fear that putting the Bible in the hands of unlearned people would do great harm. Only theologically trained church leaders could be trusted to handle the Scriptures.
The Reformers argued that God’s Word should be available to every church member in his or her native language. After all, Psalm 119:105 calls the Bible “a lamp to my feet and a light to my path.” Proverbs 6:23 says, “The commandment is a lamp; and the law is light.” Without God’s Word, the Reformers rightly argued, God’s people walk in darkness. Christ referred to Himself as “the Light of the World” and commanded His people to walk in the light.
God’s people need a clear light, and He has furnished it.
Of course, most Christians would agree that some parts of Scripture are clearer than others. The Book of Revelation is a prime example. Throughout church history, there have been almost as many interpretations of the Apocalypse as there have been interpreters. The visions of Zechariah and sections of other prophets such as Daniel 7 are disputed among godly pastors and scholars for a reason. And there’s Ecclesiastes: While preaching through it a few years back, I wondered if Solomon wrote the book while in the middle of the partying he describes in the early chapters.
As a preacher and teacher of God’s Word, I’ve often taken solace in the apostle Peter’s humble admission in 2 Peter 3:16, where he wrote that, in Paul’s epistles, “some things are hard to understand.”
Gender and Sexuality: It Does Not Whisper
As secularism and Satan continue to press their devilish views upon the church, particularly regarding issues of gender and sexuality, some denominations, organizations, and evangelical leaders cave, seeming to have grown muddled on that which Scripture makes clear. God’s Word is not confused and does not whisper on issues of gender and sexuality.
Until recently, the church has stood firm on the very issues some believers seem to be vacillating on today. Make no mistake, Christians face an active and potent enemy who works day and night to undermine the church. And the culture will continue its full court press for acceptance on issues which Scripture clearly demands rejection. A few of those most pertinent for Southern Baptist churches:
1. How many genders?
God neither stuttered nor whispered in breathing out this concise, glorious sentence: “So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them.” Really, that says it all. There aren’t three genders or four or five or 100. To argue for more genders than male and female is nonsense. The ever-morphing alphabet soup that is LGBTQ+ is an evil, man-made lie, a treasonous affront to a holy Creator.
2. Isn’t transgenderism playing God?
Transgenderism is a particularly heinous sin (see Rom. 1:18–32). Why? Because it seeks to edit God. I am a fallible human writer. I make mistakes and need an editor. God, our perfect and holy Creator, does not. The very availability of audaciously wicked “transition” surgeries communicates a blasphemous message: God made a mistake, and I will correct it. God made me a man or woman. He is in error, and I will make it right. Man is infallible, God is not.
What lurks behind transgenderism, and why does it seem so trendy? Sin is popular in every generation. Righteousness is not. I believe some people genuinely struggle with gender confusion, and I think the best explanation for it is a combination of two things: rebelliousness intrinsic to the fallen human heart, and, in many cases, mental illness. At the end of her life, my mother suffered from dementia. She imagined all kinds of things that were not true. For example, she insisted she had 12 sons; she had three. She believed her parents both lived next door; both had been dead for decades. Mom’s mental illness told her those things were true.
A man who insists he’s a woman — or vice-versa — or a man who insists he should play women’s sports is suffering from spiritual and mental brokenness that should be treated with appropriate care, not enablement.
The cruelest thing we can do for these image-bearers is send them to “transition” surgeries that enable them to live a fantasy life that is 100 percent fiction. It would be like telling a person bent toward alcoholism to go ahead and embrace their identity as an alcoholic and live fully out of that reality. No rational person would ever counsel an alcoholic that way.
Many transgendered people later regret what they’ve done, and their quality of life is increasingly diminished, not to mention the myriad health issues that follow in the wake of such radical bodily alteration. Like all lost sinners, they need Christ. They need compassionate Christians who are willing to share that Good News with them. And, in some cases, I believe they need help from doctors who are called to heal the sick, who refuse to butcher them.
3. Homosexuality and “same-sex marriage”?
God sets His expectation for marriage at the beginning of time, again in the early chapters of Genesis, when He holds a wedding — knitting together our first parents, Adam and Eve. The U.S. Supreme Court notwithstanding, genuine marriage is a permanent, exclusive covenant relationship between one man and one woman for a lifetime. No other relationship constitutes genuine marriage.
In Romans 1:18–32, Paul uses homosexual behavior to illustrate the lowest depth to which sinful man will stoop in rebelling against his Maker.
4. Does Scripture limit the office of pastor to men?
Granted, this gender issue differs from the previous three, but it has arisen in the SBC these past five to six years, and more recently in South Carolina with one church withdrawing from the denomination over female ordination.
The qualifications for elders in 1 Timothy 3:1–7 and Titus 1, combined with 1 Timothy 2:12 (“I do not permit a woman to teach or to exercise authority over a man …”) make it clear that God has limited the office of pastor/elder (New Testament synonyms for the same office) to men. As my friend Ligon Duncan, one of Greenville’s finest sons, once said, if you don’t get that from Scripture, you may not get anything else right from Scripture.
God created men and women equal in worth and in dignity and has gifted them to play complementary roles alongside men in the home and church — each role equally glorious before the Lord when understood and lived out biblically. We are not wiser than God. The church that calls women to the office of pastor/elder might win kudos from the culture, but it is not submitting to the clear teaching of God’s Word.
What Will We Do with It?
It is true that God emphasizes some topics in Scripture more than others. But on issues such as gender, marriage, sexuality, and the like, it couldn’t ring more clearly. After all, it is a light for our path and a lamp for our feet — inspired, inerrant, infallible, authoritative, sufficient, clear. It’s only a question of whether we will submit ourselves to it.
— Jeff Robinson is editor and president of The Baptist Courier. He also serves as an adjunct professor of church history at North Greenville University.