Email from Misty Irons to an OPC pastor friend
July 31, 2002
As I had previously reported, the upshot of my meeting with the session on July
23 was that instead of charging me (as one elder had talked about doing all the
way up to the night before the meeting), they decided to simply monitor the
progress of my website over the next two months. Although charges are by no
means off the table, I nevertheless view this outcome as something close to
miraculous, considering what I was told to expect. When I told [name withheld]
the news last week, his first response was to exhort me to give the credit to
those people whose prayers apparently moved the hearts of my overseeing elders
to listen to me (perhaps even against their own wishes). So once again I thank
you for your prayers.
I thought you might be interested to know the highlights of what we discussed
during our two hour meeting, particularly those points that my elders seemed to
respond to, or at least had no answer to, in case you might find them useful in
your own discussions . . .
* * * * * *
Why I think homosexuality is a sin:
On the OPC discussion list in March, I told the list that I thought
homosexuality was a sin because it flew in the face of God's creation order,
because the sexual union between Adam and Eve is presented in Genesis as God's
ideal for humanity. With the session, I shared with them that I thought the
theological basis for heterosexual unions ran even deeper than the Adam and Eve
account, for it goes back to the statement in Genesis 1:27: "And God
created man in His own image, in the image of God He created him; male and
female He created them." I think this verse implies that there is
something about male and female together that completes the image of God in a
way that the male alone (or the female alone) could not. (Recognizing the
Hebrew parallelism in this seemingly poetic statement would suggest that we
understand the final clause as: "male and female He created them [in His
own image].") Since male and female together image (verb) God in the
fullest and most complete sense, the idea of a heterosexual marriage
union must be rooted in the character of God himself, and to deviate from that
marriage ideal is a perversion of the imago Dei.
Whether supporting the right to civil same-sex marriage is the same as
"advocating sin":
After months of Lee and I hammering at the parallel with religious freedom, we
finally got somewhere. I told the session once again that I support the rights
of Muslims to worship their false god, and would indeed advocate that right on
their behalf because of their constitutional freedom, even though I obviously
believe idolatry is a sin. One session member whose standard response to that
argument has always been "I don't feel a need to be consistent"
finally budged and said that he does not, in fact, support the right of Muslims
to worship their god. Sure, he'll put up with it, but he would not advocate
that right because that would be advocating sin. I told him that I am willing
to respect that position if that's what he believes; however, I am not a
Covenanter, and since the OPC is not a Covenanter church, I naturally assumed
the OPC's standpoint was that supporting the U.S. Constitution was not a sin,
let alone a violation of one's membership vows.
That seemed to sink in, although I could see that they were still struggling
with the idea of supporting freedom of conscience in society even when it leads
people to commit sin. I think it helped a little when I started talking about
how this very question was wrestled with by thinkers such as John Locke during
the English Civil War, when people finally realized that killing each other
over religious differences was getting them nowhere and that a political
philosophy of tolerance had to be developed in order to stop the religious
wars. I admitted that discussing the philosophy of John Locke was a little out
of my depth, but I mentioned Locke's "A Letter Concerning Toleration"
which presents the pertinent points. I also pointed to the differences between
the original WCF and the American revision in 1788 as evidence that our
American presbyterian tradition has accepted the contribution of the
Enlightenment thinkers in this area.
Why I am critical of fellow Christians on the Musings On website:
I told the session that openly criticizing other Christians is not something I
am normally keen on doing, but on my website I felt it was entirely necessary
and something I chose purposefully to do as an evangelistic strategy. I
explained that I viewed my website as basically a cross-cultural missionary
effort designed to target the gay community. As a missionary you have to study
the culture of the people you wish to evangelize, pinpoint those stumbling
blocks which might cause offense to the people of that culture, and do what you
can to minimize those stumbling blocks, which often amount to cultural
differences, so that the gospel message is not hindered. In the case of the gay
and lesbian community, the biggest stumbling block to the gospel
is...conservative Christians! So unless I am willing to be self-critical and
acknowledge the ways in which gays and lesbians have been hurt by Christians,
there is no way I could get these people even to begin to listen to me. I said
that I know some people in the OPC are offended by my approach, but I would
simply plead for tolerance in view of what I am trying to accomplish.
Furthermore, given that Reformed Christians are notorious for being openly
critical of other Christians anyhow (I cited Credenda Agenda as an example), I
hoped that my writings could be understood as merely following in that
already-tolerated practice (though, again, for quite a different purpose).
* * * * * *
Not to run on forever about this meeting but I want to add that, to their
credit, the session agreed (at my request) to write a letter to the man who
stood up at the last presbytery meeting and publicly accused me of being
unsubmissive to my elders, to ask him to make a public apology at the next
meeting. I'm pretty happy about that.
Well, I've sent you a lot of email recently since there has been a lot of news
that I thought might be of interest to you. August should be fairly uneventful,
however, so I assure that I won't be burdening your mailbox too much over the
next month. Let's hope that in the meantime good discussions will continue to
take place in the OPC, paving the way for people to employ a more thoughtful,
compassionate and gospel-centered approach to dealing with homosexual people in
the future.
Misty