The Reformed University Fellowship has had rough few days. Several of their ministers came out and apologized to the LGBTQ community on behalf of their fellow Christians’ hate towards the LGBTQs. Additionally a minister from the RUF joined in an observance by his campus’ Office of Institutional Diversity and Inclusion service, which includes some songs and chanting that were straight out of the politically correct playbook.

One article by a minister named Sammy Rhodes in particular struck a nerve with those who hold to the Biblical teaching on sodomy. Carl Trueman responded to the article. Trueman’s answer is appropriately sarcastic, witty, and right. Read it to understand why Trueman thinks Rhodes is wrong: Rhodes makes no argument. He just emotes. Truemans’ article is helpful in showing how feelings whether of guilt, pride, or fear trump any argument or propositions in our culture. In our age we don’t need  or want truth. We need emotion. Or maybe the better way to say it is, our emotions are truth. This kind of thinking means the death of Biblical Christianity and of peace. The whole article is worth reading, but I wanted to quote one of Trueman’s paragraphs in full.  The bold is mine.

Rhodes does not really give the LGBTQs what they actually want. Today, sexuality is a major component of personal identity and as such is driven by the ethics of personal authenticity, thus requiring social recognition. This means that society at large has to recognize the complete legitimacy of that identity. Merely to come close to this but yet to fail to do so completely (as I read Rhodes doing) is thus still to engage in oppression and to facilitate the kind of culture which the LGBTQ lobby (and it would seem Rhodes himself) sees as leading to such as the Orlando killings. Rhodes does not explicitly repent for the conservative Christian denial of the legitimacy of the paradigm of identity underlying LGBTQism. He therefore remains as guilty as the rest of us of maintaining an ideology which the LGBTQers regard as oppressive. Strange to tell, he seems remarkably unaware of this. I would suggest that he needs to make a clear choice on that if his apology is to carry the weight he wants with the LGBTQ community.

Trueman’s point is why I find articles like Rhodes hopelessly naive besides being unbiblical. Many in the LGBTQ community do not want your apologies, your tears, your prayers. They want you to “recognize the complete legitimacy of that identity.” We must declare that who they are and what they want to do is not just okay, but virtuous, right, noble, just, and good. Until that happens we are the problem. Until we give them complete legitimacy we are the ones who hate. We are the ones who drive men like Mateen. Numerous homosexual writers have come out upset that Christians and others are treating the deaths of those in Orlando as a human tragedy. They were not just humans who were tragically killed. They were LGBTQs who were killed. They are martyrs for LGBTQ cause. If we are to truly mourn them we must mourn them for their true identity: gay, lesbian, transgender, etc. Truman’s final paragraph is not enough for the LGBTQ community:

In the meantime, we should feel horror at Orlando because human beings have been slaughtered – just as we should feel horror at the slaughter of human beings on the streets of American cities every day of the year.

There are numerous things Christians should do in the wake of the Orlando tragedy.

• We should mourn the loss of human life. It was a tragedy and should be treated as such.
• We should repent of our own sins knowing that we will have to face our Maker.
• We should call on men to repent of their sins, both “words, works, and gestures” as well as sins of the “understanding, will, affections, and other powers of the soul.”
• We should preach God’s word faithfully from the pulpits.
• We should argue persuasively with word and deed that the Christian life, the way that conforms with God’s revealed will in Scripture and nature, is best for us, our neighbors, our communities, and to glorify God.
• We should give thanks to Christ for his work on the cross so we might be pardoned from our sins and those sins might be subdued in us.
• We should treat homosexuals and lesbians just like we do all humans with respect and kindness, but aware that they need Jesus and if they do not repent they will not enter the kingdom of Heaven (I Cor. 6:9-10).

But Rhodes’ article (along with numerous others) does none of that. His article is compromise and capitulation in the guise of false humility and manipulation. He believes he is reaching out to the LGBTQs when he is really only surrendering and in the process dividing the body of Christ and leading sheep astray.