June 10th, 2015
Tony Campolo is a speaker and author and is highly influential in the side of evangelical Christianity that prioritizes social justice and charity. He has long been supportive of gay people, but his position on marriage was that the government should honor only civil unions for all and let churches decide for whom to conduct marriages. And he has been, for some time, a bit ambiguous about what he believes the church should do.
This week he revised his position.
It has taken countless hours of prayer, study, conversation and emotional turmoil to bring me to the place where I am finally ready to call for the full acceptance of Christian gay couples into the Church.
For me, the most important part of that process was answering a more fundamental question: What is the point of marriage in the first place? For some Christians, in a tradition that traces back to St. Augustine, the sole purpose of marriage is procreation, which obviously negates the legitimacy of same-sex unions. Others of us, however, recognize a more spiritual dimension of marriage, which is of supreme importance. We believe that God intends married partners to help actualize in each other the “fruits of the spirit,” which are love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control, often citing the Apostle Paul’s comparison of marriage to Christ’s sanctifying relationship with the Church. This doesn’t mean that unmarried people cannot achieve the highest levels of spiritual actualization – our Savior himself was single, after all – but only that the institution of marriage should always be primarily about spiritual growth.
This casts the role of same-sex marriage not as acceptable, but as a spiritual good, a blessing to the couple and the church. He cites his experiences with gay Christian couple, and watching how they function, as influential to his change of thinking.
This is no inconsequential endorsement.
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Paul Douglas
June 10th, 2015
The Campolos are very gracious people. Met them once and was quite impressed.
Bose
June 11th, 2015
And of course, Tony & Peggy have long offered themselves as a gentle, poignant, good-cop/bad-cop dichotomy. She was the one broadly welcoming and affirming LGBT people; he strove for an empathetic and compassionate voice while still labeling being LGBT as sin.
So, I agree — this is big. Decent, thoughtful Christians who might once have aligned themselves easily with Brian Brown or Abp. Cordileone have the perfect opening to take a breath and consider whether they’d rather be angry or spiritual about their LGBT neighbors.
SharonB
June 11th, 2015
This is the approach of cultural critical mass. No less momentous than when some churches in Italy and Britain turned on the “scriptural ” interpretation of how to view involuntary manumission.
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