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Denny Burk
Breaking the Moratorium
In 2006, Brian McLaren infamously urged
evangelicals to observe a five-year moratorium
on making pronouncements about the moral sta-
tus of homosexuality. He deemed Christianity’s
2,000-year-old ethic too offensive to be preached
to modern people and the Bible’s teaching unclear.
McLaren argued that evangelicals needed to have
a five-year period of studied, humble conversa-
tion about homosexuality. In essence, McLaren
told evangelicals and not to offend moderns with
Christian sexual ethics.
Well, that was then, and this is now. McLaren
himself has made a moral pronouncement with still
a year remaining on his moratorium. In his 2010
book A New Kind of Christianity, McLaren seeks
to redefine the Christian faith for a new day, and
in one chapter in particular he argues that tradi-
tional evangelicals need to get over their hang-ups
with homosexuality. He pillories their beliefs as
“fundasexuality,” which he defines as a “reactive,
combative brand of religious fundamentalism that
preoccupies itself with sexuality…. It is a kind of
heterophobia: the fear of people who are different”
(174–75). Traditional evangelicals, he argues, need
an enemy against which they can coalesce in com-
mon cause: “Groups can exist without a god, but no
group can exist without a devil. Some individual or
group needs to be identified as the enemy…. Gay,
lesbian, bisexual, and transgendered people are an
ideal choice for this kind of scapegoating” (175).
For McLaren, evangelicals who treat homosexuals
as sinners are really just looking for an enemy—a
scapegoat. In other words, traditionalist faith is less
about theology than it is about psychology. Evan-
gelicals need someone to loathe, and homosexuals
are the unfortunate target. In this way, McLaren
likens traditional evangelicals to racist bigots and
misogynists of a former generation.
McLaren’s Apostolic Loathing
There are a number of problems with McLar-
en’s argument concerning homosexuality, but I
want to address one in particular. There is a kind
of apostolic loathing in McLaren’s treatment of
the Bible. He simply doesn’t like what the apostles
have to say, and he appeals to Jesus to back him up.
McLaren views Jesus as the hermeneutical trump
card in all discussions about the Bible and theology.
That means that when other biblical texts disagree
with Jesus, those texts have to give way to Jesus’
authority. He writes,
If Jesus’ life and example are simply tex-
tual data on equal par with Leviticus, and
if Jesus can make no claim to be Lord
and teacher over Paul, then perhaps the
conventional approaches win. But if
Jesus represents the zenith of God’s self-
revelation and the climax of a dynamic
biblical narrative, rather than simply one
article in a flat and static constitution,
Jesus’ treatment of the marginalized and
stigmatized requires us to question the
conventional approach. We have many
examples of Jesus crossing boundaries to
include outcasts and sinners and not a
single example of Jesus crossing his arms
and refusing to do so (179).
The implication here is clear. The book of
Leviticus and Paul’s letters contain unambigu-
ous condemnations of homosexual behavior (Lev
18:22; 20:13; Rom 1:26–27; 1 Cor 6:9; 1 Tim
1:10). McLaren views such statements as contra-
dicting Jesus’ radical inclusiveness of outcasts and
sinners. Thus Leviticus and Paul must give way to
Jesus. Jesus accepts homosexuals as they are, and
so must we despite what Moses and Paul think.
McLaren would have us believe that the Bible’s
condemnation of homosexual behavior is brushed
away by Jesus himself.
This clever move by McLaren has a certain
rhetorical attractiveness to it. After all, Paul called
himself a “slave” of Christ on numerous occasions
(e.g., Rom 1:1), and Jesus clearly subsumed Moses’
authority under his own (Matt 5:21–22). Shouldn’t
these other authorities give way to Jesus? Apart
from the fact that the question presupposes that
the Bible contradicts itself, there are other prob-
lems with McLaren’s argument.
First, Jesus himself argues for the continuing
validity of the Old Testament: “Do not think that
I came to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I did
not come to abolish, but to fulfill” (Matthew 5:17).
McLaren speaks as if Jesus is abolishing the Old
Testament’s sexual ethic, yet Jesus himself does
no such thing. In fact, Jesus explicitly defines the
norm for human sexuality according to the cre-
ation pattern established in Genesis 2—which is
a monogamous, heterosexual union (Matt 19:5;
Mark 10:7–8).
Second, we have no access to an unmediated
Jesus. McLaren speaks as if the Jesus of the Gos-
pels is the author of the Gospels just as Paul is the
author of his letters. But that is not the case. Each
Gospel account comes to us either from an apos-
tle (Matthew, John) or someone closely associated
with an apostle (Mark, Luke). We have no unmedi-
ated access to Jesus’ life and words. We know what
we know about Jesus from the evangelists Matthew,
Mark, Luke and John. Jesus promised the apostles
that after he left he would lead them into all truth
( John 16:13). Similarly, Jesus chose Paul to bear his
name before the Gentiles (Acts 9:15). Jesus has the
right and authority to choose his own spokesmen,
and no person—not even McLaren!—has the right
to gainsay Jesus’ selection. The evangelists and Paul
speak in behalf of Jesus, and it’s hermeneutical and
theological nonsense to pit their witness against
one another.
Moreover, anyone who would tell Christians
to listen to one and not the other is not being faith-
ful to Jesus. That is why the apostle John wrote,
“We are from God; he who knows God listens to
us; he who is not from God does not listen to us.
By this we know the spirit of truth and the spirit of
error” (1 John 4:6). McLaren is outraged by those
who do not follow his hermeneutical paradigm
(274, n.6). But when he calls believers to ignore
Jesus’ apostolic spokesmen, he has more in com-
mon with the spirit of antichrist than with the
spirit of Jesus (1 John 4:3).
What Jesus and Paul Really Say
McLaren would like to dismiss the Old Tes-
tament’s sexual ethic as marred by polygamy and
other sexual dysfunctions. But what he misses is
the unity between Jesus and Paul in the way that
they ground their teaching in the Old Testament.
When Jesus and Paul set out new covenant norms
for marriage and sexuality, they do not appeal to
polygamist kings like David or Solomon or to
polygamist patriarchs like Abraham, Isaac, or
Jacob. For all the importance these Old Testament
figures have in the history of redemption, Jesus and
Paul do not look to any of them as the paradigm for
understanding marriage and sex. Instead, Jesus and
Paul look back without exception to the pre-fall
monogamous union of Adam and Eve in Genesis
2 as the norm of human sexuality and marriage.
“For this cause a man shall leave his father and his
mother and shall cling to his wife; and they shall
become one flesh” (Gen 2:24, author’s translation;
cf. Matt 19:5; Mark 10:7–8; 1 Cor 6:16; Eph 5:31).
If McLaren is serious about following Jesus,
then he should follow Jesus to Genesis 2. But this is
one way in which Jesus’ teaching is just too counter-
cultural for Brian McLaren.
