Randy Alcorn, founder and director of Eternal Perspective Ministries, has been serving the church through his writing and teaching ministry for decades now, giving careful attention to a wide variety of topics on Christian faithfulness including heaven and eternity, marriage, the sanctity of life, and sexuality and purity. He is also an initial signatory to the Nashville Statement.
In a recent blog post, Alcorn carefully answers some of the criticisms that have been leveled at the Nashville Statement since its release. Below is an excerpt of his post, but I encourage you to read the whole thing, which is a model for addressing criticism with biblical patience, clarity, truth, and love.
“[I]nstead of expecting the God of love to define love as we do, we need to look at what He actually reveals in His Word. The Nashville Statement attempts to do this. We need to realize that we can’t truly love people by lying to them and saying God believes their actions to be right, when He has said He doesn’t…”
“I find it odd to hear people say that if I were a true Christian I would support homosexual marriage and transgenderism, then turn around and say I have no right to consider these inconsistent with the historic Christian faith.
“Of course they are inconsistent with both Scripture and the historic Christian faith. Feel free to reject Scripture or the historic Christian faith if you so choose, but don’t feel free to retroactively revise them to make them fit the positions that our culture has come to embrace in, oh, about the last five minutes!
“It may feel much nicer and more loving, but such revisionism is not only objectively wrong, but also cowardly and ultimately unloving. Our job is not to reinvent and dilute and dismantle the Christian faith, nor to cower in fear about declaring it. Rather, it is to accurately represent it and live it out faithfully and humbly. Our job is not to disagree with God and say that sin is right and that moral righteousness is wrong, but to explain that the God who offers us His grace does so in the context of recognizing our proneness to violate His truth.” (emphasis original)
You can read the rest of Randy Alcorn’s excellent piece here.
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