Matthew 19 Refutes Matthew Vines

St. Matthew

The homosexual “Christian” movement is made up of two factions. The first is those who say that we need to move beyond the Bible because it’s such an archaic document which endorses slavery, oppression of women and other things. Since the Church has “moved beyond” those ideas, it can certainly make room for homosexual marriage.

The second faction is more devious and sinister. It declares that the Bible actually never condemns loving, monogamous, covenantal same-sex relationships. They usually add a bunch of fluffy adjectives that a holy God would never use. It should be pointed out that this faction completely contradicts the first one. The only thing that they agree on is that homosexuality is okay in the eyes of God. Their arguments couldn’t be further away from each other.  However, you’ll never see them debating each other.

While the first faction is bogus and anti-Christian, it at least has a bit of consistency as it is nothing more than liberalism in the Church applied to the topic of homosexuality. Liberalism has been applied to many things in the Church such as abortion, contraception, divorce, the role of women, liturgy, exclusivism and other issues. Homosexuality was simply next on the list. The Liberal is not being consistent with Christianity but he is being consistent with his liberalism.

The second faction is simply demonic through and through. It was started with the 1980 book Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality. It was written by John Boswell who later died of AIDS. More books followed throughout the 80’s and into the 90’s. By the year 2000 there were many books available but they mostly just quoted each other so scholarship was not advanced at all. The books continued until 2013 when James Brownson published Bible, Gender, and Sexuality.

This book is the main book used by most homosexual “Christian” apologists today including Matthew Vines. Vines became famous with an hour-long video that he posted on Youtube in 2012. This video eventually led to him publishing a book on the subject in 2014 entitled God And The Gay Christian. Vines takes the approach of almost every homosexual “Christian” apologist in the second faction. Basically the tactic he employs is he states: “There are six Bible verses that condemn homosexual behavior. Let’s take a closer look at them…” These verses are Genesis 19, Leviticus 18 and 20, Romans 1, 1 Corinthians 6, and 1 Timothy 1. Eventually after a hundred pages or an hour long speech of trying to fit a square peg into a round hole, he will conclude by saying that nowhere does the Bible ever condemn loving, monogamous, covenantal same-sex relationships.

What Vines and his crew don’t realize is that homosexuality is not wrong primarily by Biblical standards because of these six verses. It is wrong because it tells us what a marriage is. Jesus Christ in Matthew 19:3-9 looks back to the Creation to find his doctrine of marriage. Here is how Christ responds:

“And there came to him the Pharisees tempting him, and saying: Is it lawful for a man to put away his wife for every cause? Who answering, said to them: Have ye not read, that he who made man from the beginning, Made them male and female? And he said: For this cause shall a man leave father and mother, and shall cleave to his wife, and they two shall be in one flesh. Therefore now they are not two, but one flesh. What therefore God hath joined together, let no man put asunder. They say to him: Why then did Moses command to give a bill of divorce, and to put away? He saith to them: Because Moses by reason of the hardness of your heart permitted you to put away your wives: but from the beginning it was not so.  And I say to you, that whosoever shall put away his wife, except it be for fornication, and shall marry another, committeth adultery: and he that shall marry her that is put away, committeth adultery.”

The whole quote screams heterosexuality. One cannot look through this quote and find the desires of Matthew Vines and that is why he does not discuss it in his book. He’ll attempt in vain to refute the six verses but won’t touch this verse or the many other the other ones that say the same thing.

At the closing of the second last chapter of his book, Vines makes an amazing statement. A statement that left me speechless for nearly thirty minutes when I first read it. He says:

“Instead of making gay Christians more like God, as turning from genuine sin would do, embracing a non-affirming position makes them less like God. So it isn’t gay Christians who are sinning against God by entering into monogamous, loving relationships. It is the church that is sinning against them by rejecting their intimate relationships.”