The Nazarenes reject the Levitical texts because, according to them, such texts fail to show the love of God. Instead, they come from “ancient cultural biases.” The authors of “Why the Church” base their subjective argumentation on the power of love. God’s love must be shown to practicing homosexuals; to determine that their sexual practice is against the law of God is to show them hatred rather than love.
We are now obliged to hallow an entire month of Gay Pride celebrations of homosexual practice. Nude men and drag queens parade through our cities, while children look on. Children attending parades used to climb on the fire engines or walk next to a police officer. Now the police are obliged to march in step with the agenda, while military representatives wear a “pride patch” on their uniforms.
How and why has our culture come to accept such perverted sexuality as a ho-hum reality? No doubt the new DEI social justice theory of “oppressed and oppressor” has identified minority sexual identities as one of the oppressed communities. In this “pride” month I discovered a 469-page book with the intriguing title, Why the Church of the Nazarene Should be Fully LGBTQ+ Affirming by Thomas Jay Oord and Lexa Oord (SacraSage, 2023). The authors are a pastor and wife couple, members of the Nazarene church. They found some 90 key church members and leaders to write short chapters encouraging the Nazarene church to accept LBGTQ+ practitioners as members and elders of the church, and to adopt the full practice of same-sex marriage.
The Church of the Nazarene: Beginnings and Current Beliefs
The Church of the Nazarene is an evangelical Christian denomination that emerged in North American Methodism and the 19th century Holiness Movement/Revival. The name was born of a genuine desire to emulate Jesus’ compassion for the poor, as well as to follow the passion for the poor exhibited in the life of John Wesley, the founder of Methodism. The “Articles of Faith” in the Manual of Church of the Nazarene, states:
We believe in one God – the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit:
- That the Old and New Testament scriptures, given by plenary inspiration, contain all truth necessary to faith and Christian living.
- That man is born with a fallen nature and is, therefore, inclined to evil, and that continually.
- That the finally impenitent are hopelessly and eternally lost.
- That the atonement through Christ is for the whole human race; and that whosoever repents and believes in the Lord Jesus Christ is justified and regenerated and saved from the dominion of sin.
- That believers are to be sanctified wholly, subsequent to regeneration, through faith in the Lord Jesus Christ.
- That the Holy Spirit bears witness to the new birth and also the entire sanctification of believers.
- That our Lord will return, the dead will be raised, and the final judgment will take place.[1]
It is a major loss for Christian orthodoxy to lose such a powerful denomination. Alas, the mother-church of orthodox Methodism, namely United Methodism, is collapsing. United Methodism’s governing General Conference, from April 23 to May 3, 2024, deleted (!) the “denomination’s specific disapproval of adultery, premarital/extramarital sex, and homosexual behavior from its Book of Discipline.” Nearly two million conservative African Methodists have resolved to exit United Methodism.[2]
How to Read Scripture
Those favoring the normalization of homosexuality have a strange way of interpreting the Scriptures, since they consider them to be divinely inspired. Their reasoning is this: Methodism found a way of interpreting Paul’s teaching on the ordination of women, and there are now women pastors throughout Methodist churches. Methodism must now find a way of interpreting not only Paul’s teaching on sexuality, but explicit texts in Old Testament passages such as Leviticus 18:20–23, which includes homosexuality with incest, child sacrifice, and bestiality as examples of Canaanite (pagan) abominations:
And you shall not lie sexually with your neighbor’s wife and so make yourself unclean with her.
You shall not give any of your children to offer them to Molech, and so profane the name of your God: I am the LORD.
You shall not lie with a male as with a woman; it is an abomination.
And you shall not lie with any animal and so make yourself unclean with it, neither shall any woman give herself to an animal to lie with it: it is perversion. (Lev 18:20–23)
Since this text is concerned with the holiness of God (and thus Israel’s holiness) it also includes reminders to Israel in symbolic practice in everyday things.