Bishop C.E. Blake's address "Why adultery and fornication are wrong" text John 8:3-11, to the 64th Women's International Convention Crusade in Louisville, KY, is still resonating with me. It was a very real and relevant word for the times. It was very relevant as our culture is in the midst of moral revolution with sexual immorality leading the insurrection against the Judeo-Christian idea of family, marriage, and sex in general. It was a very real and relevant message because Bishop Blake drew a solid, scriptural moral line between the Biblical sexual ethic and culture’s fuzzy conceptions of sexual morality. What especially stood out was that his message dealt with two topics that were discussed in a preaching conference that I attended last month. The first one was the topic of preaching in a blurred lines culture. Preaching in a blurred lines culture is to embrace the Bible as authority and the authority of scripture. The debates over the issue homosexuality/same sex marriage, which have caused church organizational splits, are, in essence, due to a basic abdication of the authority of scripture and orthodoxy with result being those holding to the authority of scripture and orthodoxy being known as fundamentalist or conservatives and those on the other side taking the labels of progressive and liberal. Now, let me clarify that the deeper complexity of the issue does involve varying theological commitments and starting points in terms hermeneutics and methods of interpretation of the text. The reason I mention this is because ultimate pre-commitments will determine hermeneutical method and final exegetical conclusions. For example, if one is pre-committed to Biblical revelation then outcome will be the affirmation of the truth of scripture; however, if one is committed to justifying same sex eroticism and behavior, or any other immoral behavior with scripture, the result is a custom tailored interpretation of the text in which context has been chopped off and the truth “stretched” by a “reading into it.”
The Second topic was the issue of relevance and preaching. There’s the proposition that the church has become irrelevant; to an extent, this is largely true. The reason is that the church has failed to address the deeper issues of life and people’s existence by dealing with petty ones. Also, the church has become irrelevant in sense that controversial issues have often been glossed over to avoid confronting the ugliness of the realities of the fallen world in which we live. Yes, the ugly realities of sex misused and abused in the forms of clergy sexual abuse, pedophilia, pornography, homosexuality, adultery, and etc. Truth is, has, and will always be relevant. As, Dr. Frank Thomas mentioned during a plenary session of the Voice of Prophet preaching conference, “for truth to be relevant it has to be dealing with the real deep pervasive issues in people’s lives and of our times, truth has to push deeper into the basic questions of life, that’s how truth is relevant and the church relevant with preaching that accomplishes this.” One problem is that relevance has been misconstrued as an end rather than a means. If relevance is an end, then the result is weak and watered down messages that conform to culture rather than being counter cultural. Relevance as a means is simply that it is like a vehicle to take truth to where people live; it simply means understanding the life situations and contexts where people are and speaking truth to them. An example of the timely relevance of Bishop Blake’s message was that he referred to UCSB mass killer Elliot Rodgers in saying that he didn’t “deserve” sex just because he felt entitled to it.
Lastly, Bishop Blake scripturally dealt with the sin of sexual immorality as an ethical and moral issue; he did not invoke any non-biblical explanations for sexual immorality. In his text he pointed out that the woman caught in adultery whom Jesus forgave and did not condemn, was told to go and sin no more. The point here is that Jesus placed and ethical imperative upon her life to live in grace. The imperative was “go” and “sin no more”. The literal translation from the Greek renders Jesus’ words as “go and from now no longer sin.” It was now up to the woman from that point on to live a sexually moral and ethical life. Today, people who have problems with disengaging themselves from fornication, illicit affairs, pornography, “shaking up”, and down low creepin, for example, are said to have a “soul tie” problem. Their souls are “tied” together and become intertwined with one another to the point that they just can’t stop their sexually immoral behavior. This heretical fringe teaching has been used to explain the inability, or unwillingness to repent of sexual sins, mostly among hyper spiritual Charismatics who claim ministries of spiritual warfare and deliverance that are grounded more in Gnosticism rather than Biblical knowledge. The problems with this teaching are manifold, but the two primary ones are the following: it presents sin as a metaphysical problem rather than an ethical one, for example, it presents sin as a problem only of soul and spirit rather than a rebellion against the revealed knowledge of right and wrong. Remember, Adam and Eve’s alienation from God was not because of a deficient spiritual nature or defect, they were made perfect; their problem was ethical in that they disobeyed the commands that were made plain to them to know God’s provision and restriction of trees in the garden. Secondly, and succinctly, the soul tie teaching is non-Biblical because it’s a form of spiritual pantheism. The Bible is clear on maintaining sexual morality, it is a matter of doing the right thing based on principle; for example, Joseph ran from Potiphar’s wife’s grip on him to fornicate and Paul tells the Corinthians to flee sexual immorality. Finally, on a homilectical note, preaching-wise, Bishop Blake started off his message discussing the regrettable realities, the sorrowful consequences, and the lamentable logical conclusions of sex outside of the covenant relationship of marriage. However, when the message concluded, he didn’t leave us with a simple description of the problem, but imparted to the audience a prescription of hope and affirmation that living holy and sexually pure is very possible with the power of Holy Spirit for all. This message from our presiding Bishop speaking penetrating truth to a prevalent issue of the times has imparted a new degree of relevance for the Grand ‘ol Church of God in Christ and the church at large.
TWB
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