(LifeSiteNews) — Christian apologist Jojo Ruba once again joins Jonathon on this week’s episode of The Van Maren Show, this time to discuss the targeting of Christian schools by the LGBT movement.
Looking at the “moral landscape” of Christian apologetics in general and how it has changed over the past several years, Ruba tells Jonathon that while about a dozen years ago Christians had to defend the veracity of the Resurrection, they are now called upon to defend the goodness of the Gospel itself.
Most people over a decade ago were not moral relativists, Ruba explains, but were rather “hiding” their own moral systems. Now, however, people openly profess a moral system believing themselves to be in the “moral majority,” a majority of the secular left as opposed to a Christian majority, with the belief that their worldview is “morally superior” to all others, including Christian morality.
Examining this new moral paradigm under the lens of the abortion debate, Ruba tells Jonathon that the conversation has shifted away from what a baby is to a “challenge of offending women” or “proclaiming justice for women,” making pro-lifers appear immoral for opposing the “choice” of a woman to get an abortion. A similar thing, Ruba observes, has happened with the conversation over LGBT issues and more basic apologetics issues, such as the veracity of Scripture.
“I think we have to understand the foundation of this worldview because this says, ‘My moral standard is better than God’s, and I’m going to change the Bible’s teachings on these moral issues to accommodate my moral standard and to make sure that God is subservient to what I believe is right or wrong,’” Ruba says.
What has happened in Christianity, meanwhile, is “no longer a cultural debate,” Ruba maintains, looking to his experience of internal discussions. “What’s happened is there is a group of people who are self-motivated to be evangelists for this new kind of Christianity, and let me emphasize, it is a new kind of Christianity,” he warns. “This is a different Jesus they’re worshiping, because if ultimately they decide what the Bible teaches, and theology and morality, they’re acting as God rather than God.”
Considering the primary influence for those seeking to upturn a Christian sexual morality, Ruba looks to fellow Christian apologist Alan Shleman, who said that every “revisionist” he knows became one after being close to someone who announced they were gay. “It’s a personal experience,” says Ruba. Rather than uphold a set of facts, the truth, or an objective standard, he explains, they choose to enable their gay or gender-confused friends. He looks at how the British Columbia Christian Schools Association, after hiring the former head of the Surrey Christian School as their executive director, decided to affirm sexuality in all schools in system – something he also did while head of the Surrey Christian School.
He also recounts how, upon first moving to Calgary, he attended an event at a church put on by a pro-LGBT group called Generous Spaciousness, which was at one time run by someone who helped Ruba with his own same-sex attraction. With that individual having since died, the church is now under the leadership of Wendy Gritter.
In light of this, Ruba describes the three-step process to “take over a Christian institution and make them pro-LGBT.” He says that what is done first is to claim there is “good scholarship” on both sides of the LGBT discussion, and that an “accommodating stance” on the issue should be taken, so that those both in favor and opposed to the issue at hand can live “in harmony.” Multi-denominational organizations, Ruba adds, are “vulnerable” to this approach, as the theology and argumentation of the “revisionists” is never examined, while the claim of “good scholarship” is made.
The second step, Ruba continues, is to “evangelize” those within the organization on the basis of being “loving and accommodating,” followed shortly thereafter by firing those who resist the change. Finally, once the “revisionists” capture most of the organization or denomination, they declare themselves pro-LGBT. Ruba adds that the Methodists were undergoing the second step when they split over the issue.
Examining the first step in greater detail, Ruba notes that most Christians do not read Scripture, and therefore do not know what it teaches, nor do they trust that what it says is good.
There are those, he maintains, who would argue that the scriptural references to homosexuality can be dismissed because Scripture’s authors had no conception of a “same-sex marriage” and the like with the idea of being “gay,” while the word “homosexual” was added to the Revised Standard Version (RSV) of Scripture in the middle part of the previous century, thus allowing for the scriptural opposition to homosexuality to be dismissed as a “cultural response to the natural opposition to homosexuality at that time, and we just added these concepts to the Scripture.” What fuels the revisionism, meanwhile, is the belief that one must be compassionate and loving to LGBT people and see to it that they feel welcomed in Christian spaces.
Looking also at the arguments related to scriptural translations not including the word “homosexual” until recently, Ruba notes the “critical” distinction between close same-sex friendships and same-sex romantic relationships. He also discusses something he calls the “redemptive view,” maintaining that as every facet of our humanity has been “corrupted” by the Fall, our identity should not be based on our sexuality but upon our Creator. As the “revisionist” arguments are based on the premise that our primary identity can be found in sex, then framing the argument in terms of the “redemptive view,” Ruba maintains, makes the “revisionist” view look like a usurpation of the place of God.
Further, if the “revisionist” understanding of the scriptural text is right that references to homosexuality in Scripture refer to pederasty or pedophilia, the problem remains that they have no positive affirmation in Scripture of that behavior, but only of a monogamous heterosexual relationship that lasts a lifetime.
“When you look at what happens in the Bible when there’s polygamy, or polyamory, or any kind of rape, or any kind of adultery, all of those things lead to destruction and death, and the same thing with homosexuality,” Ruba notes. “The same thing with any kind of gender confusion. Why is that? Because God’s design is good, and whenever we deviate from God’s design, it’s bad.”
Meanwhile, he adds, the reason why the word “homosexual” was used in Scriptural translations was because of the emergence of a gay “identity” in the 1860s. However, Ruba continues, the fear of the “gay identity” spread as people did not want to be associated with it, and that Christians “ostracized” people who experienced same-sex attraction, inadvertently helping the emergence of a gay community and that they “became their own identity.” Ruba himself maintains, however, that our identity should be rooted in Christ and following Him, the question related to LGBT issues not being one of how we love them in particular, but how we love people as Christians.
Later in the episode, Ruba returns to this thought and states that welcoming someone is not the same thing as accepting their behavior or beliefs. Looking to a recent episode in which a Muslim interrupted a Mass by spreading out a prayer rug and praying, Ruba says that Canadian Christians need to claim the freedom of association rather than freedom of religion, as the former “protects our right to discriminate based on beliefs.”
Meanwhile, the fact some Christian communities struggle with LGBT issues shows only that they do not know Scripture or trust it as good. Ruba says teaching youth about what Scripture says and its goodness will give them the discernment necessary to “navigate through the bombardment of their culture” and see the “lies behind the arguments.”
If gender, however, is not influenced by biology, then it is merely something determined by the caprice of the moment. Ruba notes that if a generation thinks in this way, then we’re seeing the beginning of the dissolution of Christianity and society writ large, since we will no longer be living in reality.
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