(upbeat music) - Today we're joined by Sam Albury, an author, a speaker for Ravi Zacharias International Ministries, and a minister at St. Mary's Maidenhead Anglican Church in the UK. He joins us today from his office in Oxford. Sam, we have so much to discuss, so let's dive right in.

Let's actually dive right into the deep end and into a big ongoing debate within the church. As we do so, I should say that this episode of APJ will be slightly different because I want to use this opportunity to better understand an ongoing debate happening inside of the church right now over same-sex attraction and orientation questions and whether or not it's appropriate to use the label gay Christian.

This episode is not an attempt to finally resolve that debate and all of its attendant issues. Nevertheless, Facebook and Twitter, I'm sure, are gonna blow up after this one because people will want to resolve it all in comment. My aim here is simply to raise the debate with you, Sam, as it stands, and to sort of bring others up to speed with the tensions that Christian brothers and sisters are struggling through right now.

And to that end, we'll look at the orientation question in just a moment, but first, Sam, explain for us what do you mean by the phrase same-sex attracted when you use it? - Thank you, yeah, these are some very big issues, so I can only kind of sketch out where I'm at in my own thinking on this.

Certainly for me, the only romantic and sexual feelings I've ever experienced have been towards other men, and so that's been just a feature of my life since I've had those kinds of feelings. So I've been trying to think through what is the best way of articulating that as a Christian?

Obviously, in our secular culture, the language people would typically and obviously use would be to say, "Well, I'm gay." But in my own experience, that kind of language tends to be used to express not just a description of what kind of sexual feelings you have, but it tends to me to be someone's identity.

So it's an indication of who you are. And as a Christian, one of the key things for me is realizing that identity for Christians is not something that we either discover in ourselves, it's not something we create, it's something we receive and are given by the only person who can know our actual identity, which is the God who made us.

So my identity as a Christian comes from the fact that I've been created by God and redeemed by him through the saving work of Jesus. So this is where I need to have a different understanding to our culture. Our culture says you are your sexuality, that the sexual feelings you have, that is you at your most you, that is the real you.

Whereas for me, that's just not the case. And so I want to use language that can describe an aspect of what is going on in my life, but which doesn't imply that that is what defines me or what kind of is the center and heart of who I am.

So the language of same-sex attraction perhaps is less familiar to people outside of Christian circles sometimes. It's a bit more clunky, but I think I feel like it's less prone to being misunderstood. I don't want to imply that a particular set of sexual temptations is where I see who I am.

It's not the lens through which I understand myself. So that's why I tend to use the language of being same-sex attracted. One potential downside of that is people can think I'm saying that there's a kind of neutrality to those attractions. I'm certainly not saying that. I'm not saying it's the equivalent of being left-handed or having blonde hair or something like that.

All I'm saying is that the particular form of a sexual temptation I experience is this particular kind. All of us are fallen in this area of life. All of us experience disordered desires that affects our sexual desires as well. So all of us are sexual sinners. This is the particular way in which that's fallenness works its way out in my life.

And so I tend to use that language. I think no language is perfect on this issue and whatever language you use is going to be misunderstood by someone. But I found this has been helpful for me. A couple of other just quick thoughts on that. One is that there have been times if I'm, a couple of times that people in the secular media have wanted to interview me about my own kind of position on this.

There have been times, maybe three or four times, when I have used the language of being gay simply because I'm either talking to someone in the secular world who just is not gonna understand the language of same-sex attraction or I'm talking to an unbelieving friend or something like that.

So there are times when I felt I needed to use the language of being gay in order to have the conversation and then I've immediately qualified what I've meant by it. Some may say that's an inappropriate thing to do. That's just the kind of way it's landed. It's not my preferred way of speaking.

I see it as sort of parallel to when Paul appeals to his Roman citizenship. It's something that opens a door for his ministry, but it's certainly not how he sees himself. I think the other thing just to say on that is that I think there's a difference between language as a starting point and language as an intended destination.

I think people who come to faith from the LGBT+ community, the most natural language they're gonna instinctively use is to say, "Oh, I belong to gay Christian." And I think that's a very understandable starting point. It wouldn't be where I'd want them to finally land in terms of the language they use, but I wouldn't wanna jump up and down on a new or young Christian just for using that language as if it's only ever always wrong 'cause they may just not have had a chance to kind of think that kind of thing through yet.

- Yeah, interesting. And then the question over whether homosexual desires are merely temptations or is same-sex attraction itself as an orientation sinful in and of itself. So I think it's rather easy to agree that a heterosexual man who commits adultery with a woman has sinned. They've both sinned. We get that.

And a homosexual man acting on that impulse with another man has sinned. They both have sinned. I think we get that. Then moving back one step to the level of desire, a heterosexual man desiring to commit adultery with a particular woman is sinning in his imagination. And a homosexual man desiring sex with one particular man is also sinning in his imagination.

I think we get that. But then you work this back one more level to what is commonly called orientation. Then the heterosexual man who is attracted to women generally is not sinning. But a homosexual man attracted to men generally remains in a state of sin, or does he? That seems to be the debate among Christians right now.

How do you process this debate at the quote-unquote orientation level? - Yes, it's a tricky issue because people often use certain terms in slightly different ways to one another. And so the language of this same-sex attraction itself, sinful, is tricky because it depends exactly what we're meaning by same-sex attraction.

Are we talking about the actual act of desire or are we talking about the capacity for that desire? I'm not sure the language of orientation always serves us well. It's a very secular concept. I think its limits are that it implies a kind of fixity that I'm not sure is always the case with our sexual feelings.

And just that calling it an orientation implies it's the vantage point from which you see the world. That it's kind of, again, it's implying it's central to who you are. However, we do need some kind of language to describe the general shape of our feelings and our temptation. So it's good to have some way of describing that.

I think there are two things we need to distinguish between. I think often when people talk about acting on desires, they're often meaning physically acting on those desires. As you've just alluded to, Jesus makes it very clear that it's our hearts and our attitudes as much as our actual physical behavior that we need to think through.

You don't have to act on something physically for it to be sinful. So that tells me that sexual sin needs to be fought in our hearts and minds. It's not enough to be not physically acting on it if we're mentally acting on it. And in fact, we're not gonna be likely to physically resist a sin if we've been mentally rehearsing for it.

So people often say it's okay provided you don't act on it. I wanna say, yes, kind of, as long as we're including mental acts in our language of acting on it. I think the other thing we need to remember is there is a distinction between temptation and sin. We see that in the Bible, in the Lord's Prayer, we need to be delivered from our temptations, but we need to be forgiven for our sins.

James chapter one reminds us that temptation gives birth to sin. It's not itself sin. And so the two are not the same thing. When we're tempted, we need to flee temptation and to stand faithfully underneath it. And I take it it's possible, therefore, to be tempted without sinning. We're not told that as we grow as Christians, temptations will just disappear from life.

We are promised that God will enable us to stand under temptation. And so I think I wanna say that the presence of temptation is not itself a sin. So James one tells me that when I experience temptation, I shouldn't blame God. I shouldn't say, well, that's God's fault that I'm tempted in this way.

I need to recognize the ways in which my own temptations are a reflection of my fallen nature. They come from my own desires. But I don't think it's right to say that having the capacity to be tempted is itself a sin. It's a sign of our fallenness, but I want to repent of the ways I sinfully respond to temptation, and I want to flee temptation itself.

Otherwise, you're saying to someone, even if you're not sinning, you're still sinning, and just because you've got the capacity to be tempted in a certain way. But I think you're right to suggest that there's not an exact symmetry between same-sex temptation and opposite-sex feelings because there are godly ways of expressing heterosexual sexual desires.

There are not godly ways of expressing homosexual sexual desires. So in that sense, there's a distinction between the two. But at the same time, I wouldn't want us to lose sight of the way there's much in common between the two. So I don't want people who are experiencing same-sex temptation to feel as though they must be complete monsters compared to all the people who are wrestling with heterosexual temptation.

We know that, again, all of us are fallen in this area of life. All of us need to put sinful desires to death. All of us need to flee temptation, and actually, all of us need encouragement and help to do that. - Thank you, Sam. I appreciate your willingness to dive into the deep end of this debate, and it doesn't resolve everything, but it does offer us a helpful place to begin this conversation and to onboard folks who maybe aren't aware of it.

So thank you. Thank you for this introduction. That was Sam Mulberry speaking with us from his office in Oxford, and this debate over the language of how we talk about same-sex attraction is really important, and it's part of an ongoing debate among brothers and sisters in Christ. But one of the more settled realities that is countercultural in this culture for sure is the fact that human identity is not defined by our sexual expression, and that's exactly what we learn from the full humanity of Jesus, which is the topic we return to on Monday with our guest and friend Sam Mulberry.

Don't miss this one on Monday. Have a great weekend, and we'll see you then. (silence) (silence) (silence) you