In this blunt and straightforward episode of A Reasoned Response, Robert Bosley exposes the core error of homosexual affirming theology and movements that claim Christians can keep sinful desires—such as same-sex attraction or other disordered inclinations—as part of their identity. Bosley argues from Scripture that this is not Christianity but a distortion of the gospel.
He explains that the gospel never tells sinners to “accept who they are,” nor does it allow believers to hold onto desires that God calls evil. True repentance involves turning not only from sinful actions but from sinful affections, emotions, and inclinations. Any teaching that encourages Christians to retain those desires is spiritually dangerous, deceptive, and ultimately denies the transforming power of Christ.
This episode calls Christians and churches to reject the half-gospel promoted by pastors like Greg Johnson. Instead the church should hold fast to biblical holiness, and embrace the full, freeing message of repentance and new life in Christ.
Conservative religions answer, you know, the colonial answer is to hide your shame. There's a lot here to respond to. Welcome to A Reasonable Response. My name is Robert Bosley, and the purpose of this podcast is to give a reasoned response to issues related to the Christian faith from a Reformed Baptist perspective. Each episode contains what we call the breakdown, where I respond to a video related to whatever the topic at hand is.
Today, that is the issue of homosexuality, specifically the perspective known as Side B Christianity, which we'll explain a little bit more in a minute. But before we get to that, I'm going to respond to some of you responding to me. At MWD Francis says in gatekeeping, the term Christian is wild. Have you read the new Testament? That's pretty much what the new Testament does is gatekeep on who is an isn't a Christian.
It's just part of Christianity is there's some people who are in some people who are out. That's just reality at gunlock bill says a person is a being. Look at the definitions of person and being. You can't have three persons in one being. Three persons equals three separate beings.
Words mean things. I agree, words have meaning. And that's why we have two different words for being and person. They aren't identical. They're identical when you're talking about humans because a human being is a human person, we're identified.
But not everything that has Being is a person. This microphone has being. It exists, it's not a person. Same thing with the desk. Everything around me, aside from my producer, is a being without personhood.
When we come to God, scripture clearly teaches that this is one essence, one being, who exists in three persons. The words are related in humanity, but they are different when we come to God. He is not like us. That's kind of the point. At Suddenly Baptist, which is a great name, referring to my comment in the Mormonism video about how the Mormon view of God is that God the Father has spirit children with a heavenly mother.
He says, quote, it's an entirely different conception, quoting me. I don't know if you intended the pun, but well said. I didn't intend it, but it just came out that way, and we liked it, and we went with it. Good catch. At Mark McMillan, 2721 says, unfortunately Jesus Christ will judge who is a Christian and not members of the 45, 000 evangelical sects.
Read the Book of Mormon and pray and you will know the truth versus the darkness of a paid pastor with no authority nor priesthood. You must decide if you want to know the truth. The claim of 30, 000, 40, 000, 45, 000, next week it's going to be 80, 000 different Protestant sects is just really tiresome. It's just not true. It's from a random encyclopedia that even says there's hundreds of Roman Catholic denominations or sects.
So It's really a meaningless number and it grows every time I see it. It's amazing. But yes, you're right. Jesus will judge who is a Christian. And he has very strong things to say about those who reject his words and add to the word of God, as Joseph did.
Joseph did. Today for the breakdown we're going to be looking at a video titled Decolonizing Christianity, Gay Shame and Jesus by Greg Johnson. In 2018 his church hosted the Revoice Conference and this conference was centered around people identifying as gay Christians who still claim to hold to traditional Christian ethics about sexuality and therefore are celibate. This created a big controversy and is really representative of what is known as the Side B movement, although that terminology isn't as prominent today as it used to be. This is in contrast to what is often called side A, which is open affirmation.
This will be the liberal view that homosexuality is to be celebrated and embraced. Side B says that homosexual activity needs to be rejected and repented of, but it still leaves room and a place for identification with the gay movement and thus they are often calling themselves gay Christians though they live celibate lifestyles. And for this particular video, before we jump into the first clip I want you to understand we're jumping in about 20 minutes into the video and the reason for that is partly for the sake of time Also those First 19 minutes or so is largely autobiographical. Johnson is simply telling us about his history and about his life growing up. And while that can be valuable, that's not really useful for what I'm wanting to do today.
And so we're going to jump in at about 19 minutes into the video. So with that out of the way, here's clip one. And and interesting that the thing that I found had the power to deliver me from toxic shame was was actually the Gospel of Jesus. You know, I didn't become a Christian in college. I was at the University of Virginia studying architecture in 1990.
And when I became a Christian, it wasn't because I was trying to figure out what to do with my shame. It's because I actually became convinced that there really is a God and that Jesus really is his son and that this is all actually true. But what I was surprised by is the degree to which my shame was lifted because for the first time in my life I had permission to be defective. And to be honest about that, because for the first time in my life I had permission to be defective and to be honest about that because for the first time in my life I wasn't lovable I was I was actually loved. This is why responding to guys like this are is sometimes very difficult because on the one hand you see it's heavily emotional that's the driving impulse behind the entire presentation sermon whatever you want to call it it's heavily leaning on emotion at the same time there's a sense in which these things could be said in a way that's true.
When we come to Jesus, we do have a sense of being loved because we are loved by God. That's what it means to be a Christian, you're God's beloved son or daughter. There is a sense in which what he says toxic shame is lifted and there's a lot of meaning he pours into that that isn't really helpful. The simple fact of the matter is when we come to Christ we are shameful. We should be ashamed because we have lived a life of sin and rebellion and that is a shameful thing.
Not just the sin of homosexuality, although the Apostle Paul does specifically say that homosexuality is a shameful act in Romans chapter 1, but all of our sin should make us ashamed before God. When God made Adam and Eve and placed them in the garden, it says that they were naked and unashamed. They had no cause for shame in their nakedness or in their relationship with one another or in their relationship in God's world. There was no shame because there was no sin in the garden yet. But when sin entered shame came with it because our sin is an inherently shameful thing.
And yes the gospel does lift that. That's true and glorious and wonderful. But then this guy and people like him then try and make it that if your shame has been lifted, you don't actually have to change your thinking. You don't have to change your attitudes. Whereas scripture calls us not to just change our actions, but also have our minds renewed.
And that's the inherent problem with Johnson and Revoice and the Side B movement. Is there really denying the need for us to have our minds renewed and to conform even our thinking to God and his word. Conservative religions answer, you know, the colonial answer is to hide your shame. Pretend to be straight. Use weird euphemisms that make it sound like you're not really gay, you just have this disease that you're going to be healed of, or just don't tell a soul.
Bake it till you make it. That's always conservative religion's answer is to hide your shame. And the world's answer is to deny your shame, to say there's nothing wrong with me. And yet we can't really live that out because we're still trying to deal with our shame. It's still there even when we don't feel it.
It's still driving us to make ourselves lovable. There's a lot here to respond to, but the first of all just the use of the colonial answer in referring to what he thinks is the normal conservative answer. Obviously he's throwing out this pejorative buzzword to try and demean those who would dare disagree with him. He doesn't really actually define it. It seems like he's using it as a just a way of saying the societal influence on Christianity.
Not recognizing that well society has held a particular view of homosexuality until the recent past. Not in spite of Christianity and then posing that on Christianity, but that's been the societal view because of Christianity. That's been the Western view towards homosexuality, generally speaking, because of nearly 2, 000 years of church influence in the West. Because when we look at what the scriptures say about homosexuality, the teaching is very, very clear. There's not any ambiguity.
It's the action that's sinful, but it's also sinful desires, which is something he denies being a proponent of what is called side B, Christianity. And his assertion that the conservative answer is to hide your shame, fake it till you make it. That's really just a bad straw man. No one's saying that we ought to hide our shame, but rather we need to confess our sin and repent so that Christ can lift our shame and we would no longer be participating in these things that are rightfully making us ashamed. Fake it till you make it.
I mean that's such a superficial way of dealing with the idea that as Christians being renewed in our minds and being conformed to the image of Christ, we have the ability to lead our desires. We are able to control ourselves, control our emotions, and actually change with the help of God's Spirit just faking it and putting on this veneer that that's not what we're talking about it's a just a complete misrepresentation of the conservative Christian opinion of you. My own experience, I became a Christian and my experience was that though I did the full ex-gay movement for decades, my sexual orientation never changed. I'm still a sixth at the top of the Kinsey scale that since the 1940s has been used to classify sexual orientation. And so where that leaves me at this point is I'm 49 years old and I'm still a virgin.
I wasn't sexually active before I was a Christian because it was the height of the AIDS epidemic and I was terrified of dying. And so I've walked with God in celibacy all these years. I've never, you know, so much has held hands. And that has had a cost. There's loneliness that goes into that.
We all long for companionship and yet very often for some of us God doesn't give us that in this life in the way that we might have wanted. And God is God and he can do as he pleases. He knows what's best for us and he knows that this is a world of suffering and brokenness and betrayal and sin, but that grace and glory is breaking in and the grace and the glory and the meaning of the coming age will already now be breaking in. We're gonna see all that come to to fruition and so my faith in Jesus has cost me more than a tithe But I'm here to say it's absolutely worth it. Jesus is absolutely worth it.
You know, I'm a guy I guess who saw field and I sold everything I had to get the field and Jesus is my treasure. And that's a treasure that no one can take away from me. I'm convinced that no community in the world longs so desperately for what only the gospel can give as the LGBT community. You know, we're all looking for acceptance. As for his comments about previously being part of the ex-gay movement, I think he's right to have some concerns with that movement.
It was almost presented as a, in a way, a kind of prosperity gospel where if you come to Jesus you'll no longer be gay immediately, your desires will overnight be changed and things like that. That's a bit of a character, but you get the idea. And we do need to reject that, because when we come to Christ, not all of our sinful desires immediately go away. We're not immediately sanctified. That's a reality of life.
Sanctification is a process, a lifelong process. But then that doesn't mean we do what He does and immediately jump to the other extreme where, well, if I have these feelings and desires and inclinations, they must be okay. They must be something that God approves of or at least tolerates and accepts. No, we have to think clearly and carefully. We come to Christ, by faith we're justified and forgiven of our sins, but our sanctification is a process wherein even our desires are renewed.
We repent of sinful desires and by God's grace they're changed over time. If those desires aren't changed, we don't just wallow in them and coddle our sinful inclinations as if they are themselves gifts from God, when in reality they're sins to be repented of. Paul says this he says, I count everything a loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord. For his sake I have suffered the loss of all things and count them as rubbish that is trash in order that I may gain Christ and be found in him not having a righteousness of my own that comes from the law in other words not being lovable not having a righteousness of my own that comes from the law, but that which comes through faith in Christ, the righteousness from God that depends on faith." You know, St. Paul says in Romans 15, accept one another as just as Christ accepted you." It's the good news of Jesus and here's I see a God who closed my shame in the righteousness of his son so that I might be found in him not having a righteousness of my own that comes through what I do, but that which is through faith in Christ.
It's the great exchange that Martin Luther talked about where where what I've spent my entire life doing is sinning, loving God with less than all of my mind, heart, soul, and strength 24 hours a day, seven days a week. I haven't loved God like that for five seconds, which means I'm continually breaking the greatest commandment, meaning continually doing the greatest sin, and yet all that sin in the exchange is transferred to Jesus on the cross and he bore it and I bear it no more. And what Jesus had from a lifetime of always doing what pleases the Father is righteousness. And then when we believe in him, it says that righteousness when we have faith is transferred to us. Which means that you now have Jesus' resume if you believe in Jesus.
This is a great example of why this Side B movement is so dangerous, really. Because almost everything he said here is true the great exchange the the receiving of Christ's righteousness when we repent and trust in him and and as he put even as he put it we have Jesus resume sure that's great the The problem is he isn't doing what Paul said. What did Paul say in Philippians? Yet indeed I also count all things loss for the excellence of the knowledge of Christ Jesus my Lord. Johnson is not counting all things loss.
He's wanting to hold on to an old identity that is rooted in a rebellion against God. That's the problem. He's not counting all things loss. He's not really forsaking his sin. He may be forsaking acting out sinful desires, but he's holding on to those desires as seen by wanting to continue to identify as part of the so-called LGBT movement, a so-called gay Christian.
That's the problem. Again, a denial that desires can be corrupted and sinful and focusing only on the activity. It's a really Pelagian view of sin. It's not Luther's view of sin. It's not the reformed view of sin.
And that's why it must be rejected, because ultimately it's not the Bible's view of sin. Shame is different from guilt and forgiveness is different from righteousness. Talk about what it means to have Christ's righteousness credited to us by faith. If you, let's say, just imagine you had maybe made a couple unwise decisions unbeknownst at the time, and you have defaulted on your mortgage, and you've defaulted on your car loan, and you have credit cards that are in excess of hundreds of thousands of dollars of debt, and you've got second mortgages and third mortgages and then your bank account is zero, your savings account is zero, in fact you're overdrawn a couple thousand in your checking account and on top of that you've got all of these fees. So for the sake of time, I'm going to summarize the analogy he makes that you through these unwise decisions have defaulted and you go to the bank, they forgive you your default and let you go your way.
And then actually they call you back in and they give you the whole bank. That's the analogy of receiving Christ's righteousness. But notice the problem there, and we see this over and over again. The minimization of sin, a few unwise decisions, unknown to you. That's not parallel to our sin.
We both inherit a fallen sinful nature as children of Adam, but then also our sins are rebellion against God. Yes, you may sin unknowingly. There's even a category for that in the Old Testament sacrificial system, but that doesn't mean that it's just an unwise decision. Your sin is rebellion against your creator. It's treason against the king of the universe.
It's not you missed a mortgage payment or two. It's far deeper than that. And that's the problem over and over, a denial of the importance and severity of our sin. Without radical grace, what we end up with is a corrupted Christianity that's no Christianity at all, because it's not good news for sinners. On the other side there's a kind of liberal Protestantism that says that there's nothing wrong with my sexuality And what that robs me of is my need for Jesus.
That robs me of salvation because it tells me that I'm okay and I'm not okay. I'm in the hands of Jesus who loves me and who delights in me. There's no message that is more powerfully for gay people than the good news about Jesus. So I'm glad to see the rejection here of what he identifies as the liberal position of saying there's nothing wrong with your sexuality, but the problem is he's not really rejecting the liberal view because he's simply limiting the problems with his sexuality to the physical act while holding on to this identity and not repenting of even the desires and the identification with this thing that is rebellion against God. And that's really what makes this position even more dangerous than the outright liberal position of rejecting biblical standards of sexual ethics.
He wants to hold on to a veneer of Christianity while at the same time denying the requirements to be changed in his thinking and repenting of sinful, corrupt desires, not just the actions itself. It's a very dangerous line to try and walk. And in the end, it's not going to go well. That is the beauty of the gospel, and that is good news. When you strip away all the homophobia and just let sinners be sinners loved by Jesus, and the church becomes a safe place to be a sinner loved by Jesus.
That is when the gospel comes alive and that's good news for gay people. The message of the gospel and the purpose of the church is not to let sinners be sinners. That actually is completely contradictory to the message of the gospel and the purpose of the church. The message of the gospel is that Christ saves us from our sins. Yes, he saves us from the judgment our sins deserve.
He removes the shame that we feel for our sins. That's true, but he also saves us from our sins themselves. We're to be renewed in our minds. We have the work of the Spirit in our hearts conforming us to the image of Christ. And if we're holding on to this self-conception, this identification as something that is in rebellion against God, for him a so-called a gay Christian, it's as incoherent as if someone wanted to call themselves, well, I'm a murderous Christian, I'm a adulterous Christian, I'm a a pedophilic Christian.
We would come to them and say that that's nonsense, that's not how the gospel works. Christianity tells you to abandon those evil desires, to repent and turn from them and to be renewed, to be washed clean, and to walk in a new way of life. To simply say that we need to let sinners be sinners is really a denial of the gospel. It's not the good news of the gospel because you're leaving sinners in their sin. You're removing all hope, not giving them hope.
So in conclusion, I hope it's obvious why this position advocated by Johnson here and promoted by groups like Revoice are so dangerous and why they need to be rejected by any faithful biblically ordered Christian or church. The gospel calls us to repent and turn away and reject sin in all forms, not just sinful actions, but even sinful emotions, sinful desires, sinful inclinations. This perspective would have us, yes, turn away from sinful actions, but to still maintain and hold on to desires that are in rebellion against God. The gospel frees us from it all. That's why the gospel is such good news It's not just about modifying our behavior, but it's about Transforming us from the inside out and making us more like Jesus and this perspective Robbs the gospel of its power because it only tells a half-truth, which then the devil uses to deceive and turn into lies.
Well, that's all the time we have for today. If you would like to contact me personally, I'm on X at R. Bosley, 1689. If you would like to learn more about church and family life, you may do so at churchandfamilylife.com. And don't forget, we've got our national conference coming up in May on biblical manhood and womanhood at Ridgecrest, North Carolina.
Thanks. See you next time. Thanks for watching. Have a great weekend.