PHILADELPHIA (BNG)—Tony Campolo, a leader of the evangelical left who for years has disagreed publicly with his wife about homosexuality, announced he now supports the full acceptance of Christian gay couples into the church.
“It has taken countless hours of prayer, study, conversation and emotional turmoil to bring me to the place where I am finally ready to call for the full acceptance of Christian gay couples into the church,” he said.
Campolo, 80, a professor emeritus at American Baptist-affiliated Eastern University in St. Davids, Pa., has appeared many times in programs alongside his wife, Peggy, who advocated full acceptance of homosexuals, to model for Christians how to discuss differences over lesbian/gay/bisexual/transgender issues calmly and with respect.
Campolo, a popular author and speaker at events including the New Baptist Covenant Celebration in 2008 and Cooperative Baptist Fellowship General Assembly in 2003, said one thing that changed his mind is Christian gay couples he met through his wife “whose relationships work in much the same way as our own.”
Friendships with gay couples
“Our friendships with these couples have helped me understand how important it is for the exclusion and disapproval of their unions by the Christian community to end,” Campolo said on his blog.
“We in the church should actively support such families. Furthermore, we should be doing all we can to reach, comfort and include all those precious children of God who have been wrongly led to believe that they are mistakes or just not good enough for God, simply because they are not straight.”
As a Christian sociologist, Campolo said, he has heard every kind of biblical argument against gay marriage, and in some cases, he has made them.
“Obviously, people of goodwill can and do read the Scriptures very differently when it comes to controversial issues, and I am painfully aware that there are ways I could be wrong about this one,” he said.
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“However, I am old enough to remember when we in the church made strong biblical cases for keeping women out of teaching roles in the church, and when divorced and remarried people often were excluded from fellowship altogether on the basis of Scripture,” he continued.
“Not long before that, some Christians even made biblical cases supporting slavery. Many of those people were sincere believers, but most of us now agree that they were wrong. I am afraid we are making the same kind of mistake again, which is why I am speaking out.”
Was ‘deeply uncertain about what was right’
Campolo noted in the past he thought he could best help gay Christians by “serving as a bridge person, encouraging the rest of the church to reach out in love and truly get to know them.” His other reason for staying on the sidelines, he said, is “like so many other Christians, I was deeply uncertain about what was right.”
Al MohlerCampolo added he hopes his announcement “will help my fellow Christians to lovingly welcome all of our gay and lesbian brothers and sisters into the church.”
In a podcast the day after Campolo released his statement, Al Mohler, president of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Ky., said given the trajectory of Campolo’s thinking across the years, the surprise is not the conclusion he reached but that it took him so long. The difference between his new statement and previous views, Mohler said, is the lack of “any serious engagement” with the Bible.
Mohler cited articles from 1999 where Campolo said he believes the Apostle Paul’s writing in the first chapter of Romans rules out moral acceptance of same-sex eroticism.
“I believe that the Bible does not allow for same-gender sexual intercourse or marriage,” Campolo said in Sojourners Magazine in May 1999.
“We can argue over this interpretation or that interpretation, but we must take the church very seriously,” Campolo said. “The fellowship of believers called the church of Jesus Christ has stood from the time of Christ to the present day, and I believe it speaks with authority. For almost 2,000 years, the church has read Romans 1 in a particular way. People who knew the Apostle Paul personally have written about what Paul meant when he wrote those verses.”
By comparison, Mohler said, Campolo’s explanation of why he changed his mind “has no serious engagement with Scripture at all.”
Mohler says ‘he’s wrong’
“To put the matter bluntly, Tony Campolo was right then, and he’s wrong now,” Mohler said. “But he speaks very differently about Scripture now. He doesn’t say that he believes Scripture to be very clear in authorizing same-sex marriage. Rather, whereas in 1999 he said that Romans 1 very clearly says that all homosexual sexual acts are sin, and that same-sex marriage would not then be legitimate in the eyes of the church, in the year 2015 he says that the Scripture can be interpreted in different ways.”
Mohler said he does not doubt that Campolo believes his new statement on homosexuality is an act of compassion.
“This is where biblical Christians who are committed to the inerrancy of Scripture and are committed to that steadfast moral tradition based upon that Scripture must understand that compassion will never actually take the form of denying anything that Scripture clearly says,” Mohler said.
“It will never take the form of in any way subverting what Scripture reveals, and in this case we have to be very clear—as in every case—that even though something may be claimed to be compassion, if it confuses the gospel and if it confuses sin, if it confuses the Bible, then it isn’t really compassion.”
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