Speaking the Truth in Love: A Compassionate Response to Same Sex Attraction and Same Sex Marriage
8/14-8/15/2013
University of Saint Mary at the Lake
Mundelein, IL
Lecture 1 – Can’t We Just Agree to Disagree – Dr. Beverly Yahnke
1. Can’t We Just Agree to Disagree – Dr. Beverly Yahnke
Beverly Yahnke sets the stage for the whole gathering, arguing that Christians cannot simply agree to disagree about same-sex attraction and marriage. She traces how the culture normalized homosexual behavior through familiarity, friendship with likeable neighbors, and sympathetic media, then walks through survey data, the 2013 Supreme Court decisions, marriage and family statistics, and the incremental strategy she sees moving from decriminalization toward the redefinition of family. Against resignation she urges a positive, pro-marriage and pro-child witness rather than a merely anti-gay posture. Throughout she insists that homosexual persons are people for whom Christ died, to be welcomed and taught the forgiveness of sins, even as their behavior is named as contrary to God’s design. Watch the lecture and read the transcript →
2. Natural Law, God, and Human Dignity – Dr. Robert P. George
Robert P. George builds a case for natural law and human dignity that a secular listener could follow without first granting Christian premises. He argues that certain goods—friendship, knowledge, health, moral character—are intrinsically and not merely instrumentally worth pursuing, and that practical reason, not mere emotion, grasps their worth, correcting Hume’s reduction of reason to a servant of the passions. From these basic goods he derives moral norms and the authority of law, distinguishing his view from utilitarian consequentialism. Fielding questions, he grounds equal human dignity in the possession of a rational nature—present even in the embryo, the disabled, and the demented—and argues one can reason to a personal God, while granting that most of what we know of God comes by His self-revelation in Scripture and in Christ. Watch the lecture and read the transcript →
3. Natural Law, Marriage, and the Common Good
Robert P. George argues that marriage is a comprehensive, all-encompassing union of a man and woman—a bodily as well as emotional bond ordered toward the procreation and rearing of children—and that this good is intrinsically, not merely instrumentally, valuable, which is why infertility never barred marriage. He contends that redefining marriage to remove sexual complementarity does not expand marriage but abolishes it, replacing it with sexual-romantic companionship that has no principled basis for permanence, exclusivity, or the limit of two persons. Quoting revisionist advocates who themselves call for open and polyamorous arrangements, he shows the norms unravel once the conjugal understanding is abandoned. He traces the erosion to divorce, cohabitation, and out-of-wedlock childbearing rather than to same-sex couples, and urges the church to recover marriage by insisting children need a mother and a father. Watch the lecture and read the transcript →
4. With My Body I THEE Worship – Dr. Gregory Schulz
Gregory Schulz treats sexuality as a matter of pastoral theology centered on the human will rather than mere cognition, framing the whole discussion under the petition “Thy will be done.” Moving through numbered propositions, he argues that being male and female belongs to our created bodily-and-soul nature, that human beings are defined as those justified by faith in Christ, and that God is known only through His Word (nisi per verbum), not through a watered-down god of the philosophers. He presses that opposition to God’s design is finally an act of the will, not a defensible argument, so the answer is repentance—contrition plus faith in Christ—worked by the Word. Closing with the Confessions and C.S. Lewis, he distinguishes same-sex temptation, which calls for the fortification of Word and Sacrament, from homosexual practice, which stands under God’s judgment and awaits His forgiving Word. Watch the lecture and read the transcript →
5. And Such Were Some of You: The Spiritual Care for People with Same Sex Attraction – Rev. Harold Senkbeil
Harold Senkbeil frames spiritual care for those with same-sex attraction by first voicing “Joe,” a Christian who is attracted to men, has chosen celibacy, and pleads that he does not need clearer law—he has heard the law all his life in taunts and rejection—but the hope of forgiveness. Senkbeil models his reply in five points: Jesus is the friend of sinners who bore Joe’s sin, His forgiveness frees from sin’s bondage, that freedom comes daily as the old Adam is drowned in baptismal repentance, renewal is the Holy Spirit’s work in the church, and no one fights alone in the body of Christ. He insists pastors preach both an unflinching law against sin and the full-bore gospel of Christ crucified, never softening either. His refrain is to speak the truth in love—to say more than “no” to the many silently suffering Joes and Jolenes in the pews. Watch the lecture and read the transcript →
6. Christian Counsel for Families of Individuals with Same Sex Attraction
Beverly Yahnke turns from the person struggling to the parents and families keeping vigil when a loved one comes out. She describes the dread and secrecy that precede such conversations and the emotional tsunami—shock, grief, shame, guilt, and self-blame—that follows, drawing on cases from her clinical practice. She reframes the account of the prodigal’s father as the model: not argument, wrath, or reproach, but compassionate, prayerful waiting that surrenders the child to God, who alone calls to repentance through the gospel. Practically, she counsels loving without condoning, setting clear household guidelines without apology, guarding the language (preferring “same-sex attraction”), telling younger children age-appropriately, and refusing to coerce reparative therapy while directing families to competent Christian counsel and, above all, to the altar for their own strength. Watch the lecture and read the transcript →
7. Reclaiming Family Virtue: Encouraging Healthy Sexuality in Unhealthy Times – Dr. Lucas Woodford
Lucas Woodford calls the church to reclaim the family as a virtue, beginning from Ephesians 5 and Genesis, where marriage as the one-flesh union of man and woman images Christ and His church and is the God-ordained context for sexuality and children. He argues that virtue—a moral good held in common and established by God—has been hollowed out and replaced by subjective “values,” so that sex has become public and shameless while families grow silent and small. Tracing decline through falling birthrates, the contraceptive revolution, no-fault divorce, and a multibillion-dollar pornography industry that reaches children young, he urges pastors and parents to celebrate the vocations of husband, wife, father, and mother and to have candid, biblical conversations about sex, modesty, and the dignity of the body. His repeated turn is to the crucified and risen Christ, who adorns and cleanses His bride and gives hope for every sin, including sexual sin. Watch the lecture and read the transcript →