The Choice: Should the Church Affirm LGBTQ+ Identities and Ways of Living?

＂Ron Highfield has made a significant contribution to the present-day discussion of LGBTQ+ claims by a tight focus on the work of Karen Keen. Highfield’s The Choice is a careful and erudite analysis of Keen’s work that uncovers a species of argument being offered from many quarters. First, he lays bare Keen’s postmodern substitution of feeling and rhetoric for Scripture and sound reasoning. ＂From the postmodern perspective,＂ he notes, ＂autobiography is argument.＂ In such a case, Scripture can be displaced by personal desire. Second, he skillfully explains the implications of such an approach to an orthodox view of the Bible. If only those historic demands of Scripture that pass muster with one’s self-defined notions of kindness, justice, love, secular psychology, and minimal human suffering (i.e., inconvenience, restraint of desire) are obligatory to Christians, we are back to the ancient times in Israel when every individual is a law to her/himself. Contrary to Keen’s claim to show how evangelicals can defend an ＂affirming＂ case for same-sex marriage, Dr. Highfield demonstrates that her case abandons an orthodox view of God-breathed Scripture in order to read into the Bible what our postmodern culture otherwise could only wish it had said.＂

-Rubel Shelley, MTH, PhD; Teaching Minister, Harpeth Hills Church of Christ, Brentwood, TN; Author of Male & Female God Made Them: A Biblical Review of LGBTQ+ Claims and The Ink is Dry: God’s Distinctive Word on Marriage, Family, and Sexual Responsibility