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A 15-minute segment of the debate aired January 27 on the PBS program Flashpoint USA, and featured Bob Wenz, vice president of the National Association of Evangelicals, along with Episcopal Bishop Gene Robinson of New Hampshire. The two men actually met for the live debate earlier this month, and it was taped for later broadcast.
Wenz says Robinson comes across as an affable, gracious, "Fred Rogers" kind of person. But while Wenz understands how some might see pastoral qualities in the bishop, still he says Robinson holds to completely heretical theology -- including the notion that the Bible is open to reinterpretation at every era according to the zeitgeist, or the cultural ideas and spirit of the times.
Wenz says the homosexual bishop expresses the belief that just because something "goes against tradition and the teaching of the Church and the Bible doesn't mean that it is necessarily wrong."
Moreover, the Evangelical spokesman says of Robinson, "His view of scripture is that God is continually revealing Himself; the Bible's a wonderful book but we have to continually draw from it what we want and what we determine to be the truth as we see it in any given generation."
Wenz felt that Bryant Gumbel, as moderator of the debate, was so uninformed that he had no capacity to ask Gene Robinson any searching or insightful theological questions. And Wenz says Gumbel is part of the pansexual movement, whose adherents believe that sex has no purpose beyond pleasure and that anything goes sexually, as long as the activity is consensual.
Still, the NAE's leader says he was able to convey a number of clear points from scripture to Robinson -- the primary point being that homosexual relationships defy God's perfect plan for mankind. Wenz goes on to explain the biblical truths that he attempted to communicate during the debate:
"Homosexuality is wrong because it goes against God's created order," Wenz says, "and God's created order begins in Genesis with the idea that God made humanity male and female -- that somehow maleness and femaleness come from God; that He is neither male nor female, but, in a sense, that He is both; that He created us in his image as male and female; and that He created us, therefore, for a complimentary relationship."
The entire half-hour session with Wenz and Robinson was taped January 4 at Christ Church in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
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National Association of Evangelicals (http://www.nae.net)
