In April, 24-year old Matthew Vines rattled the Church with his first book titled God and the Gay Christian, in which 
he reinterprets 2,000 years of traditional Christian teaching to justify same-sex behavior within Christendom.
Coincidentally, or more likely Providentially, Dr. Michael Brown’s 25th book, Can You Be Gay and Christian, was released within a week of Vines’ book and is by far one of the most compassionate, yet traditional responses to the same-sex dilemma on the market. Dr. Brown is a Christian apologist, professor at The King’s University, Denver Theological Seminary, Southern Evangelical Seminary
and Gordon Conwell Theological seminary. In addition, Dr. Brown holds a PhD in Near Eastern languages and literature and is a published Old Testament and Hebrew Scholar.
Well, on Saturday these two polar opposites came virtually face-to-face for a debate hosted by Moody Radio’s Julie Roys.
Dr. Michael Brown was confident in his defense of God’s design for sexuality and marriage stating, “I really agonized over this, not because there is any question about what the Bible says. We’ll see there is zero question whatsoever. The Bible and God’s loving Word only ordains heterosexual relationships and always under all circumstances roundly condemns homosexual acts and homosexual relationships.”
Dr. Brown continued, “In fact, we have more than 31,000 verses in the Bible. Not a single one of them has a single positive thing to say about homosexual relationships… [but] all day yesterday I was feeling the weight and pain of this because I care about people like Matthew and others. But you cannot judge the Message by our response to it.”
On the other hand, Vines struggled to use Scripture to affirm his argument claiming, essentially, committed same-sex relationships are not addressed by the Bible because God (who divinely inspired the authors of the Bible and Designer of sexuality) did not understand this “new issue of Gay Christians.”
Noticeably defensive, at one point Matt Vines stated, “my microphone continues to be muted, un-muted and keeps being muted which is a bit of a problem” and seemed to insinuate twice that his lack of video stream might be intentional on the part of Moody Radio. Although, it must be noted that while watching another live stream chat featuring Vines and hosted by Patheos’ progressive channel, the Kansas-based writer graciously experienced the same visual and audio complications.
Watch the entire debate below:
(Video credit: YouTube)
Comment by Harris Sun on December 22, 2017 at 6:14 am
Firstly, the whole idea that Bible condemns homosexuality is not justified with evidence that has not been clearly rebuttaled by this very book and other famous scholars. Secondly,There are tons of things Bible did NOT address. For this forum you are using now. This very argument of Bible did not say, is EXACTLY THE SAME argument that some EXTREME Christians use to condemn the use of internet, gaming and this very forum page you are using. Do you agree with the stance of those 90s extreme conservative socalledChristian fanatics? If no, then why are you using the same argument they use to back up your point. If yes, PLEASE DO NOT POST AGAIN. You are being hypocritical to the max.