Christian morality does not stop there; it understands that the way of life and action of Jesus Christ is the highest expression of morality. Jesus Himself said in the Sermon on the Mount that He came to fulfill the moral law, that unless His followers were more righteous than the most scrupulous moralists, they would not make it to heaven. (Matt. 5: 17-20)

But wasn't Jesus' morality summed up in one word: love? Aren't moral judgments at odds with the God-man who took up the case of the immoral, who claimed that the prostitutes would enter heaven before the Pharisees? (Matt. 21:31)

The answer is simple. Holy love is transformational; God inspires the sinner to fulfill the moral law by persuading him/her that His love is better than one's old life. Jesus manifested that love in the vast amounts of energy He spent drawing the immoral to Himself. He offered Himself as the target for their turning; in His very being, He fulfilled the Law and the deep longing of wayward hearts.

Robert Gagnon says it best in his masterpiece The Bible and Homosexual Practice: 'Jesus balanced the Father's ethical demands with God's self-sacrificing outreach to transform sinners...His ministry proves that the Church can practice radical love without sacrificing God's demand for righteous conduct.'

Why then do powerful, decent and otherwise loving men like Adam Hamilton demoralize the Gospel, as he does in his book When Christians Get It Wrong? The pastor of the largest evangelical church in Kansas City, and the largest Methodist Church in the USA, guts the Gospel of its truth by insisting that Jesus simply loves 'His gay children'; He requires of them no repentance, and thus no transformation unto righteousness.

Hamilton preaches a love designed for a generation that is particularly allergic to any notion that homosexuality is sin. He dedicated his book to 'John', a twenty-something heterosexual so influenced by a gay-affirming culture that he defines himself significantly by his defense of homosexual practice. Hamilton quotes John as saying: 'I fully support those who chose [homosexuality] as their lifestyle...it has become something that is accepted...I don't see anything wrong with it.'

Neither does Hamilton, if his chapter on homosexuality is an accurate indication. To support his demoralized love, Hamilton mimics the rationale employed by mainline Protestant denominations of the last 40 years to support homosexual practice. Love conquers all, including the Bible's sexual morality.

(To be fair, Hamilton stops short of blessing same-sex unions. To be true, however, he lays the groundwork for doing just that by removing any biblical objection to homosexual practice. He rightfully prophesies that in 10 years the evangelical world will be as divided as the Protestant denominations in regards to homosexuality, a divide widened by Hamilton's own demoralized Gospel.)

More specifically, Hamilton claims that Jesus puts people over rules and that Scripture offers us many examples of 'progressive revelation'. Citing outdated dietary and ceremonial laws, as well as changing ethical ones, like women's ordination and outlawing slavery, Hamilton challenges the notion that the Scripture has anything binding to say about homosexuality.

Agreed, many Old Testament laws concerning ritual and diet lose force in the New, and God's image in both women and the enslaved has been progressively liberated from cultural ties that have bound them, ties that the Apostle Paul was slow to disrupt in lieu of other priorities.

But Scripture from start to finish upholds God's image in humanity as the duality of male and female, a fullness manifest from Genesis One's Adam and Eve to Christ the Bridegroom returning for His bride at the end of Revelation.

The truth of Scripture and Church tradition points only to marital union as blessed; any other sexual configuration is a violation of God's will for humanity. Gagnon again: 'The scriptural witness for heterosexual monogamy and against same-sex practice is strong, pervasive, absolute, and counter-cultural.'

Where Hamilton and I agree is that Jesus' love applies pointedly to those with same-sex attraction. Where we disagree mightily is in demoralizing that love in order to make the truth of the Gospel acceptable to them and their 'John-like' friends.

I want 'John' and his friends, whether inclined toward the same or opposite gender, to know the transformational truth of love: how Jesus sets people free from violating themselves and others through sexual immorality. I would cite John 4-Jesus' encounter with the Samaritan woman--as one such biblical, transformational model.

Paradoxically, that very passage from which we derived the essence of 'Living Waters', our main healing course, is the same one Hamilton cites as his approach to gays.

In the passage, Hamilton sees only a loving encounter between a shameful woman and Christ, who poses no challenge to her immorality whatsoever. I see the stern and splendid and altogether compassionate advance of God's Kingdom; grace and truth converge in Christ as He extends 'living water' to the Samaritan then exposes the folly of her multiple partnerships. In truth, it is only after Jesus reveals her immoral state that she proclaims Him as Lord.

Holy love transforms; worldly love caters to the consumer, and allows him or her to conform spirituality to whatever (s)he wants it to be. 'John' may prefer Hamilton's demoralized love, but it cannot transform him; demoralized love fails to call one to anything higher than his own self-interests.

The US Catholic Catechism for Adults says it best: "Love alone, set adrift from moral direction, can easily descend into sentimentality that puts us at the mercy of our feelings...In our permissive culture, love is sometimes so romanticized that it is separated from sacrifice. Because of this, tough moral choices cannot be faced. The absence of sacrificial love dooms the possibility of an authentic moral life.' And I would add, an authentic Christian life.

One more agreement with Hamilton: he is absolutely right in claiming that young adults today will tend to use a negative view of homosexuality as one reason why they reject orthodox Christianity. But rather than conform the message of the Gospel to the cultural flow, let us go against the current and offer them transformation, something worth dying for.

Christine is a good friend of mine, a pre-Christian seeking the truth. We speak of Jesus often; she said to me yesterday that she would never oppose gay marriage because people should be able to do what they want.

I looked her straight in the eyes and told her the whole painful, shameful, marvelous story of how God loved me so much that He called me to repent of my homosexual identity and practice then follow Him on an adventure of healing in order to discover who He really is and who I really am as a beautiful, broken part of God's heterosexual creation. (Whew.)

'Surrender to His love, Christine, that's all He asks. He accepts our weakness, our fears, and our questions, but He refuses to give us duo passports. You either follow Jesus and serve God's Kingdom, or you are under the mastery of the Kingdom of this world.' For the first time in one of our conversations, her eyes widened and filled with tears. She heard the whole message.

Adam Hamilton, you are a good man. Just stick to the whole Gospel. In demoralizing it in When Christians Get it Wrong, you get it wrong and sadly extend your error to a generation that deserves better.

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