This is not an easy or fun opinion to write as a Christian who has loved listening to and learning from Alistair Begg for years.
Alistair is a solid Christian teacher, a faithful expositor of God's Word, and usually unflinching in his commitment.
However, he has made a grave mistake.
In writing an opinion piece calling someone to repentance, I believe that it is important to lay out all of the information that we know and deal with the facts as they are.
Let's start from the beginning.
On his podcast, Begg gave a response to a letter from a grandmother who was struggling to choose whether or not to attend her grandson's wedding where he was marrying a transgender person (no one is sure if he was marrying a man pretending to be a woman or a woman pretending to be a man).
He told the grandmother that she should attend the wedding and bring a gift.
You can listen to his answer here:
This is my charitable summary of Begg's position. He wants the grandmother, who has made it clear in the past that she disapproves of the sexual sin her grandson is involved in, to attend the "wedding" and bring a gift to show that she still loves her grandson.
He does not want to advise the grandmother to make a decision that will cut off the grandson from her love and the love of Christ.
Your love for them may catch them off guard. But your absence will reinforce the fact that they said these people are what I always thought. Judgmental, critical, unprepared to countenance anything.
Here's the problem: Attending a wedding, as we will discuss later, is not a small thing. The crowd at a wedding isn't an audience, it is an assembling of witnesses. By being a witness at a wedding you are, simply by your presence, affirming the validity of the marriage.
Homosexual "marriage" is not marriage at all because marriage is definitionally between a man and a woman. It was God's design from the beginning. Anything else, including celebration of "transgender" identity at a wedding, is a perversion of that design and a rebellion against God's created order. This is not a small thing.
Genesis 2:18 - Then the Lord God said, "It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him a helper fit for him."
We also have this reiterated in the New Testament.
Mark 10:6-9 - But from the beginning of creation, ‘God made them male and female.' ‘Therefore a man shall leave his father and mother and hold fast to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh.' So they are no longer two but one flesh. What therefore God has joined together, let not man separate."
Going to a ceremony that twists the meaning of God's design itself is a surrender to the culture.
Begg would agree that God has a specific design for marriage and that is one man, one woman for life. But he doesn't seem to understand that attending a "wedding" that in contradiction to God's design is the opposite of holding marriage in honor, as we are called to do in Hebrews.
Hebrews 13:4 - Let marriage be held in honor among all, and let the marriage bed be undefiled, for God will judge the sexually immoral and adulterous.
The Bible throughout refers to homosexual activity as an abomination that cannot be countenanced by believers.
Begg contends that attending a wedding and bringing a gift is NOT an endorsement of a behavior, but rather an act of love towards sinners.
Is this how God calls Christians to be loving?
Carl Trueman at First Things has some thoughts on the matter:
To consider a declined invitation necessarily a sign of hatred is to adopt the notion of "hate" as a mere refusal to affirm. That is our secular age's understanding, and not that of the Christian faith. A refusal to attend might also cause offense, but to make the giving of offense itself into a moral category is to replace moral categories of right and wrong with aesthetic categories of taste. The latter should always be subordinate to the former in the realm of ethical questions.
Just because someone views an action or inaction as hateful doesn't definitively mean that it is hateful.
Nothing is loving about ignoring or affirming a person in their sins.
Pastor Douglas Wilson, in his thoughtful response, said that Begg was begging the question. His conclusions don't pass the sniff test. All a faithful brother or sister must do is swap out the culturally-acceptable sin for another to see how warped said conclusions are.
Say that your brother-in-law, married to your sister for thirty years, decides to leave her for his mistress, a much younger woman who has just moved to the area six months ago. He decides to host a reception in order to introduce people to his girlfriend, who doesn't know many people yet, being new to the area. Does the metric outlined by Alistair work? You had several earnest conversations with your brother-in-law, explaining to him exactly why the divorce was wrong and unjustified. So he knows where you stand. Does that mean you go to the reception?
Despite responses for clarity and repentance, Begg has since doubled down on his advice, saying we need to have grace and not be dogmatic on the issue.
He uses the story of the Prodigal Son as an illustration of his point.
You can watch the entire sermon here.
The title, "Compassion vs. Condemnation," tells you everything you need to know about Begg's reply. His response is compassionate and if you disagree with him, you are condemning, pharisaical, and an "American fundamentalist."
This is a tragic response that impugns the motives of Begg's critics, who also want to show love to the LGBT community by calling them to repentance and above all, by honoring God (you cannot show love by dishonoring God).
Unfortunately, in his response, Begg does not respond to any of the particular criticisms he received from other pastors such as Doug Wilson and James White (they go into more detail in the links above, and I would encourage listening and reading both of them in this case).
He instead compares going to a "wedding" between two unrepentant sinners who are declaring their intent to continue in sin to the brother of the repentant prodigal who did not want to accept his brother's restoration.
To put it simply:
Begg does not note a difference between having lunch with sinners and attending a ceremony that celebrates sin.
Again, we can replace the sin with one that gets around our cultural blinders to help us see the severity of the error. Would Begg be okay attending a wedding between a woman and a dog? Or a wedding of a man to three women? Or a child bride? What would loving the sinner look like in those cases?
Would it merit the same response from Begg, or is it only certain sins that the culture has sanctioned that can be witnessed?
Pastor Begg is an incredibly loving and compassionate man. Nothing in this article is meant to impugn his character. I believe that Begg's response is driven by his desire to be kind and compassionate, and out of genuine love and desire not to hurt someone's feelings. Sadly, this is the "road paved to hell with good intentions" that the Western church has gone down over the last century, and what a successful trap of the devil it has been.
I will refer to Trueman again:
In short, attending a gay wedding involves remaining silent when one should speak. It involves a concession on bodily sex that undermines any attempt to hold fast to the importance of the biological distinction between men and women. And it involves approving of a ceremony that makes a mockery of a central New Testament teaching and of Christ himself. That's a very high price tag for avoiding hurting someone's feelings. And if Christians still think it worth paying, the future of the Church is bleak indeed.
My prayer is that Pastor Begg will hear these objections, consider these biblical principles, discuss with other leaders outside of his inner circle, and come to the repentance that he is now openly denying he needs.
