Review: "What Does the Bible Really Teach about Homosexuality?"

Homosexuality has been on the front-burner of the clash between the church and culture for some time now, but it is threatening to boil over as the church now fights on two fronts - without and within the church. In "What Does the Bible Really Teach about Homosexuality?" Kevin DeYoung has written a balanced and passionate defense of the biblical doctrine of sex and marriage. Beginning with careful exegesis of the relevant passages, he shows that the Bible is not ambiguous about its call to sexual purity and the fact that marriage is between a man and a women. In doing so he addresses some of the recent scholarship within the evangelical community that questions is that what God really said about the issue. He rightly calls out those who would have experience trump the clear teaching of Scripture. In the second half of the book, DeYoung turns his attention to some of the common objections made to the matter. Both pastoral and forthright, he answers the questions without resorting to some of the tired tropes that have sadly marked the Evangelical response thus far to the issue of homosexuality. This section will be a resource to be returned to time and again. The three appendixes address the issue of same sex marriage and same sex attraction with a call to the church to make ten commitments in is interaction with those wrestling with the issue of both. I want to conclude my review with I think the best quote in the whole book: "The God we worship is indeed a God of love. Which does not, according to any verse in the Bible, make sexual sin acceptable. But it does, by the witness of a thousand verses all over the Bible, make every one of our sexual sins changeable, redeemable, and wondrously forgivable." I highly recommend this excellent resource.