The Atonement of Sexual Impotence

by Rev. Ellsworth McIntyre

The song leader finished a shouting chorus of "He lives, He lives, salvation to impart! my heart..."

"And now, rear of the church. You ask me how I know He lives? He lives within our pastor!" shouted the song leader, pointing to the I caught a flash of a white sportcoat, fire engine red trousers, and white buck shoes streaking down the aisle. With one leap to the platform, the pastor landed flatfooted and teetered.

The congregation gasped, fearing the aged pastor would pitch forward onto his face. Fortunately, he recovered, and the crowd gave him a round of applause and a sprinkling of "amens."

The pastor patted his helmet-shaped haircut to straighten any stray hair.  There was no need; he had so much hair spray on that he looked like he was wearing a cardboard toupee.

The pastor's sermon was the standard distortion of the atonement. "If you want to go to heaven, you must love Jesus as He loved you. Return His unconditional love.  Come on down.  Walk the aisle and pray with one of our "expert" counselors.  Don't worry about sin.  After all, we all sin.

Instead, worry about failing to cry out for mercy to the Lord Jesus. Jesus will free you from the law if only you will admit your need. When the music starts, please come forward while all eyes are closed and no one is looking around."

The atonement thus became a demonstration of unconditional love instead of God's death sentence.

The Culture of the Homosexual

Dr. R. J. Rushdoony writes, "...the homosexual has an abnormal fear of aging and of death.    As a result, homosexuals insist on dressing and acting on the assumption of perpetual youth, in particular, immature youth.

At all times, the facade of youth must be maintained" (Institutes of Biblical Law, Vol.I, 421).

"...by replacing sound standards with arbitrary and vulgar styles, the homosexual derives a deep satisfaction: he is subverting, he believes, ultimate law and asserting man's autonomy" (422).

Every pastor who dresses like a queer used car salesman is not a homosexual, but he is definitely influenced by the homosexual aspects of our culture, whether he knows it or not.  Our culture reflects our lawless  atonement  of sensual  love and hatred of the absolute authority of the law of God.  The kingship of Christ is not represented by silly old men dressed like fugitives from a gay bar. The homosexual attack on the family is not just from the pulpit but also by means of the arts and the theater.

Rushdoony continues,

"...because the homosexual lives against reality and in a world of make-believe,  he has  therefore found the theater to be a happy element for his self-realization." "...Western countries have been radically infected by the parasitic homosexual culture (Institutes, 422).

An example of anti-Christian theater is Katharine Hepburn. In her autobiography, (Ballantine Books, 1991), she admits adopting the woman-as-boy look in order to increase her popularity.

She says that look was "in the air." She studied the walk and mannerisms of another star, Hope Williams. Hepburn writes, "Vocally, walk-wise, I incorporated a lot of Hope into my so-called personality. It was in the air, that boy-woman. My arrival in the big city was well timed."

A society that lusts for a boy-woman is not a normal society, but a society in Rushdoony's words,"influenced by homosexuals."

Conservative Perverts

I live and pastor in Florida. White shoes, red pants with a wide white belt, wild sport coats, and plastered helmet haircuts dot the landscape in my town. Also seventy and eighty-year-old women in short skirts, dyed hair, and enough makeup to make Tammy Faye Baker look modest are prevalent. I comfort myself with the thought that if they won't  be converted, they will surely die.

What a horrible world it would be if such freaks lived forever!  None of these afraid to die kooks believe they are victims of bad theology, but they most certainly are. When our culture returns to the Bible's plan of salvation, our styles,culture, and even our personal sexual vitality will also change.

A society that needs Viagra is a society that has lost much of its sexual vitality.

Perpetual Teenagers

My father, a virile product of another age, observed to me (nearly 30 years ago), that the younger generation working with him at the steel mill talked constantly about sex, but he suspected that they talked more but did it less. Apparently he was right.  The manufacturers of Viagra estimate that one out of two men from 40 to 70 years of age is impotent. Instead of asking forViagra, we should ask for the correct gospel.

The Bible's gospel, given full strength, increases vitality in every area of life. For example, historians tell us that for the first 100 years of our history, the average sized family was twelve children.

That is a standard  of vitality  we can never  hope to match with the impotent gospel of our age.

The poster boys of our weakened theology are Christians like Pat Boone, a mindless, smiling, insipid, androgynous man who would not say an angry word if he was drowning in a sea of homosexuality. Perhaps a secularized version would beDick Clark, the perpetual teenager.

The Wrong Cure

Many  Christian schools  try to correct  the homosexual aspects of dress and theater by imposing dress codes. This they ought to do, but such codes can never convert the culture.

This is the Bible's remedy.

The hearts of the children must be converted by a better doctrine of the atonement.  "By the fear of God, men depart from evil" (Prov. 16: 6). Please note the verse reads fear of God, not the love of God. One of my better Bible teachers loved to quote the verse about "reading the times" (Matt. 16:3).

Well, I  do see some improvement in our times. For example, teenagers are cutting their hair (perhaps a little weird, but still of the recent past). a vast improvement over the Shirley Temple cut Houses are looking more Victorian and music with words that can be understood are coming back. Some of today's kids dress  up instead  of down. When  the  lost  of my  generation  are  buried with their ugly gospel, it will be a better world. I pray to live long enough to read those times.

The Correct Cure

We can build a better world by teaching our children that an atonement that works produces a believer more afraid of sin than death. There are those who are dead while they yet live.  As Christ declares, "...let the dead bury their dead" (Matt. 8:22).

There  is  no  more foolish illusion than the notion that salvation can be known without supernatural obedience to the law-word of God.

As Rushdoony writes,

"Love is the cure-all for deprivation. But the Biblical doctrine of atonement declares plainly that man's salvation is by Christ's works of law." "We are sentenced to death by law, and we are made righteous before God bylaw, but we receive this fact by faith" (Institutes, p. 174).  In other words, romantic or emotional love is not the way of salvation.  Release from covenant keeping is the way of death and sexual impotence. Emotional love is the false atonement of the impotent.