This past week Ray Boltz, the celebrated CCM artist, announced his life long secret of homosexuality. Boltz choose to make his announcement through the gay magazine The Washington Blade.“I’d denied it ever since I was a kid," Boltz, now 55, told the magazine. "I became a Christian, I thought that was the way to deal with this and I prayed hard and tried for 30-some years and then at the end, I was just going, ‘I’m still gay. I know I am.’ And I just got to the place where I couldn’t take it anymore … when I was going through all this darkness, I thought, ‘Just end this.’”
Things had not always been so dark for Boltz. Early in his life, after a tragic accident, Boltz committed his life to Christ at a Southern Gospel concert. “That evening had a profound impact on my life,” he says. “I realized that this was the truth and that Jesus was alive … that’s really where I made a commitment to Christ. I decided I could be born again and all of the things I was feeling in the past would fall away and I would have this new life.”
However, the struggle continued. Though married for over 30 years, and the father of four grown children, Boltz finally made the decision to cease his struggles against homosexual desire. In 2004 he announced the decision to the family, but only recently came forward publically.
“This is what it really comes down to,” he says. “If this is the way God made me, then this is the way I’m going to live. It’s not like God made me this way and he’ll send me to hell if I am who he created me to be … I really feel closer to God because I no longer hate myself.”
Boltz says he has been dating and lives “a normal gay life” now.
It is interesting that Boltz so readily appeals to God as creator. Genesis chapters 1 and 2 record the creative genius and power of God as he formed not only the universe and this world, but also the human beings who now live in it. For Boltz, accepting his homosexuality is tantamount to accepting the Creator's design for his life. Such biblical appeal seems powerful and faithful, but it is important to notice the theological slight-of-hand that has taken place. Boltz can only arrive at such a conclusion by ignoring Genesis 3.
In that chapter, God reveals to us our fall from holiness into sin. A Christianity without chapter 3 can never understand the seriousness of sin, and therefore can never understand the atonement which Christ offers. Instead of continuing to lay his sins at the feet of the Lamb (whom he wrote so much about), Boltz simply relabeled them. We will never feel compelled to atone for something we do not consider wrong in the first place. "Salvation", in such a system of thought" is not acheived by conformity to God's law (through Christ), but rather by being "true to ourselves".
We need to pray for Boltz, and we must pray for the Evangelical church which has lost its theological & biblical bearings.
I'm reminded of Amy Grant's comments after she divorced Gary Chapman, in their entirety here.
ReplyDeleteThe relevant part reads like this: Out of respect and privacy to Chapman, their three children and herself, Grant speaks in generalities about the divorce. And although she declines to comment on any specifics of numerous marriage counseling sessions which began in 1986, she does remember wondering, "How did I wind up here?" She agrees that marriage is difficult, but nevertheless she felt like an unlikely candidate for becoming a divorce statistic. "I’m from a big family. My parents are still together, and my three older sisters are married and still together. I stood up at the front of a packed-out church and made a vow before God about—as best I could—how I would lead my life. And I failed in that. Failure’s incredibly humbling.
"I tried at every turn to take the high road. And yet, my personal life kept just spiraling downward."
An avid journal writer, Grant admits she’d need to re-read some entries to give more context to those times. She declines to comment on what exactly was causing her life to spiral. "It just seems so unbelievably private."
She continues, "I guess the real pinnacle came for me in February 1998. I wound up having a really intense meeting with Gary and two pastors that we both trust. I basically said, ‘I’m completely laying my life out as honestly as I know how, and my desperate plea is, Is there really such a thing as healing? Does God really heal?’ And I wasn’t even thinking to heal our marriage; I just needed Him to heal me. So we all committed to pray. Pray, pray, pray, pray, pray."
The sessions to follow helped Grant identify what needed to be healed in her, but again she declines to comment. "A lot of life is just meant for everybody to take to their grave."
Throughout their marriage, Grant asserts she was committed to making the marriage work. But in August of 1998, after years of counseling, Grant made a different commitment, and she went to the pastors with whom she had been meeting and to Chapman. "I said, ‘I believe and trust that I’ve been released from this [marriage]. And I say that knowing that even the Bible says the heart’s deceitful.’
"And anybody could so easily say, ‘You’re completely deceived,’" Grant interjects, "I guess a part of being deceived would be that you wouldn’t know it. But to the best of my level of peace, I had a very settled, unshakable feeling about the path that I was going to follow.
"We all met together and just said, you know, if the mercy of Jesus doesn’t extend to a situation like this, then it doesn’t go very far, does it? So we started meeting to pray toward individual healing, to help mediate our lives, to try to pursue the most respectful path possible toward divorce. I think that there was a part of us that felt incredibly tender toward the other one all through the divorce."
Grant believes God hates divorce and its ramifications, but not the people involved.
"I know why God hates divorce," Grant says, "because it rips you from stem to stern, and children are the total innocent recipients of a torn and shattered life.
"There’s not a week that doesn’t go by that I don’t really cry out from the soles of my feet and just say, ‘God, let me go back. How could this have worked out differently?’
"And yet—just as a functioning, somewhat intelligent woman, I also got to the point of saying, how many times can I re-duct tape myself and go through the charade and not feel like what I’m really passing on, especially to my daughters, is [a false sense of] ‘This is OK.’ Neither the charade nor the duct tape is OK."
Grant pauses for an extended moment and continues.
"At some point you see the path ahead of you, and you say, ‘I have to walk this path because I believe it’s the path that I have to walk,’ regardless of anybody’s opinion."
"This [divorce] has been just unbelievably humbling. But it has been healing. It makes me incredibly thankful that God is a God of second chances."
Grant recalls something a counselor told her. "He said, ‘Amy, God made marriage for people. He didn’t make people for marriage. He didn’t create this institution so He could just plug people into it. He provided this so that people could enjoy each other to the fullest.’ I say, if you have two people that are not thriving healthily in a situation, I say remove the marriage. Let them heal."
Gary had a different perspective, according to Amy. "His feeling was that this is our life, this is our commitment, and being true to this standard and keeping this vow is the most important thing for us, for our children, for our spiritual wellness.
" Gary has the kind of valor toward ideals that would make people overthrow governments and run armies. I think we all have different gifts, and I think one of Gary’s is that he is like a standard-bearer. And if I have a gift, it’s compassion. And at some point those things are different. They’re really different. That’s kind of a positive way of looking at some dynamics that have a negative side as well."
It sure appears that her focus was turned inward on herself and not outward toward the living God. Comparing her attitude toward ultimately making the marriage work versus Gary's is interesting as well. It also appears that her counselor gave her some dubious advice.
Nothing like some good old-fashioned "Christian" rationalization for our sins, eh? Prayer for Mr. Boltz would be a good thing, yes. And, prayer for each other that we may not be deceived.