Christian Reformed Church, Calvin University, and the Sanctity of Marriage

Hank Unplugged: Essential Christian Conversations

Hank Hanegraaff, president of the Christian Research Institute and host of the Bible Answer Man broadcast, reflects on the Christian Reformed Church’s (CRC) charge to uphold biblical sexuality. An article by Jonathan Cohn at Huffpost, “An Elite Christian College Has Become the Latest Battleground in America’s Culture Wars,” points out that the CRC sees the Bible as infallible and thus renders same-sex marriage incompatible with Christian orthodoxy. The fly in the ointment is Joseph Kuilema, a Calvin University professor of sociology (and teacher of the year in 2019) who considers the biblical text outdated and incompatible with his own great Awokening. As such, he dogmatically contends that the CRC should support his rendering of the biblical text. Kuilema officiated over the wedding of a lesbian couple and, principally as a result, was terminated from Calvin University. Kuilema, who is Reformed and always reforming based on his own authoritative interpretation of Scripture, not only has taken it upon himself to redefine marriage but cavalierly negates the words of God in human flesh who rebuked the Pharisees of His day with the words, “Have you not read, that he who created them from the beginning made them male and female”—and did so for the very purpose of joining them together as one flesh (Matthew 19:4). Therefore, says Saint Paul, “a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife and the two shall become one flesh” (Ephesians 5:31). Saint Paul also explicitly states that lesbian women exchange natural relations for relations that are contrary to nature itself—the delusional attempt to merge sexual same’s (see Romans 1:26). Marriage has at all times and in all societies been a relationship between men and women, with an end toward bearing and rearing children. The marriage of one man and one woman is not only Scriptural, it is distinctly sacramental. Indeed, marriage is about the gospel! Emblematic of the union of Christ and His church. Yet in full view of the mystery of marriage—replete with its parabolic profundity in Christ and the church, its potential for procreating children in the image and likeness of God, and its promise of psychophysical pleasure—Professor Kuilema gratuitously reimagines the Scripture in the image of the culture. Will the CRC and Calvin hold on to the sanctity of marriage? Time will tell.
See Jonathan Cohn, “An Elite Christian College Has Become the Latest Battleground in America’s Culture Wars,” Huffpost, June 19, 2022, https://www.huffpost.com/entry/calvin-university-professor-joe-kuilema-gay-marriage-lgbtq_n_62aca02de4b06169ca988191; Rod Dreher, “Saving Calvin,” The American Conservative, June 20, 2022, https://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/saving-calvin-university-lgbt-kristin-du-mez/.