Fred Phelps is dead. The fire-and-brimstone preacher, who for many years was pastor of the institution known as Westboro Baptist Church, died late Wednesday in a hospice in Topeka, Kansas. The announcement was made on his church’s website. The wording was simple: “Fred W. Phelps Sr. has gone the way of all flesh.” Thus brings to an end one of most bitter lives in modern history — and one of the most harmful to the Gospel.

Fred Phelps became infamous due to one central fact — he was a world-class hater. He brought great discredit to the Gospel of Christ because his message was undiluted hatred packaged as the beliefs of a church. Even Mark Potok of the Southern Poverty Law Center referred to Westboro Baptist Church as “this so-called church.” The damage was due to the fact that his platform for hatred was called a church. That provided the watching and listening world with a ready target and case study for the accusation that Christian conviction on questions of sexual morality is nothing more than disguised hatred for homosexuals. And, like radioactivity, Fred Phelps’ hatred will survive in lasting half-lives of animus.

The media made Fred Phelps into a public image, but they could hardly ignore a prophet of antipathy who showed up with his followers in public demonstrations and took his case for public protest all the way to the U. S. Supreme Court. Phelps and the media needed each other and fed each other. The New York Times described Phelps as “a loathed figure at the fringe of the American religious scene,” but he was not a fringe figure in terms of media attention. I have done my best not to add to his publicity, but as calls from the media in recent days made clear, the time has come for a necessary word.

Fred Phelps claimed to preach against homosexuality, calling out sin as sin. “The way to prove you love your neighbor is to warn them that they’re committing sin,” he said in 2004. That is the full lie of a half truth. The way you prove you love your neighbor is to be honest about sin — including our own sin — in order to tell the good news of the forgiveness of sin and salvation in Christ.

Phelps knew exactly what he was doing.  As The Washington Post reported: “He found comfort in being a pariah. ‘If I had nobody mad at me, what right would I have to claim that I was preaching the gospel?’”

But that raises the most emphatic point — it was not the gospel that Fred Phelps was preaching. The gospel is the declaration of the good news that God saves sinners. It is the declaration of the fact that there is forgiveness of sins and life everlasting to be found in Christ and in belief in Him, and that is not the message for which Fred Phelps was known and hated.

He not only preached against homosexuality using the most vile and offensive graphic language possible, but he also took the next step and organized public protests at events such as the funerals for returning American soldiers who died in Afghanistan and Iraq. He was taking advantage of a moment of national focus and personal grief in order to transform a moment of sorrow and honor into a moment of controversy at the expense of compassion. He was a publicity hound in service to the powers of hell — corrupting the gospel of Christ.

Fred Phelps was so engaged in denouncing sin that the good news, the grace and mercy of God in Christ, was never made clear in his message. The gospel was never the point of his message. He did not represent the scandal of the gospel, but rather the scandal of preaching a false gospel. The gospel does not consist of denouncing sin. As the Puritans used to state so well, the preacher must do the “sin work” before declaring the “gospel work.” But the honest and necessary indictment of sin is but the threshold for the declaration of salvation in Christ’s name.

In Luke 15, Jesus told three parables about lostness and foundness, and in every one of them the point is clear — it is the salvation of even one sinner that causes rejoicing in heaven. Heaven is not pleased with the self-righteous preaching of a self-declared prophet. There is no rejoicing in heaven over the self-righteous preacher who does nothing but condemn sin and to do so in the most hateful and angry ways possible.

Fred Phelps made it easy for people to point to him and assert that theological opposition to homosexual behavior is rooted in nothing more than animus and hatred. He made the very point gospel-minded Christians have been trying to refute. He will be held accountable for a massive misrepresentation of the Christian faith, the Christian church, and the gospel of Christ. He single-handedly committed incalculable damage by presenting an enormous obstacle to the faithful teaching of the gospel. He made the job of every Christian more difficult in telling the truth about homosexuality as a sin and in declaring the good news of the gospel that Christ saves sinners.

What was missing is the attitude found in the New Testament. For instance, in First Corinthians chapter 5 and chapter 6, where the Apostle Paul indicts the Corinthian church for its complicity in sexual sin and lists those sexual sins, including homosexuality, and then says, “But such were some of you .. but you were washed.” The Christian gospel is not proclaimed from a position of moral superiority and smugness, but rather from the experience of one who has come to know God’s grace and cannot wait to share that message of grace with others.

We must be very clear about the fact that Fred Phelps’ sin was not that he said that sin is sin. That’s an essential task of every biblical Christian. It was that he seemed to celebrate the sinfulness of sin rather than be brokenhearted over it, and he never saw it as the opportunity — without skipping a breath — to get right to the declaration of the promise of salvation and forgiveness of sins in Jesus Christ. The problem is that Fred Phelps gloried in sin and in his denunciation of sin to the expense of the gospel. The good news of the gospel simply never came through. The grace and mercy of God in Christ were never made clear in his message, and he became an enemy of the gospel rather than a representative of the gospel.

An article published at Slate.com just after the death of Fred Phelps raised a very interesting point and a troubling one as well. Tyler Lopez wrote: “But Westboro’s bombastic vitriol makes room for more casual or calculated anti-gay individuals to claim tolerance, love, and mercy. A quick comparison with Phelps can make even the most vicious anti-gay activists look like saints. By twisting the meaning of love and acceptance through carefully worded statements, homophobes are able to do a lot more damage to the LGBTQ community than a group like Westboro will ever do.”

That’s a very important statement and it’s one Christians need to read very carefully. Gay activist Tyler Lopez is saying that it is impossible to distinguish between the sin and the sinner. Hauntingly, it’s the mirror image of what Fred Phelps was declaring in his message. Fred Phelps represented a hatred of sin that became a hatred of sinners, and now Tyler Lopez, coming from the other direction, says the very same thing in the opposite form. He said it is impossible to say that you love me, if you say that you do not love my homosexuality. This points to the fact that Christians remain in a very difficult position, particularly in this age when Gospel truth-telling is becoming acutely more difficult every single day.

Fred Phelps made our challenge much worse. In this case, Tyler Lopez argues that Phelps made it easier for other people [and here he means evangelical Christians] to sound sane and rational. But the most tragic aspect of his accusation is that Tyler Lopez doesn’t consider our message — that is, a gospel-grounded biblical message on homosexuality — to be any better than Fred Phelps’ message. That’s a sobering realization for all of us. We also face the fact that any statement that same-sex sexuality is sin is going to be heard and condemned by many people as hateful and homophobic. This puts those who are the ambassadors and heralds of the gospel in this generation in an extremely awkward situation.

But, these are our times and that is our challenge. Our commission is to make very clear that we do love people, but we hate sin. And yet that doesn’t start with homosexuals — it starts in the mirror and in the church. And the knowledge of our sin drives us to seek refuge in Christ, in whom we find forgiveness and everlasting life.

This article was originally posted at the AlbertMohler.com blog.

Written by S. M. Hutchens 
(originally appeared in the July/August 2013 issue of Touchstone  Magazine) 

In homosexuality’s assault on the beliefs of churches that once unanimously identified it as sexual perversion—sodomy being “the abominable and detestable crime against nature”—its most potent weapon has been the counter-accusation that identification of homosexuality as sinful is a detestable offense against charity. By these presents, all who hold to the ancient interdict as God’s word may be numbered among the crowing yahoos of Westboro Baptist Church with its “God Hates Fags” placards. 

The churches, thus accused, have divided into those that hold to the Judeo-Christian teaching and those converted to regarding homosexuality as no sin at all, for where the question is posed, as the church homosexualists have pointedly and indefatigably done in the last generation, the winnowing fan comes into play and there is a division—for there is no third way. 

At the point where the question touches the resisting churches, however, there is often much confusion, which includes a genuine concern about whether the complete rejection of homosexuality is indeed uncharitable, whether those who bear the burden of homosexual lust are being unfairly singled out as greater sinners than those with other, no less sinful tendencies. They are troubled by the question of whether they, with a perverse desire to justify themselves by condemning others, fail to distinguish between sin and sinner so that the hate banners are really their own as well. 

These questions, if not resolved, lead to a kind of moral suspension in which questions like, “What about our homosexual brethren here in the church? Are we denying their existence, failing to hear them?” become askable, and, encouraged by “moderate” voices within these communions, are indeed asked in a form something like and affirmation has been crossed. 

The Apostolic Answer 

In 1 Corinthians 6, St. Paul gives vital clarification on a subject where there is much foggy thinking among those who ask questions like, “What should the Church’s approach to homosexual Christians be?” The apostolic answer is that there is no such thing as a homosexual Christian. There are brethren who struggle with various temptations, to be sure, and may on occasion fall to them before rising again. But believers who resist homosexual lust are not “homosexuals.” They are just Christians, as are the rest of us with our own besetting sins. 

Do you not know that the unrighteous will not inherit the kingdom of God? [Then comes a list of sinners, including “sexual perverts.”] And such were some of you. But you were washed, you were sanctified, you were justified in the Name of the Lord Jesus Christ and in the Spirit of our God. 

Such were some of you. The apostle is writing to the baptized saints in the church of Corinth who are no longer these things. He does not say they are no longer susceptible to their old sins, nor that these old sins mustn’t be dealt with: addressing the problems old sins create is a large part of the epistle’s burden. Given this apostolic definition, however, we cannot—we dare not—say there is any such thing as a “gay (or lesbian, etc.) Christian,” for the Christian by definition has been cleansed of his homosexuality. He cannot regard himself as a homosexual—or idolater, or thief, or drunkard—nor can the Church affirm him, or the various acts associated with the old vice, as such. 

There is no “homosexual voice within the Church,” for the homosexual’s conversion entails a choice—This, or That—the sin, or the Faith. He cannot have both, nor can the Church in any way accommodate the sin from which he has been cleansed. It is wholly and actively and vehemently against it as a destroyer of the souls it has been called to save. It labors among the saints only in the accomplishment of what has already been done in Christ: cleansing, sanctification, and justification in the Name of the Lord. 

Its message to those who, in abandonment of hope, define themselves by some sin, and present themselves as though they, as so defined, should have a place in the Church, is and only can be that of complete rejection.

With respect to loving the sinner and hating the sin, which it indeed is called to do, what can it say to those who, in contempt of the saints who have fled their sins, declare their persons to be inseparable from the sin, identifying themselves with it—and then blame the Church for hating them as persons? It can only say to them that all perversion of what it is to be human has been destroyed in and by Christ, who makes those who love him straight and whole after his own image. To some, this is the promise of life; to others, who have bound themselves to that which is to be destroyed, it is the intolerable threat of destruction. 

No Satisfaction 

What do these latter have to speak to, much less teach or admonish, the Church upon? They have no voice among us. Christian authorities need to stop thinking and writing as though the categories of homosexual and Christian can be joined—as though the Church could tolerate or accommodate, or speak gently of, much less bless or sanctify, anything peculiar to the garment stained by the flesh that those who come to Christ throw off  in their baptism. 

In that baptism we become penitents, and as such divided from our sins. St. Paul tells us here that no penitent is to be named by, identified by, what he has abjured. Those injured people who have put on Christ have put on, in him, life, hope, healing of their diseases, and resurrection of their bodies in the image and likeness of the one who has saved them. 

The Church never can and never will give satisfaction—and the homosexualist knows it, for he knows the words against him are ineradicable—to the declared and impenitent homosexual, the person who, through an act of the vermiculate will, has identified his person with a sin, whether he demands acceptance of his sin through “love,” or vindication through identification of his perceived enemies as bigots. Whether he presents himself as an object of love or indignation, what he demands in either case is acceptance not of the person, but of the sin-bound and sin-defined person. He demands the declaration of spiritual authority that there is nothing objectively disordered about this binding of man to sin, and assurance that this monstrous amalgam can indeed enter the kingdom of heaven. This can never happen among Christians until they abandon Christianity, which is at war with every sin, and whose indelible constitution places all perversions of the perfect man at the muzzle of its canons.