The U.S. Supreme Court ruled 5-4 June 26 that states cannot ban same-sex marriage and must recognize such marriages licensed in other states. As Southern Baptist pastors and ministry leaders across Texas and the nation processed the ruling’s implications, they reaffirmed the role of the church in America that is increasingly antagonistic to biblical Christianity.

Calling the decision disheartening but unsurprising, Southern Baptist leaders said the ruling could bring to the fore additional attempts to redefine marriage, legal challenges to churches and religious ministries that do not comply with the new standard, and opportunities for the church to be a witness in the face of opposition. Jimmy Pritchard, pastor of FBC Forney and SBTC president, said the decision magnifies the need for a “fresh movement of God’s Spirit” to address the challenges ahead.

Criswell College President Barry Creamer told the TEXAN, “Because we have understood sexuality and marriage as personal fulfillment rather than a social identity and responsibility, these decisions (along with myriad others, including no-fault divorce) were practically inevitable.”

Evan Lenow, assistant professor of ethics at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, agreed. In responding to the Supreme Court ruling, he said, “The logic of the decision grounds the definition and significance of marriage in the preferences of the individuals who want to enter into marriage. Although the decision acknowledges the longstanding history of marriage as a union of a man and a woman, the majority brushed aside that history in favor of the social whims of individuals.”

In a first-person piece titled “Chutzpah and the Supreme Court,” Southwestern Seminary President Paige Patterson was more succinct.

“Today’s anticipated decision is a decision of five people in a country of millions to call something right that God has already called wrong,” Patterson said.

Opposition to the ruling also came from the Texas capital. Moments after the ruling was announced, Gov. Greg Abbott Tweeted a statement, “Marriage was defined by God. No man can redefine it. We will defend our religious liberties.”

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton asked county clerks Thursday to hold off issuing marriage licenses to same-sex couples. Uncertainty over whether the ruling immediately impacts all states or just those involved in the lawsuit prompted the statement.

In a press release issued the day before the ruling, Paxton said, “But whatever the ruling, I would recommend that all County Clerks and Justices of the Peace wait for direction and clarity from this office about the meaning of the Court’s opinion and the rights of Texans under the law.

But despite the call for caution, clerks in some Texas counties began issuing same-sex marriage licenses immediately.

Social media exploded as soon as the ruling was read by Justice Kennedy. Cries of victory from homosexuals and LGBT advocates were matched by calls for prayer and faith in God’s sovereignty by those opposed to the ruling.

Albert Mohler, president of Southern Seminary, Tweeted, “Marriage remains what God designed as his gift to humanity, the union of a man and a woman. Our society will now call something else marriage.”

Also on Twitter, author Eric Metaxas asked the slippery-slope question, “I also want to know precisely how the SCOTUS can define marriage as between 2 people? Does that arbitrary number come from the Constitution?”

In his dissent of the ruling Roberts wrote, “The majority’s decision is an act of will, not legal judgment. The right it announces has no basis in the Constitution or this Court’s precedent.”

He said those who gained a desired status by the courts ruling should celebrate that fact but “do not celebrate the Constitution. It had nothing to do with it.”

In his majority opinion, Kennedy wrote of the evolving nature of marriage, such as women no longer given in arranged marriages or receiving social status only after marrying, and that “these new insights have strengthened, not weakened, the institution.”

Creamer begged to differ.

“The idea that marriage is stronger now than in the previous century or centuries can only make sense to someone with a worldview so skewed by individualism against social and community obligation that marriage itself has changed in meaning to him,” Creamer said.

But as the culture luxuriates in the new paradigm, Creamer said faithful Christians will only become more identifiable as social outliers making “moral education in biblical ministry environments both more challenging and more significant.”

As fidelity to biblical sexuality and marriage will make Christians more recognizable in the community and thereby open opportunities for sharing the gospel, it can also make them targets for social ridicule or legal action.

In his dissent, Roberts stated, “It is one thing for the majority to conclude that the Constitution protects a right to same-sex marriage; it is something else to portray everyone who does not share the majority’s ‘better informed understanding’ as bigoted.”

 “[Roberts] warns that future conflicts regarding the free exercise of religion will arise,” Lenow said. “This is echoed in a recent opinion piece in the Washington Post in which the ACLU declares that it can no longer support the federal Religious Freedom Restoration Act.”

Arguing that the 1993 federal RFRA was intended to assist religious expression that “does no harm to anyone else,” Louise Melling, deputy legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union, in a twisted view of religious liberty, wrote, “It’s time for Congress to amend the RFRA so that it cannot be used as a defense for discrimination. Religious freedom will be undermined only if we continue to tolerate and enable abuses in its name.”

Melling said RFRA has been used as “a sword to discriminate against women, gay and transgender people and others.”

Paxton said it is the advocates for marriage equality who have sought to discriminate against those who hold to the traditional view of marriage.

“This ruling will likely only embolden those who seek to punish people who take personal, moral stands based upon their conscience and the teachings of their religion,” Paxton said in a press release following the ruling.

For Patterson, religious liberty could be the next domino to fall.

“The critical issue that many recognize is the future of religious liberty,” Patterson said. “In fact, without religious liberty, people are not really free at all.”

Although he painted a similarly bleak picture of cultural repercussions stemming from the ruling, Russell Moore, president of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, wrote now is not the time for Christians to panic or express outrage.

“Despite this ruling, the church of Jesus Christ will stand fast,” Moore said in a statement released by the ERLC. “We will not capitulate on this issue because we cannot. To minimize or ignore a Christian sexual ethic is to abandon the message Jesus handed down to us, and we have no authority to do this.”

The commission issued an Evangelical Declaration of Marriage signed by mor than 100 evangelical leaders. It is an en masse dissention of the Supreme Court ruling and reiterates the biblical doctrine of marriage and human sexuality. Others are invited to sign it at erlc.com/erlc/herewestand.

Although Southern Baptist leaders admit the SCOTUS decision has disconcerting implications for the church and individual Christians they said “good riddance” to a cultural Christianity that brought people into the church and in line with a Judeo-Christian ethic but not into the kingdom of Christ. Many have emphasized the fact that the church has often flourished when it is in opposition to the culture.

“I see this as an opportunity for the church to be a city set on a hill,” Lenow said. “Therefore, the church will have to stand with conviction on the truth of God’s Word against the changing tide of culture. No longer will people want to identify with our churches for social reasons—they will join us because of what we believe.”

Creamer said, “Churches must begin to demonstrate extraordinary religion, one out of step with the broader culture, both in the level of kindness and grace with which every person is received and served by the community of the gospel, and in the conviction and purity with which the actual members of the body of Christ are identified.”

Pritchard said the most important thing Christians can do now is pray.

“It is time to extend the gospel to all. It is time to stand on Truth,” Pritchard said. “This can be our opportunity to let our light shine brightly into the deepening darkness.”

Voting for the plaintiffs in Obergefell v. Hodges were Supreme Court Justices Anthony M. Kennedy, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Sonia Sotomayor, Stephen G. Breyer, and Elena Kagan. Dissenting were Justices Samuel A. Alito, Jr., Clarence Thomas, Antonin Scalia, and Chief Justice John G. Roberts.

Read the majority opinion and dissenting arguments here.

HOUSTON The university campus has long been the intellectual caldron in which students stew over the “big” questions, roil in their doubts and bubble over with newfound convictions—or at least it should be. Political correctness, trigger warnings and flagrant attempts to stifle ideological foes threaten to douse the fires of inquiry that lead to the truth, particularly the truth of the gospel. But an upstart Christian apologetics program at Houston Baptist University has kindled an enthusiastic response from students and scholars alike.

Launched part-time in the spring semester of 2013, HBU’s Master of Arts in Apologetics boasts a robust (and growing) academic program on campus and launched a full-time online presence in 2014. Students can take the philosophical or cultural track of the interdisciplinary program taught by a coterie of the top Christian apologists in the nation. Sharp minds instruct students not to win arguments but to engage in civil, confident dialogue for the sake of the gospel.

“Apologetics lays the groundwork that makes a serious consideration of the Christian claim possible,” Holly Ordway, professor and director of the MAA program, stated in an email interview. 

Ordway speaks from experience. Formerly an atheist, she could not seriously consider the notion of God much less the precepts of the Christian faith. But “rational apologetics,” along with the writings of C.S. Lewis, put a crack in the wall of her secularist defenses.

“Rational apologetics is very important because it helps remove obstacles to belief—if someone genuinely believes that what we call God is a big man in the sky, then of course the Christian faith will seem ridiculous,” she said. “Rational apologetics also helps to show that our faith is reasonable, that we don’t ‘check our brains at the door.’” 

Ordway’s colleague and fellow former atheist Mary Jo Sharp explained that philosophical and cultural apologetics provide an inroad for sharing the gospel within a society that is increasingly offended by the truth of Christianity.

Quoting from Augustine’s Confessions, Sharp said, “’They love truth for the light it sheds but hate it when it shows them up as being wrong.’”

Part of the problem lies in society’s separation of the secular and the sacred, as people compartmentalize their lives and relegate religion to the “no facts to be found here” category. This separation is evident even in the church, where believers all too readily accept secular notions of what is true.

“The truth of Jesus Christ relates to all of life,” Sharp said. “It doesn’t matter where you are. You can’t separate the sacred and the secular.”

HBU president Robert Sloan agrees. A polarized society where people dig their heels into the ground they claim as truth and refuse to hear another perspective, Sloan said, creates a problem for the Christian witness.

Some Christians are not open to apologetics, often associating it with arguing. Not long ago a woman asked to pray with Sharp following a speaking engagement and went on to beseech God to undermine her ministry because “it teaches people to argue.”

Sloan contends that every Christian must give an answer for his faith. That is the basic tenet of apologetics, which is derived from the Greek apologia, which means “to defend.”

“If apologetics is approached as simply argument to score points—and unfortunately it often is—then frankly it’s not very useful for communicating the gospel,” Ordway said. “That’s one of the premises behind our program: that it’s not enough to know things about God; we want our students to know God and to be able to draw others to him through personal witness, rational argument and imaginative engagement.”

The interdisciplinary nature of HBU’s cultural apologetics program teaches students to recognize and then communicate God’s truths that can be found in philosophy, the arts and literature. Speaking God’s word is always effective, but the manner in which it is conveyed is key to gaining the opportunity to speak in the first place.

Enrollment in the program has swelled from 10 to 50 in just a year and a half. These students represent recent college graduates, pastors, lay leaders and one surprising subset: mothers.

Both Sloan and Sharp said that mothers are concerned about the ideas their children bring home. Many moms feel ill-equipped to prepare their children to hold their own in matters of faith.

“It has been thrust upon us,” Sloan said. “There is more vocal challenge to the Christian faith.”

The students and faculty represent the breadth of Christendom, with roots in Protestant, Catholic, Orthodox and non-denominational evangelical churches. All of them, Ordway said, share “a commitment to Christ, a passion for sharing the gospel, and a desire to love God with their minds as well as their hearts.”

In addition to full-time faculty—an amalgamation of authors, bloggers, philosophers, ministry directors, male and female—visiting scholars include names like William Lane Craig, Lee Strobel, Nancy Pearcey and HBU Provost John Mark Reynolds.

Still in its fledgling stages, the HBU apologetics program is just beginning to teach and train its students to use cultural apologetics as a means to an end—the spread of the gospel of Jesus Christ. In the interim, Sharp recognizes the work to be done.

“I’m not seeing bold Christian witness—people who are naturally living their faith in public,” she said.

But Ordway is seeing students gain confidence in her classes. 

“The more frequent ‘aha!’ moment has actually been as students realize how they can use what they’re learning to transform the culture rather than fleeing from it—that they are becoming equipped to use literature and the arts to convey the truths of the faith; that they can articulate why science and faith are not at odds; that they can engage in constructive dialogue and creative work.”

The professors and Sloan see the program only growing and being duplicated on other campuses. The reason, Sloan said, is obvious.

“I believe [apologetics] is increasingly effective because it is increasingly necessary.”