Explaining that he and the church “have found ourselves in an impossible situation,” Pastor Joshua Butler has resigned from his position as co-pastor of Redemption Church in Tempe, Arizona, following the outcry over his book Beautiful Union.
Two months ago after the Gospel Coalition’s Keller Center for Cultural Apologetics published an article about the similarities between sexual intercourse and the church’s union with Christ, which was an excerpt from his book, both he and TGC received unprecedented pushback, resulting in TGC retracting the article and seeing Butler replaced from his role at The Keller Institute.
These rebuffs include fair-minded critiques unimpressed with these crude comparisons, endorsers of the book who admit they never read it in the first place and were forced to retract, and the usual cadre of cry-foul ChristianHarpies seeking to use these questionable texts as a way to score points against complementarianism while bolstering their own bizarre notions of gender roles.
In many ways, the book was used as fodder by hysterical women and effeminate nuancebros who make a habit of getting outraged and upset by the lack of nuance in the Christian community, taking the book to extremes that it was never intended to go and then crying foul as an excuse to virtue-twerk their tears all over social media. To be clear, much of Butler’s book was very good, some was not so good, and some was trash, but the response to this has been outsized in the extreme.
In his resignation letter, he writes:
I am resigning as co-lead pastor of Redemption Tempe. I have processed this with our elders and am writing this together with them, with a desire to share my reasons for resigning with you.
We have found ourselves in an impossible situation. On the one hand, I feel called to step more into these public conversations. I desire to be humble, charitable, winsome, and wise. There are some mistakes I’ve made I wish to own but also deep convictions hold that I wish to contribute to the broader conversation.…On the other hand, I don’t want to drag Redemption into that public conversation with me. The toll of this controversy on many of our staff and leaders this month has been intense, at both Redemption Tempe and other Redemption Arizona congregations.
While they have borne that burden well, I am concerned that my continuing to step into this public conversation would generate distraction from the primary ministry God has called us to as a local church. As elders, we’ve affirmed this assessment together.
Unfortunately, Butler also reiterates how sorry he is for his ‘lack of nuance,’ giving an apology where none was needed and capitulating to the frenzy that insists you can’t write about the theology of sex without getting the approval and go-ahead from every intersectional group.
For some of you, my lack of greater pastoral nuance in areas of the excerpt evoked pain, particularly for some women with histories of sexual abuse. I want to apologize for not showing greater consideration for how my words in this section could be heard from within your shoes. I’m truly sorry.
I’ve worked with the publisher to make revisions to the excerpt based on a dozen additional sensitivity reviews I commissioned this last month from women (including sexual abuse survivors, counselors, and those who grew up in purity culture). These revisions will be incorporated into the next printing of the book.
Butler previously explained:
We, the publisher and I, we have valued sensitivity in this process. We ran the content through a wide variety of perspectives; single people, divorce people, women and people of color, same-sex attracted people, people with backgrounds of sexual abuse, all gave really valuable input on the manuscript.
And when all that was done, the publisher actually, together we hired an outside professional female editor who specialized with sensitivity reviews too, and she had a personal story uniquely suited to give sensitive input on the book.
