Ralph Blair, Unexpected Pioneer
By Fisher Humphreys
Dr. Ralph Blair practices psychotherapy in New York City. He is a prolific writer and an urbane conversationalist and correspondent. He has assembled a magnificent collection of art, letters, and autographed books. He teaches a weekly Bible study in his office on the Upper East Side. He is an evangelical Christian.
And he is gay. Surprisingly, he never struggled with this fact: “I was a Christian who happened to be attracted to a few people of the same sex. Okay. I took the simple but profound gospel of Christ at face value and moved on from there.”1 He never felt he was a victim.
This has not prevented him from appreciating the pain which most homosexuals have experienced in their families and churches as well as in society at large. In 1975 Blair created and today he continues to lead Evangelicals Concerned, a New York based corporation whose mission is to encourage conservative evangelical Christians and their churches to welcome and affirm homosexuals. It sounds like an impossible task, but Blair is quietly hopeful. After all, he points out, the civil rights movement brought about a transformation in churches even though no white parents ever discovered that they have given birth to a black child; why shouldn’t churches undergo a similar transformation in their attitude toward homosexual persons, given that every day heterosexual parents are discovering that they have given birth to a homosexual child?
There is a popular assumption that all religious people who work on behalf of homosexuals are theologically liberal. Blair’s life and work prove that this is not universally true. Blair is a theological conservative. He champions the cause of helping churches change their mind about homosexuality, not in spite of the fact that he is a conservative evangelical Christian, but because he is. In Blair’s life and work evangelicalism and homosexuality are fully integrated.2 Life
Ralph Blair was born in Youngstown, Ohio, in 1939, the oldest of three children of James and Emma Blair. The following year he was baptized into a congregation of the Evangelical and Reformed Church. At the age of 12 Blair was grasped by the truth and hope and beauty of the gospel of Jesus Christ.
He went on to have experiences in higher education that reflect both his conservative evangelicalism and his commitment to a revised understanding of homosexuality. He attended three of the most conservative Christian schools in America. His first two years as an undergraduate were spent at Bob Jones University, the epicenter of Fundamentalist university education. He spent a year at Dallas Theological Seminary, the principal institutional defender of the dispensationalist interpretation of the Bible. And he spent a year at Westminster Theological Seminary, a stronghold of Reformed and Calvinistic theology. Blair appreciates these schools and never speaks negatively about them. On the other hand, his degrees are from different kinds of schools. His undergraduate degree is from Bowling Green State University in his home state of Ohio. He earned a master’s degree in philosophy from the University of Southern California where he studied with the great Christian philosopher Geddes MacGregor, among others. His thesis at USC was on voluntary euthanasia. He received his doctorate from Pennsylvania State University; his dissertation was about counseling homosexual persons and their families. While he was studying philosophy at USC Blair spent a summer back in Youngstown in order to help found a Presbyterian church; today it is a congregation of the Presbyterian Church in America. After leaving USC he worked for InterVarsity Christian Fellowship at the University of Pennsylvania. In 1965 he gave a talk to some Yale students in which he voiced his support for same-sex couples. The students welcomed the talk, but some administrators of IVCF did not. As a result he was not reappointed by IVCF for the following year. Blair then worked for a year with college students at Pennsylvania State University as interim Baptist chaplain through the American Baptist Convention, although he was not a Baptist. He stayed on at Penn State to earn his doctorate. In 1969 he was invited to come to New York as Director of Counseling at the New York City Community College, a part of the City University of New York (CUNY). He has been a New Yorker ever since. He doesn’t drive a car; he walks from his home to his office, both located on the Upper East side. Work Blair possesses the entrepreneurial spirit. During his tenure at CUNY he created and chaired the National Task Force on Personnel Services and Homosexuality. This enabled him to lead workshops and give lectures in New York and elsewhere to therapists, counselors, physicians, medical students, and others about working with homosexuals. Through the Task Force he launched and edited a series of In Blair’s life and work evangelicalism and homosexuality are fully integrated.
books about homosexuality entitled The Otherwise Monograph Series. Its authors were distinguished scholars who were experts in the subject; Blair’s own volume was on the etiology of homosexuality. In 1971 Blair resigned his position at the university and established his private practice in psychotherapy. Today, at the age of 76, he continues his practice. At the time Blair began his work in New York the official view of the medical and therapeutic communities was that homosexuality was a mental disorder, and it was difficult for gays to find a psychiatrist or a psychotherapist who would not treat them as ill. So in 1971 Blair founded the Homosexual Community Counseling Center, a referral system which provided gays and their families with information about where they could receive sympathetic counseling and other services. After the medical community changed its view the Center was no longer needed, and it was disbanded. In 1973 Blair founded and edited the quarterly Homosexual Counseling Journal. The journal sponsored major conferences in more than a dozen American cities from 1974 to 1976. Late in 1975 Blair met with Robert Rayburn, the founding president of Covenant College and Seminary. He told Rayburn about his intention to start a solidly evangelical ministry of support for the integration of evangelical Christian faith and homosexuality. Rayburn suggested that Blair launch the ministry during the next annual meeting of the National Association of Evangelicals. Blair took Rayburn’s advice, and Evangelicals Concerned came into existence in February 1976 during the NAE meeting in Washington, D.C. In Evangelicals Concerned Blair found the instrument through which he has made his greatest and most lasting contributions. Through EC, as well as through his work as a psychotherapist and through his weekly Bible studies, Blair ministers directly to homosexuals and their families and friends. Also through EC he reaches out to evangelical leaders, people, churches, and schools to encourage them to have a better understanding of same-sex orientation and to be more accepting of gay persons and gay couples. EC currently sponsors two major events a year, a preaching conference in October and a retreat in the summer. Blair himself speaks at the events, but he always invites other evangelicals to speak as well. Some of these speakers are gay and others are not. Across the years speakers at his connECtion retreats have included well-known Christian leaders such as Ken Medema, Lewis Smedes, Nicholas Wolterstorff, Peggy Campolo, Charlie Shedd, Ken and Nancy Hastings Sehested, Randall Balmer, Cynthia Clawson, and Jack Rogers. Ralph invited me to speak at the EC retreat at Kirkridge in Pennsylvania in 2010. The moment he invited me I knew immediately what my topic would have to be— forgiveness. In America homosexuals have been hurt by the wider society as much as any group I know, and Jesus taught his followers that the way to respond when they were hurt was to forgive those who hurt them. It is not an easy thing to do, but it’s the best thing, and with the Lord’s help we can forgive our enemies. On the website of Evangelicals Concerned (www.ECinc.org) there is information about the conferences. There also are links to the two quarterly publications of EC, both of which Blair writes. One is called RECORD and is a running commentary on news and developments concerning homosexuality and evangelicalism. The other is called REVIEW, and in it Blair reviews new books and articles about Christian faith and homosexuality. Blair has been doing this writing for forty years. In his writing he goes the second mile to express his appreciation for the work of others. However, there are some things which he opposes very, very forcefully. These include, on the one hand, claims that it is psychologically healthy for gays to engage in promiscuous sex, and, on the other hand, claims that gays can be “cured” and transformed into heterosexuals. The Bible Also on the website there is information about the million-dollar question which hovers in the background when one thinks about Blair’s work. It is the question of the Bible. In particular, it is the question of the meaning of seven passages—Blair calls them “the clobber passages”—which refer to sexual activity between persons of the same sex. Given what the Bible says about such activity, how can a Bible-believing Christian like Blair possibly think that homosexual sexual activity is not sinful? The short answer is that Blair thinks that the Bible does not refer to homosexuality as it exists today, particularly among Christians. That is, the Bible contains no references to consensual, loving, faithful, peer relationships between persons of the same sex. It does refer to relationships that are non-consensual, as in the threat of gang rape in Genesis 19. And it refers to promiscuous sexual activities engaged in as part of idolatrous worship (Romans 1). But it does not refer to caring relationships such as many Christians today undertake. This interpretation is not original with Blair who points out that it was made as early as 1964 by the devoutly evangelical and widely respected German theologian Helmut Thielicke, and it has been made by many Bible scholars since.
Given what the Bible says about such activity, how can a Bible-believing Christian like Blair possibly think that homosexual sexual activity is not sinful?
A brief article like this is no place to try to assess whether the understanding of the Bible which Blair holds is correct; the issues are too technical. What I can do is to note that there are some very knowledgeable, very responsible, very faithful Christian interpreters who come down on both sides of this issue. In the past few years, for example, the distinguished evangelical New Testament scholar and current dean of the divinity school at Duke University, Richard B. Hays, has written essays saying that the sort of interpretation that Blair offers is not correct; and the distinguished evangelical ethicist David Gushee of Mercer University (now also a columnist for Religion News Service) has written a book endorsing the kind of interpretation that Blair holds.3 It is simply false to argue that the explanation for the differences in these scholars’ interpretations is that one of them believes the Bible and the other does not. The Christian church has always managed to live with differences in interpretation of the Bible on important issues such as, for example, predestination. Perhaps the church will learn to do the same thing concerning homosexuality. The Pioneer Americans’ attitudes toward homosexuals have shifted dramatically in the past few years. This shift occurred much more rapidly than the shift in attitude toward women which resulted in the 19th amendment of the Constitution (1920), and much more rapidly than the shift in attitude toward African-Americans which resulted in the Civil Rights Act (1964) and the Voting Rights Act (1965). The shift concerning homosexuals, like these other shifts, was preceded and made possible by the work of people who held a minority view and worked to gain a broader acceptance for their view. When Ralph Blair began the work of publicly calling conservative evangelicals to be accepting of homosexuals, he did not know any other evangelical Christians who were doing this work. He was a pioneer. For more than half a century he has continued to work for a reformation in the conservative evangelical churches he loves so much. It seems possible to me that in the not-too-distant future many evangelical churches may change their attitudes toward homosexuals just as they have changed their attitudes toward women and toward racial minorities. If this happens, they may look back on the energetic, patient, pioneering work of Ralph Blair who showed the way to a more hospitable Christian church. In an address given at Princeton Theological Seminary in 2003 Blair said: I would challenge my fellow Evangelicals to take a closer look at what they think they know about homosexuality and what they know about Christian faith. Let’s take the gospel seriously and not relegate it to a mere mantra. Let’s take sin seriously and not trivialize it as merely a matter of anatomical correctness. Let’s take Christian discipleship biblically, with no propping up of a few poorly grasped Bible verses out of all proportion to Jesus’ clear call for a grateful love for God and a rigorously generous love for our neighbors. And let’s . . . find the self-sacrificing solution to hostilities at the cross of Christ, the only Savior and Lord there is.4
Fisher Humphreys is Professor of Divinity, Emeritus, of Samford University in Birmingham, Alabama.
1 Ralph Blair, “On Evangelical Faith and Homosexuality,” a presentation made at Princeton Theological Seminary in 2003, viewed at http://ecinc.org/onevangelical-faith-and-homosexuality/.
2 When Blair began speaking about homosexuality in the 1960s it was customary to refer to all non-heterosexual persons as homosexuals. By the 1970s, when Blair began writing about homosexuality, the word gays had come into use. Since then many writers make numerous distinctions among the nonheterosexual population, sometimes employing acronyms such as LGBTQ. These distinctions are important, but for convenience and also for accuracy in reporting about Blair’s views, I have in this article used only the two earlier words.
3 Richard B. Hays, “Awaiting the Redemption of Our Bodies” in Jeffrey S. Siker, ed., Homosexuality in the Church: Both Sides of the Debate (Louisville: Westminster/John Knox Press, 1994). Richard B. Hays, “The Biblical Witness concerning Homosexuality” in Maxie Dunnam and H. Newton Malony, eds., Staying the Course (Nashville: Abington Press, 2003). David P. Gushee, Changing Our Minds, 2nd ed. (Canton, Michigan: David Crumm Media, 2014).
4 Ralph Blair, “On Evangelical Faith and Homosexuality,” a presentation made at Princeton Theological Seminary in 2003, viewed at http://ecinc.org/onevangelical-faith-and-homosexuality/.
