Prevailing Winds "For the Lord is the Spirit, and where the Spirit of the Lord is there is freedom . . ." 2 Cor. 3:17, TNIV

July 13, 2011

Gays and Lesbians and the Church

Filed under: Uncategorized — keelyem @ 5:04 pm

I freely confess that I don’t know how best to understand the Bible’s prohibition of “homosexuality,” and, like most of us, I would love to know that I’ve got it nailed — that the intent of the Holiness Codes and Paul’s writings in Romans and First Corinthians is now completely within my infallible understanding. Of course, like any of us who approach Scripture that way, I’d be guilty of gross arrogance and an attitude of judgment most unbecoming the Christian. Still, I like certainty.

But the truth is, I don’t know with utter certainty what Paul meant. And to be honest, neither do you.

The reason, as I alluded to in my previous post, is that what Christians condemn as “homosexuality” and “homosexuals” did not exist until centuries later. In Old and New Testament times, same-sex physical/erotic behavior simply was not found in the context of stable, mutual, adult, and monogamous relationships, the relationships at the center of the gay marriage and virtually all other “gay rights” issues evangelicals decry. The men who engaged in the debauchery of cultic, pagan worship were not “homosexuals.” Neither were the Greeks who “trained” young boys in the erotic arts, and neither were the eunuchs.

Biblical scholars enormously more knowledgeable than I see a difference between what Moses and Paul and their contemporaries viewed as “homosexual behavior” and what we see now. I wish I knew more — I wish I knew more about everything in Scripture — but I’m not certain that Paul’s sexual ethic, properly understood today, would condemn what he simply couldn’t have known: stable, consensual, mutual homosexual relationships. So I have to fall back on what I DO know. And what I am certain of is the ethic of love that Jesus taught, an ethic that requires the disciple, even if she or he concludes that same-sex erotic behavior is sinful, to exercise profound charity and humility toward its practitioners, knowing that all of us are in the grip of sin until redeemed by Christ.

While I’m hesitant to equate homosexuality as we understand it today with a disease/pathology analogy, I think it’s worthwhile to explore how our understanding of “what the Bible says” about a lot of things has changed. We now realize
that when people have seizures, they have epilepsy; we wouldn’t rush someone to the doctor with the news that the patient is possessed by an evil spirit.

Likewise, when some Christians talk about “Biblical marriage,” I have to ask what they mean. Levirate marriage, where the widow must sleep with successive of her dead husband’s brothers to produce an heir? Polygamy, as practiced by David, who took Bathsheba as his wife, not just as his concubine/playmate? Do we condemn interracial marriage between believers, or do we cling to literal prohibitions against marrying “foreigners,” even as we understand that the Old Testament context actually just prohibits Yahweh’s people from marrying those who worship foreign gods? (Of course, I live in Moscow, Idaho, where neo-Confederates rock, roll, and rule, and it’s uncertain if those angling for an Anglo-Celtic homeland in the South have, in fact, adjusted their interpretation of the “marrying foreigners” verses). And one thing I know for certain is that virtually no conservative Christian that I know of practices, or expects anyone else to practice, matrilocal marriage — commanded clearly in Genesis 2:24, where a man is to leave his father and his mother and cling to his wife. Does that mean that the marriage is “un-Biblical” if the woman leaves her family in Idaho and, say, moves with her new husband to Louisiana, where his family lives?

To be honest, the most “fundamentalist” of Bible interpreters picks and chooses the verses he chooses to stand on. Paul’s laborious and clear marriage commandments in First Corinthians, wherein he makes numerous “as the husband, so the wife; as the wife, so the husband” arguments for marital mutuality and not hierarchy, is significantly different from the patriarchal Christian view of marriage, drawn from Ephesians 5 with blithe indifference to the mutual submission/mutual love/mutual respect verses that begin the Apostle’s narrative. You either have a patriarchal marriage or a Christian marriage. According to Paul, who writes much more about marriage than about what he knew of same-sex erotic behavior, a patriarchal marriage isn’t a Christian marriage.

Biblical marriage, anyone? Let’s define our terms first.

My point is this: There is no single definition of “marriage” in the Bible, and I would argue that, as with epilepsy-as-demon-possession, we might consider that our definition of “homosexuality” and its condemnation might warrant re-consideration. But what cannot change, either through the wonders of science or a more knowledgeable hermeneutic, is our allegiance to the ethic of sacrifice, submission, humility, reconciliation, truth and love taught and modeled by Jesus — no matter what other Reformed churches are teaching. That “Jesus ethic” prohibits me from despising other sinners, and it prohibits “Christian” homophobes and bigots from despising gays, lesbians, the transgendered, and others whose sexual identities differ from our own. No one needs Jesus because they’re gay, and no one is “safer” in him because they’re not.

Until the Church understands that there are many thousands of GLBT women and men in this world who love the Lord Jesus Christ and worship him as Savior, we’re not going to get far, and our sisters and brothers will suffer. Doug Wilson and others may choose to believe that “gay” is synonymous with “hates Jesus,” but, God be praised, it’s the Holy Spirit and not the Bishop of Moscow who knows the hearts of all women and men who seek him.

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