I’ve been running into a lot of comments from friends across the blogosphere lately, revolving around the issue of how the church should respond to homosexuality today.  I write this response with trepidation, because I have a hunch it’ll upset many of my more “liberal” friends with about the same level of fervor many of my other writings upset my “conservative” brethren.  However, I feel we have got to cut to the chase on a couple important points that I do not see showing up in these dialogs.  The most important is this:

If we insist that the church should be affirming of gay unions, we better come clean and admit that we’ve decided that Biblical Christianity has nothing left to say regarding sexuality in any form.

Why do I say this?  Well, first of all, because the arguments I hear in favor of “affirming” gay unions in the church are based, not on scripture, not on the teachings of Jesus, but on the generic concept of compassion.  LGTBQ (Lesbian, Gay, Transgender, Bisexual, and Questioning or Queer–depends on who’s translating) individuals are often marginalized, subjected to discrimination, even victims of violence in our society–this is unarguably true.  Jesus came to minister to the marginalized and love them (also true).  Therefore, the argument goes, the church should stop teaching LGBTQ behavior is immoral, welcome these individuals into full fellowship, and even bless their lifestyles and unions in the church.  Problem is, that “therefore” involves a quantum leap that is incompatible with New Testament discipleship.

First of all, let me be clear:  violence against any person–including violence motivated or excused by that person’s sexuality, gender identity, or our perception of the same–is always, in all contexts, wrong, and we in the church should be first in line to oppose it.  We see this truth throughout the life of Jesus and the teachings of the apostles.  When Christians are even slightly on the side of defending anti-gay violence and persecution, we are to that extent guilty of active blasphemy.  As with any other form of violence and oppression, we ought to be known for our active opposition to anti-LGBTQ violence.

Nevertheless, while scriptural guidance on sexuality may not be as clear or comprehensive as a Bible-lawyer might wish, the evidence we do have is pretty one-sided, and it weighs heavily in the direction that sexual activity outside the bounds of a one-woman, one-man marriage is proscribed for the Christian.  I’ve gone into this in some detail before so I won’t repeat it all here.  In short, however, marriage (or perhaps I should say “holy matrimony” to distinguish from the civil definition which is frankly none of our affair) is the union in which “a man leaves his father and mother and [is] joined to his wife, and the two become one flesh.”  That sanctified union is not available to a man joining another man, nor a woman to a woman, and that union is the sole basis in which sexual relations can be a holy and God-blessed thing.  Sexual relations in any other context–whether straight or gay is beside the point–are adultery or fornication, both forbidden to the believer.  Wes Hill stated it well (I recommend you read his entire message here):

…although many people find themselves, through no fault of their own, to have sexual desires for members of their own sex, this is not something to be affirmed and celebrated but is, rather, a sign that we are broken, in need of redemption and re-creation. Gay people are not uniquely broken—that’s a position we share with every other human who has ever lived, or will live—but we are, nonetheless, broken. And following Jesus means turning our backs on a life of sexual sin, just as it does for every other Christian.

There are many who suggest that the New Testament writers never considered same-sex unions when they wrote about marital fidelity, because they were in a conservative culture that would not have even thought about it.  Any reference to the sexuality of Greek and Roman culture seems to me more than sufficient to put this idea to rest.  Jesus, Paul, and the rest were perfectly familiar with same-sex relationships in the broader culture.  As I wrote in the post I linked above, I do not think many of the texts people often interpret to condemn homosexuality–e.g. 1 Cor. 6:9–are as clear as the fundamentalist might wish (for an interesting read on these passages, though I disagree with his ultimate conclusion, see this article by Dale B. Martin; his error is to fail to engage the broader questions of marriage and adultery in the N.T.).  It is not that somehow “gay adultery” is somehow “worse” or “more perverted” than the straight kind.  It’s just still adultery.

But adultery is not OK and should not be “affirmed” by the church.

So am I being “unloving” here, as the Dale Martin article above (and many of my Facebook friends) would suggest?  Well, let’s think about that.  The presumption seems to be that the “loving” thing to do, is to encourage everyone to fulfill their sexual desire with whomever they desire.  After all, if (as seems to be the going theory) sexual orientation is an innate characteristic and not a lifestyle choice, everyone should have the right to follow their innate urge to seek pleasure in a mutually-fulfilling physical relationship.

Of course, implicit in the notion of “orientation” is that our human impulses are God-given and therefore right.  I don’t see how anyone can take the New Testament seriously and still buy this contention.  Scripture teaches us that human impulses tend toward depravity in essentially every area of life, from economics to violence to sex.  Romans 1:18-32 is a pretty good compendium of these “orientations,” only a few of them sexual, but sexuality definitely figures among them.  Paul seems to be suggesting that God essentially said “you want to screw up my creation, then here, feel what screwed up is really like!”  Our “orientations,” both sexual and otherwise, are corrupted.  They need to be redeemed, not fulfilled and honored.

The drive to “affirm” gay unions seems to me to be an attempt to lift out the one issue of same-sex attraction and somehow separate it from all the other ways in which fallen humanity expresses its sexuality.  I can see neither a Biblical nor a logical rationale in which to affirm the gay union without also choosing to condone polygamy/polyandry, pedophilia, multiple divorces & remarriages (“serial monogamy,” it’s sometimes called), and on and on, just so long as both (all?) parties consent.  In such a setting, matrimony as a construct becomes somewhat irrelevant outside of whatever secular benefits it may convey.  We really come down to the same situation C.S. Lewis described so well in his essay “We have No ‘Right to Happiness’,” part of the collection God in the Dock (see the full text of the essay here).   While Lewis was primarily arguing that people’s perceived happiness was no excuse for abandoning the marital commitment, he also stated that at the root was the notion that somehow

… sex [is] to be treated as no other impulse in our nature has ever been treated by civilized people. All the others, we admit, have to be bridled. Absolute obedience to your instinct for self-preservation is what we call cowardice; to your acquisitive impulse, avarice. Even sleep must be resisted if you’re a sentry. But every unkindness and breach of faith seems to be condoned provided that the object aimed at is “four bare legs in a bed.”

Which brings me back to the claim I made at the beginning of this post.  If we are going to continue teaching in our churches (and I hope we are), that God cares about about sexual purity, monogamy, the sanctity of the union of matrimony, and how husbands and wives ought to behave toward each other, upon what basis are we going to make those claims?  If the New Testament standard is to be discarded or reinterpreted away with regard to same-sex unions, how then can anyone claim it speaks with any clarity or authority about any other aspect of sexuality?  Either all of it matters, or else be honest and admit that none of it is relevant any longer.  I see no logical or hermaneutical basis for any in-between.

What do I mean in practice?  That’s where the title of this post comes in.  The church’s doors and hearts should be open to anybody who’s interested in seeking or learning about Jesus.  No one is required to accept his lordship in order to hear about him, or to experience the love of his people–and this is as true for people whose moral shortcomings are in the sexual area, as any other.  As Wes Hill asked in another important post you should read, “Will the Church shelter and nourish and humanize those who are deeply lonely and struggling desperately to remain faithful?”  I sincerely hope so.

But we must never confuse love with affirmation.  The church has no business blessing gay unions, any more than it ought to be blessing divorces  or multiple marriages.  And it most certainly ought not to be placing into leadership anyone who is engaged in *any* form of adultery.

I do not claim that any of this is easy.  Celibacy is a tough choice for the gay and the straight.  I find the various claims of people having been “cured” of same-sex attraction to be as questionable as most gay-rights activists do.  Frankly, this isn’t unique to sex.  An awful lot of addicts I’ve known have struggled to some degree with their addictions for many years after going clean.  While the call of Christ is to live a new life, the painful reality for many is that their old life keeps rearing its ugly head for a really long time…sometimes a lifetime.  We remain in a fallen world, even as we seek to live in the Kingdom of Christ.  Redemption is most assuredly a process that will not be completed for any of us this side of the grave.  But never–not for one moment–dare we suggest that the old life was all right after all.

Those who’ve read my blog for any length of time know that I dispute the usual Evangelical/Fundamentalist doctrines of Biblical inspiration.  What may have not been so clear, except by extrapolation, is what I do (and do not) propose this means when it comes to the authority-basis for Christian belief and practice.

I begin with the premise (unprovable—that’s why it’s a premise—but I believe it’s defensible) that the texts we commonly refer to as the Bible; that is, the 66-text collection accepted by both Catholic and Protestant Christians, is authoritative for the understanding of God’s intent and humanity’s role in creation and redemption.  Though recorded by human beings with all their foibles, biases, and limitations, the Biblical texts are a faithful account of the things godly human beings have seen, heard, experienced, and done as they have interacted with their creator over a rather large span of history.  Whatever other traditions humans may have passed down—and there are many—the ancient texts of the Biblical documents are older (and therefore closer to the primary sources), more complete, and more faithfully preserved than many, if not most, other historical documents.  They deserve to be heard.

Nevertheless, if the Bible is authoritative about anything at all, we must consider its texts authoritative to the extent they do or do not self-identify.  Here is where I part company with the vast majority of the Evangelical church:  nowhere in the entire text of the Old and New Testaments, do we find a defensible basis for the claim that the Bible is the Word of God, or that it is infallible (as an aside, it’s actually a little silly to talk about a text being infallible at all…the only thing that can fail–or not–are those who attempt to interpret it).  I have written on this subject before and will not repeat the entire discussion here; nevertheless I cannot let this claim stand without referring to 2 Tim. 3:14-17 (my inclusion of all four verses, not merely v. 16 is deliberate).  In brief:

• The term our Bibles translate as “scripture” is “gramata,” a form of the word graphe which refers to any writing, not only sacred scriptures (“scripture,” for that matter, is just the Latin word for “writing”).  In Paul’s day (if less so than in ours) there was plenty of writing that was clearly not divinely inspired…the lesbian poetry of Sappho or the racy plays of Sophocles for a couple examples.  The only reasonable interpretation of Paul’s use of “all scripture” in v. 16, I believe, is to refer to the context he set up in v. 14-15, in which he refers to those writings Timothy learned from his youth, which are “able to make you wise unto salvation.”  There is no basis but presupposition, to suggest that Paul was referring to the compendium of a canon that would not be agreed for another three hundred years.
• Next we turn to the word which is usually translated as “inspired” or “God-breathed” in the passage.  Paul did us the inconvenience of coining a word theopneustos (the Liddel-Scott lexicon shows no prior usage) without giving us a definition of what he meant.  The word is obviously a compound of the word Theos, which can mean any god but in the New Testament is nearly always in reference to the one God of Abraham and Father of Jesus, and pneuma, one of two more or less synonymous words (the other is pnoe) that are variously translated in the Bible as “spirit,” “breath,” or “wind.”  A tradition has built up in the church that theopneustos refers to the process by which God influenced the writers of our scriptural texts, though Christians differ wildly about whether that influence was more in the form of a gentle nudge in the right direction or a direct control of the words and phrases used.  However, if we are candid (and here, few are), we must acknowledge that this tradition is conjecture at best; certainly not enough upon which to hang a dogma.  It’s equally possible that theopneustos refers, not to the source-mechanism of scripture, but rather to the operation of God’s spirit in the reader(s) as he/she/they/we seek God in the texts.  Whatever it means, there is absolutely no basis to use theopneustos as a synonym for “God’s Word,” a phrase which carries very specific meanings in the Biblical texts.
• The interpretation of 2 Tim. 3:16 is further complicated by the fact that the sentence contains no verb in Greek.  While it is perfectly true that a translator must insert a verb (the “is”) into the English statement to make a coherent sentence (at least, if we presume that v. 16-17, not v. 14-17, are a single sentence), there is nothing in the text to guide the translator as to whether the “is” belongs before or after whatever word is used to render theopneustos.  In other words, while most translations read declaratively “All scripture is inspired…,” it is equally-valid to render it as the 1901 American Standard Version does:  “All scripture inspired of God is profitable…” which is a decidedly different claim.

Therefore, I hold that the 2 Tim. passage, whatever its meaning(s), cannot validly be used as the basis for a claim of divine infallibility for the Biblical canon.  Other prooftexts used by the verbal-inspiration crowd fare no better when properly examined.  The Bible does not call itself God’s word–therefore, neither should we.

This does not mean we have no record of God speaking.  Specific places–particularly the prophets with their “Thus saith the LORD” declarations, highlight that at the particular point thereby designated, they are repeating God’s word.  If we believe anything at all about Jesus’ divinity (a topic for another time), then Jesus’ own words certainly rise to the level of God’s words…and of course Jesus himself is described as the Word of God become flesh.  If, as I have claimed above, it is in error to view the entire Biblical text as the Word of God, and yet the texts in many places contain words from God, then it becomes incumbent upon us to discern which is which.  I have misappropriated another Pauline phrase and labeled this discernment process “Rightly Dividing the Word,” from which I get the R in my ROCK summary.

As a rule of thumb, I hold to a hierarchy of authority among the texts, where the words of Jesus as reported in the Gospels take supremacy, and shortly behind them, the words of the prophets where they explicitly highlight their message as the “Word of the LORD.”  Explicative works like the epistles follow behind these, and historical reporting still further behind, with wisdom and poetry such as Proverbs and Psalms bringing up the utmost rear (well, along with apocalyptic literature which frankly, nobody really understands any more despite their enthusiastic claims to the contrary).

There is much more that can be said about the process of Biblical interpretation.  As is (I hope) evidenced in my writing, I hold that legitimate interpretation of the Bible begins with assessing the source of the particular message, examining both the historical and textual context surrounding it (the only valid use for a “prooftext” is to refute somebody else’s invalid prooftext…responsible Biblical interpretation can never hang a dogma on a single phrase).

It is also valid to consider what other faithful believers have gleaned from a text.  But please note I said “consider,” not “accept.”  While I just got done stating that infallibility claims for the Bible are in error, it remains that nothing else rises even to the level of the Bible’s authority.  The claims of apostolic authority made by various church magisteria, episcopates, etc., are circularly established…that is, the authority by which they make their claim is the very claim itself.  No one—not the ancient church fathers, not the ecumenical councils of the fourth and fifth centuries, not Augustine or Aquinas or Calvin or Luther, and most certainly no one of the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries (including the elders or pastors or bishops of your own church fellowship)—has the right or authority to make any statement that is not subject to the accountability question “what is your scriptural basis for that claim?”  And even if they answer that question, the validity of their hermaneutic is still subject to challenge, re-examination, and even correction.  The fathers, the great theologians, and the faithful “lay” people (and even, I would submit, the “heretics”) of all these ages still deserve to be re-heard through the lens of the Body of Christ searching the scriptures, yet again today, to see whether the things they say are so.

And this brings me to my final point on Biblical interpretation:  it’s not a spectator sport.  If we believe anything about the work of the Holy Spirit, and if we accept the Biblical accounts as valid at all, then God’s modus operandi tends toward reserving his most important messages to be delivered by the “unimportant” among us (from a foreign whore to a talking donkey to a 12-year-old kid to a guy hiding out on the threshing floor to a young girl accused of breaking her betrothal vow to a swaggering, cussing fisherman…the people God uses tend not to be those we might have chosen).  Michael Jordan may be (or may become) a follower of Jesus, but in faith, there are no Michael Jordans.  I am grateful for the insight careful researchers such as Tom Wright have brought to the table, as I am for the insights in other centuries of many faithful men and not enough women who have also sought to understand God and his ways, and share their understanding with the rest of us.  But the real work of following Jesus—including rightly dividing his word—occurs not in the halls of academia and the magisterium, but around the tables (including the virtual tables of the net) where we break bread and open the texts in fellowship with one another.

You, my sister, and you, my brother, may have as much to share with me about the things of Christ, as Calvin or Luther or Aquinas or Augustine ever did—perhaps even more than they.  We’ll still need to search the scriptures together to see if you’re getting it right (I need you to do the same with my thoughts), but don’t ever let the “authorities” tell you you’re wrong to speak or to question just because they say so, or because God gave them authority over you.  Jesus—and the real apostles, the ones in the first century—say otherwise.

I was at an event recently where a missionary from Africa came and shared about their work. After he spoke a pastor came up and shared how blessed he felt that a member of his church was called to the mission field. Although it sounds odd it seemed as though in the mind of the pastor this persons calling was “higher” because he left the USA to go the missionfield.

So I was left wondering, if this person is a missionary then what am I? Is the USA not a missionfield? More specifically is where I live the Bay Area not a missionfield?

You may read this and say well of course it is, to which I agree, however it seems like a common theme of the evangelical denomination is to celebrate and point to those who leave country and family because THEY have higher callings and are the true “missionaries.”

This line of thinking is highly unfortunate because it de-emphasises the work of the local church and puts an emphasis on foreign missions. Now don’t get me wrong there is nothing wrong with foreign missions, my point however is that not everyone is called to use their time and talents over seas.

I’ve not had time to write for the last couple weeks, but I have to recommend this editorial, Evangelicals Without Blowhards by Nicholas Kristoff in the New York Times.  Kristoff makes an excellent case for what happens when people actually try to live like Jesus instead of usurping the Holy Spirit’s role in convicting everyone else of sin.  He also gives a heartfelt tribute to the late John Stott.  I strongly recommend it!