a commenter

I got a comment from a post back in April that warrants some discussion, I think. It was in response to a statement about my support of gay marriage and that opposing it is simply non-biblical, though I guess I would have to change that word to "extra-biblical."

Anyway, here is the comment....

pam said...
What do you make of the verse that states homosexuality is an abomination? or how about the one that says, "Verily I say to you (Jesus speaking) that a homosexual shall not enter the kingdom of God." Do we only take as truth that part of the word that we can tolerate or do we take the entirety of the word as truth? I have many good friends who are practicing homosexuals; they are very nice, good people. It grieves me that they are giving up their inheritance.



Me back.

First of all, I think it is the height of arrogance to claim that anyone has lost his or her inheritance. As if the blood of Christ is good enough to wash me or you but not this person over here. Who are you or I to limit God's redemptive power?

But as to the larger point, the bit about homosexuality being an abomination is from Leviticus. We throw out almost all of Leviticus as being irrelevent. We as Christians don't eat kosher. We don't worry about ritual uncleanliness from touching a menstruating woman. Maybe Pam does those things. I don't.

Jesus may have said something like what Pam quotes. However, if so, it is not said in the canonical gospels. I just spent a half hour looking at every quote that was red in the Matt, Mark, Luke, and John, and nary a word was about homosexuality. I don't doubt that Jesus said a lot of things that aren't reported in the four gospels I use, but I don't know what access Pam has that I don't.

If, however, we want to look at what Paul said, then we have some things close to what Pam has reported. However, her report is based on a mistranslation of the Greek. What Paul is talking about is sex that is unnatural in Romans 1, for example. (Same is true in Corinthians and Timothy) When it came time to put together the King James Bible, unnatural sex was translated as sodomy, and later as homosexual sex.

One of the things we have to remember is that "homosexuality" as an orientation did not exist as a concept until the 19th century. The old testament references to homosexual sex are all about rape. The letters of Paul address the context of the communities in which he was writing, in which homosexual relationships between men and boys were commonplace. Certainly, it is possible to distinguish between rape and child abuse versus a lifetime orientation.

But Paul warns us against unnatural sex, and for me, that is a warning against homosexual sex, which to me is unnatural. I like girls. Always have, well, at least since the day I saw down a girl's shirt in journalism class that day in eighth grade. I went from zero to puberty in like 0.4 seconds. But I digress. But what is natural to me may not be natural to everyone else. If you are a homosexual, then heterosexual sex is unnatural, and would be sinful.

John Wesley, who founded Methodism, wrote that we needed to use four things to make religious decisions: scripture, tradition, reason, and experience. This is a framework that makes sense to me. It is what has allowed us to move away from things tacitly approved of in the Bible that are clearly immoral, like slavery. We have to be very careful in reading Paul as a social critic. His eschatology (expectation of Christ's return within a generation) made him unconcerned with changing society as a whole. Why worry about changing the structure of society when it is all about to be ended anyway?

But the main point I would ask Pam to consider is why some sins are outside of the ability of God to redeem. That is a theology that is very sad to me.