Last week I got some great comments and questions springing from the post about homosexual marriage. I answered one question on Friday, I wanted to answer Royale's question here today because I think it's a crucial issue.
You can see all of Royale's comments under Friday's post, but I'll copy and paste the crux of it here:
Here's the deal - the Bible has a lot of plain, straightforward and obvious commands. Many of them appear irrational to our modern perspective. It's not just the OT, but the words of Jesus as well. (turn the other cheek, give the proceeds to the poor, etc...)It's about literalism. Why take the command against homosexuality literal if you do not take the literal the OTHER commands?First off, the OT, then we'll talk some about Jesus: When people started becoming Christians who weren't Jewish, it caused tons of controversy. Much of the NT and especially Acts is devoted to sorting through the issue of how "Jewish" do new Christians have to be? They quickly came to consensus that the moral law (i.e. the Ten commandments) was clearly still applicable but that ceremonial law (food restrictions and circumcision being the capstones) was not to be applied to the new converts. This line between moral law and ceremonial law may seem arbitrary to us 2,000 years later, but it clearly wasn't to the Jewish folks making the decisions. They knew the difference and were able to communicate it to the new Gentile churches with remarkable unanimity.
Regarding the NT commands, I don't think it's an accident that the examples that Royale chooses are generally mercy-type commands (turn the other cheek, give proceeds to the poor) and so I think this warrants an important aside. While I agree that the Christian church has failed dramatically at living out the commands to care for the sick, the poor, and the marginalized, I also gladly and proudly say that over the past 2,000 years there is absolutely no other organization and certainly no other religion that has done more to help people outside of it's own affinity group than the Christian church. No one has built more hospitals, given more to the sick, cared for more orphans, built more schools or rushed to the aid of a disaster with more regularity than Christians: not the Muslims, not the Jews, not the Hindus, not the Red Cross, not the Shriners, not the U.N. No one. The "high-profile" disasters of the past two years (Katrina and the Tsunami) only serve to highlight was has historically been true.
In light of this I must confess that I'm a bit perplexed by the charge that Christians seem to take these commands of Jesus metaphorically. We are called to love those who hate us and to turn the other cheek when someone strikes us. Really. And for the past 2,000 years, we've done that, mostly falteringly and struggling so, but we've at least struggled to move in that general direction. And in 32 years of being in churches, I've never heard those passages dismissed as just metaphorical. If these commands sound irrational to our modern ears, they also sounded irrational to First-Century Palestinian ears. No one wants to do this. That's part of what makes Christianity different and why people converted by the thousands even as they were being fed to lions and burned alive as human torches to light Roman Emperor's parties.
There
is something to understanding the whole of Scripture and reading it thoughtfully and not just taking each isolated incident at total face value, which maybe could be taken for a cop-out or convenient making of metaphors, but I don't think so. For example: Jesus tells the Rich Young Ruler to sell everything he owns and follow him, but he doesn't say that to everyone. And so we have to understand the context of each event and take the whole of Scripture on any given subject to get the full picture. But generally there are clear and remarkable patterns that emerge with a thoughtful reading of the Scriptures from the posture of faith.
If you want woodenly rigid, literal interpretation of the Bible, fundamentalism is the way to go. If you want everything metaphored to death, try the liberal main-line church (holy crap those people have to work really hard to try to keep calling themselves Christians while explaining away just about every truly distinguishing mark of Christianity). If you want a thoughtful engagement of the Scriptures that tries to take the context and situation of each text into account as well as a general posture of submitting to the Scriptures while trying to grasp the larger arc of what's being said on the subject throughout the whole of Scripture, I offer you evangelicalism. Perhaps that leaves us open to the charge of picking and choosing our way through the Scriptures and certainly that is one possible outcome of this way of reading the Scripture. But obviously I think that's the best way to go because it combines thoughtfulness with faithfulness with holy submission.
A different, related issue: Last Friday a student was concerned that his parents were leaving their church denomination that was moving towards ordaining homosexuals. Isn't all sin the same? Why leave a church over this issue? But there's a crucial difference. It's one thing to say that lying is a sin and yet we see Christians lie--that's hypocrisy and it must be dealt with. It's a completely different matter to say that lying isn't a sin at all any more, and so anyone who lies is really just fine like they are.
Similarly, it's a different thing to charge Christians with not living up to the code of conduct commanded by Scripture (that's hypocrisy) than it is to say that we make things to be metaphorical simply to suit us (that's cutting-and-pasting the Bible recreationally). If the charge is hypocrisy--i.e. we don't turn the other cheek when Jesus commands us to or that we pick and choose our Biblical sexual ethics, then we certainly stand guilty as charged (even granted the generally extraordinary track record noted above).
But it is not up to us to nullify the arc of the commands of Scripture (either about sexuality or about giving to the poor) and decide that they are no longer commands because we find them annoying, awkward, they don't fit our politics, or are not politically correct. This is why I'm so deeply troubled by the Christian-Republican marriage, even though I tend to vote that way. We are not to be in any one's back pocket. We are to engage the full measure of the Biblical commands about the poor, about sex, about marriage, about worship, about prayer, etc. and live those out as faithfully as we can. Some passages aren't clear, other passages were more directly applicable to the immediate context, but taken as a whole the clearer Scriptures help us to interpret the less clear Scriptures and most issues can be addressed with reasonable clarity in a context of holy humility.
And so the sexual ethic over the whole of Scripture is very clear. The creation story is to be taken realistically--it is poetry with a point. What is being communicated there about Who created and the purpose behind creation, including male-female relations, be fruitful and multiply, and leave and cleave is very much the point of why that's been written down for us. Marriage is a sacred thing, even if the people who enter into it don't think so or aren't aware of it.
Why are we gendered beings? Why did God create us with gender in the first place? It is difference that blesses, just as the nature of the Trinity is that it is 3 differentiated Persons who are One God. The Father is the Father, the Son is the Son, and the Holy Spirit is the Holy Spirit; each is delighted to be Who they are, each delights in the othes, none of them tries to be the other or do exactly what the other one does. Each aspect of marriage is to mirror that relationship, including the sexual aspect of marriage--"the two shall become one." Throw in the functional pro-creational aspects of marriage inherent in the command to "fill the land and subdue it" and you've got a pretty clear mandate for a male-female marriage relationship.
So Romans 1 talks about homosexuality in a way that comports with much of the rest of the sexual ethic in Scripture--the clear assumption of a sexual relationship exercised in a male-female marriage based on the creational purpose of gender in the first place and the pro-creational aspect of sexual relations. If it were an aberration, then maybe we could talk about the need to find a reason for Paul to rant on about it and could reasonably dismiss it. But it's not, and so we must submit to it or stop calling ourselves Christians--there's lots of other options out there.
The trouble with this discussion is that I don't really expect to change anyone's mind with this post. Change is a process for most anyone. My mind won't change with a few very thoughtful objections, I don't expect any of my readers to change their mind's because of a few scattered thoughts on my blog. I just hope that maybe this exchange can be helpful in shedding a little bit of light on some small part of this pretty significant cultural debate.
