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.
5 comments:
nice post! pretty huge, actually. :-)
Thanks. Haven't had time to read all this, but couple things:
"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."
I beg to differ. I don't see any reference in the Bible to this moral v. ceremonial code. You're basically importing your own classifications, not the Bibles.
If you want, I wouldn't stop there, but add several other categories, including "only applicable to a desert civilization in 1000 BC." My categorization is just as Biblical as yours.
"And so the sexual ethic over the whole of Scripture is very clear."
You actually serious? No it's not.
First, there are 9 different types of marriages, including concubinery and polygamy. How many wives and concubines did King David or Solomon have?
Second, nowhere in the Bible does it actually define a marriage. I bring this up because our standard of fornication was the Roman equivalent of an actual marriage. Thus, it's anachronistic to blindly impose sexual lines based on a different concept of marriage.
Third, nowhere is lesbianism mentioned, despite the comprehensivess of the OT moral code.
Fourth, different Bibles translate the homosexuality references as man-boy rape.
Royale,
I figured it wouldn't be quite so easy!
Okay, so like I said earlier, I don't really expect to change your (or anyone else's) mind with all this, but still your objections warrant a response:
1. The big difference between your categories and the moral law/ceremonial law? The disciples decided on it, not you or me. In the Christian tradition, we grant the first apostles apostlic authority to write the Scriptures and to re-interpret the OT law based on the Christ death and resurrection event. Like I said earlier, this might seem arbitrary or unclear to a couple Gentiles reading it 2,000 years later, but to the Jews who made these decisions (and I think it's critical that we see God's grace in the fact that it was, indeed, Jewish Christians who made the decisions) it was pretty clear. Acts, Galatians, Colossians, Romans and Ephesians all deal with this to greater and lesser extents. Again, the categories I'm describing aren't arbitrarily mine, they're the categories that the apostles designated as Gentiles came into the church. Ergo, your categories aren't Biblical but the ones that the apostles designated are.
2. Admittedly, the various types of marriage arrangements in the OT are thorny, particularly for the "Focus on the Family" crowd that I've argued against in earlier posts. But really it has very little to do with our conversation here.
The real issue is gender. Does gender matter or is it an evolutionary fluke that can be dispensed with? If gender is random or just recreational like a frisbee, sure, do whatever the heck you want with it including ignore it or engage in any number of sexual activities. However, if gender is indeed image-bearing as the Genesis description tells us, then there is an original image that we are supposed to bear witness to, comport with, point to. If male-ness and female-ness are essentially given to us that we might express the character and nature of God, then it is absolutely not up to us to do whatever the heck we want to with it. Gender is not a frisbee. It is intended to be a reflection of the Triune God--something that I know that you don't put much stock in based on my brief glance at one of your blogs, but something that I find perfectly sublime, as I posted on a couple weeks ago. Gender is more like a mortgage loan. It can only be used in certain ways or else there are consequences.
Marriage, then, is one possible expression of working out image-bearing, and certainly there are cultural influences that shape how we view marriage. It is not the only one (single people are image bearers as well) nor does it make us complete or whole. But my original summary was stated intentionally broadly: "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." This is true even for a concubine.
3. Re: lesbianism. I had a ferret in 5th grade--nowhere in the Bible did it tell me that I needed to actually care for my ferret. In fact there is little in the Bible about gambling, nothing about on-line pornography and most of the references to prostitution in the NT have to do with temple prostitutes, which is not exactly what's being offered in downtown Durham.
Again, the real issue is the purpose of our being gendered beings as image-bearers and Adam and Eve as the protypes of what that means. If both men and women reflect the image of God in unique and complimentary ways simply by virtue of their male-ness and female-ness, and gender is more like a mortgage loan with repsonsibilies than a frisbee that we can do whatever the heck we want to with, then we need to take that seriously.
4. You've got me on the different Bible's translations of homosexuality, don't know much about that.
I don't want to move on :-)
re: disciples
Couple things:
1. They still didn't create this category of ceremonial v. moral law. And if they did, it's not followed, not by you, nor by them.
What day of the week do you go to church? The seventh day as commanded by the "moral" law, aka, the version of 10 commandments that I think you're referring. (Note, there are 3 versions of the 10 commandments, one of which lays out the Jewish holy days) or the first day, which is nowhere commanded or changed from the 7th day in the Bible. If the latter, then either you're changing the moral law or following someone else's change of the moral law.
Likewise, if marriage is a moral law and not ceremonial, then the only proper Christians are the polygamous sects in Utah, for after all, polygamy is a proper virtue of the OT marriage.
I can find other areas where the Apostles violated this ceremonial law category of yours, but that's at the top of my head.
2. In each of Paul's letters, he was in crisis mode and certainly did not intend to lay down a moral code for all time. Corinthians, Galatians, Ephesians, Romans - each one was responding to a specific crisis for that specific time. The church at Corinth was using temple prostitutes, the Galatians thought they had to be Jewish, some of the churches wanted to replace Paul, etc...
When people are in crisis, they over-compensate, which Paul did, as evidenced by his self-contradictions. Furthermore, Paul believed the end of time would occur immediately, which just compounded the immediacy of the crisis.
If Paul believed his letters would read 2000 years later, glueing his letters together, he would have written something very, very different.
The modern equivalent would be to take the airplane security measures immediately after the next plane crisis, such as the whole liquid explosive scare, and to use that guideline for 2000 years, long after airplanes and Al Qaeda have disappeared.
3. Besides, Paul was a revolutionary egalitarian. To hold his ideas 2000 years ago as a moral constant would violate the spirit of Paul.
re: gender
The breakdown of gender occurs commonly in nature, both in man and other species.
You admit homosexuals might have a biological inclination to be homosexual. Well, I can tell you that homosexuality has been found in 500 other species.
Both of which support that idea that the cookie-cutter gender idea doesn't fit 100% of the time. If it doesn't 100% of the time, then neither mankind nor other species were meant to ALWAYS be male or female.
What gender is Jamie Lee Curtis? Physically, she's female but genetically, she's male. What image of God is that? I'm not trying to be facetious, but it seems to me you're applying a cookie cutter standard that doesn't always apply. And if God is the source of that deviation, we should be very reluctant to question it.
(side note, I don't take the image of God to be a physical or gender one, but rather a moral as God is not physical, it defies logic to say we are physically like God. Furthermore, if physical image of God, then that would mean the chimps are also in God's image and homosexuality is very, very common among bonobo chimpanzees)
re: Marriage
That was in response to your allegation that sexual practices in the OT and NT are somehow coherent. A lot of people seem to convince themselves that it somehow is coherent, but I would not.
Move on if you must, but I enjoyed this. peace
Royale,
Thanks for your willingness to engage this with me, it's been really beneficial for me to have to articulate some things. I appreciate your patience and willingness to engage real issues. It's even and especially good for me to be forced to admit that I don't know something!
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