Where Theology Gets Hard

I was in ceramics class in the Spring of 2004.  I remember that I had terracotta up to my mid fore arms and was thinning the inner wall of a pot I had just carelessly thrown when a peer of mine, Michelle Moon, inquired "so what do you think about your brother coming out today" a bit antagonistically.   It was the first I had heard of it.  "Damn!"  That was all I thought, literally for a week.  I am from an ultra conservative background; theologically and politically.  I actually hadn't met a Christian Democrat until about two years ago.  I knew that they existed, in the kind of knowing an ornithologist has when he believes the bird he did his masters thesis on, before he found the bird he did his doctoral dissertation on, had not gone extinct.  I had no supposition that a Christian homosexual could exist, anywhere.

I entered what has become a life long study of the doctrine surrounding the lives and fates of the homosexual population that I have come to love so much.  I have come to a number of conclusions, that may quickly become a book, regarding the Christian response to homosexuality.

My first and most critical maxim is such: the only Biblical response to homosexuals is Christological love!  That is a love that supports and encourages a person's value and intrinsic worth.

It is so easy however, as we study Theology and Scripture, to impose our sentiments upon the corpus of Christian thought.  In so doing forcing our wills upon God.  I never really noticed this until I began to really dig into the depths of theology and began to hear people forcing things on the Biblical text that it didn't offer.  This had been true all across history from the Crusades to the slavery of entire African tribes, but I have seen more cases of this in recent history than in the greater past.

I was pointed to a Huffington Post article called "Is Evangelical Christianity Having a Great Gay Awakening?" by Cathleen Falsani.  Many of us in the Christian community are very familiar with the wildly talented Falsani.  She represents the uber-intellectual ultra-liberal American Christian. She is widely published in Sojourners magazine and wrote a book on Bono that I enjoyed very much.  Her book "Sin Boldly" however was nails on a chalk board to every pietist, slapping Paul in the face as he emplors us "What then are we to say? Should we continue in sin in order that grace may abound?  By no means!"  She is a woman however that does two things better than almost anybody; she asks pertinant and pressing questions, and honestly searches.

I would like to give a theological critique of this article that first appeared in Religious News Service.
"Some of my dearest friends are gay.  Most of my dearest friends are Christians.And more than a few of my dearest friends are gay Christians.

As an evangelical, that last part is not something that, traditionally and culturally, I'm supposed to say out loud. For most of my life, I've been taught that it's impossible to be both openly gay and authentically Christian."
She is really hitting a vein in Christianity that is in need of addressing.  The Christian community, intended for inclusivism, has become a community that is fiercely exclusive.  Take the infamous Westboro Baptist Church as the best example of this in recent history.  Fred Phelps is absolutely everything a pastor should not be.  What is more, he has taken his views and has forced them on Scripture, and now receives incredible media attention that has served the Church very poorly.  The Christian Church must invite people to authentic dialogue.

"According to biblical accounts, Jesus said very little, if anything, about homosexuality. But he spent loads of time talking, preaching, teaching and issuing commandments about love."


Both Christ and the Apostles (men who spent countless hours with Christ) speak pretty clearly on the issue of homosexuality.  There is no disconnect between the Old and New Testaments in their treatment of homosexuality.  There is a serious failure to carefully examine the context of the Old Testament however.  It was in every way abhorrent to a Jew to be involved in homosexuality.  This was not a view shared by the rest of the world and the Jews did not enforce it on them.  They also had no love for those outside of their religious family.  There was little teaching on this issue because it was a cultural non-issue; homosexuality was pagan and had no place in their lives.  We now acknowledge that homosexuality is not that simple, and are compelled by love to different practices.

"Some of my gay friends are married, have children and have been with their partners and spouses as long as I've been with my husband."

I see this often times in the gay community, but not nearly as often as I see rampant promiscuity. This whole argument limits people to merely carnal beings.  Stanley Hauerwas points out that it is reductionist in nature.  People are not so simple as who they sleep with.  The humanity of a person is actually found in how not true this is.  Animals are bound to passion and lust as a means of procreation, many people choose celibacy for their whole lives.  We must never reduce our humanity to the fact that a person has been entertaining a monogamous relationship.  We are so much more.

"The simple fact is that Old Testament references in Leviticus do treat homosexuality as a sin ... a capital offense even," Bakker writes. "But before you say, 'I told you so,' consider this: Eating shellfish, cutting your sideburns and getting tattoos were equally prohibited by ancient religious law."

This is all true, however, there is one very important thing that he fails to mention.  There is a principle called binding and loosing that was practiced in the Hebrew culture.  This was the practice whereby commands were deemed more or less grievous in the eyes of the Lord.  Christ in fact gives the power of binding and loosing to the Apostles, and they set the trajectory for what will remain sin and what be liberated.  Shellfish, haircuts, and even circumcision (among the most precious practices to the Jews) were loosened by the Apostles.  Tattoos were never explicitly prohibited, rather "markings for the dead" were.  Both homosexuality and markings for the dead were never loosed by the Apostles which says something about the way they viewed them in light of the teachings of Christ.  The early Christian teachings (first Christ's, then the Apostles, then the Church Fathers) set a trajectory for Theology that is of critical importance.  

Jay Bakker goes on to attack a number of Old Testament practices without any real knowledge of historic cultural context.  He attacks the prohibition of interracial marriage which he sees as racist, while in reality it was an issue of maintaining religious autonomy and has nothing to do with race.  Contrary to Bakker's belief, the Bible never implicitly approves of slavery (it prophesies that it will happen to specific peoples such as the offspring of Ishmael and Esau, or that it is currently happening), rather acknowledges it as a cultural reality and gives codes of conduct to both slave and master alike.  Most of the worlds human rights movements have been born out of Biblical interpretation, and scholars would agree that as a united work the Bible extols liberty. 

Bakker also condemns the practice of stoning women found to be adulteresses, and fails to acknowledge the heart of the teaching.  Rebellion in any form begins plainly like sleeping in a married man's bed or having sex outside of marriage, and ends in a whole nation drifting from God.  This teaching was not created in the hope that many would be found in adultery and a genocide would ensue, rather as a deterrent and a life and salvific preserving text.

"The church has always been late," Bakker told me in an interview this week. "We were late on slavery. We were late on civil rights. And now we're late on this."

This may be the statement I have the most problem with.  The Church has always been ahead on every one of these issues.  The Civil Rights movements, Emancipation were all born out of the Church (and the Republican party in America in fact).  Justice is best found and exercised in the Church.

What we read as "homosexuals" and "homosexuality" actually refers to male prostitutes and the men who hire them. The passages address prostitution -- sex as a commodity -- and not same-sex, consensual relationships, he says.

If the last were my biggest problem, this is my second.  This statement is absolutely ridiculous in every way possible!  Etymologically the word that has been translated as homosexual in the Bible is specifically speaking of people of the same sex having intimate relations of a sexual nature.  It has its antecedent in the Old Testament and was adopted to Greek first and then to Latin, and finally arrived in the English.  These texts without question speak to men that have intercourse with men, and the same of women with other women.  This statement is so poorly founded, and his argument so weak that even the most liberal denominations in the world are opting to not deal with the controversial texts in stead of taking stances like Bakker takes here.

Baker goes on to cite Tony Jones as a "theologian-in-residence" which simultaneously got me to laugh, and made me a little upset.  Jones is a hack at best and one of the most unstable voices in the Emergent Village.  His heart is great and his ministry is gaining ground but so is Fred Phelps.  Falsani also quotes Brian McLaren who has been forsaken by the Church for dogmatic heresy (although if you have a chance read his book "A Generous Orthodoxy").  I don't know if Baker could have picked two less reputable or qualified personalities if she had tried.  She then goes on to say she wishes Rob Bell would take a stand on the issue.  The reason for this that Bell is a credible voice, and has stuck to Orthodoxy on every issue that matters.

I have the highest respect and love for homosexuals, but there are just no good answers offered in this article.  We must see where answers like this are being birthed though: the people in the world that are supposed to be the most loving alive, are forsaking that love for hatred.  We must learn what it means to be the Church, the blessed Bride of Christ!

*the terms liberal and conservative here denote those assertions that are of classically accepted nature or those that are of new and novel thought.  Concerning Christianity the term conservative would refer to the widespread beliefs of the Church (Roman Catholic, Easter Orthodox, and Protestant) across time.