Homosexuality

[Scott Peterson]

What are your thoughts on how a church community seeking to live out God's shalom should handle the issue of homosexuality?

[Andrew Cornelius]

I believe we can participate in the kingdom here and now, but it is inbreaking, not fully realized. Moreover, that verse speaks of the resurrection. That was considered a specific moment yet to come. So you draw from a verse that speaks of "the resurrection" but conflate it with "heaven" and "the kingdom". These are not all one and the same.

[Nathanael Snow]

Does regeneration make us different?
Suppose I am a man who has a tendency toward anger, conceit, and sensuality, including the use of pornography. Can I hope, or should I even desire, to be changed? If not, why bother with Christianity?
The brokenness which is me only desires to be healed when exposed to the person of Jesus Christ. Otherwise, I am unaware of my own condition, and even favorable toward it, defensive of it, proud of it.
Each and every one of us is broken. It is this brokenness which separates us from God, and the source of the brokenness is mutual among humans. The same sin which separates you from God is the sin which separates me from God.
I may ask whether physiology is relevant when discussing sexuality and its purpose in revealing the nature of God to man. I may find answers which give glory to God. I ought never to find justification for affording myself privilege, or appointing myself to a position of authority - least of all judgment - over others.
Yet the church exists, and when I am baptized I say to the church, "I am Christ's, He died for me and for you, I love you because He loves you and He loved me. If I have sinned I want you to confront me in love. I am more concerned about the purity of the body of Christ than I am about my own pride or needs."
If this is not what the church is, then why bother?
Other institutions already exist which are based on an ethic of exchange or power-over. The church is called out due to the work of Christ in its members.
Therefore, the church adopts a peculiar ethic, that established by Jesus. It maintains peculiar mandates regarding behavior. Deviations from the prescribed set of behaviors threaten the purity and effectiveness of the body. Paul authorizes exclusion from the body under such circumstances. That I have not been excluded is a testimony to the weakness of relationships I have within the body, and my own deceitfulness. I am called to exclude myself at communion in these situations, and have been faithful to do so.
I have also sought the ministry of the body, and have received healing - real and lasting change - through the faithfulness of my brothers in the Lord.
In short:
Broken people should be welcomed, embraced, and loved by the church more than by any other people, because we are honest about our own shortcomings. But baptism requires that we renounce our old nature and live new lives according to the spirit. We no longer favor, defend, or boast of our brokenness. We grieve over it, for these things Christ died!
Participation in the body means that I no longer make a claim to my own life, nor do I make claims on the lives of others, but I make myself available to the claims of the body and the least of these.
Pray for me brothers! I am broken, and my flesh prevails so much more often than the spirit!

[Chad]

The next question that has to be asked is, "If homosexuality is okay, then what about polygamy?" I think that there's WAY more Biblical support for that than homosexuality. If 10 people want to live in a loving relationship, how is that immoral IF homosexuality is moral?

[Barry Mast]

I think this question highlights that shifts occur re: morals in the biblical text itself. Comparing OT references to polygamy with NT passages such as 1 Tim 3.2 and Titus 1.6. seem to suggest that there is a NT prohibition against polygamy (at least for "elders" and "overseers") that was absent in the OT. If moral standards may shift inside the text, can they shift outside the text as well under the guidance of the Holy Spirit (thus creating the possibility that faithful homosexuality can legitimately be considered morally acceptable even if it isn't recognized as such in the Bible)?

Chad said:

The next question that has to be asked is, "If homosexuality is okay, then what about polygamy?" I think that there's WAY more Biblical support for that than homosexuality. If 10 people want to live in a loving relationship, how is that immoral IF homosexuality is moral?

[Nate Myers]

The movement from polygamy to monogamy that is clear in the Bible is one of intensifying monogamous heterosexuality.

There is zero movement on the subject of homosexuality (it remains a dark rebellion against the created purposes of God), which therefore should lead us to answer "No" to the suggestion that faithful homosexuality can legitimately be considered morally acceptable.

I don't mean to sound desperate and ridiculous here, as many fundamentalists use this argument in naive ways, but there are any number of cultural temptations in every age that we can justify acting on and call it "the guidance of the Holy Spirit." If we abandon the text, we create a situation of permanently shifting cultural and moral norms, which makes Christian morality anchorless, taking away from the call to be culturally distinctive to witness to a different way.

One of the central Christian confessions is this; in Jesus we have seen the fullness of truth displayed to us. We will never experience anything fuller under God's creation; and it is through the revelation of God with Jesus at the pinnacle that we interpret the "Spirit of Truth." Anything we regard as truth must stem from the revelation of the Scriptures and the instruction of Jesus.

[Andrew Cornelius]

If moral standards may shift inside the text, can they shift outside the text as well under the guidance of the Holy Spirit (thus creating the possibility that faithful homosexuality can legitimately be considered morally acceptable even if it isn't recognized as such in the Bible)?
Yes. But I would add that what ended up "in" the text first originated outside of and prior to it. So you have gentiles being incorporated into Israel before Acts speaks of the council in Jerusalem and so on. Early Christianity didn't have a complete NT, of course. Yet they followed Christ and received the spirit. Too often people make an idol/god out of a collection of writings. While the bible is extremely important, it is not the end-all, be-all.

Regarding polygamy, it has little to do with monogamous, committed homosexual marriages. The same rationale for heterosexual marriages can apply, albeit without the option of procreation (but 6.7 billion people is already enough I think). But if you want to address what is "biblical", Barry makes a great point. The bible doesn't explicitly rule out polygamy for all Christians. I am not saying I support it, but it is another issue altogether. The fundamental difference between Nate and me is that I don't view the back cover of the bible as authoritative in and of itself. In other words, I think the shifting of which Barry spoke did not end ~1,900 years ago.

[Nate Myers]

Early Christianity didn't have a complete NT, of course. Yet they followed Christ and received the spirit. Too often people make an idol/god out of a collection of writings. While the bible is extremely important, it is not the end-all, be-all.

Of course the Bible is not the end-all, be-all. It does not answer cleanly every major and/or minor issue we are confronted with. I do not consult the Bible for every question that comes up, or try to torture the text to say something it does not because of Biblical obsession. Some engage in such activity.

But what the Bible DOES do is provide a structure, a framework within which to make wise, just, moral decisions on human life. And we confess that it is God who provided this framework for us as He worked to shape a people to witness to the light. Even as I struggle with the sudden shift in circumcision in the early church, I can see where the thinking originated from, and it is consistent with the structure of the Bible. There's wiggle room in interpretation with the matter, as there is with any number of issues. And Gentiles had been incorporated into Israel long before the early church and the council in Jerusalem; thousands of years before, in fact.

So to "follow Christ and receive the spirit" is not one that takes place in a rootless, foundationless manner. "Is there room for such a belief or practice?" we should ask ourselves continually as we encounter issues and suggestions in our world. I would suggest, as a counterpoint to Andrew's suggestion the "people make an idol/god out of a collection of writings," that too often people make an idol/god out of the spirit of the age that seems true because of deep shaping influences, but needs to be relativized by the revelation of God. While intuition/moving with the spirit is extremely important, it is not the end-all, be-all of moral discernment.

I don't view the back cover of the Bible as authoritative. I view God as authoritative. And I see Jesus as the pinnacle of that authority. The centrality of Jesus in the story of God is incontrovertible. He finds his place in a story, brings completion and consistency to that story, and all of human history before and after was judged in the light of the truth he brought. Including what we believe to be true today.

[Barry Mast]

I think I may be circling back to my earlier point. If the scripture is not the end-all-be-all and God is our final authority with Jesus being the pinnacle...this all seems to lead to the primacy of the Holy Spirit as the guide and teacher of the community of faith. This still begs the question. Can the Holy Spirit, working in a community of faith, legitimately "override" the biblical text and make acceptable what was once unacceptable (or vice versa)? I am thinking specifically of the change in our view of slavery (apparently morally legitimate in much of the New Testament but, by and large, no longer legitimate in contemporary Christian thinking).

Can the Spirit of God confront a people so that they no longer exclude a homosexual relationship from being morally right in and of itself (I still believe that the abuse of such a relationship would be just as morally unacceptable as the abuse of a heterosexual relationship). What kind of evidence would we need to show that the Holy Spirit has indeed reshaped our thinking apart from the biblical text? Or are we pushed back out of moral relativism by eventually falling once again on the Bible as the end-all-be-all because discerning the Spirit of God from the spirit of the age is just too ambiguous?

[Andrew Cornelius]

The biblical texts themselves reveal some 'overriding'. I would add they further demonstrate morality is not simply some objective black-and-white other-wordly thing handed down from God devoid of fallible human construct. When we make the bible into a god, it becomes our God.

[Nate Myers]

Clearly morality is not always some objective black-and-white other-worldly thing, but sometimes it is clearer than clear, distinctively clear. While persons who excel at being "open to the Spirit" and to new light often have much to offer to those with too much structure, one can also say this;

"When we make our own hunches, our own leadings, our own senses, our own cultural understandings a god, they become our God."

So we live life seeking faithfulness uncomfortably in tension most times, but with deep clarity other times.

Andrew Cornelius said:

The biblical texts themselves reveal some 'overriding'. I would add they further demonstrate morality is not simply some objective black-and-white other-wordly thing handed down from God devoid of fallible human construct. When we make the bible into a god, it becomes our God.

[Andrew Cornelius]

http://516quailmeadow.blogspot.com/2009/06/gays-bible-and-kingdom-o...

[dlw]

I replied a while back and never got any responses.

http://www.thecommonroot.org/forum/topics/homosexuality-1?page=1&am...

My views are basically this: The word Homosexuality, as used today, refers to a heterogeneous set of phenomena. We're lumping apples and oranges and bananas and the two sides are insisting that they are either apples or oranges, when the right thing to do is to affirm the humanity and the fallenness of all individuals and then take matters more on a case-by-case basis. I believe this can be done without either denying the biblical ideal for human sexuality or getting hot-n-heavy over the human cultural institutions that surround actual marriages or civil-unions for the ways they accommodate human fallenness (like w. divorce, or allowing polygamist converts to keep their existing wives, or permitting bilateral civil unions and letting local church-communities decide if two partners are committed to upholding the biblical ideal of marriage in all other respects).

Now, we gotta be as wise as serpents on this issues, because as terrible as homophobia is, such a term can be wielded loosely to apply to a heterosexism that makes a normative distinction among sexual orientations. Gay-rights activism is notorious for drawing parallels between themselves and the civil rights movement, without any qualifications. It is the absence of qualifications that make it easily coupled with a libertinism and a biological determinism that are IMHO counter to the Gospel. If we don't make these distinctions, the result will be undue heat amongst ourselves, with the authority of the Bible being collateral damage.
dlw