Editor’s Note: Last Sunday, the nation witnessed a horrific tragedy in Orlando, Florida. Over 50 patrons of a gay nightclub were murdered in the worst mass shooting in US history. In the aftermath of this tragedy, we’ve seen beautiful outpourings of love and solidarity across the country. We’ve also seen many who would place themselves under the “Christian” banner double down on hateful rhetoric and verbally attack the LGBT community.

First, we at Brazen Church want to offer our voice in love and solidarity with the LGBT community. Second, we want to help move the conversation on homosexuality forward by dismantling a common misconception – the idea that the Bible offers a crystal clear take on this issue. The reality is that homosexuality in the Bible is anything but straightforward… but you may not realize that if you read in English.

The following post was written by Dr. Donald Haynes for The United Methodist Reporter ahead of the 2016 General Conference in Portland. Dr. Haynes is a highly respected minister and a longtime writer, and despite coming from a more “conservative” theological stream, this is what he sees when he takes an honest look at scripture.

 

In the January-February 2016 issue of “Good News” magazine, Thomas Lambrecht wrote a very helpful article in which he presents quite clearly four of the proposals being circulated prior to the 2016 General Conference regarding the ordination, the appointment or the marriage of persons of LGBTQ sexual orientation. Any reader should thank Tom for bringing these into focus for all elected delegates to preview. I respectfully present a response.

Prior to his excellent specificity about potential legislative proposals, Tom wrote, “The root issues are biblical authority–‘will we keep church teaching in line with what the Scriptures say….’? This rather pejorative statement implies that the Scriptures speak with a unilaterally definitive voice on homosexuality. That is a stretch! To my knowledge, there are only seven biblical references to homosexuality. The most frequently quoted is Leviticus 18:21-22 that is in the context of Mosaic cultic laws, most of which we ignore. Most likely, he joins this text with other interpretative voices in Romans 1:26-27, I Corinthians 6:9-10 or even I Timothy 1:8-10. At least these are the passages over which I have more deeply poured and whose interpretations I have researched from biblical commentaries.

For me, there are some major stumbling blocks in making the Bible a manual of jurisprudent specificity rather than holistic principles:

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Western society loves to think.

The lineage of our method to thought traces back all the way to our Greco-Roman ancestors – Plato, Aristotle, and Socrates – the greatest thinkers of all time. The term Orthodoxy, or “correct belief”, is tied directly into these conversations of thought that happen to this day within the Christian Church: what do we think? What creeds do we affirm? To what doctrines do we hold?

These questions divide the Church into Catholics and Protestants, Orthodox and New Age, and into every denomination in between. They construct barriers that divide us, restrict us, and label us, until we become nothing, save for the labels that have been passed about behind our backs and under our noses.

There’s a reason that last sentence doesn’t sound biblical. I would suggest that the Bible presents a different reality. It presents a reality that is counter-intuitive to the thoughts and ideas we form on our own: about the world, the text, and the way those two intertwine.

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(Author’s Note: This started with direction and then sort of spiraled out on me. After sitting on it for way too long, I’m just releasing it’s imperfect self into the wild, because I think there are some things mentioned in here that people need to be talking about, and maybe some of you will resonate with some of those issues and write about them more eloquently than I do here.)

I think my least favorite part about growing up charismatic was the desperation.

My entire existence boiled down to this perpetual standard of “hunger”.  How desperate was I for God?

Sometimes, I felt genuinely desperate, and ironically, those were the “good” times, because I could tell I was being genuine. Other times, I couldn’t quite muster up that emotional longing, but I sure would try, all the while berating myself for not being genuinely “hungry for more of God.”

I remember one time, I even came up with this surprisingly wise philosophy, where I reasoned that if I wasn’t longing for God, I could at least long to be longing for Him. And maybe… if that didn’t work, I could long to long to be longing for Him.

Deep stuff.

Why so intent on this hunger/longing/desperation?

Well… because that’s the only way God was going to move… to bring this thing called “revival” to a world that was on it’s way to Hell.

The word on the pulpit was that if I didn’t want our loving God to perpetually roast everyone for infinity and beyond, we needed to get millions of people SO desperate for God to move, that He would oblige.

But even more than that, I think the answer was that I really wanted to be God’s best friend. I wanted to be the one He picked to release His supernatural power and reconcile the world to Himself.

And I hated myself for not wanting that even more than I already did.

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The Bible shows a progression of thought concerning the divine. Coming out of the pagan cultures of the Earth, Israel’s faith evolved from polytheism, or henotheism, to monotheism. Just as with many concepts within the Bible – through its different authors and writings spanning thousands of years – we see a plurality of views wrestling with each other and evolving into new ways of thinking concerning the nature of the divine.

Many Christians today seem to think that there is a unanimous voice in scripture concerning the nature of the metaphysical concepts that it describes. However, in dealing with metaphysical concepts, we must admit that it is a “through a glass darkly.” Metaphor, analogy, anthropomorphism, parable, poetry, and myth are constantly employed by the writers of the Bible. There is not always consistency with language when trying to grasp existential and metaphysical realities.

When we actually read and study the Bible and its history and culture, we find that the concepts within the Bible are very much evolving and progressing with new voices being added to the discussion. The Bible, after all, was written not by one person, but by dozens of people over the course of thousands of years. The story of human existence and culture and awareness is one of learning and growing and evolving into new understandings, and religion is not exempt from this process.

The multivocal and progressive nature of the Bible, instead of being seen as a threat (shaking the self-certain evangelical insistence of inerrancy), should be viewed as a beautiful testament to this faithful universal Presence that is drawing us up and forward into truth, relating to us where we are at, and summoning history towards himself. God is with us in the process.

With the generations that unfold from the Old Testament to the New Testament, we see a progressive nature to the way people see God, and this was all leading up to Jesus, as discussed in a previous article. But there are other metaphysical ideas that are evolving in the scriptures too, such as what we normally see as the antithesis to God, the character that we call “Satan.”

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Reading is good for you. It’s full of Vitamin A, Vitamin B, Calcium…

But I don’t have to convince you. You already love reading. That’s why you are reading at this very moment… reading this pointless intro to a collection of things you actually want to read.

Many of these authors will disagree with each other on various issues, and we wouldn’t have it any other way. Like Brazen Church, these books aren’t about replacing your old ideology with a new, equally dogmatic one. They’re about breaking the box that we’ve placed God in and exposing us to a more complex, dynamic, and beautiful reality than our minds have made room for. You’ll learn a ton from every single one of these authors.

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‘Whatever you do in life, surround yourself with smart people who’ll argue with you.’ – John Wooden

We all want to be part of a community that loves us, validates us, and even agrees with us. We thrive among “like-minded” friends who share our view of the world, and thanks to today’s connectivity, finding our “tribe” has never been easier. Regardless of where you fall on the ideological spectrum, it’s incredibly easy to find a group that agrees with you wholeheartedly and will affirm your views.

It’s also incredibly easy to find a group that agrees with you wholeheartedly, will affirm your views, and will join you in mocking and disparaging anyone who disagrees with your shared perspectives.

No group is immune to this phenomenon. Let me say that again. No tribe, group, club, or community is immune to this phenomenon.

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