We often hears that Christians have no choice but to regard homosexuality as a sin – that Scripture simply demands it.
As a Bible scholar and pastor myself, I say that Scripture does no such thing.
“I love gay people, but the Bible forces me to condemn them” is a poor excuse that attempts to avoid accountability by wrapping a very particular and narrow interpretation of a few biblical passages in a cloak of divinely inspired respectability.
“The Genesis creation stories can support the notion that sexual intercourse is designed to reunite male and female into one body, but they can also suggest that God’s blessing was first placed on an undifferentiated body that didn’t have sex at all.
Heterosexual sex was therefore an afterthought designed to give back the man what he had lost”.
It’s always entertaining when writers disprove their own theory.
“Paul’s letters urge followers of Christ to remain celibate and blame all Gentiles in general for their poor sexual standards”.
Notice she doesn’t provide references for this statement.
I thought Dr. Gagnon had already dispensed with the David/Jonathan thing.
I’ve never seen my priest “condemn” gay people. It is true that, if a same-sex couple asks him for a “marriage” or “blessing”, the answer is “no”. I tell MY children “no” all the time, and that is not condemnation(even though they might beg to differ). 🙂
More of the same…moving right along…
So many people are being led to destruction, pain and loss in the area of sexuality, and it really hurts when it is people in positions of authority who substitute lies for the truth as to what Scripture says about sexuality.
This isn’t about homosexuality, this is about purity, which is God’s desire and requirement for us in the Christian walk. I Corinthians 6:18-20. When you discard one of God’s requirements regarding purity, sooner or later you will discard them all. Sure, many of us will fail at one time or another–I bear my own deep scars from not being faithful to God’s Word in this area in my past–but that doesn’t mean we can simply ignore God’s desire for us to lead lives of purity and think it will not affect us spiritually.
Ahem. Matt 18:6.
Of course, Jennifer Wright is going to say that scripture says what Jennifer Wright wants it to say. Of course her argument is laughable and transparent. Yawn.
Anywho – why bother at all with a church like her’s – follow her lead and simply reject or reappraise any scripture that might suggest attendance (or anything else you don’t like in scripture): what’s more – you can do it from the comfort of your own home!
🙄
The mother of all straw men: “In Genesis, for example, it would seem that God’s original intention for humanity was androgyny, not sexual differentiation and heterosexuality…Ancient Christians and Jews explained this two-step creation by imagining that the first human person possessed the genitalia of both sexes. Then, when the androgynous, dually-sexed person was placed in the garden, s/he was divided in two.”
To recap this Biblical “scholar”: man was androgynous initially, so anything goes sexually today. My question, suppose that man was initially androgynous, but then God with apparent absolute intentionality made man and women distinct and complementary. Are we to ignore that?
Why doesn’t this Biblical “scholar” say that man reproduced asexually like protozoa? Does anyone think that this Biblical “scholar” puts any weight whatsoever into Genesis rather than simply reading the text to manipulate it?
the real point here #3 is that so many people do exactly what she has done, believing that they have made a compelling case simply because they themselves have made it. There is an altered comprehension of what truth is here, and this comprehension runs deep and strong in the Left. It is successful, it appears, because the complete isolation of the position makes the case irrefutable. If it is irrefutable, it MUST be true, must it not? Larry
Huh.
I am, of course, on her side in the sense that I believe that God does not call homosexuality inherently sinful.
But I have to say, if I were unconvinced of that, this is not the article that would convince me. The “primal androgyne” argument in particular is rather a non sequitur. As for the others — even if the relationship between David and Jonathan was sexual, which is far from obvious, it doesn’t demonstrate that God approves… God certainly did not care for David’s later adultery-and-murder maneuver. And the nephilim — I assume that’s what she’s referring to with the “sex between men and angels” bit — it strikes me as a bit of a reach to apply that rather odd passage to the story of Sodom.
If you’re going to cite the Bible as evidence on either side of this agument, then you have to lay your groundwork first, by answering questions like: what do I think the Bible is? Given that, how should we read it? What authority does it have, and how is that authority manifested?
For instance, if I say that the Bible is “God’s rule book,” then I have to approach it in one way. If, on the other extreme, I say that the Bible is “a collection of folk tales elevated by accident to holy writ,” then I have to approach it in an entirely different way. (Neither of the above describes my position, by the way.)
If you don’t lay that groundwork, then you’re simply going to be arguing past your opponent — as Knust and Gagnon are, here.
Same-sex attraction is a challenge, a test of faith. It’s not a sin. Homosexual practice signifies that one has failed the challenge, failed the test of faith. It’s a defiling sin.
God doesn’t condemn homosexuals. God warns them (and all of us who are sinners) via the Words of Scripture.
Marriage she seems to have forgotten is also about the Nature of God in Trinity. A full self giving love to another which is capable of producing life is not possible in homosexual relationships anymore than it is possible in masturbation. (I hope that term is not too candid.)
God is a God of creation and of life. It is one thing for sterility to exist for medical reasons and such is not an impediment to marriage. But deliberate sterility (especially in the context of pervesity) is something else. It is akin to taking Communion and spitting it out in the dirt. It affronts the Sacrament and denies its grace.
always amazing how thin revisionist arguments are….even from a ‘scholar’……… thankfully, the American (and Canadian and English and NZ….) people are not easily fooled and revisionists are seeing already tiny Sunday attendance falling precipitously …… many revisionists will close their doors in the next 20 years…….. people just ain’t so easily fooled…….even by a ‘scholar’
Such an important point Paula. It is one thing to be infertile. It is quite another to be anti-life,vfor such inherently are all homosexual relations.
Sodomy is the very paradigm of what anti-life means. Beneath all we do, evolution has declared that the creation and fostering of new life is every species all-in-all, its very survival, and all homosexuality stands in denial of that fundamental declaration. Larry