Thoughts on Biblical Theology, Homosexuality and the United Methodist Church

 I am saddened by the schism of the United Methodist Church over whether to accept and ordain LGBTQ folks.  But the rift is really about more than whether the Church should include the LGBTQ community.  It is about how Christians read the Bible - and how their world view influences their understanding of Scripture.

It all started with the Apostles' Creed.  That's where we went wrong.  That's when we began to define faith as right belief, rather than right behavior.  It became more important to give one's cognitive assent to a structure of orthodox rules, rather than to live as Jesus taught us to live.  

Presbyterians (I'm one) believe that "truth is in order to goodness."  That's one of our "radical," or core beliefs. In other words, if something is true, then it should lead to goodness, and not evil.  Or, to use Jesus' words, "You will know them by their fruits."  

When we forgot that FAITH is living from a childlike trust in God and redefined faith as swearing an oath to a system of doctrines, we lost the truth, and consequently the goodness.  Our bitter fruit included the Inquisition., burning "heretics," and fighting "holy" wars.

The Church became the very Pharisees against whom Jesus railed.

Jesus prayed that we would be one, even as He is one with the Father.  But when it comes to Unity, the Christian Church has been a colossal failure.  We have been racked with division ever since the Roman church split from its Eastern Orthodox family.  Do you know who the lord of division is? Satan.

In contrast to what many of us believe the Bible teaches, here are some facts that I encourage you to verify for yourself:

• Jesus NEVER mentions homosexuality.  Some argue that he doesn't mention it because he didn't think it was up for debate.  That is an assumption that folks make from their own biases. We don't really now why Jesus avoided the subject.  But we DO know that he did not shy away from condemning sin.  He attacked the hypocrisy of the Pharisees.  He warned against the love of money. He drove the moneylenders out of the Temple. On the other hand, he spoke to the Samaritan woman at the well - a scandalous thing to do in his day.  He defended the woman caught in adultery.  He touched the leper.  He ate and drank with tax collectors and sinners.  If the Church is looking for role model for excluding the sinner, Jesus ain't it.
• Leviticus outlaws same sex relationships between men . But it NEVER says one word about same sex relationships between women.
• Men who rape other men in prison would kill you if you said they were gay. It's not about love, but about power and humiliation.  The same is true in war.  I'm sure you've read about, or heard about, Russian soldiers raping women and children in Ukraine.  The "holy" soldiers of the Islamic State did the same, to men and women (ironically, they execute their own citizens in peacetime for the same behavior).  This method of debasing their vanqished foes has been practice for five millennia, by Muslim and Christian armies alike.  THIS IS THE SIN OF SODOM AND GOMORRAH.  It was the contempt shown by the men of these towns toward the strangers within their gates that angered God enough to destroy them.
• When the Apostle Paul condemns homosexual behavior in Greco-Roman culture, in Romans 1, he is speaking specifically about the practice of older rich men hiring teenage boys for sex at men-only orgies.
• In that same passage Paul equally condemns other behaviors: "envy, murder, strife, deceit and malice. ... gossips, slanderers, God-haters, insolent, arrogant and boastful; ... they disobey their parents; they have no understanding, no fidelity, no love, no mercy."  If the Church is going to be morally consistent, we're going to have to exclude gossips and people who disobey their parents as well as LGBTQ folks.  Heck, there will be nobody left.
• And here's a nuance that almost everybody misses: Paul does not call homosexual behavior a sin, but a consequence of sin.  The sin in this passage is idolatry - worshiping the creature rather than the Creator.

But the problem isn't really homosexuality, but what the Church calls the Authority of Scripture. Or as evangelicals are wont to claim, whether we believe the Bible.  What does that mean, to believe the Bible?

The Bible NEVER claims to be inerrant.  In fact, the Church didn't start talking about inerrancy until the turn of the 20th Century.  The Bible claims only to be inspired, and that only one time, in Paul's second letter to Timothy.  Paul does not say that Scripture is scientifically and historically accurate and must be believed without question.  He says that scripture is "God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness, so that the servant of God may be thoroughly equipped for every good work (II Tim. 3:16-17, NIV)."  The purpose of Scripture is not to teach orthodoxy (right thinking), but orthopraxy (right acting).

As an aside, when Paul wrote this, "all scripture" was the Septuagint - the Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible. There was no New Testament. Paul probably didn't even know that what he was writing would one day be considered "God-breathed," as well.  And even more scandalous for pious Protestants, "all scripture" also included the Deuterocanonical books -- the books in the Catholic Bible that Martin Luther and John Calvin excised from the Scriptures.

Even if the Bible were inerrant, does anyone really read it literally?  As my good friend Larry Bates is fond of saying, the only true literalists have only one eye and one hand.  That is to say, one cannot lift out of the Bible the parts with which one is comfortable while ignoring the uncomfortable parts.  This makes biblical literalism untenable. 

For example:  if you are going to use the Leviticus passage prohibiting male-male sex, then you are going to have to be ok with female-female sex (it's not prohibited . . . read it for yourself).  AND you're going to have to stop eating shrimp.  And you're going to have to have your tattoos removed. And you have to stop wearing stretchy jeans, because they mix cotton with Spandex. And Bacon is definitely out.

If you're going to leverage the Sodom and Gomorrah story, then you're also going to have to be ok with having your virgin daughters gang-raped by the local hoodlums.

If you're going pull your church out of the denomination over the inclusion of LGBTQ folks, then you're also going to have to split from the gossips. And of course, you'll have to stone all the children who disobey their parents.

Finally, Jesus never commanded us to write up a list of doctrines and hold people to believing them. Jesus never said, "believe in the Trinity, and the Virgin Birth, and the Resurrection of the Dead."  

Jesus said, "Follow me."  But it's a lot easier to focus on who's in and who's out than it is to deny yourself, take up your cross, and follow Jesus.