Jack Rogers, Presbyterian minister, considers himself an evangelical. He had the standards anti-gay stance that most evangelicals have, until he did an extensive study on what the bible says about homosexuality. Now he’s written a book, Jesus, the Bible, and Homosexuality. He believes that Jesus would accept gays and transgenders just like he did other socially marginalized people.
He was recently interviewed on KQED’s Forum program, check out Jesus, the Bible, and Homosexuality (real-media audio). I transcribed some of the interview below…
Rogers: Jesus accepted women and persons with disabilities, and people who were outcasts, and took them as his disciples…how would Jesus treat gays and transgender people who are marginalized today? He would accept and love them….
Every time in society and the church when we meet a new issue that we haven’t thought much about, we seem to lapse back into the old bad ways of literalism and proof-texting and taking one verse out of it’s historical and cultural context in the bible and making a universal law out of it. And it takes a while to get beyond that and get back to the right way of looking at it, through the eyes of Jesus’ redemptive ministry.
Krasney: What about love the sinner and hate the sin?
R: In practice, the rhetoric used is actually very violent, they make outrageous claims about homosexuals that are not true.
K: And the injunctions about men lying with other men?
R: You have to look at the OT and Leviticus, and what you have is a people with a desperate need to be different from the people around them, and they develop these elaborate regulations to keep themselves pure. If a child cursed his parents, he should be stoned to death. [These rituals were] designed for ritual purity, and do not apply to our modern situations at all.
The problem with this logic is that those things are still morally wrong. But it does make a point about why we might not have to follow the prescribed punishments. But I’m not convinced that this is the right argument.
K: One of the sterling examples you use is that priests could not be ordained if they were lame or had a scar on their face… you say that similarly, the prohibitions regarding ordination of homosexuals ought to be wiped off the board.
R: Absolutely.
Good point. Does this analogy apply? Why or why not?
Yes. Because it makes no sense to treat people differently, or unfairly, for being born different, and for not hurting anybody as a result.
Well said. But don't forget the "go and sin no more" part.
No, because being lame or having a scar on your face isn't a sin. Acceptance of homosexuality as a good way of life consistent with Christ's teaching is, frankly, calling evil good, by Biblical standards. I would accept people who struggle with this particular sin in my church without a second thought; God knows I have my own struggles in other areas. But I am willing to admit that my sin is sin. I would not ordain a practicing homosexual for the same reason I would not ordain a serial adulterer.
I agree matthew.
But what the author is saying is that the ritual purity laws were all based on ritual purity, and did not mean that the prohibitions on ordination were sins – so if a scar is not a sin, neither is homosexuality. He then links this to the obvious condemnation of homosexuality as a capital crime via the punishment for rebellious children – i.e. if a scar is not a sin, and childhood rebellion is certainly not a capital crime (so therefore, they must have been concerned with ritual purity, not sin), then homosexuality also must have been a ritual impurity (like menstruation), not a sin.
Prety good argument. But I don't think it's right. By this argument, none of the capital crimes, including murder, would be considered a sin.
So the real question is, how do we separate ritual impurity from sin? While all sins are impurity, some of the ritual prohibitions were not sins. Where did homosexuality fall in this schema? As a SIN.
I don't think it's a good argument, myself. Scars were manifestly treated in the Old Testament as ritual impurities, not as sins. Childhood rebellion, like homosexuality, was manifestly treated as a sin, not as a ritual impurity. The legal punishment no longer applies, but the status of the activity remains the same.
I generally look to the first recorded church conference in Acts as a guide to these matters. That conference did away with virtually all of the ritual codes, but it maintained the stance that Christians (Jew or Gentile) must abstain from sexual immorality. For them, of course, sexual immorality was defined by the Torah.
Why does the legal punishment no longer apply?
The more I read stuff like this, the more I am convinced that xianity is a crock. You think Scientology is weird? Listen to these two guys above.
Louis brings up a good point. All of those jewish rituals seem really primitive and strange.
seeker – That's a tougher question. It doesn't change my argument about the sinfulness of homosexual behavior, though.
Perhaps I should have said "is no longer applied". I've heard a few arguments about this, but again I would refer to the New Testament – actually the Jesus quote you alluded to earlier. In dealing with the woman caught in adultery, Jesus upheld the sinfulness of the act while effectively removing the punishment, as an act of mercy and grace. Of course, that's really what the Crucifixion was all about.
Though that assumes Jesus actually did those things. Most of the Bible scholars that I have read believe that the story of the adulterous woman was a later addition to the book, as it is not found in some early manuscripts and does not match the writing style of the rest of John. That said, I am all for interpretations that do not call for stoning me!
As for the Hebrew Bible, one could simply argue that they took sex seriously back then. Remember that non-virgin girls were also to be stoned, though oddly lesbianism is never mentioned. Others hold that homosexuality was tied to religious rituals of the day, which might explain the verses in I Kings. Some textual critics believe this section or even all of Leviticus was written during the Babylonian captivity, so the passage might be tied to that culture's relative acceptance of homosexual practices.
It still doesn't explain to me why I should pay any attention whatsoever to the ramblings of primitive sheepherders from 1,000 b.c.
You shouldn't. You should find out what god wants now, if god exists at all. We should all seek to forsake lies and embrace truth. And love. Not easy, based on our natures.
I agree that we should forsake lies and, instead, embrace truth. That's why I left xianity.
Love is another matter.