The Church’s failure to compete in the spheres of vocabulary and language has brought our society to the place where it is about to get hit by a train. It’s time for Christians to ask for, even insist upon, several things. The Church needs to: (1) reclaim the true biblical concept of tolerance; (2) reclaim the vocabulary of civil rights; (3) explain biblical teaching on family issues; and (4) refuse to be browbeaten by comical, trendoid explanations of biblical concepts – as if the Church and Israel before it have been wrong or confused about homosexuality for 4,000 years. American Christians must (preferably before tomorrow morning) cease to be intimidated by the possibility that someone may claim they are motivated by “hate.”
I was annoyed when I saw a clip of the pro-homosexual marriage video in which Jack Black appears as Jesus, castigating Christians by reminding them that shellfish, like gay sex, is an abomination in the Bible. Is this really the best that supporters of gay marriage can do? And have Christians become so utterly crippled in biblical knowledge and their ability to articulate it that hearing the phrase “God hates shrimp” paralyzes them?
Some time ago Christianity Today ran an excellent article by Edith Humphrey, a seminary professor, who explained for the confused what the Bible teaches: God is opposed to homosexuality. This shouldn’t come as a newsflash, but in our day we have many who are deceiving themselves or are being deceived. In her article, “What God Hath Not Joined,” Ms. Humphrey explains:
Leviticus 18:22 says bluntly: “You shall not lie with a male as with a woman; it is an abomination.” Some within the church argue that such prohibitions concern only cultic practices in ancient Israel and so are no longer binding on Christians. But some Levitical proscriptions concern immoral behavior, not simply ritual uncleanness. We need to ask, How does the general pattern of the Scriptures direct us to understand this prohibition?
The answer is that homoerotic behavior contradicts God’s purpose for all his creatures. It is not in the same category as the cultic or cultural prohibitions regarding non-kosher foods and the twining together of two types of thread. Like the prohibition of incest (Lev. 18:6-18), the prohibition of homoerotic acts addresses every age.
As the New Testament epistles show, the early church did not discard what the Hebrew Bible said about sexual ethics. When Corinthian Christians thought that their spiritual sophistication gave them license to sin, Paul challenged them (1 Cor. 6:9ff.): “Do you not know that evildoers will not inherit God’s kingdom?” Then he offered as examples those who steal, get drunk, scorn what is holy, pursue sexual immorality, and practice two modes of male homoerotic behavior.
Some argue that we cannot understand Paul’s reference to these two behaviors (malakoi and arsenokoitai, as in and ) in terms of homoeroticism. But arsenokoitai is in fact a compound word derived from the Greek version of Leviticus 20:13 for those men “who lie with a male.” Malakoi means literally “soft ones” and in Greek writings frequently identified the passive homoerotic partner. It is a mistake to limit the term’s meaning, as do some, to masturbation, or as the NRSV does, to male prostitution.
The Genesis narratives, because they are stories, and the Levitical passages, because they are part of a code given to Israel in particular, must be considered in light of the whole biblical narrative. When we do this, the lists of immoral behavior in and show that the early Christian communities held firm to Old Testament views of sexual immorality…
Of course. But it’s worth thinking about these things in a little more depth than what we get in sound bites, which are more often than not pure sophistry. It’s important we do so because the press is not going to let up, and is forever seeking to teach people of good will that the Bible can be read to support gay marriage.
This week, Newsweek’s Lisa Miller sticks her finger in the eye of everyone who has read the Bible, saying:
Biblical literalists will disagree, but the Bible is a living document, powerful for more than 2,000 years because its truths speak to us even as we change through history. In that light, Scripture gives us no good reason why gays and lesbians should not be (civilly and religiously) married—and a number of excellent reasons why they should.
Is this for real? The Jesus who said “go and sin no more” now wants two girls to marry each other?
Christians need to respond to this drivel every time it appears in print, for when we let these things go unanswered, others over time may accept them by default.
Albert Mohler, never afraid of a fight, takes Newsweek to task:
Disappointingly, Newsweek editor Jon Meacham offers an editorial note that broadens Newsweek’s responsibility for this atrocity of an article and reveals even more of the agenda: “No matter what one thinks about gay rights –- for, against or somewhere in between –- this conservative resort to biblical authority is the worst kind of fundamentalism,” Meacham writes. “Given the history of the making of the Scriptures and the millennia of critical attention scholars and others have given to the stories and injunctions that come to us in the Hebrew Bible and the Christian New Testament, to argue that something is so because it is in the Bible is more than intellectually bankrupt –- it is unserious, and unworthy of the great Judeo-Christian tradition.”
Well, that statement sets the issue clearly before us. He insists that “to argue that something is so because it is in the Bible is more than intellectually bankrupt.” No serious student of the Bible can deny the challenge of responsible biblical interpretation, but the purpose of legitimate biblical interpretation is to determine, as faithfully as possible, what the Bible actually teaches — and then to accept, teach, apply and obey.
It’s time to focus on teaching and proclaiming the truths that virtually all societies have taken for granted across those millennia, whether they had a Bible or not, and without being ashamed to do so.
