faithasawayoflife

On thinking biblically about sexuality

As I've worked on the chapter on Leonard Cohen in my forthcoming book, Broken Hallelujah, I've been trying to get at the deep biblical grounding of his work, and his sense of God, in particular. In Hallelujah, he says this: "You say I took the name in vain / I don't even know the name / But if I did, well really, what's it to you? / There's a blaze of light / In every word / It doesn't matter which you heard / The holy or the broken Hallelujah."  So I've been looking into the phrase 'the name' which refers to the foundational Jewish and Christian text from Exodus 3:14 where Moses says to God, who shall I tell them sent me, and God tells Moses 'I am who I am' (one translation). 

Anyhow, I digress. I got a great recommendation to help me think about this text.  In Thinking Biblically: Exegetical and Hermeneutical Studies, Andre LaCocque and Paul Ricoeur engage in reading a set of "First Testament" (as they call it) texts, reading them together through their biblical and philosophical scholarly eyes, respectively.  The preface, on how they read Scripture, is incredibly illuminating and speaks in very helpful ways to my struggles to say why I don't buy what my critics on the issue of homosexuality say, namely, that not reading key texts their way means I've abandoned faithfulness to the Scriptures, and perhaps the Christian faith for another faith of my own designs.  Here's how I put it in a post a few weeks ago:

Despite the admission that Scripture says nothing positive about same-sex sexual relations, I chafe at claims that faithfulness to Scripture requires giving over primary authority on these questions to two texts,  Genesis 1:26-28 and Mark 10:2-12.  These two texts, our critics say, prove God's intention in creation for marriage as a "life-long promise of fidelity between a man and a woman" as the ELCA draft Social Statement on Human Sexuality puts it. Why chafe at this claim? I've been married to Sonja now 18 years, faithfully and with joy. I do take these texts to be important in setting a scriptural context for discussion of marriage.  It is just that I think these texts say more than "marriage is a life-long promise of fidelity between a man and a woman"

So, if these texts don't just mean ONE thing, how to make the case?  Well, partly I know that the issue is how one interprets Scripture, but it is not just how one interprets particular texts, but the overall view of what one thinks Scripture is at all.  The new teaching resource from the ELCA titled Opening The Book of Faith has a clear and accessible introduction to a Lutheran hermeneutic (things like: the word of God is Jesus and the good news about the meaning of his life, death and resurrection, and the Scriptures bear this word, without being reducible to it.  So, Martin Luther would say, the bible holds the good news like the manger and straw held Jesus.  The take-away is that every word of Scripture is not equal; we don't worship the bible but Christ whom it shows. So if some ugly passage encourages genocidal fury or stoning your teenager, hold that up against Christ who says, "love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you." 

I find the Lutheran hermeneutic hugely freeing and smart, and of great help in making sense of Scripture.  But I found something fresh in LaCocque and Ricoeur, which is complicated but let me take a shot at it briefly.  Most of this is either quotation or direct summary from their book, so don't quote me on it--quote LaCocque and Ricoeur!

The first factor: That the biblical corpus was written means that we read it, and that reading confers an autonomy, an independent existence on the text.  A corollary follows.  The autonomy of the text asks us to abandon concern to recover the author's intentions and to set them up as governing all interpretation.  Historical studies are key, but the authors argue, the meaning of the text is an event emerging at the intersection of the constraints the text bears within itself and the different expectations communities of reading and interpretation that the presumed authors of the text could not have anticipated. 

The second factor:  The formulation and accumulation of different traditional readings of a text within the canon of Scripture, and that form a kind of trajectory of interpretation rooted in the the text but that distances us somewhat further from the author's presumed intention. 

The third factor: The living word 'spoken' by the reading of the text in contemporary communities has its own authority not reducible to the written text.  The Jewish tradition speaks of a 'written Torah' and an 'orally transmitted Torah' to cope with this distinction. The authors, interestingly, give the 16th century reformers and their principle of sola scriptura tore apart these two, creating the possibility of a text as a cadaver to be historically dissected and dismissed, a la Bart Ehrman 500 years later.  The oral texts projected a future, and writing down the text need not consign them to history; the text exists thanks to the community, for the use and to give shape to, the community and its living into God's promised future.

This includes the way the First Testament follows a trajectory beyond the first corpus and inside a second corpus, not abolishing the first, but reinterpreting and, in a sense, fulfilling the first, in the sense that fulfillment presupposes consistency of a tradition.  Christian reading is not taken as a substitute for Jewish reading, but as an alternative to the traditional Jewish reading.

The final factor, and the key one for me, but that can't be gotten to without the other three: The hermeneutics that places the principle accent on authorial intention and historical context tends to claim a univocal status for the meaning of the text.  What the authors are offering is a hermeneutics that is attentive to the history of reception, respectful of the irreducible plurivocity of the text.  The text is not something unilinear, not something given finality instituted by the presumed intention of the author, but multidimensional.  Just as a work of art solicits several interpretations whose cumulative effects are meant to do justice to the work and contribute to its subsequent life, the way the interpreting community proposes a historical reading and interpretation contributes to the pluridimentionality of the text. 

If this all has any value, and I think it does have, then it at the very least exposes some of our opponents as seeking to create doctrinal-historical straight jackets for some scripture texts that seem very self-serving.  I want to wonder with them if their readings are the only ones, and if they are the only possible ones, both in Scripture and in subsequent communities of interpretation.  Of course this is not an argument for any reading at all having value or authority within a community, but it does raise the question best epitomized by the parable Peter Rollins loves to tell.  Here it is, in his own words:

There is an ancient Jewish parable which illustrates this, in which two rabbis are arguing over a verse in the Torah, an argument that has gone on for over twenty years. In the parable God gets so annoyed by the endless discussion that he comes down and he tells them that he will reveal what it really means. However, right at this moment they respond by saying, "What right do you have to tell us what it means? You gave us the words, now leave us in peace to wrestle with them.

Soon: God Loves Gay Marriage: On Lutheran Debates, part four, with notes on this idea of a trajectory of Scripture interpretation and its pluridimentionality (what a word!).

Anon and Peace,
Chris

Tony asks: Should Christian leaders be outed on their view of gay marriage?

Tony asks an uncomfortable question about the consequences for Christian public leaders who come out in favor of gay marriage and all that implies. They risk, esp. in the Evangelical world, losing speaking and publishing opportunities, and even jobs.  Many have private thoughts but waffle or keep silent in public. Tony asks if this lacks integrity.  I admit that I kept relatively quite in this blog about my views during the years I was at Yale as a result of concerns my boss had about delicate donor relations.  Making my views too public might cost us, literally.  So I agreed. While I think such self-silencing does lack integrity, as a Lutheran believer who understands the reality of our lives as sinner-saints, I think everything I do lacks integrity in the sense that I can't resolve the sinful motivations within me for whatever I do.  What integrity I do have comes, to put it in pious but theologically accurate terms, from 'Christ who lives in me'.  So I consider my views on sexuality, too, not something to be held on to but out of love and concern for those who suffer the indignity of rejection and condemnation, I need to be conformed to Christ, breaking open what I have learned in my study and reflection, giving it to those who need that food for thought.  Now at Luther Seminary, I feel more free to speak, and also more responsibility to do so as a theologian of the church teaching at one of its seminaries at a time when the discussion is so central in church and nation.  Too many good people don't take up the work of articulating our reasons for supporting gay marriage, and then it seems as if we don't have them.  We do have them, and we need to say it for the sake of those who might otherwise have reason to despair.
Anon, and peace,
Chris

God Loves Gay Desire: On Lutheran Debates, part three

I'm gradually working my way through a series of related posts on the sexuality debates ongoing in the ELCA, the Lutheran tribe among whom I try to live out my Christian faith.  The stakes are high just now because our every-other-year  national gathering (called the Churchwide Assembly) in Minneapolis in August is, among other things, voting on a proposed social statement on human sexuality as well as related proposals to allow for same-sex unions and ordination for those living in such unions (neither of which we officially allow at present). 

In this post I want to venture a bit further with the logic I'm seeking to follow.  I started in my first post arguing that God loves gays (see here). That, I said, is not in dispute.  The question is how to encourage gays to live their Christian lives because of God's judgement and mercy shown in Christ.  What we say here depends upon how we understand sin in relation to gay persons.  That leads to my second post which takes up the key question of whether being gay is a result of God's good creation, or a result of the disordering effects of sin (see here).  I carefully work through the argument for saying God loves gays gay; that is, God made them that way and delights in their lives and loves.  So it follows from such a position, then, that God loves gay desire, the topic I'll say a few words about here.

  As I noted at the end of my last post, Lutheran theologian Paul Hinlickly has said he is just waiting for "some fool to argue that".  To be specific, he argues that:

The Social Statement utterly ignores the Reformation-era controversies regarding monastic vows and the theology of marriage that the Reformers developed out of the Holy Scriptures and professed in the Augsburg Confession in the light of the gospel. One of the most important social consequences of the Reformation gospel is therefore ignored as an embarrassment and left behind as an impediment to the sexual liberation intended for us by the religious Left. I am just waiting for some fool to argue that, as Luther insisted against monastic vows that sexual desire implanted by God cannot be denied, so also homosexual desire cannot be denied. I am just waiting, as I said, for some fool to try that silly piece of reasoning. It overlooks the central issue in contention in this controversy, whether God has created and blessed homosexual desire, or whether such desire is a deformation of God’s good creation. Well, let’s be merciful. Cogent reasoning has never been the strength of the religious Left, which looks instead for emotional symbols to serve as pretexts to fool people.

I will have to leave it up to others to decide in what ways I am a fool, but I have been working with exactly such an argument since the I wrote my masters thesis in Berkeley in 1995 (published as Married in Sight of God: Theology, Ethics and Debates over Homosexuality, UPA 2000).  I've summarized and developed the constructive argument of that book in a recent chapter titled, "Married in the Sight of God: Martin Luther, Theology, and Same-Sex Unions."  Any serious reader of my position will see that I am not, as Hinlickly suggests, overlooking the central issue of whether God has created and blessed homosexual desire.  Furthermore, in making such an argument I do not overlook scripture, nor the core texts he holds to be so important in the Reformers' theology of marriage (Genesis 1:26-28 and Mark 10:2-12).  However, I read them differently, and count as central other passages that open other directions of interpretation allowing one to say God loves gays gay, and therefore exactly those desires Luther argued must not--indeed cannot--be thwarted by the imposition of celibacy apply to our contemporary imposition of celibacy on gays who wish to serve as pastors.  I won't even go into the silly position we've found ourselves in affirming the person as good while condemning the desire or acting on the desire of same-sex attraction as an "abiding defect." How is it that such deeply rooted desires can be separated from personhood? I've heard too many stories of self-hatred and near suicide to buy that argument.  Gays are good all the way down, and subject to sin as all people, not for reasons particular to their same-sex attraction.  Sexual desires will have their way for good or ill, Luther would say, and therefore ought to be channeled towards good in the estate of marriage, an estate that can by analogy be understood as the social form able to guide such same-sex desire in its expression.

A caution, however, in rushing to Luther for help in shoring up our positions, whatever they are.  Any claim that we ought to simply take what Luther said about sexuality, desire and marriage without some fresh thinking is worth debating, I'd say.  Listen to Luther on sex:

In Paradise that union would have taken place without any bashfulness, as an activity created and blessed by God.  It would have been accompanied by a noble delight, such as there was at the time in eating and drinking.  Now, alas, it is so hideous and frightful a pleasure that physicians compare it with epilepsy or falling sickness. (LW1, Commentary on Genesis, 119).

Really? I'd say that such a quote makes clear how difficult it is to say what exactly God intended in the original creation, even if we must say some things clearly nonetheless (such as God made creation good, and so material creation is not evil).  Yet our limitations of knowledge, for example Luther’s understanding of science and the body, show us how mistaken we can be.  We simply work with a completely different understanding of human anatomy and physiology than Luther and as a consequence we have evidence that impacts our theological understandings of sexuality in ways he could not have foreseen. This is true in many respects, and not simply in the meaning of orgasm and pleasure during sex.  While it may be contested in some circles, I'd like to venture that the simple categorical equation of sexual pleasure with sin is unchristian, an example of what Charles Taylor calls the deeply problematic "excarnating" impulse in Christianity in the West.    I'll say more about those issues in my last two posts on gay marriage and gay sex.  For now, a quote to lead us towards the next post on gay marriage, this from a the chapter I wrote noted above.

"While covenantal promise-making is often symbolized in Scripture through heterosexual images (Christ and his bride, the Church), it is not always (see Ruth 1:16-17 or Matthew 23:37).  At any rate, the key factor is not sexual orientation (God’s or ours) but the promise-making and practice of fidelity.  To experience love and self-giving, and to receive the fullness of unconditional promise in return, is not a heterosexual hope, or a homosexual hope.  It is a human hope.  It is, fundamentally, a response to Adam’s plight in the Garden of Eden: a concern that the human not be alone, that this new creature have companionship of it’s own kind.  God has made marriage that we might learn something of God’s own trinitarian life: a perfect community of mutual self-giving and love.  And thus, what God wants from marriage is to provide for the most basic of human hopes.  Here is the eloquent testimony of British theologian and priest, Jeffery John, speaking of “homosexual” Christians he has known:

What they hoped for was precisely the same as their heterosexual friends: finding someone to love and be wholly given to, someone to grow together with, someone to be there at the end of the day and to the end of their life.    It seems to me inhumane and un-Christian (in a profound, not trivial sense) to deny that hope to so many men and women whom God has created for fulfillment—yes—but a fulfillment which will only be reached through our learning in this life to love one another in God’s way.  That is why I believe we have an absolute duty in the Church to offer homosexual couples, clerical and lay, not merely a grudging admission, but a positive theological understanding of their relationships, just as we do for heterosexual couples in marriage: to help them realize the same hope, the same ideal, of secure, faithful, lifelong love."

Anon, and peace,
Chris

Celebrating Luther Seminary Graduation

I felt compelled to write something positive after a depressing post yesterday and focusing on the fabulous graduates of Luther Seminary getting diplomas tomorrow seemed the obvious place to start. The best and simplest compliment I can make is to say that among this class are many that I would happily have as my own pastor.  Is that not the gold standard?  Of course not everyone would want the sort of pastor I want, but the basics of faithfulness, critical thinking about church and world, and imagination are present in spades. I think about the creative preaching I heard during my fall course on preaching and worship. I think of the searching reflections I read from my class on worship and politics.  I imagine the hilarious and moving articles I read in the student papers, the Concord and the spoof Noncord.  I have a buzz in my brain from thinking with a small group about secularism, modern society and the moral life.  All in all,  I enter into my first commencement exercises proud to be on the faculty and proud of the amazing men and women we're sending on to their next stage of life, mission and ministry. Are we perfect? No way. We're broken all the way down, baby.  But we work out of that brokenness in ways that allows God's love to be manifested in us, through us, for the sake of a hurting world.  Blessings upon you, graduates!
Anon, and peace,
Chris

Sickening news of more clerical sexual abuse

As a parent and clergyman, I feel my heart break and my face flush in anger to read the NYT article detailing the final report of the Irish Commission to Inquire into Child Abuse.  Established in 2000 after decades of rumors and investigative journalism, the report highlights incredible abuses going back into the 1930s at church-run 'reformatory schools' many of which simply put boys and girls to work in shops (as this picture from the St. Joseph's Industrial School).

Of the more than 1000 who testified anonymously, more than 90% reported physical abuse and more than 50% reported sexual abuse, on top of normal conditions of neglect, emotional abuse, and all done under the auspices of Catholic religious orders running these institutions.  The comments section is a study in how bad the public image is for the followers of Jesus today. We are imphatically NOT "known by our love for one another" (John 13:34-35). I don't really know what to say. Explaining it, even by acknowedging the power of sin and evil, don't seem to do justice to the feeling of tragic, irreparable damage such abuse does.  Thoughts?

anon, and peace,

Chris

What the ELCA Could Learn from Obama's Abortion Speech at Notre Dame

When can you remember any speech by a sitting President of the United States that so ably discussed the role of sin in social life and the way it ought to impact our way of holding deeply held views as we engage those with whom we disagree? (I really hear the influence of Reinhold Niebuhr here). This speech was deep and offers the means for thinking through how I engage sexuality debates in my own denomination, the ELCA. I am in the midst of a couple post series on sexuality and especially homosexuality. And I hope that I can imbue my writing on these issues with something like Obama's winsome combination of self-assurance and self-doubt, a self-doubt rooted in knowledge both of my own sin and the importance of loving the neighbor to whom I owe my love most of all. Here's the speech, embedded form a handy new feature I learned today from Scribd, the YouTube of written documents. Obama Notre Dame Commencement Address, 2009

Publish at Scribd or explore others: Fiction Non-fiction university obama

God Loves Gays Gay: On Lutheran Debates, part two

About a week ago I began a series of posts based upon my basic view that God loves gays.  It turns out that the sacrifice of love Jesus made was for all, and not just for all people, but for all creation.  Faithful people on all sides of the question start here, with welcome in the Gospel. Those often labeled 'progressives' or 'the religious left' who are arguing for change in the church's teaching on homosexuality don't often admit that those opposed to change ARE for welcome. It is the character of their welcome that I want to explore, and how welcome looks different from a different starting place.

The crux of the issue is, I believe, embodied in this young woman's poster in the photograph.  The issue, that is, revolves around how one answers the question: are gay persons part of a good creation, God's intention for life, or do they represent a tragic result of sin and the disordering of creation that followed?  The question I'd like to deal with here is:

Can one be faithful to Scripture and the Confessions to which I am bound in my confirmation and ordination vows AND affirm the goodness of gays as gay? Some critics have told me that in holding such a view I am at best dangerous and unfaithful, and at worst in heresy (as are a good number of my colleagues teaching at Lutheran Seminaries and colleges). It is a question worth asking, I think, how well we have been heard if more than 140 people in theological education, many at ELCA institutions, can summarily by dismissed as 'dangerous and unfaithful'.  As I hope to show through these posts, I may at points be wrong, but I do not intend to engage these issues in a 'dangerous and unfaithful' way. 

So, onward.  To begin, a word about blogs. This is not, I repeat, not an academic paper. I'll hyperlink to articles and chapters I've written, but this is meant to be brief, timely and provocative. The nuance may not be fully on display and that's okay in this genre.

I acknowledge here, as I have any number of times before, Scripture (and in the Christian tradition) has little to say about same-sex orientation, love and commitment.  Those few time anything at all related to same-sex relationship is mentioned, setting aside for now the vital debates regarding the meaning of the texts, the character of comment is either seen as friendship and therefore positive (Ruth and Naomi, David and Jonathan, Jesus and the beloved disciple) or seen as sexual and therefore negative (texts like Lev. 18 - 20, or Rom. 1, for instance). 

Despite the admission that Scripture says nothing positive about same-sex sexual relations, I chafe at claims that faithfulness to Scripture requires giving over primary authority on these questions to two texts,  Genesis 1:26-28 and Mark 10:2-12.  These two texts, our critics say, prove God's intention in creation for marriage as a "life-long promise of fidelity between a man and a woman" as the ELCA draft Social STatement on Human Sexuality puts it.. Why chafe at this claim? I've been married to Sonja now 18 years, faithfully and with joy. I do take these texts to be important in setting a scriptural context for discussion of marriage.  It is just that I think these texts say more than "marriage is a life-long promise of fidelity between a man and a woman", and other texts are important, too, like Jesus' call to discipleship in Matthew 10:34ff where we are told allegiance to Jesus trumps human family.  

Critics will agree other texts are necessary but they will say that the 'no' passages (Lev. or Rom.) responding to same-sex behavior are to be read intratextually in relationship to these texts from Genesis and Mark in setting the normative view.   The use of normative here is a theological 'ought' that covers, or ignores, a messy empirical reality.  I wonder if one could say this is true as a descriptive or positive norm, as in most people are attracted to a member of the opposite sex, while still saying there are a certain number of deviations from the norm. Some people will already see a major problem with doing this, something Georges Canguilhem dealt with in his important book The Normal and the Pathological.   While obviously it is worrisome to distinguish between the normal and the pathological, and some 'deviations' are truly horrific (pedophilia, for instance) I don't want to say all who 'deviate' from the 'norm' are 'pathological.'  Perhaps Andrew Sullivan's term of 'virtually normal' makes more sense. As in 'we gay people are the same in almost every way except our deepest desire for love and companionship turns in a same-sex direction, not an opposite-sex direction'. The point is, Scripture, like nature, shows diversity in kinds of relationships, from Solomon's hundreds of wives and concubines to Jesus' and Paul's presumed singleness.  The Scripture contains multitudes, and we need a way to say, yes, male-female fidelity is central, normative even, without having that shortcut the complexity of Scripture's witness as a way of helping us understand the complexity of life.   We at least need a place for the centrality of singleness as a counter-weight to the idealization of marriage as the only legitimate form of life God has blessed.  That then opens the question of the interaction of texts to speak to the complexity of our lives and loves. This, just to be clear, is not an apologia for antinomianism (a typical 16th century term meaning 'anti-law' used as critique of positions that believe God might have a new Word to say for us today) . My position is hardly anti-law. I simply think a more complex understanding of Scripture with regards to sexuality allows us to see fidelity and self-giving love as the central teaching, not heterosexuality.

An interlude to deal with the role of experience in theology is needed just now, before continuing with further discussion of scripture. I agree completely with those who want no change on church teaching with regard to homosexuality when they invoke our commitment to the "canonical Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments  as the inspired Word of God and the authoritative source and norm of our proclamation, faith and life" (ELCA Constitution 2.03).  This is a powerful statement, and not in the slightest a fundamentalist statement of the Bible's authority as a text. That is, not every word is equally true and equally authoritative.  I think that is a hopeless position to live with, and it is not the claim of my church.  What it is, then?  It is rather a claim about the Word of God, Jesus and his coming to us as Living Word in Law and Gospel, borne in and through the canonical Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments. This then raises the question of interpretation.  Luther said (and I know well the danger of quoting Luther--he said enough to be made to support anyone's position):

"One must deal openly with the Scriptures. From the very beginning the word has come to us in various ways. It is not enough simply to look and see whether this is God’s word, whether God has said it; rather we must look and see to whom it has been spoken, whether it fits us. That makes all the difference between night and day." (in “How Christians Should Regard Moses,” p. 145 in Timothy F. Lull, ed. Martin Luther’s Basic Theological Writings (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1989).

So it is not enough to say, as some do, 'The bible says, I believe it, and that ends it.'  Over a number of articles and a book on this subject, I have made a careful attempt to speak about the role of experience as a part of the interpretation of Scripture, and as a source for theological reflection generally.  The most clear engagement of this sort is in a little piece I wrote for a lecture series at St. Mark's Lutheran Church in Spokane, WA, later published in the Union Seminary Quarterly Review. Titled "Experiencing the Body: Sexuality and Conflict in American Denominations," I there write carefully about the way our life-story interacts with our understandings of worldviews, including how we interpret Scripture as God's Word to and for us.  It is, in part, a phenomenology of changing one's mind.  And it tries to account for the fact that actually knowing and loving people is very often the key factor in causing a crisis of belief, leading to the disorienting and difficult work of rethinking.  I went through such a change in my view of gay people, and tell that story. I've heard it told by gay people, their parents, friends, pastors, congregations, and on and on.  The plain fact is that experience interacts with Scripture in the process of our interpretation.  This is not merely a function of our culture's collapse into moral relativism.  It is not that people want to live by their senses and pleasures, i.e., by whatever pleases them.  This is a claim about how humans makes sense of the world around them.

This, then, is the crux of the issue.  In theory I understand the argument that gay identity, that is, the reality of people's durable sexual attraction to others of their same gender, is a result of the chaos of sin set in motion by 'the fall'.  Lots of things 'go wrong' in the world that were not intended to be so in God's original creation.  Murder, for instance, was a result of the fall.  Presumably Cain and Abel would not have done this to one another had there parents not sinned. Homosexuality has been put in this same category, as an abidingly defective impulse like hatred that leads to acts classed as abominations.  I say I can understand the argument, and I mean I understand the logic of it. Yet I know now many people who are gay and Christian, who are in Sullivan's words "virtually normal" in the sense that their hopes and longings, faith and commitments, are the same as mine.  They have all been a part of my experience, a source of the crisis of belief in the logic of classing homosexuality as disordered, as a result of the fall.  It can't be avoided; I (and presumably many of those ordinary Lutherans and others who support changing the Church's teaching on homosexuality) have come to the place where it seems not only impossible, but deeply immoral, to look gay people in the face and say, "you are abidingly defective, in your person, and in your fundamental desires, and in your hopes and longings for companionship rooted in such desires, and thus in Christ you must suffer, bearing this cross in life, and we the Church shall help you to bear it." One reason why I admire Paul Hinlicky is that his position takes this starting point and follows it through carefully all the way through welcoming gay people in Christ and even allowing for the 'recognition, not blessing' of civil unions as marriage-like places of commitment and faithfulness for those who cannot change their fundamental orientation.  This is, he would argue, as far as one can go if one wishes to remain a "confessional Lutheran." 

Returning, now, to wrap up the discussion of the question I began with: Can one be faithful to Scripture and the Confessions to which I am bound in my confirmation and ordination vows AND affirm the goodness of gays as gay?  I am in a position where I have had life-changing experiences with gay people whom I understand to be good, through and through.  Is it indeed impossible to honor Scripture and confession as part of understanding how this could be?  Must a 'confessional position' start and end with Genesis 1:26-28 and Mark 10:2-12?  NO!  Must every argument for God's offer of a new word be met with the legitimate charge of 'enthusiasm' and preaching 'another Gospel'?  NO!  I've tried in a piece boringly titled "Assessing the ELCA Draft Social Statement on Human Sexuality," to work with my colleague Fred Gaiser's exegesis of Isaiah 56:1-8 (and its background in Lev. 21:16-23 and Deut. 23:1).  This remarkable passage in Isaiah welcomes fully the formerly excluded category of persons who had been sexually mutilated (Eunuchs).  This example, where within Scripture God gives a new word that abrogates a previous word, comes also in Matt. 5, Acts 10 and Gal. 3.  Such examples give us a solid place to work in thinking what it might mean to faithfully understand gays as "clean" and not in need of either exclusion or change (in their identity as gay, no, that is, but transformation of sinful selves in the same sense as all people need transformation, yes, indeed.)

Well, enough, enough.  I will venture a bit further with these issues in the next post that takes the next logical step: if God loves gays gay, then God loves gay desire.  Paul Hinlickly has said he is just waiting for "some fool to argue that."  Well, Paul, wait no longer.  I'll have a go because if indeed a faithful argument can be imagined in which God loves gays gay, then it follows.  It must follow, actually, and needs to be said clearly for the sake of those whose lives quiver in fear and doubt that their desires, their longings, are worthy not of God's joy but God's wrath.

Anon, and peace,

Chris

U2's video for the new single, "Magnificent" (and it is)

God Loves Gays: On Lutheran debates, part one

I have signed a statement titled "Appropriate Next Steps for the ELCA" that has as its goal to encourage theological leaders in the ELCA to join publicly in affirming and supporting  the four recommendations on Ministry Policies proposed by the Task Force for  ELCA Studies on Sexuality to the 2009 Churchwide Assembly in Minneapolis.  I didn't plan on writing in response to these recommendations, or writing about sexuality at all at the moment, as I've written a lot already on the topic (most of what I've written will be posted on my Luther Seminary faculty site, if you want to track it all down easily) and I have other writing responsibilities just now (including a fun book on pop music and theology).  But for three reasons I've decided to write a few short provocative posts on the issues. 

The reasons are:

1. I am bound by my Christian faith to love, encourage, and publicly support my neighbors who are, in this case, gay people.  Many people come to mind whom I know and love personally.   Some are Lutheran, some are not, but that is beside the point.

2. The recommendations of the ELCA are, in my view, pretty circumspect on some key issues I'd like to put out in the open. It is an exercise in logic to say clearly what my support for "publicly accountable, lifelong, monogamous, same-gender relationships" and for those in such partnerships to "serve as rostered leaders of this church" implies.  So, while the topic of this post is, I take it, fairly uncontroversial in our church (more on that below), I am planning to cover these topics: gay persons as part of a good creation, gay desire, gay marriage, and gay sex.  Each will have its own post, will engage biblical and confessional/theological sources, and be quite traditional in nature because despite what my critics over the years have said, I an not an antinomian and I take with great seriousness the charge I accepted (in my ordination), namely to teach in accordance with the Holy Scriptures and the Confessions of the Lutheran Church, and in addition this: "to care for God's people, bear their burdens, and do not betray their confidence. So discipline yourselves in life and teaching that you preserve the truth, giving no occasion for false security or illusory hope." 

3. I and my fellow-signers of the statement "Appropriate Next Steps for the ELCA" have been strongly challenged by Lutheran theologian Paul Hinlicky. To point out of few of the ways he describes signers of this statement, we are "misleading," "self-contradictory," "self-righteous," engaged in "subterfuge," teaching "material antinomianism," and he has felt called to "bear public witness that those who teach these things are not faithful to Scripture and Confession," and thus are not acting "in fidelity to vows made in confirmation and ordination."  How could one not respond to that?  The challenge, as I put it in my article "The Difficulty of Thinking Well Together: Notes on Writing about Homosexuality in the ELCA," is how to do this in such a way that I model the kind of humility and love I think ought to mark our conversations with one another.  So here is my commitment for these posts, taken from the work of the
 late British Dominican, Gareth Moore:  "Bad arguments need to be avoided. These do not convince, and give the impression there are no good arguments. We sometimes have the tendency not to examine too closely arguments that support our own position. Bad arguments can be used to make us feel more comfortable in pre-conceived positions that may be false. We need to be on guard against ourselves, conscious that we want to be more comfortable, to have our positions reinforced. To safeguard against error, we need to accept that our own position is open to scrutiny, both from those sympathetic to us and from those opposed to us. We often learn most from our opponents."

Well, to conclude, I just want to make the point that Paul and I do agree that God loves gays.  "For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son that all who believe in him should not perish but have eternal life."  Yes, we agree that God loves the whole world, gays included. We agree that gays, like any other persons, deserve equal protection under the law.  God's love is not the issue; the issue is how to encourage gay people to live in light of God's word that comes as law and gospel, and there the divide between us becomes stark. The crux of the issue is, I believe, how one answers the question: are gay persons part of a good creation, God's intention for life, or do they represent a tragic result of sin and the disordering of creation that followed?  That is for the next post.

Anon and peace,
Chris

Essential reading: what non-Christians are saying about Christian support for torture

I spent the afternoon talking with a group of senior students at Luther Seminary about secularism and ministry. We're reading Charles Taylor's A Secular Age together and talking about how we got to be the sort of society we are, where it is just as likely that people don't believe in God as do.  And I was making the argument that many critiques of Christianity held by those who reject faith are critiques I also hold, and the actual gap between our way of thinking faith and life is not so broad, aside from the fact that they are being critical outside and I'm being critical inside. Okay, that is true to some extent.  But reading through the comments on blogs responding to the Pew survey showing church-going correlates with the highest support for torture makes me reel at how grossly Christianity is mis-understood, or at least what an in-credible version of this faith is out there.  Come on, pastors and theologians! We've got so much work to do to speak wisely and clearly about this life-giving tradition.  Here's how the post on The Atlantic's blog starts (note the title--ugh!):

Apr 30 2009, 2:29 pm by Chris Good

Pew: Church-Goers Like Torture More

They were told not to damage the grass of the earth or any green growth or any tree, but only those people who do not have the seal of God on their foreheads. They were allowed to torture them for five months, but not to kill them, and their torture was like the torture of a scorpion when it stings someone.          -Revelation 9:4,5, NRSV

According to a new study from the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, those who attend church at least weekly are more prone to say that torture is justifiable. Suffice it to say that, in the eyes of those who support the use of torture, Khalid Sheikh Muhammad and Abu Zubaydah do not have the seal of God on their foreheads.

Here are some choice quotes from the blog, The Friendly Atheist (written by the author of I Sold My Soul on Ebay)

arkonbey Says:
May 1st, 2009 at 6:49 am

What allows them to accept torture is that, as insular groups, they have created a culture of the ‘other’. It’s the same sort of culture that allows any group to dehumanize another.

It’s what allowed the Imperial Japanese armed forces, the Third Reich and the Shankhill Butchers to do the things they did. Now, it doesn’t matter if non-christian non-whites are tortured, as they are not quite as human as ‘us’, you see?

Darwin's Dagger Says:

May 1st, 2009 at 9:00 am

The God they believe in couldn’t find any better way to offer salvation than to have himself tortured to death. With this kind of violence at the heart of their belief system, I’m not surprised that they think torture is OK.

Brooks Says:

May 1st, 2009 at 9:38 am

This isn’t the evidence of a fundamental difference between morals of theists and non-theists that same commentators are trying to make it. Take a look again at those numbers. They say that, roughly 40% of atheists, 50% of Catholics and mainline Protestants, and 60% of evangelicals, support torture. That’s hardly a huge difference. And given the sample sizes the statistical error alone is +-5%.

I think that’s a good point, but whether it’s a correlation or causation, I think it also disproves the claim that being a Christian will automatically make you more moral than the rest of society. As for why specifically those evangelicals would support torture, as already stated, I think it’s because they already have a warped sense of morality as it is. Most of them already believe that eternal torture in hell is perfectly justified although they may deny that it is eternal torture. They also believe that it’s ok for God to do whatever he wants because he’s God and I think many of them wish for a Christian theocracy where they get to rule the world. As for the question if they would allow other countries to do the same, I somehow doubt it. Most fundies consider themselves to be more human than anyone who disagrees with them and that anyone who defies their theology doesn’t deserve the same rights and privileges as them. So while they might think it’s justifiable for them to torture people, I doubt they’d let other people do it to them because they consider themselves to be more important and more deserving than the rest of society.

Okay, folks, this ought to really motivate us to 1) actually get serious about becoming the kind of people who love our enemies and pray for those who persecute us every week in church and 2) offering another version of Christianity in which Jesus' crucifixion was God's NO to torture, and our lives are not lived as 'better than thou' but 'servant of thou'.  Because that version is not the loudest in our time.  The headline is, 'Church-goers like torture more.'

Anon and peace,

Chris