disagreement

Beauty in the Midst of Tension

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Copyright 2013 Gregg Webb

Copyright © 2013 by Gregg Webb

We are people who enjoy comfort. It is easy to exist within a bubble where our ideas and world-views are only confirmed and never challenged. We are prone to shy away from opportunities for our own growth by allowing possible friends to remain strangers. Ideological differences are allowed to define and enforce separation often under the guise of safety.

My own experience has shown that this bubble is not truly “safe.” It is far too easily ruptured when an uninvited co-worker, family member or classmate who would otherwise be an ideological object becomes a real person. When this happens I am forced to grapple with the tension that relationship creates in my life. I must embrace a biblical calling to be “all things to all people” and by doing so understand my own convictions. It is only through relationship with others that my own understanding and faith can be fully deepened and formed.

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The Problem with the “Gag Reflex”

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A couple of days ago, Thabiti Anyabwile put up a post on his Gospel Coalition blog entitled The Importance of Your Gag Reflex When Discussing Homosexuality and “Gay Marriage” (warning: post contains graphic language).

There are a number of problems with this post. Before criticizing, however, I want to make a couple of points.

First, prior to reading this blog post, I knew relatively little about Anyabwile; however, the only contexts in which I had heard of him had been overwhelmingly positive. So I want to be clear that the negative things I say about this particular post are not intended to be an overall judgment of Anyabwile. I know too little to make such a judgment, and, aside from the problems with this particular post, everything else I have heard about him has been positive.

Second,  many of those who have criticized this post have done so because they disagree with Anyabwile about the morality of gay sex. However, I agree with him that gay sex is contrary to God’s plan in creation, and have written extensively on the subject (see, for example, The Great Debate, this speech at Georgetown University, or, for a briefer statement, this speech at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette). I share his concern about the way American culture has ceased to respect the sanctity of marriage, and have been defending the traditional Christian understanding of marriage for many years now.

(I will add that as a Lord of the Rings fan who loves to fly, the photo of the Air New Zealand 777 in painted in the Lord of the Rings livery was a pleasant distraction in an otherwise disappointing post.)

Having said all that, however, this post is one of the more problematic discussions of homosexuality I have seen in a serious Christian publication in recent years.

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“Gay”: Clarity or Obfuscation? (Part 2)

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In my last post, I pointed out the way that some Christians have exploited the ambiguous meaning of the word “gay” to make misleading promises (like “You don’t have to be gay”) to others.

Today, I want to look at how the word is sometimes used to mislead others—including other Christians—about the speaker’s own life and experiences.

Consider, for example, the sad case of Dr. George Rekers. He helped co-found the Family Research Council, and was for many years a member of the board and scientific advisor for the National Association for Research and Therapy of Homosexuality (NARTH). He was a leading opponent of gay rights and advocate of reparative therapy for several decades.

In 2010, he hired a man who worked as a male prostitute to accompany him on a trip to Europe. Allegedly, his travel assistant provided him with daily sexual massage services during the trip.

When these accusations became public, Dr. Rekers denied that he was gay.

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Intrinsically Disordered? How Not to Talk About Homosexuality

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If there is one thing we can learn from Pope Francis’s recent comments on gay Christians, it is that style matters. Francis said nothing other recent popes haven’t said, but the winsome way he said it earned him a hearing from many for whom Catholic teaching on homosexuality is considered toxic.

Many Catholics have expressed disquiet with the form in which that teaching has been presented in recent decades, and in particular with the Church’s oft-repeated claim that homosexuality is “intrinsically disordered.” Less has been said, however, about what the Church might say instead of this.

As Eve Tushnet points out, “you can’t have a vocation of not-gay-marrying and not-having-sex.” It’s important not to reduce what the Church has to say to gay people merely to its teaching on sex. But while not-having-sex is only a small part of what the Church has to say, it is worth thinking about how it could be better presented, given that the ham-fisted way in which this particular teaching is presented often causes significant damage to the Church’s relationship with the gay community.

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Language, the Person, and the “Identity Problem”

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Matthew Schmitz’s recent post on First Thoughts (“Evangelicals Oppose Gay Marriage, Now More than Ever”, Wednesday, July 10, 2013) noted that First Things has become the venue of choice for discussion of the pastoral issues concerning celibate gay Christians, one which has now (happily) come to include a first-person perspective.  The exploration of the terminology used by the Church about the personal status of homosexuality has formed a major thread in this discussion, and has brought forth many articles.  On the one hand, Daniel Mattson has written some pointed pieces arguing that the Church condemns describing a person as ‘gay’ or ‘queer’ (e.g. “Why I Don’t Call Myself a Gay Christian,” “Homosexual Orientation, or Disorientation?” and “In Defense of the Church’s Challenging Language on Homosexuality“). On the other hand, Joshua Gonnerman has written an explanation of how the omission of a word from the original Latin has led to a misreading of the English text of Homosexualitatis Problema.  This would form what one might call the “general argument about identity terms.”

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How Do Bodies Matter?

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In the most recent issue of Christianity Today, Andy Crouch has an excellent editorial on the church’s future and matters LGBTQIA. Please do read the whole thing. He writes,

There is really only one conviction that can hold this coalition of disparate human experiences [i.e., the experiences captured under the label LGBTQIA] together. And it is the irrelevance of bodies—specifically, the irrelevance of biological sexual differentiation in how we use our bodies.

What unites the LGBTQIA coalition is a conviction that human beings are not created male and female in any essential or important way. What matters is not one’s body but one’s heart—the seat of human will and desire, which only its owner can know.

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Homosexuality and the development of doctrine

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For almost 20 centuries, there was little controversy over Christian teaching about homosexuality. For the last few decades, there has been an extraordinary amount of controversy. How should Christians respond to this changing situation?

In a helpful recent blog post, Christopher Damian draws on the ideas of John Henry Newman to explore how Church teaching on abortion has developed in the past, and how the teaching on homosexuality may develop in the future. The object here is not to argue for a revision of Church teaching to bring it into line with the fashions of contemporary culture. Rather, authentic doctrinal development leads to a deeper understanding of the unchanging deposit of Christian faith.

I wrote about similar ideas of doctrinal development last fall on Spiritual Friendship. As I am currently working on a series of posts which will, I hope, develop the orthodox teaching of the Church in a more pastorally fruitful direction, I thought I would begin with a reminder of some of my thoughts on doctrinal development from last fall. (Apologies for those for whom this is a repeat.)

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On Reading James Brownson

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In the latest issue of The Living Church, I review James Brownson’s new book Bible, Gender, Sexuality. Here’s my summary of the book’s main argument:

Brownson argues that… gender complementarity is nowhere “explicitly portrayed or discussed” in Scripture. Genesis 2:24, the primary text to which traditionalists appeal to establish that complementarity, is, he argues, not speaking primarily of the difference between male and female but rather of their sameness. Adam needs one who is like him, rather than unlike him (Gen. 2:18-20). Therefore God creates a woman to be such a “like” partner (Gen. 2:20).

On the basis of their sameness, male and female are able to form a “kinship bond,” and the “flesh of my flesh” idiom in Genesis 2:23 thus functions the same way it functions elsewhere in the Old Testament: that is, to denote kinship, not a sexual, anatomical “fit” (Gen. 29:14; Judges 9:2; 2 Sam. 5:1 and 19:12-13; 1 Chr. 11:1). The sexually differentiated couple is then blessed to “be fruitful and multiply,” but they are not commanded to do so. Furthermore, their ability to do so is not the basis on which they are said to be in relation to one another.

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Church Before Sex

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When I was in seminary, one of the hot topics we students debated was where each of us stood on the matter of women’s ordination. In our evangelical world, this issue was talked about in terms of “egalitarianism” (i.e., women are equally gifted alongside men and are called to serve at every level of Christian ministry) versus “complementarianism” (i.e., women are equal in dignity and worth but are called to different forms of ministry in the church than men are, and women are not permitted to be “elders” [presbyteroi]).

It was only later, after seminary, that it occurred to me that our debate was, among other things, odd. We students interrogated each other, and each of us felt a (mostly self-imposed) obligation to settle “our position” on the matter. But in retrospect, I view that as strange—because whether women can be ordained to diaconal or priestly/pastoral ministry is not a question that can be “settled” by an individual Christian, even one who’s been to seminary and been ordained. Rather, that’s a matter for churches to decide. Even in the Baptist church to which I belonged at that time, it made no real difference what I as a seminarian thought on the matter; nor would it have made much difference if I’d been a pastor or elder there. What mattered is what my denomination had decided and whether I wanted to remain a part of it, working within its confines or else kicking against the goads.

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Scout’s honor

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A while back, a student in my philosophy of religion class turned in a paper which stated that, “in The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values, Sam Harris argued that morality was based on scientific discoveries about the order God had put into the world at the Creation.” I was, I confess, a bit at a loss about what sort of helpful comments I could make on the paper. There’s only so much I could do to soften the blow of, “Actually, Sam Harris is one of the leading advocates of atheism, and his book argued that we can base morality on science, not God.”

I was reminded of that student’s paper the other day, when a friend pointed me to an article by Ken Klukowski, the Director of the Center for Religious Liberty at the Family Research Council, titled “Boy Scout Leaders Propose Incoherent Policy on Gay Scouts.”

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