Praising Jesus, Condemning others.

January 17, 2008 by Pastor Dan.

We had an astonishing and unsettling occurrence last night at the outset of our mid-week Bible Study. A friend of someone in our community came in, agitated, stood up to praise Jesus and then thoroughly condemn us for tolerating homosexuals. Chapter and verse!  He read us the riot act, and then bolted for the door—several times, returning in between.  He continued to interrupt even after I had announced that we would now be about our prayers and was already naming those in our community who had prayer concerns!  I am still trying “to process” what happened and how I handled it, and how I feel after it is all over!

First there was the hubris of a Biblical know-it-all fundamentalist.  He was the answer man who can set us all straight because the Bible is The Answer Book, and he knows his Bible cover to cover. In this case, he was unaware that several of us in the room had studied the passages he had in mind far more extensively than he—to the point of reading and even writing articles and books on the subject. The Biblical view of homosexuality is complex and does not yield straight-forward or conclusive answers, regardless of how many “know-it-alls” insist that it does.

But being a Biblical liberal here only inflames the conservatives, who are sure they are right and therefore are on God’s side. We can’t simply argue that the Bible is full of social prejudices – that does not fly with people who sincerely believe that the Bible contains no errors and was dictated word for word by the Holy Spirit into the ears of its writers, in fact that the Bible contains no human content because it is God’s Word. We’re simply are a world apart on this, and no amount of shouting in a room will make that fundamental difference go away. (I wonder if this isn’t behind a lot of Biblical ignorance/uncertainty of our own people, who do not want to be drawn into the exactitude of fundamentalism. They are gun-shy about stating anything of their faith and knowledge because it can never be as seemingly solid and impregnable as the position of Christian conservatives.)

He was also full of rapid-fire relentless speech for a few minutes—imitating what he has no doubt learned from preachers, especially the fast-talking charismatic radio and television personalities who seem to be so full of faith. For this style of argumentation it is important to keep talking, even if highly repetitious, so as (1) not to lose one’s nerve; (2) not to give someone else opportunity to respond or disagree.

We don’t study the Bible that way. We don’t arrive at truth that way. We don’t formulate our public teachings as a church—local or national—that way. But it is an effective technique that has made televangelists millions of dollars!

I might have countered this outburst—and I did later in the evening, after he bolted form the room—that the Bible’s apparently strict ethical teaching about human sexuality contains some elements that most people would find odious today, and even the most conservative heterosexual Christians among us do not live by them.

For example, the Bible’s answer to rape is really horrific from an ethical point of view. It is not and cannot be the final answer in a Christian sexual theology. The Mosaic law requires the rapist to marry the woman he has raped, without possibility of divorce, and there is no other punishment! Or is there? In the case of Shechem, is it the appropriate punishment to kill the rapist and his entire family and all his compatriots? Does Genesis 34 belong in a Christian sexual ethic? If not, why does Genesis 19?

The religious right—such strident students of every word of the Biblical text—must somehow know as well as I do that a lot of bad ethics and unusable teaching about sexuality is scattered all over the Scriptures. It may be that there is so much uncertainty in the Bible’s sexual ethics that conservatives have latched on to one small matter—homosexuality—that they think they can be absolutely certain about, and therefore feel like they are doing their religious “duty to warn” sinners about the wrath of God.¹ There is no complete view of human sexuality in the Bible we have, and on some matters such as homosexuality there is so little which actually is decipherable that we cannot rely on it. But in fact, the less said in the Bible on a given subject, the better for an “answer man,” a Biblical “know-it-all”, and the more certain his answers, because it is so much easier to “flip and point” to the answer than to wrestle with conflicting or confusing ideas and their implications.

—Pastor Dan Hooper, Los Angeles

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