Is the Bible Intolerant?: Sexist? Oppressive? Homophobic? Outdated? Irrelevant? by Amy Orr-Ewing (InterVarsity Press, 2005), 144 pp.
by Dr. Ralph Blair
Yes, the Bible’s intolerant – of injustice, neglect of mercy and refusals to love God and all others. But these days, it’s likely thought to be intolerant of what the politically correct hold sacred and to tolerate what they damn. So Orr-Ewing rightly tries to clarify things. Most evangelical reviewers say her book is “excellent”. But they fail to note that, on homophobia and homosexuality, her book is not excellent. They’re as unprepared to review what she writes on these matters as she was unprepared to write it. I’m sorry she fails to measure up here to her usual acumen, for her apologetics work is otherwise well done. I’ve always enjoyed Founders Weekends with her and the rest of the Ravi Zacharias International Ministries team and I heartily endorse RZIM’s ministry.
A sage of ancient Israel warned: “Anyone who answers before listening is foolish.” (Prov 18:13) Said William Barclay: “One of our greatest necessities is to learn the art of getting alongside people.” Listening well prepares us for loving well; to really hear, prepares us to really help. Orr-Ewing seems not to have listened well enough or long enough to homosexuals.
I’ve listened to other gay people since before 1964 when I was not reappointed to the InterVarsity staff at Penn after my talk at Yale in which I’d endorsed committed gay relationship for gay Christians. (Ironically, ten years later, InterVarsity published a book by Margaret Evening, concluding: “I would not presume to provide answers [on] the rightness or wrongness of homosexual acts” but “Surely we are all meant to enjoy our sexuality, whether we are heterosexual or homosexual.”) I did my doctoral dissertation on homosexuality and, since 1971, I’ve practiced psychotherapy (mainly) with gay people. I founded Evangelicals Concerned in 1975 – the year Orr-Ewing was born.
She needs to hear the heartbeats of those whose unasked-for longings for intimacy with a same-sex partner are just like her orientation’s heartbeats, and those of her husband’s, for each other. Given what’s at stake for gay Christians whose experience of the “god” within homophobic evangelicalism is of unrequited love for God, her well intended but ill-informed words are worse than unhelpful, and they reinforce the alienation of those who then conclude: the evangelical leaders just don’t get it!
Evangelical leaders must do even more than hear testimonies of Christians who happen to be homosexual. Just as did sincerely anti-Copernican, pro-slavery, pro-segregation and anti-feminist Christians of earlier eras, they need to carefully attend to the natural and social sciences and to what Scripture says and doesn’t say.
What Orr-Ewing calls the Bible’s “teaching on homosexuality” is her own confusion of contemporary same-sex love commitments with the ancient world’s sex abuse of slaves, pederasty, rape of foreigners and rites of fertility. As Marten Woudstra, chair of the NIV Old Testament scholars, president of the Evangelical Theological Society and Calvin Seminary professor, affirmed: The Old Testament says nothing about homosexuality as we understand it today. And from her own publisher, we read in its Dictionary of Paul and His Letters (1993): “Paul never addresses the subject of human sexuality in a systematic manner” and yet, in “Paul’s most extended discussion of sexuality [he] lays the groundwork for a suggestive and flexible Christian sexuality.”
Orr-Ewing fails to understand both psychosocial findings on sexual orientation and so-called interventions for change. The American Psychological Association’s short answer on changeability of sexual orientation: “No. [It] is not changeable.” But she asserts that it’s not a “fixed ‘condition’” and then appeals to a phone survey to show it can be fixed. But is that what this phone survey shows? Said Robert Spitzer, the man who made the phone calls to what, to him, was a surprising few – referred to him by “ex-gay” ministries as their best-outcome cases: “To my horror, some of the media reported the study as an attempt to show that homosexuality is a choice, and that substantial change is possible for any homosexual who decides to make the effort.”
Ann Phillips, a woman who has since left “ex-gay” leadership, remembers that she felt conflicted when she told Spitzer she’d become heterosexual: “I felt deceitful.” Today she wonders: “Was I the only one who gave what she or he believed were ‘the right answers.’?” Research on diet or stop-smoking programs, for example, finds that glowing testimonials don’t match actual effects, for people need to believe and say that their efforts paid off. So instead of relying on self-reports, why not use pre- and post-treatment thermal imaging technology or a penile volume apparatus to measure involuntary sexual arousal in “reparative therapy”. When such technology is used while subjects view erotic videos, sexual arousal begins within 30 seconds. But “baloney detecting” technology is not used in these programs. And beyond mere sexual arousal, the neural profile of heterosexual and homosexual romantic love resembles the drives of thirst and hunger. So no wonder orientation is immutable.
Too often, we evangelicals have been slow to adopt more enlightened views in science and human rights (e.g., re: evolution’s role in God’s creation, racial integration and interracial marriage, women’s rights, etc.). Eventually, we do see that the Bible really doesn’t say what we used to say it said. Social convention, prejudice and economics have played their parts. As Upton Sinclair observed: “It’s difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on not understanding it.” How many evangelical leaders today can really afford to counter the party line? Of course, self-interest pushes the party line within the pro-gay Left, as well. But for anyone who affirms that “all is of grace” and says we should love every neighbor as we love ourselves, why is there not a more ready will to act on what we hear from “the other”?
Zacharias quotes Aristotle: “Justice is not part of virtue, it is virtue entire, nor is the contrary, injustice, a part of vice but vice entire.” So, he asks: “Suppose you say you love somebody but you are unjust in your dealings with them. How would that person respond to your words, ‘But I love you’?” If heterosexual Christians fail to identify with those who are chained by ecclesiastical homophobia, as though chained with them, how will the enchained respond to: “But I love you!”?