“Putting Asunder” by Jamie Dean, World, June 10, 2006.
“A Coming Storm” by Lynn Vincent, World, June 10, 2006.
“Bus Stop” by David M. Howard, Jr., The Wall Street Journal, May 5, 2006.
“Open-Door Policy” by Frederick J. Gaiser, The Christian Century, May 2, 2006.
“Battle for the Bible” by Mark Noll, The Christian Century, May 2, 2006.
by Dr. Ralph Blair
America’s No.1 wedding city: Las Vegas. Besides that dismal fact, how healthy is American marriage these days? Each year, 5 million Americans marry. Their weddings cost 60 billion dollars – not counting honeymoons. Yet, some 50 percent of these marriages (including those of born-again Christians) end in divorce. By their early 40’s, 16.5 percent of men and 12.5 percent of women remain unmarried – many choosing to stay single to avoid marriage responsibilities. Each year, 1.5 million babies are born to single mothers. It’s been said that our country’s interest in procreation is a reason to oppose same-sex marriage, but heterosexual couples are having fewer children (down by more than 20% since 1960) and same-sex couples are rearing more discarded children than ever. And the Religious Right claims the big threat to marriage is an extension of legal marriage to a relatively few same-sex couples?
Dean cites a Southern Baptist professor’s saying that, while fighting gay marriage, we “shouldn’t lose track of the fact that so many of our Christian marriages are ending in divorce.” But he strangely concludes: “gay marriage and divorce both grow from the same dark root: sin and a low view of marriage.”
Vincent’s scare story on marriage for same-sex couples is reminiscent of racist warnings on mixed-race couples. Only 39 summers ago, “activist judges” struck down anti-miscegenation laws. She seems oblivious to the irony of her quoting a Georgetown law scholar’s drawing the analogy to that era: “When society’s view of morality shifts in a way that is a good shift – e.g., we no longer believe that it is immoral for the races to mix or we no longer believe it is immoral to love someone of the same sex, the people still operating on the former moral plane will necessarily be disadvantaged.”
Howard teaches Old Testament at Bethel University. He comments on a campus visit by progay Soulforce Equality Riders. Bethel was one of the evangelical schools where these young people sought to bring testimonial enlightenment. Unlike schools where they were barred or arrested, Bethel welcomed them into specially scheduled assemblies, classes, and luncheons. Attendance reached 1,200 at one meeting “where,” he says, “the presentations and questions from the audience were animated but polite.” Howard reports: “Despite the cordial exchanges, profound differences endure.” Here’s Bethel’s president’s “biblical” brush-off: the school’s “principles of ethical conduct [are] grounded in the Scriptures, not … personal preference or dominant cultural themes.” But the point of the Riders’ testimonies was not “personal preference or dominant cultural themes”. It was witness to their discovered psychosexuality. What Noll (see below) says on old proslavery arguments parallels the posturing of Bethel’s president.
But is the textual witness of the Bible antigay? In The Southern Baptist Journal of Theology, Howard commends an Old Testament scholar, the late Marten Woudstra of Calvin Seminary, as “a conservative evangelical” who was “clearly committed to the authority and integrity” of Scripture. “Woudstra,” he writes, “is very sensitive to small nuances in the text missed by many commentators [and] his is one of the very best commentaries on the text of Joshua.” Yet Woudstra said that nothing in the Old Testament corresponds to homosexuality as we understand it today. Howard, of course, is not addressing Woudstra’s remarks on the Bible and homosexuality, but his recognizing Woudstra’s careful, conservative evangelical scholarship should caution against the wooden assumptions of a biblical negativity on homosexuality per se.
The Christian Century offers two thoughtful essays in a “Crisis of Interpretation.” Gaiser, a Luther Seminary Old Testament professor, applies revelation’s revision on eunuchs in Isaiah 56 to today’s debate on homosexuals: “the promise [to eunuchs] comes not by right but as gift. … God is gathering ‘others’ to ‘the outcasts of Israel’ that God has ‘already gathered’ (56:8). The people of Israel can accept the inclusion of others because they know themselves to be outcasts and sinners, welcome in God’s house because of who God is and what God has done, not because of their own righteousness.”
Though Noll’s excellent discussion of slavery debates doesn’t address homosexuality, there’s a striking analogy. This Wheaton history professor traces the torturous trek of proslavery preachers’ “chapter-and-verse argumentation with [the abolitionists’] larger gestalt of scriptural sentiment.” He avers: “the stronger [the abolitionists’] arguments based on general humanitarian principles became, the weaker the Bible looked in any traditional sense. By contrast, rebuttal of such arguments from biblical principle increasingly came to look like a defense of scripture itself.” He explains that those who “defended the legitimacy of slavery in the Bible had the easiest task.” Their line went like this: “First, open the scriptures and read – at say, Leviticus 25:45 or, even better, at I Corinthians 7:20-21. [Cf. Lev 20:13 and I Cor 6:9] Second, decide for yourself what these passages mean. Don’t wait for a bishop … or a meddling Yankee to tell you what the passage means, but decide for yourself.” Third, if you can find any unorthodox bit in whatever the abolitionists say, you must conclude they’re asking you to abandon “the entire trust in the Bible that made the country into such a great Christian civilization.” Doesn’t today’s debate over homosexuality echo that earlier debate over slavery?
This summer, a leader in one of America’s most conservative denominations wrote this in an email (reprinted by permission): “I was just thinking of you yesterday. We had a retreat …with all of our senior ministers and their wives – we had 36 people there. We had a very long discussion on homosexuality. My, my, how things have changed. … The senior minister [at one of our large churches] put it this way, ‘We got slavery wrong 150 years ago. Are we so sure we’re not getting homosexuality wrong now?’ There was complete and open discussion around the table – marvelously so.”