Undeception

I have the depressing feeling that this will fall on deaf ears among most of those it’s intended for. But I’ve got to try.

A friend reacted with disbelief after reading the description of the [ad hoc] Podcast’s recent show on homosexuality and the Church. The offending sentence:

How should the growing number of us who support treating homosexual Christians with fairness (to varying degrees) approach those who disagree?

To paraphrase this friend, “Being a Christian is about setting aside our old, sinful ways. So wouldn’t Christians who are struggling with homosexuality want us to help deliver them from their homosexuality rather than enable them to live in that sin?” A true Christian isn’t content to live in sin.

Many who accept homosexuality as a valid lifestyle do not understand those who object so strenuously: after all, we all occasionally do things that we believe are sinful but that don’t inspire the kind of reaction we see on the homosexuality issue! The answer is that, agree or disagree, the Christian rejection of homosexuality is based on the fact that supporters are viewed as making excuses for and “living in” an obvious sin: people with homosexual desires refuse to do what it takes to reform, justifying themselves by coming up with clever ways of saying that their sin is actually not sin.

Now, granting the sinfulness of homosexuality, this would be understandable — although a modicum of loving concern (what used to be called “Christian charity”) should temper even a justified objection like that. For the purposes of this post, I’m going to grant that homosexuality is sinful behavior. But wait just a second before you expect everyone else to grant this.

Step back for a moment to view things outside the presumption of your correctness. Some Christians have been convinced that it is sinful to ignore Torah’s dietary laws, collect interest (or at very least, high interest) on loans, read versions other than the KJV, drink alcohol, dance, attend church on Sunday, work on Saturday, or – going way back – eat food offered to idols. Other Christians think that although many of those beliefs are well grounded in Scripture, those other believers are misidentifying those practices as sins for one reason or another. Assured that we know better, we are nonetheless considered by those groups to be living in willful sin, making excuses in order to justify our chosen lifestyles.

A growing number of Christians are finding it harder and harder to believe that God has a fundamental problem with homosexuality, even when they do not accept it as ideal. This is particularly true of Christians who have tried their very best for decades to get “straight” again, enrolling in re-orientation programs, getting married to someone of the opposite sex, etc., all to no avail. Their stories are heartbreaking. That is, if you have a heart, and if you can avoid making the awful leap of responding that, since you are confident in your beliefs, those people must just not be trying hard enough (those who do this obviously don’t know any of “those people”).

Let’s take a poll:

1. Can principled Saturday churchers have fellowship with Sunday churchers, despite the latter’s Sabbath-breaking ways?

2. Can usury-eschewing believers have fellowship with interest-charging believers, despite the latter’s greed-driven refusal to acknowledge the difference between the ritual aspects of the Law that did pass away and the moral obligations of the Law (such as the Ten Commandments and usury prohibitions) that are still in effect?

3. Can Christian socialists have fellowship with self-centered, overly individualistic capitalist Christians, despite the clear evidence in Acts that those who try to fool others into believing they are giving all they can to the cause are subject to being stricken down dead on the spot?

4. Can men-pastored church members have fellowship with women-pastored church members, despite the latter’s Bible-ignoring and culture-beholden compromises?

In my experience, reasonable believers on both sides of the fence will answer at least a qualified “Yes” to most of those questions. Even most evangelicals who would be against having a woman pastor come and preach in their churches can accept her as a fellow believer and even work with her church to do outreach, etc. But there are certain other differences in understanding what constitutes “sin” that produce a radically different answer. I’m sure you saw this one coming:

5. Can Christians who are anti-homosexuality have fellowship with Christians who advocate for gay rights? With homosexuals who self-identify as devout Christians?

The question you have to ask yourself is this: if not, why not? They go about their Christian lives learning to live out their faith, worship God, forgive and serve one another, and they usually hold most of the same beliefs about the nature of God and the work of Christ that you do. They, too, have theological explanations for their behavior that many find convenient, compromising, and unconvincing. But unlike the other disagreements over sinful behavior I listed above, it is routinely concluded that homosexual Christians are the way they are because they’re just disgusting, perverse sin-lovers who require only as much of our Christian empathy as will motivate us to cite Romans 1 and expect it to convince them to repent. Until they do repent…let’s not pretend that their so-called Christian lives consist of anything other than justifying their willfully sinful bedroom activities. Jesus wants to cleanse you from all unrighteousness, provided you allow him to start on that sin first!

Why is there a different standard for homosexuals? It’s not as though their every second is spent having illicit sex; and if homosexuality is really just a choice, outside of their moments of lust they aren’t even being homosexuals. I suggest that one common reason for the sharp reaction we see, other than disgust in imagining the sex act, is a fear that what they most boldly proclaim to be true is actually false after all: maybe homosexuals really are born that way. Maybe they don’t have as much of a choice as our theology says they must. Or maybe God has unfairly laid upon them a requirement that’s almost impossible for them to meet. Their very existence, not to mention their recent flourishing and acceptance within mainline Christian denominations, is a vivid reminder that our theology just might be wrong.

We have to come to grips with the fact that not all of those who are committed to picking up their crosses and following Christ will also carry all of our own convictions with them. Jesus makes our own burdens light: how wrong is it of us to insist upon placing burdens on the back of others? Where we are wrong, we trust our loving Father to correct us. And so we must encourage one another’s faith, entrust others’ commitment to error to God, and work on getting the planks out of our own eyes, the secret sins that might not give us a lisp but do cause us to live in enmity with one another and cause the weak among us to stumble — which is a sin Jesus actually did warn us about.

Most of the hullaballoo surrounding Knapp-gate seems to have blown over for the time being, but its implications and the probability of similar future incidents continue to grow.

Undeniably, a crucial aspect of Christians’ discomfort with Jennifer Knapp’s stance is that she is “unrepentant” as a lesbian. That charge only works from outside, however, in that from her standpoint, homosexuality is not sin at all. This is considered to make her situation even worse — she’s living in denial! Surely she’s being selective in her use of Scripture, twisting it to make it mean what she thinks it should based upon her experience!

But is interpreting Scripture based upon prevailing sensibilities so unparalleled among her critics? Take, for example, the clear teaching in both the Old and the New Testaments, coming from the mouth of Jesus in fact, that charging interest on loans (called usury in Bible-ese) to fellow believers is a reprehensible, inexcusable practice. Lending money was considered a form of charity and as such undeniably played into Jesus’ fury at the “moneychangers” in the temple and in the social situation of the earliest believers in Acts who shared all possessions.

As I recall, the late Christian financial advisor Larry Burkett advised his evangelical audience not to charge interest among believers based upon this firmly biblical teaching. I can’t say that I’m surprised that Burkett’s once widely-broadcast counsel on this matter has not had much longevity; lending money is bifurcated, conveniently enough, into instances of necessity/charity vs. voluntary business transaction (as with banks), and usury now is taken to mean not “interest” but “excessive interest”.

I’m not saying that these categorizations and redefinitions are illegitimate; among other uses, charging interest actually makes a good deal of sense as a mechanism to allocate scarce capital. What I am saying is that the moment evangelicals (usually unconsciously) fly right past the clear teaching of the text to justify something they feel is common sense, right, and fair, they are in the same territory as those who creatively reinterpret/ignore Scripture for things which evangelicals steadfastly oppose, such as women in leadership or homosexuality. I, too, have found just about every justification for homosexuality based upon reinterpretation of Scripture to lack credibility. Yet evangelicals should not too quickly affirm their knee-jerk impression that those believers who “ignore” or reinterpret Scriptural condemnations of causes such as homosexuality or women in leadership are such unnatural aberrations, or rather, they should not harbor the illusion that they themselves are somehow exempt from unnatural or aberrant beliefs about Scripture despite their own unavoidable interpretive incompetence.

What evangelicalism needs most is a swift kick in the pride. Evangelicals must learn to recognize that even their beliefs are conditioned by things other than the text — are sometimes even directly at odds with the text; to acknowledge that no human may legitimately claim or imply the unimpeachability of his opinion merely by adorning it with the words, “The Bible says…” in place of the more accurate statement, “I interpret certain passages of Scripture to mean…”; to grant that even knowing what the Bible says is no guarantor that one knows the meaning or value of what it says. Humility needs to come home to the Church, that institution built in honor of, but too rarely in imitation of, our exemplar who “…humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death—even to death on a cross” (Php 2.8). Humility, in doctrine as much as anywhere, should be the very hallmark of our faith. Newsflash, American Christians: it’s not.

In a recent post I defended believers whose genuine compassion causes them to show concern about homosexuality among believers. Unfortunately, there is another common response to homosexuality, often accompanying and getting mistaken for the compassionate type, that I find much less defensible.

It’s apparent to most believers, at least intuitively if not deductively, that some sins are “worse” than others. Fudging the truth (lying, intentionally misleading, etc.) is not considered to be as bad as theft, theft is not as bad as murder, murder is not as bad as voting Democratic (a little joke there), etc. Even the many Christians who would support the idea that all sins carry equal weight before God as a result of their belief in His perfectionistic criterion admit that, in the temporal realm anyway, some sins carry greater consequences than others. Even in the Torah, the severity of the punishment often fluctuated according to the crime’s varying severity.

We are more horrified that even somebody incapable of rape (a quadraplegic, say) might idly desire to commit the act than we are if he actually committed another sin such as shoplifting. This is because physical violence and actions with painful or irreversible consequences are generally what burdens us the most when we evaluate how unacceptable sins are. At any rate, this is what most of us would say are our main criteria: yet no matter what we say, there are certain exceptions.

Yes, we are generally more offended with sins that harm innocent victims; we’re also likely to be especially offended by behavior for which we cannot fathom the temptation — temptations to do unnatural things. As with teetotalling Baptists looking at Presbyterians, what really sets us off is when the person doesn’t recognize as sin that which we recognize to be sin, especially when s/he openly embraces it.

But a lifestyle commitment to sin doesn’t alone account for the reactions most evangelicals have toward homosexuality. For instance, Christians are likely to feel worse about someone embracing homosexuality than we are that s/he has unapologetically embraced a negative attitude manifesting with a slanderous tongue about others. I have known plenty of this latter sort of Christian and cannot help concluding that they have the potential to do much more damage than the former. Should the amount of grief we feel over each not be divvied up accordingly?

I think a huge part of it comes down to being disgusted by something reckoned to be unnatural. This disgust is often masked by righteous indignation: Christians will often pretend that they’re reacting toward sin in the same way that they think God does. Those who believe that God wants to smite all sinners will egg God on toward doing so. But others are much more nuanced and subtle. To these, sin is something that disturbs us and grieves us. If we, like God, are of purer eyes than to behold sin, we will be disturbed by sin. How can true believers ignore what we believe to be true?

But is this really the way Jesus taught us to respond to sin? Looking at the Gospels, I feel safe saying that our right to be “disturbed” by someone’s sin stops where our empathy for the sinner is compromised, at least in areas in which the only victims are those involved (and probably other areas, too). In the South especially, we’re much likelier to try to befriend a person with a chronically bad attitude in order to “love them out of it” than we are to befriend, for the same reason, a homosexual whom we’re disgusted by.

My guess is that we easily mistake our visceral reaction to the thought of homosexual sex for a righteous indignation toward sin. But visceral reactions did not stop Jesus from fellowshipping with “tax collectors and sinners”, including prostitutes whose chosen lifestyles are clearly condemned in Scripture. (I also guess that those who feel the most convicted by my other guess have already begun to justify their emotions on some other basis.)

Whatever the misused “judge not” teaching in Scripture means, I think it’s safe to say that it’s not at all scriptural to put ourselves in God’s seat to be affronted, offended, or otherwise similarly aggrieved by every sin according to His (supposed) perfectionistic criterion. Only a being without sin has that right, so we certainly can’t claim it.

I think there’s a good argument to be made from the Gospels that Jesus’ response to sin was always compassion that eclipsed disgust, except perhaps for those situations in which the sin was taking advantage of innocents. For example, the cleansing in the temple is a scarcely questioned historic fact, but we don’t have the whole picture if we take John’s commentary (“Zeal for your house has eaten me up”) to mean that Jesus was offended because they were mocking God. In what way were they mocking God? Was it the fact that they were exchanging money in the temple? Where’s the Torah regulation against that? The consensus seems to be, rather, that Jesus was exhibiting his OT prophetic credentials: he was offended by the moneychanging because they were “thieves” in that they were taking advantage of the poor who had to buy animals to sacrifice, and because they had the audacity to do so in God’s house of all places! Do modern Christians, especially those deeply aggrieved by other Christians not condemning homosexuality, ever display their ire for that sort of injustice?

The main group Jesus regularly showed his disgust for was the Jewish leadership, and there is no doubt that this was because he was so deeply offended that those who were supposed to be shepherding the people were instead condemning and casting them aside because of their perfectionistic criteria. Like those upset by Jennifer Knapp’s sins, Jesus’ dispute was with those within the community of faith, but unlike Knappgate, it was because of a disregard for the helpless perpetrated by those whose self-righteous disgust for unrighteous living eclipsed their compassion.

I can certainly imagine Jesus finding cause to fashion a whip to scourge many modern day houses of worship.

In the wake of the Jennifer Knapp story, I’ve had a chance to analyze the reactions of people on either side of debate. One of the things that’s bothered me most is that the media and the blogosphere are predictably going out of their way to find reactions that sound hateful and hurtful. I’m convinced that the larger part of the truly reproachable reactions are the ones called out for attention by those who find criticism of homosexuality to be hopelessly benighted and who make a point to imply that these examples are but the tip of the iceberg of how cruel and uncivil Christians are. I’d like to point out that even Jennifer Knapp told Larry King that the responses have been overwhelmingly civil and fair.

This is not to say that Christians haven’t been critical of Knapp in large part; the evangelical community has, as expected, overwhelmingly opposed Knapp’s decision to be an apologist for Christian homosexuality. But I think any fair-minded person should step into the shoes of their opponents (even Christians!) for half a second.

I’ll save another post for my response to certain Christian critics of homosexuality, but in this one, I’d like to pose this question for the thoughtful.

For people who truly believe that the gay lifestyle is not only displeasing to God but is a harmful lifestyle for anyone embracing it, what reaction is appropriate?

No one seems to want to address the fact that it is neither hateful nor boneheadedly intolerant for people to be distressed when someone they care about has embraced something they are convinced is harmful to that person, or when someone with influence over people they care about acts in a way that effectively legitimizes harmful behavior.

You may or may not be convinced that the neighbor’s house is on fire; you may in fact be throroughly convinced that the person who called the fire department is blind and delusional. But last time I checked, the enlightened are expected to feel compassion and seek care for the blind and delusional, aren’t they? And when you seek to enlighten them and change their behavior, aren’t you doing exactly what they’re doing to homosexuals when they attempt to reform them? Heck, if you think my house is on fire, please act compassionately — I can certainly forgive you if you’re wrong.

Enough emotionalist rhetoric already. Believing the Bible’s clear criticisms of homosexuality (just save the fancy footwork, please — they are in there) may make conservative Christians benighted, naive, or even outright moronic. But it does not alone make them bigoted hypocrites. One must actually think or act in bigoted, hypocritical ways before one can legitimately be criticized as bigoted and hypocritical.

By all means, continue telling critics of homosexuality why you think they’re wrong in their beliefs (here’s a hint: honey attracts more flies than vinegar). But please think twice before assuming that every Christian opposed to homosexuality does so for prideful or otherwise nefarious reasons.