Homosexuality: Silence and Story

January 24, 2012 in Bible Thoughts with 87 Comments

I am grateful to Tony Jones for returning, once again, to engage ch. 9 of Jesus Have I Loved, but Paul?, after first critiquing the chapter last week.

He summarizes my three-fold engagement with scripture:

  1. We can’t run to the OT on this, but need to begin with the NT interpretation of the place of sex within the Christian story.
  2. Jesus is silent on the issue. I take this to be a slight argument against Jesus’ approval of homosexual practice–Jesus was Jew, and where he disagreed with his Jewish contemporaries we’ve heard about it.
  3. This leaves Romans 1 and 1 Corinthians 6 as the principal sparring grounds for our exegetical debates about homosexual practice.

To points 2 and 3, he has this to say:

First, we don’t use Jesus’ arguments from silence to uphold ethical evils such as slavery, racism and rape. So what’s the argumentative force of arguing from Jesus’ silence on homosexuality?

Second, this leaves a couple of verses in the traditionalist camp, hardly enough to exclude one whole segment of society from full participation in the church.

I think that this is a strong counter-argument to a biblicist approach to homosexuality. Having one or two verses in our pockets is not sufficient to create blanket ethical statements for the church. But I’m working from another angle.

Image: digitalart / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Everything we believe and practice as a church has to be integrated into the larger narrative of the God at work in the world through the people of Israel to reconcile the entire cosmos to Himself in Jesus Christ.

In the book, I argued that the larger, redemptive dynamics of that story were sufficient to overturn practices of slavery and of excluding women from pastoral ministry and teaching. This was on the basis of a couple of considerations: (1) the overall trajectory of the story toward social equality and liberation; (2) the indications that inequalities and subjugations entailed in hierarchical relationships are dynamics of a disordered world and therefore subject to redemption; and (3) varied testimony in scripture.

The narrative of scripture undermines the complementarian efforts, for example, to uphold 1 Tim 2:11-15 as universally normative for male-only leadership in the church.

I increasingly feel the weight of the argument that point 1 is a factor in favor of full inclusion of homosexuals in the church.

It was factors two and three that kept me from allowing the trajectory toward freedom and liberation to play a decisive role. What I mean is this: first, whereas the indications in scripture are in favor of subjugation of women and other humans as slaves are distortions of the world as God intended, the narrative within which Paul’s critique of homosexual practice is embedded in Rom 1 is the opposite. There, homosexual desire and practice itself is depicted as an outcome of a world gone astray from God.

Also, there is no counter-testimony on this issue such as there is on so many others such as those pertaining to women in the church or ethnicity and the people of God.

So the bottom line of my response to Tony’s post is that it’s not simply two verses, but how those verses fit within the larger story line of the biblical narrative.

This is why I suggested that a different means of argumentation would have to be offered to convince me that homosexual desire and practice is o.k. within the biblical narrative. One of these is a reconsideration of what the “new creation” looks like that is both making itself felt in the present and toward which we are straining–the new reality that we are to realize in an incipient way within the church.

The second is a compelling work of the Spirit in and among my brothers and sisters (yes, I will call them that gladly) who are practicing homosexuals such that their acceptance by God as they are becomes an undeniable testimony of God that they should be received by the church as such.

To my mind, the call to affirming and embracing is an uncircumcision argument: a plea to recognize that God has accepted and embraced those whom we could never anticipate, based on scriptural exegesis, would be accepted as they are.

Our story has taken any number of unexpected turns. If the embrace and affirmation of practicing homosexuals is one of them, it will be one of those moments that could not have been anticipated beforehand, calling us to reimagine a bit more broadly the place of sexuality in our story.

Based on Tony’s first engagement with my chapter, I think this is where he is, and where I’m not yet ready to go.

To me the issue is less the content of a couple of verses and more the overall narrative withing which those verses find their coherence.

Pastoring the Cross; or, The Epic Fail Pastors Conference

January 23, 2012 in Bible Thoughts, Conferences with 4 Comments

One of the most powerful gifts that the gospel has to offer the church is the reality of power in weakness. This is not only the texture of our cross-shaped gospel, it is also the means of effective ministry that integrates itself with the message of the cross that we proclaim.

In real life, this is hit home almost every time I, someone I’m listening to, or someone I hear of, is willing to admit of particular weaknesses and struggles to other folks in the body–or when we confess our actual, particular sins to one another.

Unfortunately, many of us are driven either by the internal voice of self-protection or the external calls for perfection, and live and minister in hope of attaining to, or at least seeming to attain to, a level of perfection that is truly impossible.

Many of the conferences that we attend that are directed at our growth actually feed this vain striving after perfection. They offer us better ways to get where we will never arrive, and hinder our embrace of the weakness that is our reality.

Enter, the Epic Fail Pastors Conference.

From all accounts, last year’s gathering was a singular opportunity for pastors to gather and embrace a transparency that fed both their own hearts and the lives of their congregations.

So get thee to Mansfield, OH, March 22-24. This one is worth getting out for.

The organizer, J. R. Briggs, has more thoughts here.

Wardrobe

January 23, 2012 in Culture, Humor with 4 Comments

I’m not normally one who gives much thought, time, energy, or money to augmenting his wardrobe. Over the past year, however, I have found two exceptional pieces of clothing that demanded purchase.

Both are t-shirts.

First, in honor of my breakfast making, E’s obsession with, and Halloween dressing, as Darth Vader, together with E’s choice of an “I am your father” Father’s Day card, there was this:

Then, in honor of… well.. my singular focus when it comes to music, there was this:

I commend them both for your consideration, and for your further insight into the man behind the blog.

Enjoy.

Worship as Belief

January 22, 2012 in Bible Thoughts, Church, Spirituality & Prayer with 5 Comments

It falls to me to pick the worship songs for our house church.

This, as you might guess is something of a liability for me, and perhaps my group. I comb through the song sheets, looking in vain for “Praised Be Thou, Inaugurator of Participationist Eschatology” and the like.

So instead, I have to go with what we have.

Image: Salvatore Vuono / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Today, as I thumbed through and picked out a few things, I did so with a little bit of an internal eye roll. I grabbed a song that I knew was little more than a compilation of scripture verses. I knew it was a theologically and pastorally apt conjunction of scripture and real life.

But it wasn’t me. I wasn’t feeling it. I felt like a bit of a hypocrite singing first person singular lyrics about myself that didn’t reflect my reality, how I actually have responded to life as late.

You get it? I didn’t want much to do with the song. But I picked it anyway, inasmuch as “The Galatian Praise Song” is something I try to save for Lent.

But then…

When it actually came time to sing the song, I found myself able to sing it, to believe it, to celebrate the reality of what I was singing.

How do you think about worship?

Usually, I think of it as an attempt at an authentic response to God, reflective of where I was when I came in.

And that’s an important piece of it.

But there’s something else going on in worship as well. Worship becomes a tutor to our hearts. We sing what is true, even when we don’t believe it, or didn’t a few seconds before, in order to enter into the belief that we lack.

Worship isn’t just about experience, it is also about ultimate reality. Or, perhaps better, is about creating an experience that expresses and embodies–and therefore summons us into–the reality into which God has called us in Christ.

When we gather as one and with one voice glorify the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, we participate in the fulfillment of God’s covenant promises. We speak truth again, we catch a glimpse of reality.

And we can believe.

Does Mercy Seat Work for You?

January 21, 2012 in Bible Thoughts with 10 Comments

How do we understand what Jesus is on the cross?

Romans 3:25 speaks of Jesus as a hilasterion. This is translated in some versions as “sacrifice of atonement,” in others as “a propitiation,” and now the CEB is translating it, “the place of sacrifice where mercy is found.”

The word is used in the LXX (Greek translation of the Old Testament) to refer both to the sacrifice of atonement and to the “mercy seat” inside the holy of holies. So what I’d like to hear from you is whether this “mercy seat” idea works for you as a reading of Rom 3:25. Does it make sense in the verse? Can you see how it’d work? Thoughts?

Here’s the passage:

All have sinned and fall short of God’s glory, but all are treated as righteous freely by his grace because of a ransom that was paid by Christ Jesus. Through his faithfulness, God displayed Jesus as the place of sacrifice where mercy is found by means of his blood. He did this to demonstrate his righteousness in passing over sins that happened before, during the time of God’s patient tolerance. (Rom 3:23-26, CEB)

Homebrewed Podast

January 20, 2012 in Bible Thoughts, blogging, SBL with 0 Comments

During SBL, I had the honor and privilege of doing a recording with the good folks at Homebrewed Christianity, Mark Scandrette, and Philip Clayton before a live studio audience at chez Scandrette. This was, in actuality, the fulfillment of a dream, as I had long hoped to bring my homebrewed beer with me to record a session of Homebrewed Christianity with Tripp, Chad, and Bo.

That discussion is now posted over at Homebrewed Christianity (which you should be subscribed to through iTunes anyway).

Take a listen, relax, and have a homebrew.

Knowing One Particular God

January 20, 2012 in Barth Dogmatics Reading, Bible Thoughts with 5 Comments

Is there some idea of “knowing” that simply have to fill with the right, God-given content, in order to understand how we know God?

Is there some idea of “being” or essence that we simply have to fill with the right, God-given content, in order to understand the God who is?

Do we begin with knowledge and being to know the God who truly is?

When we think about who God is as Lord, Creator, Redeemer, and Reconciler, do we reason upward from our general ideas to a God who is Lord, Creator, Redeemer, and Reconciler because he is such notions of ours writ large?

No, Barth will argue throughout the first part of his discussion of “The Readiness of God” (Church Dogmatics §26.1). We do not have general categories which God fills in a bigger way, and thereby conforms to humanity’s innate ideas. We know the true God as this God is revealed in Scripture. God is known as all these things: Lord, Creator, Redeemer, and Reconciler altogether–so that knowledge of the true God depends on what I would call here the story to which God has bound Godself as primary actor, not simply human notions of what someone called god should do.

In fact, Barth wants to push it back farther than this and to say that it’s not merely our ideas of Lordship, Creation, and the like that are derivative from God’s revelation of who God truly is.

The very idea, and long-standing philosophical problem, of God’s very knowability, is dependent on a prior action of God as well. We can know God because God is actually known and has actually chosen to make himself known. We can know the truth of who God is because God “is” before we are, and this truth of himself is known: Father to Son and Son to Father by the Spirit.

Knowledge of God is, then, an act of grace in which God makes Himself known. This means that it is not an act of nature, in which people might simply reason their way to true knowledge of the true God.

That last piece, an argument against natural theology, takes up a great deal of Barth’s energies as the chapter moves on.

I confess to finding myself torn here. As someone who deals with the deeply contextualized, historically situated texts of the Bible, I stumble over the idea that our images and metaphors for God are revealed rather than varied human expressions of various people in various times and cultures. Note well! I do believe that God reveals and speaks through the images–but that this revelation is known and understood and used because it carries certain preexisting connotative freight for the first hearers.

But on the other hand, I appreciate Barth’s insistence that we not affirm some “god” in general in vain hopes that someone serving such a being will one day attain to faith in the Christian God in particular. This skepticism of natural theology, not only in its validity but also in its purported pastoral value, is well grounded.

Those were my impressions of these 30ish pages. You?

Colossians Questions & Giveaway

January 19, 2012 in Bible Thoughts, blogging, Book Reviews with 31 Comments

I have some books to give away.

I’d also like some help.

Put the two together, and here’s your chance to help humanity and, possibly, nab yourself a book.

First, how can you help humanity?

I am writing study notes on Colossians for a Study Bible. As a NT Prof, I have my ideas about what I’d like to comment on, what I think is important.

But most people who will be using the Study Bible won’t be academics, and will bring different questions. So here’s what I’d like from you: Look over Colossians, in the Common English Bible if possible, and tell me: if you were reading through Colossians, either on your own or with a Bible study group, what passage, word, idea, verse, etc. would you want a study note on? Is there a confusing idea or word you’d like explained? Any piece of theological awesomeness you’d want to make sure everyone was dialed into?

Leave a comment below and let me know what you’d want to know if you were reading through Colossians.

I am also taking this opportunity to give away a few books. Suggest a passage for me to comment on, and you could win big!

Here’s what you do:

(1) Tell me a verse or two you’d like comment on if you were reading Colossians in a Study Bible.
(2) Next Friday I’ll randomly choose three winners.
(3) These three books will be distributed to those upon whom providence smiles:

So, let me know: what would you like to know about Colossians from your study Bible?

Living the Impossible Dream

January 18, 2012 in Bible Thoughts with 5 Comments

I’m getting ready to teach Romans again. No, I’ve not yet repented of the idea that the resurrection of Jesus is the most important theme in the letter. But in my recalcitrance, I continue to find, as well, the call to live our the impossible dream. For all that we approach Romans for its theological interest, Paul’s interest lies in mixing the cement by which the scattered and divided Christian communities might be held together.

In a letter full of great “therefore” moments, none is so great as when Paul says, “Therefore, accept one another–Just as Christ has accepted you, to the glory of God!” (Rom 15:7).

Why tell an elaborate story of the resurrected Christ as the culmination of the story of Israel? Why insist that faithful living is through the power of this Jesus’ resurrection at work in the world through the same Spirit who gave this Jesus life? Why argue that proclaiming this Lord to the Gentiles will result in the belief of until-now-unbelieving Jews?

The resurrected Lord is Lord over all, the agent of God’s faithfulness to not only Israel but the whole world:

I’m saying that Christ became a servant of those who are circumcised for the sake of God’s truth, in order to confirm the promises given to the ancestors, and so that the Gentiles could glorify God for his mercy. (Rom 15:8-9, CEB)

One of the reasons I am passionate about a narrative approach to scripture, and why I’ve written on a “storied approach” to Paul, is tied to this mandate that we purse the impossible unity that should characterize us as God’s people in Christ.

When we talk systematic theology, we have language at the ready to distinguish us from those with whom we disagree. This is fine, it’s what systematic theology does. It’s what dogma does more generally.

But when we engage the biblical texts using narrative categories, we find ourselves on different ground. Suddenly, a Presbyterian, a Methodist, and an Anglican are standing together as they articulate the most fundamental dynamics in Paul’s letters. A new set of glasses is employed, a story is seen, and we see it together.

When we define ourselves by the story of the God of Israel at work to redeem the world through the reconciling life, death, and resurrection of Christ, we have created a new venue for unity around a holistic gospel, a story with all-encompassing ramifications.

Why agitate for a narrative theology?

Because we need to have our minds transformed again, so that we can reimagine not only what the work of God in Christ is, in itself, but who we are and whom we are with when we occupy that reconciled space in Christ.

Jesus Conference in October

January 17, 2012 in Bible Thoughts, Conferences with 1 Comment

Mark your calendars for this great opportunity coming next fall.

October 4 & 5, Lincoln Christian University will be hosting a conference on the Third Quest for the Historical Jesus.

With a lineup of guests that includes Dale Allison, Mark Goodacre, Scot McKnight, and Loren Stuckenbruck, among others, this is a truly unique opportunity to explore various factors at play in on-going quest for the historical Jesus.

Also: there are student scholarships available to help defray the cost of attending the conference. Check out details here.

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