religious chest-beating and hysteria
In relation to my post below regarding an article written by Peter Jensen in relation to the Anglican church’s position on homosexuality, Justin left a comment which I think deserves a response:
While I think Jensen is wrong to say that sexuality issues are terribly prominent in scripture, they are quite clear when it comes to homosexuality. Basically, Dan, if I understand your argument, it is that we should condone homosexuality because it makes us look bad before the world if we say (publicly or internally) that it’s wrong, and if the Anglican church (or any part of it) takes the stance that it is wrong, they’re being divisive.
Actually I wasn’t suggesting that we condone homosexuality at all. My views on the morality of homosexuality are separate to my views on the wisdom of this debate. We can have that discussion another day. I fully expect and foresee that there will be disagreement within the church and between denominations over this issue. But there is disagreement within the church and between denominations over any number of issues of doctrine, theology and biblical interpretation. Disagreement is not the same as division. In fact, disagreement is a great strength of faith communities as it causes us to continue to develop and journey in our faith and understanding and be challenged by alternative points of view.
I really don’t understand how you can say “You will have succeeded in making the most important and foremost tenet of belief in the Anglican church an opposition to homosexuality.” If this particular tenet gets a lot of press, so be it. That’s not the same as it being a central tenet. I think people know what the central tenets of Christianity are.
There are those that say your heart is where your treasure is. For Christians, our heart is where our mouth is. We betray our feelings on the relative importance of issues by how much we talk about them. Jesus spoke a lot about money, injustice and the kingdom of God. In a lot of churches we speak most about morality, behaviour and judgment.
As I said above, there are many things that we disagree with, and we are content to disagree about them. Within the Anglican communion, there are disagreements about theology, including such matters as the historicity of the bible, there are disagreements about worship and liturgy and there are probably heaps more that I would be familiar with if I were a part of that tradition. However, the one that everyone is placing in the “absolutely very important and critical to our unity” pile is homosexuality. The fact that people are saying that this issue is worth dividing over reveals that the people involved believe that it is critically central to their faith.
A while ago, Jensen released a joint press release with other Sydney Archbishops in which he said that those that believed that homosexuality should be accepted were challenging the “Lordship of Jesus Christ”. In the article quoted, he suggests kicking churches out of the Anglican communion who disagree with him. So, yes, I think that this argument has elevated the issue of homosexuality to being a central tenet of the faith as practiced and preached by the Anglican church. I don’t think that it is central to what Jesus was on about, but that is why this whole controversy distresses me.
However, I can see how, if Christianity is only known to outsiders by its controversial stances on current hot topics, that would be bad. We would have avoided the problem entirely if the Anglican church (and others) had come up with a sensible and scriptural yet compassionate position long ago.
Agree absolutely.
Since when did it become a bad thing for Christians to be countercultural?
It is not a bad thing to be counter-cultural. Nor is it something that we should strive for. We shouldn’t be doing things simply because they are confronting to our society. In fact, we should be considering our culture and legal system (as we do in a whole range of issues) as part of our evaluation of what role we take.
Here in Melbourne we are in the middle of a gangster/mafia-type war. It doesn’t affect law-abiding people too much, but over the past 3 years, gangsters have been executing each other throughout our fair city. And every one of the funerals for career gangsters has taken place in prominent Catholic churches and celebrated by the full rites of the Roman Catholic church. Nobody bats an eyelid.
In our prison system we have chaplains and churches ministering to our worst criminals - murderers, sex offenders. They receive communion, they receive spiritual guidance, regardless of whether they are truly repentant of their lifestyles and the types of activities they engage in.
Western churches are packed with wealthy people, people who buy investment property which drives up property prices, ensuring that poorer people cannot afford to buy their own homes and are destined to be tenants of the wealthy. Our churches are filled with people who vote conservatively to reduce welfare, to reduce affordable health care, to increase penalties for poverty and homelessness related crimes.
Many churches believe that God sanctions the leadership of women despite clear statements in scripture that this is unacceptable. Most churches believe that God does not sanction slavery, despite the clear biblical support for this position. Many churches believe that divorced people may be blessed and redeemed through church-sanctioned re-marriage, despite the clear biblical teaching against this. Many christian organisations oppose capital punishment, despite the biblical demand that this punishment be imposed in a whole range of cases.
I am not arguing one way or the other on this issue. I am merely saying that in many ways we tolerate and embrace different viewpoints, even those that go against clear biblical teaching. This doesn’t mean that we necessarily should follow that path here or not. However, if we are going to pick this issue as the one to draw the line on, we really need to be able to justify what makes this disagreement so special as to justify the schism.
October 10th, 2003 at 11:52 am
Brilliant post.
Being Christian must not come to mean becoming fixated on some pet cultural issues.
As for being against scripture, if I recall, there is also the death penalty for talking back to your parents somewhere in the Pentateuch…not to mention death for a host of other sins.
As you point out, we allow the vilest thugs to be granted sacramental relief of their burdens…and isn’t that exactly what our Lord would do?
October 12th, 2003 at 5:45 am
Dan-
Thanks for responding to my comment with such thoughtful analysis.
I suppose a response would be easier if I came from an Anglican background, but since I don’t, I don’t know what their primary authority base is, so I don’t know how they would argue it.
I do know that in evangelical churches (the anglicans are not evangelicals in any sense of the word, so I don’t know why this keeps getting confused in the press) scripture is seen as the final authority. I think some of this trickles over into the Episcopal church in America, and there is a revulsion to anything that is in such clear violation of scripture.
I totally agree that we need to make it clear why this is worth dividing over. For an evangelical, it’s clearly a matter of not taking scripture seriously enough. Christians must take the Christian scriptures seriously (obviously, some of the examples you cited were OT, so the way we apply those texts is different). We should do the same in the case of women taking the same leadership roles as men - can we really justify the current egalitarian position? From my perspective, yes, and this is an important yes. Cultural arguments can be made that justify the explaining away of Paul’s instructions.
I don’t think anyone can do the same for condoning homosexuality. For one, it was accepted in the greek culture, so if God was even the slightest bit OK with it, surely it would be condoned. But it’s not. There are many hints throughout the NT that women are really equal to men, that Christ has broken all such barriers down, but no such hints that God is ok with homosexual behavior.
But what it comes down to for me is that the pro-homosexuality arguments that take scripture seriously are crappy, exegetically speaking. I’ve never once seen someone try to explain away a scripture without resorting to “well, every time this word is used, it really means something completely different than what people have always thought.” There is no real scholarship on the issue, at least by people who aren’t homosexuals themselves, or a priori strongly pro-homosexual.
It is a matter of how we view the authority of and interpret scripture, and that is why so many people feel that it is worth dividing over - an acid test, if you will, for whether a church wishes to be aligned with biblical, historical Christianity or not.
Again, though, it is hard to say how this would sound to an Anglican, since their view of the interaction between scripture and the church in holding authority is different than mine.
October 12th, 2003 at 5:49 am
I don’t necessarily think it’s true that we talk most about what’s most important to us. So often, the important things are understood and require no discussion, so we entertain ourselves with discussions of things we find interesting at the moment but don’t care that much about. Jesus talked a lot about money, yes, but he never said, “I have come that they may use money wisely, and earn profits abundantly.” He made it clear what was most important to Him, even though he talked a lot about other things.
October 12th, 2003 at 5:54 am
Also, I agree that we shouldn’t be countercultural for its own sake, but only for the sake of conformity to God’s revealed will.
What I meant about being countercultural is that the Anglican church and others who want homosexuality to be condoned seem to think that, if some biblical countercultural stance makes us look bad to the world, we shouldn’t be countercultural. This is how I interpreted your “The Sidelined Church” post a few months back. We just need to make sure that we’re only being countercultural when God really wants us to, or else we’re creating unnecessary barriers to the Gospel. But there are some necessary barriers. Paul talked about removing stumbling blocks, but Jesus referred to himself and his teaching as stumbling blocks.
October 16th, 2003 at 12:31 pm
Why affirming homosexuality is a dividing issue
Dan and Phil at Signposts have shared some challenging thoughts on the issues of homosexual affirmation, ordination, and marriage. Most recently, Dan questions the wisdom of dividing over this issue. While strictly speaking this issue is not really any…