In particular, the page on How mainline &, liberal/progressive Christians develop their homosexual teachings and beliefs, from the Bible, church tradition, scientific studies, and personal experience seems to directly address the OP’s question.
True; but the faithful can also honestly and fairly disagree about both what the Bible means and how it should be applied. Were there any particular “mental gymnastics” in that link that you found particularly spurious?
I’m not UCC, but I’m very active in the lay leadership of the Episcopal Church. I was a deputy to our last two General Conventions at which the rights of gays and lesbians were signifcantly broadened and affirmed. We have partnered gay priests and bishops and in a number of dioceses same-sex blessings are performed.
For an Episcopalian I am rather conservative (I voted against same-sex blessings) but for an American Christian I am pretty liberal (I voted in favor of non-discrimination against sexual orientation, gender identity or expression in membership and ordination, and for a resolution opposing DOMA).
The religous tolerance link above gives most of the arguments for re-assessing the church’s historical view of homosexuality. First, the OT prohibtions have to be taken in context of the Law of Moses and how binding it is on Christians. Following the lead of Jesus and the church fathers we have moved beyond the Jewish purity code and no longer avoid shellfish, mixed fabrics, or tattoos. We don’t separate ourselves from menstruating women. The prohibition of male/male sex (lesbianism is not mentioned) is placed in this category of laws that served their pupose at that point in the relationship between God and God’s people, but Jesus has set us free from the Law.
In the New Testament, Jesus never mentioned homosexuality (which is neither an argument for or against). “Sexual immorality” is mentioned a number of times in the NT but does not refer specifically to homosexuality. Nowhere is homosexuality specifically and clearly admonished, except in Romans 1-2 which can be interpreted in diverse ways.
Finally, as stpauler touches upon, there are a number of passages in the NT that clearly reject condemnation by the Law and call for a new attitude of grace. Paul says there are now “neither Jew nor Gentile; neither slave nor free; neither male nor female” in Christ.
From my perspective one of the strongest arguments for acceptance of all views on homosexuality is a passage in Romans dealing with the analagous issue of that day - are Christians permitted to eat meat sacrificed to idols? Try reading this passage and substituting homosexuality instead of eating (bolding mine):
While Jesus never specifically addresses homosexuality, He did say that “I came not abolish the law but to fulfill the law.” Okay, so does that mean that we don’t have to worry about the original prohibitions on homosexuality, or not? Also, Christ also told His disciples that what they hold loosed on earth is loose in heaven, and what they hold bound on earth is bound in heaven. So could this mean that since several churches hold homosexual behaviors bound on earth, that heaven disapproves as well?
What does it mean to have “fulfilled the Law”? One way it can be (and is) understood is to mean that Jesus is the completion or fullness of what the Law points to. So the Law is not useless or pointless or insufficient, but that it has been surpassed by Jesus.
I’m sure different churches would answer this differently. Some would say that Jesus was specifically addressing only Peter and his successors (the Popes); some would say the Church (universal); some would say believers in general. I doubt many people would say that individual churches can “bind and loose” with authority but only on their particular members.
I’m no longer a member or a UCCer, but I used to be both, and I’m still fond of my local church. I’ve heard the pastor there say–in public, both in sermons and in classes – that some parts of the Bible simply aren’t correct. She gave a sermon entitled “When God is Wrong,” for instance, in which she analyzed an Old Testament story (I think it was the incident in which King David is punished by God for conducting a census, which he was ordered to do by God). Her point, I always took it, was that all Christians pick and choose what to believe and not to believe in the Bible; she just admits it. No gymnastics necessary. She has a basic philosophy taken from the Bible and judges specific teachings and passages based on that.
Few modern popular religions are based on everything in the texts they’re ostensibly based on. Culling the good bits and ignoring the bad bits is called “theology”, and they differ dramatically. No difference here.
It’s what you get when you consider some collection of text the source of Truth.
Paul doesn’t say anything about it. Even though he easily could have (and would have, had he had a problem with it), he didn’t.
Not all conservative churches that have women in leadership have contempt for those positions. Let me give two examples. Bishop Betty Peeblesof Jericho City of Praise an over 10,000 person church in Maryland, and Joyce Myersspeaker and author.
As seen the Washington Post article about her funeral, Bishop Peebles had the titles both Bishop and Apostle. She had important Maryland politicians as well as other minister vying to speak at her funeral
Joyce Myers was named 17th of the top 25 most influential evangelist by Time in 2005,
There’s a whole lot of stuff to read in the link and I’m not inclined to pore over it all. On the main page it says that conservatives tend to view the passages as condemnations of homosexuality while progressive churches see it and condemning a person for “engaging in sexual behavior that is against one’s sexual orientation and basic nature.” You can see various examples on their page titled “major or ‘clobber’ passages.” I do not buy that Leviticus only refers to gay sex in a pagan temple.
I don’t have a dog in this fight. I’m an atheist who is okay with gay people and wants them to have the same legal rights that heterosexuals enjoy. Nor am I hostile towards Christianity or other religions in general. If someone wants to argue that some of the rules proscribed in the bible or actions taken have to be understood within their cultural context and do not apply today, fine. Like I said, that is an answer I can respect. However, if someone is tells me that the bible doesn’t endorse slavery, genocide and doesn’t condemn homosexuality I’m going to call bullshit. Because it absolutely does.
Odesio, what you’re doing is similar to arguing that because the makers of the U.S. Constitution accepted slavery and suppression of voting rights for women (and implicitly included them in the Constitution), we should not bother to think about what they said about other issues. In fact, they had other beliefs implicitly stated there that aren’t much mentioned. They didn’t believe that American Indians should be citizens. They didn’t much like the idea of popular elections, so only the House was popularly elected. The Senators were chosen by state legislators. The President was chosen by the Electorial College. In fact, they actually believed that most of the time the Electorial College wouldn’t agree on a President and Vice-President, so the election would be decided by the Congress.
If we can find good in a document written about 230 years ago, despite some things that we currently object to, can’t we similarly tolerate the problems in a document that’s about ten times as old, despite other things we object to.
But isn’t that just what the liberals are doing with some of the less ambiguous verses?
As Dryden wrote:
From The Medal, A Satire against Sedition, 1682, or possibly Absalom and Achitophel (1st Part, or maybe the 2nd. I should check but I’m too lazy.)
So I’m a UCCer, and while I can’t speak for all UCCers (we’re a congregational denomination, which means that we pretty much let everyone decide for themselves what they believe), I can speak on what I believe, which comes from my experience in many UCC congregations.
First of all, it’s impossible to understand how progressive Christians understand what the Bible says about LGBT people without understanding how we read the Bible. Whereas conservative Christians often view the Bible as “infallible”, progressive Christians do not. Conservative Christians will sometimes even go so far as to say that God literally dictated the words of the Bible to the people who wrote it (this is called “plenary inspiration”).
On the other hand, most progressive Christians tend to accept that the Bible is the product of a couple hundred of years of writings that built upon each other, from multiple authors and multiple time periods, pretty much in agreement with most Biblical scholars. Indeed, the Bible comes with loads of cultural and societal biases that we have to read and sift through. So while conservative Christians refer to the Bible as the “Word of God”, progressive Christians take the lead of theologian Karl Barth and say that Jesus and his example is the “Word” of God, and the Bible points us to him.
Unfortunately, this is a hard viewpoint to articulate, and it’s way more difficult to express in bumper sticker terms than the conservative viewpoint. But because we understand that the Bible is not an infallible document, we also understand that prohibitions on LGBT people are culturally-situated, and that we can learn from human experience that discrimination against LGBT people is, well, wrong. This may or may not come from the scripture, but the command to love our neighbor is, and because we believe in the continuing work of the Holy Spirit, we believe that we always need to keep ourselves open to learning more about who our neighbors are, and what it means to love them.
You see, we don’t usually read the Bible as some kind of book of laws; it’s a story (or really, a collection of stories) about God and humanity and how we relate to each other. And because we believe in the story, we believe that we are constantly challenged to learn about people in whom God might be revealed, and that includes LGBT people and other marginalized groups. God, after all, was not made human in a rich king but as an impoverished peasant born into an oppressed and conquered people. If we take that seriously, and the teachings of Jesus seriously, then we can’t possibly ignore the struggles and oppression faced by LGBT people.
So while there are certainly no passages in the Bible that will say, “Being gay is cool”, there are stories that we think apply to this particular situation. Paul’s letters, for example, are consistently concerned with the inclusion of people who the Old Testament (and keep in mind, the OT was at the time the only Bible the early church new) called “unclean” and said that Gentiles did not need to be circumcised to join the fledgling Christian movement. Acts 10 tells us about how Peter had a dream of a sheet coming from heaven filled with unclean animals, and God telling him to “kill and eat” because Peter can no longer call “unclean what God has made clean” and to minister to a Gentile, Cornelius the centurion. We might not take these stories “literally”, but we really do take them seriously and recognize that they, in conjunction with new experiences and understandings, that we should no longer call LGBT people unclean, when God has already made them clean.
This is not a new way of reading scripture, by the way. Take a look at Galatians 4, and pay attention to how Paul reads the Old Testament story of Hagar and Sarah- he calls it an allegory and applies it to his current context, not as literal history.
I admit that there are plenty of Christians who might not like what I just wrote, but the way progressive Christians read the Bible is not new, nor is it out of the mainstream. The UCC might be the most vocal in our support of LGBT people, but the Episcopal Church USA, the Presbyterian Church USA, and the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America aren’t too far behind, and you can’t really get more mainstream Christian than that.
I made no such argument but I’ll go along with your analogy. If someone told me that the U.S. Constitution as originally written did not endorse slavery I would laugh out loud. Whether or not you can find good in the bible really isn’t my concern nor do I have any desire to get people to stop looking at the good. Honestly, I love the book of Job as it includes the very valuable lesson that shit happens to good people.
As I keep saying. If anyone wants to argue that those passages in the bible that refer to homosexuality aren’t relevant today for whatever reason, well, I can respect that. If you want to argue that the bible only condemned homosexual relations when it was outside the nature of those participating, well, I’ll respect you as much as people who claim that the wine in the bible is actually non-fermented grape juice.
Excellent exposition by baronsabato. The UCC congregation of which I am a member recently had the baptism of a baby with two mothers. I know nothing of their story. In arriving at a situation where this was unremarkable we lost a few members; we have also gained members who like our inclusiveness.
I grew up in the UCC, but I’m not a believer.
As far as homosexuality goes: there are all sorts of things that are prohibited in the bible, that we just don’t care much about. Usury, for example, is pretty clearly prohibited, and was considered evil and sinful for a long long time (Dante puts usurers in the same circle of hell as sodomites, for example :)). But you don’t see a huge Christian movement against Visa, these days. The Bible didn’t change, but culture sure did.
The current cultural clash over homosexuality is similar. Clearly, it doesn’t derive from biblical dictates. People who are opposed to homosexuality find biblical passages to support their opposition, and people who aren’t focus on other parts. I remember a lot of “we are all sinners, but God loves us anyway” and “do unto others”, which, in my not so humble opinion, are more aligned with the sorts of things Jesus said and did than “look at those faggots over there; they’re gonna burn.”
The only scripture of relevance that I can think of that addresses one’s nature is the one in Romans 1, and it’s specifically about God punishing people who reject him by turning them over to shameful desires. It shows us that Paul thought homosexuality was shameful, but does not call it sinful. And it does specifically require that the person at least previously was heterosexual, otherwise God didn’t do anything to them.
Most of the arguments I’ve seen argue that the words translated as “homosexual” don’t mean what that term means today. Most also appeal to context. I don’t think I’ve seen any argument that the sin is going against one’s nature, except on that website linked above.
Our very nature is sinful. Why would the Bible teach Christians to follow their nature?
I do find the eunuch argument in the above link (direct link to relevant page) rather convincing, though. Surely there weren’t enough men born without balls that Jesus would have to specifically mention them. It’s a pretty good argument that he meant a man who was not attracted to women.
Few men are born ball-less anyway. Most eunuchs have their balls taken from them for purposes of singing prettily, being trustworthy harem guards, and transforming baby-daddy tutors into tortured Catholic theologians.