Several hundred gay, lesbian, bisexual and
transgender Christians recently gathered at the National City Christian
Church in Washington for a meeting of The Reformation Project.
The
group was founded by Matthew Vines, a pastor who announced he was gay
in a 1-hour YouTube testimonial he posted two years ago which went
viral.
Vines said the aim of the meeting is to
show that “there is a path to both affirming the full authority of the
Bible and affirming same-sex relationships.”
Most Christians believe that the bible totally condemns homosexuality. The book of Leviticus calls male-male sex “detestable,” while in Romans, one of
Jesus’ apostles, Paul, condemns men who commit “shameless acts" with
other men.
But Vines says homosexuality was seen
differently in the ancient world, and believes these passages are about
lasciviousness, and do not apply to loving same-sex couples.
“The
heart of the scripture’s teaching is that marriage is about commitment -
that is about keeping one’s covenant with one’s spouse in the same way
that God keeps his covenant with us,” he said in an interview. “And that
is something that same-sex couples can do just as well as opposite sex
couples can.”
Voice of America reports
that, Vines also argues the traditional teaching is wrong because it
has failed in its objective - it has not stopped homosexuality and it
has caused much suffering among Christians with same-sex attractions.
But
critics argue he is reinterpreting scripture to justify his own sexual
orientation. One of those critics is Sam Allberry, a British pastor who
said he is attracted to men, but stays single.
“What
you have to do to the Bible to make it approve of same-sex
relationships is profoundly un-evangelical,” he told a meeting last
month of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern
Baptist Convention in Nashville, Tennessee.
At
that meeting, Baptist leaders toned down past rhetoric about gays
without changing their core beliefs. That prompted some comparisons to
Pope Francis’ recent efforts to reach out to gays, while not changing
church doctrine.
The biblical passages dealing
with homosexuality are central for Evangelical Christians, because they
read much of scripture literally. But evangelical ethicist David
Gushee said they are blown out of proportion.
“The
Bible has 31,273 verses,” he said in an interview in Washington. “The
number of verses that can be called on to support the traditional
position is essentially six passages, maybe 15 verses at the most. That
is something to pay attention to.”
Gushee, who
teaches at Mercer University, a Baptist divinity school in Atlanta,
Georgia, recently caused a sensation in evangelical circles when he
changed his own position and published a book called “Changing Our
Mind.” He said the change partly came about from meeting homosexuals,
and after his younger sister came out as a lesbian.
“When
I stopped thinking of this mainly as a sexual ethics issue, and started
thinking about it mainly as a human suffering issue - rejected
children, people kicked out of their families and churches, people
wanting to kill themselves because of what they were hearing from their
parents and their friends and their churches... it is not just about
those six passages, it is about how marginalized people are supposed to
be treated,” he said.
In his speech at the conference, he spoke at length about his other area of expertise: Christians and the Holocaust.
“I
will view what got us here as one of those tragic situations in
Christian history, in which well-intentioned Christians, just trying to
follow Jesus, misread scripture, causing great harm to oppressed
people,” he said.
A stained glass window above him
in the sanctuary depicted the martyrdom of St. Steven, a biblical
parable that many Christians historically have read in an anti-Semitic
vein, even though both killers and victim were Jewish.
In
the interview with VOA, Gushee said the gay issue is just another
example of biblical distortions resulting in what he calls
“un-Christlike” behavior.
“I think it remains very
hard for Christians to say this simple thing: ‘We were wrong,’” he said
in the interview. “We’ve been wrong on slavery, on race, on women, on a
whole host of issues.”
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