Come, Let Us Reason Together

We are an arguing family.

Growing up, I thought all families argued. In mine, we like to get the last word in. I remember realizing that perhaps this was not conventional when my little sister had a friend over in high school and he watched in horror as my dad and I yelled and shook our fists and stomped our feet about school prayer and carried the argument out of the house into the driveway until I ended it by slamming the car door. (After launching a particularly strong argument. Because I like to have the last word. And the first, and most of the ones in between.)

I was thinking of this recently because I think we, as a church, have gotten sloppy as arguers. We proof text. We throw around words like "liberal" and "conservative" as slurs without really knowing what they mean. And growing up in a family where vigorous debate and reasoning was valued and where you'd better be able to defend your position (as my dad has said, "Your mama may have raised a mean child, but she raised no fools") has made me realize that it's a rapidly disappearing art, and the church is suffering for it.

I have a friend recently who said the arguments against ordaining gay people or blessing gay unions were the same ones used by racists to justify apartheid. It's an argument I've heard before, and it's sloppy and inaccurate. Apartheid theology twisted Scripture to see something that isn't there: a vision of race before race existed. The Biblical writers had some concept of tribe, but not of race as defined by color; that was a European invention about 1500 years later. Even many evangelicals took issue with apartheid theology: apartheid apologists used the Tower of Babel and Pentecost as examples of God wanting people to remain separate, while evangelicals typically see Pentecost as setting right what went wrong at Babel--the sin that caused division was now being set right by the Spirit, speaking to all in their languages so they were brought together, not pushed apart, the beginning of this radical new venture in inclusion that was the early church. (Flawed and faulty, as we all are, but still radical. And an adventure. I do love adventure.)

The parallel doesn't quite work with homosexuality. You can say Scripture doesn't refer to homosexual relationships as we now understand them, but then that does one of two things: 1) you are inverting the race analogy and, rhetorically, putting those who support full inclusion of LGBTQ people in the same position as the apartheid apologists. In one case, we argue that the Bible is misused to justify an argument about race that didn't exist then; in the second, we turn around and use the Bible to justify an argument about homosexuality that we assert didn't exist then; ie in either case, we are alleging the construct of race or sexuality *as we understand them today* did not exist in Biblical times, but in one place we are using it as a critique and in another as a justification; or 2) you're wrong, and no less a Biblical scholar than N.T. Wright says it, who says that "there is nothing that we know now about either the condition or the behavior of homosexuality that was unknown in the first century." It was not just pederasty or sexual use of slaves, he asserts, but also "read Plato's Symposium: they have permanent, faithful, stable male-male partnerships, lifelong stuff, Achilles and Patroclus in Homer, all sorts of things--Paul, in Corinth, will not have been unaware, in a world in which private life only is for the very rich and the very aristocratic, everyone else does what they do pretty much in public--Paul will have known the full range of behavior." The dismissal of first century understanding of homosexuality is, he says, "Enlightenment arrogance."

Now. It seems to me if he is right, and I tend to trust him as probably the leading NT scholar alive and certainly one of the leading authorities on Paul and Romans, then the question is not so much what the Bible has to say about homosexuality, but what weight and authority we give it. And that is a valid discussion to have. But let's have that one and not the one in which we try to force Scripture to say what it doesn't.

As for me, I'd like to think I'm probably not so easy to pin down on this issue as some might think I am. Where I am unsure, I prefer to err on the side of grace; I think it unlikely that God will ever say to me "You took that grace thing too literally, you over-graced the world, it got out of hand." I am tasked with loving people; the Holy Spirit is tasked with transforming them. I am less concerned with whether homosexual behavior is or is not a sin and more concerned with how the church has isolated it as a sin beyond others while ignoring the sins in its midst. We have way bigger fish to fry, folks.

I am sorry that in our shouting at each other, we miss the opportunity to articulate what a Christian vision of human sexuality and sexual mores might look like. At least the evangelical tradition is still clear: it is covenantal, to be exercised within the sanctuary and safety of marriage, because letting someone quite literally inside your skin is not to be taken lightly and not something we do with just anyone. It's a very high view of marriage, of sexuality, and of the body. It is also, in a world where marriage now may occur 15 or 20 years after the onset of sexual maturity and may not occur at all, a very demanding view--which doesn't make it wrong, but it's worth exploring. And for those Christians (I hesitate to say liberal just because I think liberal and conservative are unhelpful terms in this context, they've become so polarizing and stereotyped) who have unloosed sex from marriage, what does a Christian vision of moral sexual behavior look like? What do Christian principles look like incarnated in our most intimate relations? That is also a conversation worth having and we're not having it.

When an activist friend and I have talked about it we get mutually frustrated because she frames the issue of gay inclusion in the church (in her case, the Anglican Communion) in terms of human rights and I say the church isn't about rights; rights is political language, Enlightenment language, but not Biblical language and not faith language. By that I don't mean I think the church should stand in opposition to human rights; it has just made me think that it isn't the question we are meant to ask. Scripture talks about laying rights down, not taking them up. And I think a better question is not "what are my rights" but "what is my responsibility to my neighbor"--which in the end is the more demanding and costly question, and hopefully one that leads us to the same place of protecting and celebrating human dignity and worth ("rights," in political language) in its fullness but gets us there together, each of us looking out for and protecting the other over ourselves.

We don't argue well anymore. I mean we as a church--perhaps it is the degradation of our political culture that has seeped into the churches, perhaps that we don't value reason ("Come, let us reason together") and the premise-evidence-logic strand anymore, perhaps that we haven't the discipline and attention for it anymore (remember Paul talks of discipline as a prelude to faith); but we are sloppy, lazy thinkers these days, and I am frustrated by it. And it wasn't always this way. The Anglican construct of the three-legged stool posits that Scripture, reason and tradition are the three legs that hold up the stool of faith, which becomes wobbly when any one of them is missing; the Methodists added experience but held on to reason. Because these things matter, they are worth reasoning through and reasoning through well; they are questions about who we are and what it is to be human and how to live well in this world. Our conversation is so impoverished and we do it so poorly.

I am postmodern enough to believe that these are not our only tools or the only legitimate way of arriving at a conclusion, that narrative and art and experience are also resources, but a well-disciplined mind is still so vital--I am just not willing to give that weapon up just yet.

"In the church of Jesus Christ there can and should be no non-theologians."--Karl Barth