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Jonathon Merritt of the Religion News Service reports that David Gushee no longer believes homosexual, bisexual, or transgender behavior to be sinful. Who is David Gushee? He is an ethicist that has been a part of the evangelical movement for many years—which is why Merritt has splashed his story. Merritt puts forth Gushee’s change of heart as a decision of great consequence for the evangelical movement saying, “It is difficult to overstate the potential impact of Gushee’s defection.” Several thoughts come to mind in response to this report: (1) David Gushee’s career has been on a leftward slide for many years now on a range of issues. That he is making this announcement now shocks no one. In fact, earlier this year Gushee endorsed a book making revisionist arguments about the Bible and homosexuality. This is not the kind of announcement that sends shockwaves through evangelicalism. For those who know about Gushee (which may be a precious few), this has been a long time in coming.

The Destruction Of Sodom And Gomorrah, a painting by John Martin (painter), died 1854, thus 100 years. (Photo credit: Wikipedia ) Boswell and others argue that the account in Judges 19:22ff. also refers only to inhospitality or violence. We all can agree that the writer of Judges has clearly modeled his telling of the story on Genesis 19 , and we should interpret them the same way.36  Although Boswell claims that “Jews and Christians have overwhelmingly failed to interpret this story as one of homosexuality,”37 he fails to back up this claim with any sources.  A footnote admits that some sources have interpreted the act as sodomy. Although the definitions for sodomy have been wide enough to include several sexual vices, no one has tried to include inhospitality as a possible meaning, except in the sense that all sexual attacks are inhospitable. The Levite could hardly view the interest of the men of Gibeah as simply an inhospitable act. In Judges 20:5–6, he recounts that t

CHARLOTTE, NC, -- On Saturday, just 24 hours after backlash from the American people convinced SunTrust bank to reopen its partnerships with Benham REO Group, David and Jason Benham thanked supporters on their YouTube channel . "We just wanted to say thank you. We were overwhelmed yesterday with this SunTrust debacle, and SunTrust heard from America. It was unbelievable what took place," David said in the video. On May 15, the Benhams reported on social media that  SunTrust had ended its partnership with their company due to their support for the unborn and traditional marriage.  The next day, a backlash forced  SunTrust to re-establish its relationship with the Benhams' company . SunTrust has denied that it ended the relationship with the Benhams, blaming a third-party vendor. The vendor, however, said the blame lay with SunTrust. The SunTrust decisions came after  the Benhams saw their HGTV reality show canceled because of their traditional Christian

"David and Jonathan," by Rembrandt. Jonathan is the figure in the turban. Hermitage News (Photo credit: Wikipedia ) David’s Lament for Saul and Jonathan (1:17–27) IN THE EVENT that any reader could conceivably doubt David’s sincerity in mourning for Saul and Jonathan, the text now moves to an elegy in which David’s deepest emotional responses are expressed lyrically. Old Testament tradition assumes that David was a man especially gifted in music and song (1 Sam. 16:18, 23; 18:10; 2 Sam. 23:1; Amos 6:5; often in the Psalms, where seventy-two individual psalms are associated with his name).  Many have noted that at various levels this poem implies that David himself is the composer, and the burden of proof lies with anyone denying this assertion. The poetry has a lofty quality; “only a rare spirit deeply moved by an event of great moment is likely to have produced a little masterpiece like this.”10 In one of the most emotional and moving scenes of the Bible, David

Now that gay marriage is legal in many jurisdictions and broadly accepted, activists are taking up the cause of polygamy. The liberal Washington Postreligion columnist Lisa Miller is sympathetic: This week, in one of his first public statements since this past summer’s anti-gay-marriage remarks, Chick-fil-A President Dan Cathy told an Atlanta television reporter that he supports “ Biblical families.” This comment immediately gave rise to jokes questioning his familiarity with the Old Testament , where, as any Mormon elder can tell you, patriarchs such as Abraham, Jacob and David all practiced polygamy. John Witte Jr., however, thinks it isn’t so funny. A scholar of religion and law at Emory University in Atlanta, Witte is working on a lengthy history of polygamy due out next year. He believes that polygamy is the next frontier in marriage and family law. If states are able to dismantle traditional or conventional views of marriage by allowing two men or two women to wed, then why s

Q. Some people say homosexuality is natural and moral; others say it is unnatural and immoral . How do we know? A. Our standard can only be what God says. In  Romans 1  we read, God gave them over to shameful lusts. Even their women exchanged natural relations for unnatural ones. In the same way the men also abandoned natural relations with women and were inflamed with lust for one another. Men committed indecent acts with other men, and received in themselves the due penalty for their perversion ( Rom 1:26-27 ). So even though homosexual desires  feel  natural, they are actually  un natural, because God says they are. He also calls all sexual involvement outside of marriage immoral. (There are 44 references to fornication— sexual immorality —in the Bible .) Therefore, any form of homosexual activity , whether a one-night stand or a long-term monogamous relationship , is by definition immoral—just as any abuse of heterosexuality outside of marriage is immoral. Q. Is homosexuality