GAY TRUTH

For better or worse, the Bible is a cultural text. And people are struggling today with how to read it. Magazines like Newsweek are informing the general public (and in this particular case advocating) that the Bible is culturally obsolete and outdated. Here is an excerpt from the December 2008 cover story The Religious Case for Gay Marriage by Lisa Miller:   Most of us no longer heed Leviticus on haircuts or blood sacrifices; our modern understanding of the world has surpassed its prescriptions. Why would we regard its condemnation of homosexuality with more seriousness than we regard its advice, which is far lengthier, on the best price to pay for a slave?… A mature view of scriptural authority requires us, as we have in the past, to move beyond literalism. The Bible was written for a world so unlike our own, it’s impossible to apply its rules, at face value, to ours. For some Christians , this is where appeals to blind faith or personal feeling come in—but these response...

Image via Wikipedia No more divisive issue faces the churches of this country today than the question of ordaining homosexuals . Like the issue of slavery a century ago, it has the potential for splitting entire denominations. And like the issue of slavery, the argument revolves around the interpretation of Scripture. What does the Bible say about homosexuality, and how are we to apply it to this tormented question? We may begin by excluding all references to Sodom in the Old and New Testaments , since the sin of the Sodomites was homosexual rape,  carried out by heterosexuals intent on humiliating strangers by treating them “like women,” thus demasculinizing them. (This is also the case in a similar account in Judges 19-21.) Their brutal gang-rape has nothing to do with the problem of whether genuine love expressed between consenting persons of the same sex is legitimate or not. Likewise Deuteronomy 23:17-18 must be pruned from the list, since it most likely refers to a heteros...