GAY TRUTH

Every passing week makes it simply more obvious that the American culture is essentially one prolonged celebration of immorality. This is true at the popular level—gay marriage at the Grammys ? Really?—as well as at the more erudite academic level, where it is a virtue to be critically authoritative with a healthy disdain for absolute truth. Photo by Matt Sayles/Invision/AP–used under Fair Use While once we held to a Christian veneer, now sexual sin is  pushed as progressive, abortion is funded by tax dollars, and the fear of the Lord has been replaced with the celebration of self. Where people used to blush, they now boast. Having been been “liberated” from biblical ethics , our society has instead produced a culture of death. People define virtue not on God ’s terms, but instead as doing what is right in their own eyes. Even in churches the gospel of grace is often replaced with a man-centered watered-down substitute, as if acceptability were the goal and compromise th...

Image via Wikipedia by Elodie Ballantine Emig Leviticus includes two very similar laws condemning homosexuality. Isn’t it enough to be told that God finds homosexuality detestable; why add, a mere chapter and a half later, that it carries with it the death penalty ?  The only answer that makes any sense is that the two laws, though using identical language in places, are of very different types. In Leviticus 18:22 and 20:13, we find homosexuality proscribed in both apodictic and casuistic law. “Do not lie with a man as one lies with a woman; that is detestable” (Lev. 18:22) is an example of apodictic, or absolute law.  “Apodictic law [embodies] laws promulgated in unconditional, categorical directives such as commands and prohibitions” (Klein, Blomberg and Hubbard, Introduction to Biblical Interpretation, rev. 2004, p. 342).  Casuistic, or case law, on the other hand, deals with the consequences of certain infractions (if …., then….). “If a man lies with a man as one ...