Prior to seminary graduation I hardly gave a thought to same-gender relationships. But eight days after Billy Graham handed me my M.Div., on the second day on the job in my first church assignment, a 20-something singles ministry member asked me if it was OK for him to be earning extra income by performing late-night sexual favors at a local truck stop. Suddenly I found myself in the throes of Christianity’s next heated debate.
Nearly a dozen LGBT persons “came out” to me in counseling over the next few years. I believed their desires and practices ran contrary to God’s design for their lives, but I restrained my judgment in order to love them in the grace-filled ways that Jesus modeled.
Through 30 subsequent years I have upheld the highest view of biblical authority I can imagine, reading the Bible on its own terms as “God-breathed” through writers addressing specific issues being faced by their respective communities of faith. In the process, I have been confronted again and again with my tendency toward selective literalism. Like everybody else I know, I treat some parts of the Bible as God’s commands to be obeyed by all, while disregarding the times those texts get contradicted in other parts of the Bible.
In recent years, I have finally admitted to myself that the Bible is packed with contradictions. And I’ve come to believe that those contradictions are just as God-breathed as are the seemingly incontrovertibly self-evident commands.
For example, the Bible that tells us to “choose life” and commands people never to kill, also reports divine directives to go to war and to execute criminals.
The Bible that prohibits stealing, heralds the slavery-fleeing Israelites’ plundering of Egyptians’ wealth — which soon was melted down to create both the golden calf and the ark of the covenant.
The Savior who promised to fulfill the Law also promised to turn son against father and daughter against mother — in spite of the commandment that children honor their parents.
That same adultery prohibiting Bible tells of the polygamous lifestyles of numerous biblical superstars and even credits God with giving King David his predecessor’s wives. Huh? God did that? Look it up: 2 Samuel 12:7-9.
The apostles dispense with the circumcising of converts, keeping the Sabbath and eating kosher. They did prohibit eating meat offered to idols (Acts 15), but Paul says not to worry where your pagan hosts bought the meat they serve you (1 Corinthians 10; Romans 14).
In the process of facing these texts honestly, I have concluded that what I’d long-treated as absolutes are not. Oh, God’s existence and identity are absolutes. The mission of the Trinitarian God — bringing salvation through the incarnation, crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus Christ — is an absolute. The Reformation affirmations of solus Christus, sola gratia, sola fide, sola scriptura, and soli Deo gloria all stand as absolutes. But the biblical teachings about lifestyles reside in the region of “aspirations,” “benchmarks” and “applications.” They call us toward holiness. But those teachings also leave room for “approximations” and “adaptations.”
We long have felt free to approximate and adapt God’s will. Face it, how many couples wishing to be married can present a prenuptial resume that matches the virgin purity of Adam and Eve? If Eden’s first couple set the paradigm for the rest of us to follow, as the Savior affirmed, how is it that Jesus himself gave allowance to divorce unfaithful spouses?
As debates around marriage policies intensify this year, and as nuclear families find the grace to say to their children, “Whom you love we will love,” and as pastors continue to perform marriages of sexually active and serially divorced heterosexual couples — maybe we ought to be asking who else’s covenant hopes ought to be blessed. Just as Lewis Smedes, the late Fuller Seminary ethicist and father of three adopted children, affirmed, “Adoption wasn’t God’s first idea, but it was a great second idea,” might we possibly consider allowing room for some other second ideas to approximate and adapt our aspirations and benchmarks?
What do you think?
—JHH
