Evangelical Leader, Jim Wallis, Now Favors Marriage Equality
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Jennifer Knapp in the Highlands
The True Colors Ministry at Highland Baptist Church is hosting Inside Out Faith a concert featuring Jennifer Knapp at Highland Baptist Church this Sunday, April 28th. DBCC has sponsored this event, and have been given a number of complimentary tickets. If you are interested in seeing this concert/conversation session, please contact the DBCC church office immediately.
Please join us for what is sure to be an incredibly moving and enlightening evening of worship and fellowship!
What Is the What?
Brief note: Since the church where I pastor, Douglass Boulevard Christian Church, voted on Sunday, April 17 to honor all marriages (gay and straight) by refraining from signing marriage licenses, I have been asked to present a justification of my views on receiving LGBTQ folks as equals in all aspects of the life of the church. Here is a brief glance at the nature of my thinking on this issue--which is to say an answer to "What is the what?"On Facebook, as many of you know, I tend to be kind of a smart aleck. More to the point, I tend to be a decidedly liberal smart aleck—a fact that annoys some people, while others seem more appreciative of my sarcasm. At any rate, I received a message on Facebook the other day from someone about whom I care a great deal. It read, in part:
“Many of the people in my generation are politically what they are because of their upbringing. It would do us well to hear the "other" side in a constructive manner. For instance, I have been thinking about the homosexual question, and all of my learning and understanding comes from my conservative teaching.”
The note went on to ask that I offer some clarification of my views on the “homosexual question.” Notwithstanding the implication that my snarkiness is often less than “constructive,” I take the message to be a genuine attempt on the part of the writer to understand a different view—admittedly, something about which I could do better myself. Since I believe the request to be a serious one, and since my early “learning and teaching” also came from “conservative teaching,” I feel a certain responsibility to try to offer a serious answer about how I have arrived at my current theological convictions. And while the nature of the medium in which I provide my response necessarily narrows the scope of how thoroughly I can address each issue associated with this question, I will try to provide a general account of how my beliefs have changed.
At the heart of what my questioner refers to as conservative teaching, it seems to me, is the issue of authority—namely, who or what guides my theological beliefs, and how those beliefs get converted into action. Growing up, I learned that it was the bible that provided a blueprint for what to think and how to act. If the bible said it, I was taught to believe it. On this reading of scripture one operates under the defining assumption that the bible was written with the intention of providing a clearly understandable set of universal guidelines by which to live, one that extends to all times and all places. In other words, what the bible said 2,500 years ago is just as binding today as it was then. When it said not to steal, that was a universally binding command. When it said not to murder, that was meant for me as much as for the Israelites wandering in the desert. When it said, “If a man commits adultery with the wife of his neighbor, both the adulterer and the adulteress shall be put to death” (Lev. 20:10), that was supposed to apply to . . . wait a minute. It was there that I ran into problems with reading the bible as a timeless blueprint, since big portions of it were ignored as being only for certain times and places.
So when Paul said that a woman “ought to have a symbol of authority on her head [either a veil or long hair], because of the angels” (1 Cor. 11:9, cf., also 11:6), and I noticed that the women I knew never wore veils and often cut their hair short, I was told that Paul was issuing only a situational command. That is to say, Paul was only speaking to women of his time. But when, some verses later, Paul said, “As in all the churches of the saints, women should be silent in the churches. For they are not permitted to speak, but should be subordinate, as the law also says” (14: 33b-34), I was told that he was speaking to women of all times and places. It wasn’t clear to me how I was supposed to tell consistently between time-bound and timeless commands. I just couldn’t figure out why the command for women to be silent in church should operate beyond the first century Roman Empire, but that the command that women ought to wear veils and refrain from cutting their hair shouldn’t.
I concluded that the church operates in a decidedly different context now—one the apostle Paul could not have foreseen. That argument began to change my mind about women’s ordination (another “question”—that is, the “women’s ordination question”—I had learned from early on was a theological no-no). In fact, it made enough sense to other Christians around me that there had already been a substantial shift in many parts of the church over the issue of ordaining women. As important as that hermeneutical shift was, however, my ideas about women in ministry were cemented when I finally received the honor of working side by side with them as colleagues. I saw how gifted they were at tasks that I had been taught were to be reserved to males. I worked with women who could preach and teach and administrate much better than I could (not necessarily a heavy lift, that). I saw this as a way that, over time, the Holy Spirit was able to reveal a new conception of what God intended. It didn’t necessarily mean that God had changed, but that the world in which we lived had changed enough that God’s true vision of the way things ought to be could finally be received.
It occurred to me, though, that another gradual revelation of God’s true design had happened even before the shift on women in the church. The bible, while not commanding slavery, certainly seemed to condone its practice. In fact, many people who, at one time, defended the practice of slavery did so while standing firmly within the tradition of biblical interpretation, using the bible as the defensive tool of choice. However, we’ve reached a point where, looking back, it seems outrageous that anyone ever used the bible to defend this kind of treatment of other human beings. It struck me that perhaps the church’s stance toward gays and lesbians might follow this same trajectory. In other words, I thought that maybe the Holy Spirit is in the process of revealing to us God’s true vision of the way things ought to be with respect to homosexuality. If this is the case, then we need not necessarily say that God has changed (though my colleagues who are Process theologians probably wouldn’t object to this description), but that the world has changed sufficiently to be able to receive the fullness of God’s truth on this issue.
But beyond what I take to be the inadequacies of a static view of biblical interpretation that seeks to match the brown shoes of scripture with the often black tuxedos of context, the thing I found most persuasive in changing my theological views of homosexuality was my contact with my brothers and sisters who are gay and lesbian. In the church where I minister there reside some of the finest people with whom I’ve ever been fortunate enough to work—people who just happen to have been be born loving others of the same gender. These people are my parishioners; but more importantly, they are my friends. My gay and lesbian brothers and sisters have the same love for Jesus in their hearts as all the rest of the people with whom I work. They want to be a part of a community seeking to live faithfully as followers of Jesus. They want this. Unfortunately, though, the church has not traditionally wanted them back. We have caused grave damage to people whose only crime was to be created different. I found I could no longer view people for whom Jesus died as defective or degenerate just because the object of their affections happened to share the same anatomy.
I don’t have the space to go into a separate exegetical defense of the seven “clobber” passages, those passages in the bible usually cited as arguments against homosexuality; those arguments are well rehearsed on both sides (stay tuned for future articles on the “clobber” passages, where I’ll rehearse the arguments again). My point here centers on how we identify authority. I want to be clear about the fact that I’m not suggesting that the bible isn’t authoritative; I believe it is. Instead, I’ve come to the place where I can no longer accept as authoritative the view that scripture is a handy guidebook, indexed with rules for every occasion. Scripture acts as authoritative when interpreted within a community that seeks seriously to understand the story of God’s loving interaction with humanity in the person of Jesus the Christ. And the community in which I interpret scripture consists of people who are better disciples than I am, but whose gender identity or sexual orientation differs from my own. And, as someone who claims to follow Jesus, my primary vocation is to learn to love others (all others) with the same radical abandon as the Jesus who radically abandoned good sense by answering “the Derek question” and loving me.
My Stonewall Remarks: 40 Years Ago
40 years ago the silent voice of a community was heard in a riotous action proclaiming that they would no longer be silent. 40 years ago a few hundred gathered to give voice to the marginalization and systemic oppression forced upon them. 40 years ago a movement was born that we celebrate here today.
The most important thing to remember about movements is that they are comprised of people. People with hopes, dreams, and vision. People with love in their hearts looking for a place to store that love. People with the right to be. PEOPLE! Movements being and end with the people. Movements cannot sustain the movement when it is boiled down to an idea.
I stand here today a leader in the Christian church. I stand here today as a white, straight male. I am a part of this movement.
The Christian faith has been utilized in the disenfranchising action of the GLBTQ community. We have demanded that you must give up your faith if you insist on keeping your love. We have demanded that you remain silent in order to nourish your soul. We have demanded that you have a place in the Kindom of God only if you conform to the narrow standards of dubious origins. For this I am terribly sorry.
It is my hope that we as a church may offer reconciliation and love to our sisters and brothers for the atrocities perpetrated upon them in the name of God. It is my hope that the beautiful voice of faith embraced by the GLBTQ Community may enrich the faith on communities across Kentucky. The faith of a few transforms the faith of us all. This is a lesson we may draw from the actions of those brave people that would not be silent 40 years ago.
I recently read a lecture from Kentucky’s proud son, Bishop V. Gene Robinson, titledWhy Religion Matters in the Quest for Gay Civil Rights. He speaks, “I believe that it will take religious people and religious voices to undo the harm that has been done by religious institutions…It’s time that progressive religious people stop being ashamed of their faith and fearful that they will be identified with the Religious Right, and start preaching the Good News of the liberating Christ, which includes ALL God’s Children.”
It seems that the harm, the damage that is being done is by us, the religious community, by us being in the shadows. It is time for us to step out of the shadows. I offer that as this movement progresses and the fires of the Spirit burn in the hearts of the many that we the religious community owe the Gay community love for the silence we offer and the isolation that we perpetrate upon you. We the religious community owe you that scared space to be fearfully & wonderfully made. We the religious community owe it to you to emerge from the silence and join our voice with yours and demand that WE shall not be denied the justice imbued within our hearts and souls because we celebrate the diversity of Gods creation.
40 years ago a rebellion began that we are honored to celebrate tonight and participate in today. 40 years ago people came together and would not be silent. Tonight let us commit ourselves to not remaining silent. Let us join our voice as we demand that Liberty & justice truly be for ALL.