This past week I have articulated a biblical framework for full inclusion of LGBTQ people in the church here on the blog and at Valley Presbyterian Church in Phoenix, and followed up with some groundwork for the hermeneutics that led me there.
To my utter shock and dismay, this show of wisdom has not instantly commanded the assent of all Christians everywhere. But, to my ever greater shock and delight, some of the arguments against have been thoughtful and charitable.
Derek Rishmawy, a Ph.D. student at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, reposted his earlier concerns about this line of biblical interpretation on his Reformedish Blog. Some of the problems he sees in the argument are ones I’ve heard bubbling up in other quarters as well, so I thought I would respond to a few of them here.
Gentile Inclusion was God’s Plan All Along
There is a trajectory for Gentile inclusion in the Old Testament. This means that my claims for the huge surprise of Gentile inclusion are unwarranted, and that the parallel argument that God might surprise us by including LGB people as they are is unfounded.
The point of inclusion of the Gentiles in the NT, however, is this: God accepted them as they are, sinful Gentiles, without making them come within the “righteous” space demarcated by Jewish Law.
Rishmawy helpfully cites Isaiah 2:2-3: all the nations come flowing to Jerusalem, to the house of the Lord. They express their hope as God “teaching us his ways,” and Isaiah says that this occurs because, “The Law shall go forth out of Zion.”
The expectation of Isaiah 2 is that Gentiles will become part of Israel in response to proclamation of the Torah, and by means of adopting the Torah of Israel.
This is exactly what does NOT happen in the New Testament, why the early church has deep conflict over Gentile inclusion, and what provides the point of comparison with LGB inclusion.
There was a way of life that included every kind of law, including the moral law of the Decalogue, that Gentiles did not have to adhere to. The identity of the people of God, when it included the Gentiles, transformed what faithful, righteous, holy living looked like.
Gentiles Aren’t Inherently “Sinners”
Well, actually they were.
They weren’t inherently transgressors, that was Israel’s unique problem to wrestle with (cf. Rom 5:12-21). But they are inherently sinners.
Why?
The only way to be righteous was to be within the sphere demarcated by the Law. This is Paul’s argument in Gal 2:16ff.: “We are Jews by nature, not sinners from among the Gentiles.”
See? Gentile = sinner. And yet, according to Galatians 2, both Paul and Peter decided to live like these Gentile sinners. Paul would now transgress, not by breaking the law, but by requiring Gentiles to conform to the standard of righteousness that was in place before “in Christ” became the standard.
As Paul tells it, and as the circumcision party seems to have argued, the only way to not be a sinner any more was to be circumcised–that is, to fulfill Genesis’ expectations of a circumcised seed of Abraham, and Isaiah’s expectation of a law-observant Gentile influx.
No New Revelation
Peter had a dream to guide him in the happenings of his day, when he embraced Cornelius. There’s no new revelation for today.
Well, I suppose that depends on who you ask! What would the person say to this who prayed to God about his gut-wrenching struggle with his gay identity, randomly opened the Bible, and turned to this passage? He thinks he was given a revelation.
But perhaps more importantly, there’s the fact that the gift of the Spirit is the determining factor in the early church’s embrace of the Gentiles.
The “Revelation” given there is that when God accepts someone with the gift of the Spirit, that person is embraced within the people of God. This is the Paul’s whole argument in Gal 3-4.
So we do not need “new revelation” to understand what it means that someone possess the Spirit, we simply need to recognize that the Spirit has, in fact, been given.
Homosexuality Is Not Race
Guess what? Neither is “Gentile”! Gentiles included every race and ethnicity of people that was not Jewish. “Gentile” is a way of saying, “Not Jewish.” Just like “Greek and barbarian” means, “Us cool kids and everyone else.”
Homosexuality is not race, but it is an identity, demarcating a distinct sociological group. I argued for this in the earlier work I’ve put out this week.
This is also where Paul’s words become important: “No longer Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female.” The ways that the gospel says, “You don’t have to conform to the presumed ‘greater,’ insider, powerful, privileged” in order to be reckoned among the firstborn son’s inheritance are pervasive.
There is No New Eschatological Moment
This argument I have heard several times: God did something new in the first century that the early church had to get direction on. The inclusion of the Gentiles is part of that new thing. The sexual revolution was not a new salvific, eschatological moment.
The weight of this is lessened when we realize that, according to the New Testament at least, we are living in the same eschatological moment as the early church.
Moreover, the work of the church for the past 350 years has been, at its best, a movement toward setting aside the hierarchies that had managed to endure the gospel’s liberating impact for the previous millennium and a half. There was no new eschatological moment that showed us the Bible’s uniform acceptance of slavery (including God’s instigation of it with Ham) was, in fact, a relic of an oppressive society. We had to bring our practice more fully into its liberating eschatological moment than the Bible had attained to.
Conversion!
I just want to say one last thing and that is this: the Christian life should be marked by holiness of practice. This does not mean only embracing liberation and looking out for the “outsider” to embrace to ourselves.
It also means an ethic of sexual fidelity. It means at very least not committing adultery. It means not engaging in sexual practices that are exploitative. And it means celebrating lifelong covenant partnerships as the place where the intimacy of sex is to be practiced alongside whole-life intimacy and vulnerability and as an image of Christ’s love for the church.
To say that LGB people are part of our body is to welcome them into this counter-cultural mystery of sex.
Those are the arguments that I found most widespread and/or challenging. What about you? What about this Gentile inclusion thing hangs you up? If there’s another angle I should tackle let me know and I’ll try to get to it in a future post.