Category Archives: gay/ex-gay

Ooops

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GAFCON attendees run smack dab into the Jerusalem Gay Pride march.
Ian Baster for the Lesbian & Gay Christian Movement (UK)
BBC: Anglicans seeking tradition faced with Gay Pride

But to the evident consternation of the organisers of the Global Anglican Future Conference (Gafcon) they had travelled all this way to the Christian Holy City only to find the streets taken over by Jerusalem Gay Pride.
…back at the conference hotel contingency plans were being laid to contend with any gay raiding party sent out to beard the traditionalists in their redoubt.

I’m sure they didn’t have anything to worry about from gay raiding parties. At least not in Jerusalem.

Do we heed history’s lessons?

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It is said that those who are ignorant of history are doomed to repeat it. I have argued numerous times that we can look back in our history and find situations very similiar to what we are now experiencing concerning the cultural and religious changes we are fighting through in the Culture Wars, primarily over homosexuality and by extention same-sex marriage.
I have been told numerous times that the social and religious experiences of Americans leading up to the Civil War over the slavery issue is not a valid comparison to what we are now experiencing in the Culture War over homosexuality. I’ve said again and again that I am not comparing homosexuality to race or same-sex marriage to the emancipation of the slaves, but rather the way Christian Americans used and interpreted Scripture, demanded that and then fought over narrow and often sectarian application of Scripture, and how we dealt with one another and our differences. The religious dynamic over slavery back then is, in fact, very, very similiar to today.
So, now I am reading histories of the time period. Here is a rather lengthy quote from my current read, The Civil War as a Theological Crisis, by Mark A. Noll.
Does this not sound so very familiar as our country, and more specifically our Anglican church, is pulling itself apart?

The Bible, or so a host of ministers affirmed, was clear as a bell about slavery.
The Bible, for example, was clear to Henry Ward Beecher, the North’s most renowned preacher, when he addressed his Plymouth Congregational Church in Brooklyn, NY, on January 4, 1861, a day of national fasting to have people pray for the country’s healing. In Beecher’s view, the evil for which the U.S. as a nation most desperately needed to repent, “the most alarming and most fertile cause of national sin, ” was slavery. About this great evil the Bible could not speak with less ambiguity: “Where the Bible has been in the household, and read in the household, and read without hindrance by parents and children together – there you have had an indomitable yeomanry, as state that would not have a tyrant on the throne, a government that would not have a slave or a serf in the field.” (1)
But of course, the Bible spoke very differently to others who also rose to preach in that fateful moment. Six weeks earlier… the South’s most respected minister, James Henley Thornwell, took up before his Presbyterian congregation in Columbia [South Carolina] the very same theme of “our national sins”… To Thornwell, slavery was the “good and merciful” way of organizing “labor which Providence has given us.” About the propriety of this system in the eyes of God, Thornwell was so confident that, like Beecher, he did not engage in any actual Biblical exegesis; rather, he simply asserted: “That the relation betwixt the slave and his master is not inconsistent with the word of God, we have long since settled… We cherish the institution not from avarice, but from principle.” (2)
The fact that Beecher in the North and Thornwell in the South found contrasting messages in Scripture by no means indicates the depth of theological crisis occasioned by this clash of interpretations. Since the dawn of time, warring combatants have regularly reached for whatever religious support they could find to nerve their own side for battle. Especially in our postmodern age, we think we know all about the way that interests dictate interpretations. It was, therefore, a more convincing indication of profound theological crisis when entirely within the North ministers battle each other on the interpretation of the Bible. In contrast to the struggle between Northern theologians and Southern theologians, this clash pitted against each other ministers who agreed about the necessity of preserving the Union and who also agreed that the Bible represented authoritative, truth-telling revelation from God.
Thus only a month before Beecher preached to the Brooklyn Congregationalists about the monstrous sinfulness of slavery, the Reverend Henry Van Dyke expounded on the related theme to his congregation, Brooklyn’s First Presbyterian Church, just down the street from Beecher’s… But when Van Dyke took up the theme of the “character and influence of abolitionism,” his conclusions were anything but similar to Beecher’s. To this Northern Presbyterian, it was obvious that the “tree of Abolitionism is evil, and only evil – root and branch, flower and leaf, and fruit; that it springs from, and is nourished by, an utter rejection of the Scriptures.” (3)
An even more interesting contrast with Beecher’s confident enlistment of the Bible against slavery offered by Rabbi Morris J. Raphall, who on the same day of national fasting that provided Beecher the occasion for his sermon, addressed the Jewish synagogue of New York. Like Van dyke’s, his sermon directly contradicted what Beecher had claimed. Raphall’s subject was the biblical view of slavery. To the learned rabbi, it was imperative that issues of ultimate significance be adjudicated by “the highest Law of all,” which was “the revealed Law and Word of God.” …Raphall’s sermon was filled with close exegesis of many passages from the Hebrew Scriptures. Significantly, this Northern rabbi was convinced that the passages he cited taught beyond cavil that the curse pronounced by Noah in Genesis 9 on his son Ham had consigned “fetish-serving benighted Africa” to everlasting servitude. Raphall was also sure that a myriad of biblical texts demonstrated as clearly as demonstration could make that slavery was a legitimate social system… Raphall’s conclusion about the scriptural legitimacy of slavery per se reflected his exasperation at anyone who could read the Bible in any other way: “Is slaveholding condemned as a sin in sacred Scripture?… How this question can at all arise in the mind of any man that has received a religious education, and is acquainted with the history of the Bible, is a phenomenon I cannot explain to myself.” (5)
One of the many Northerners with good religious education who know the Bible very well, yet in whose mind questions did not arise about the intrinsic evil of slaveholding, was Tayler Lewis, a Dutch Reformed layman… a professor of Greek and oriental studies… Professor Lewis complained that “there is… something in the more interior spirit of those [biblical] texts that [Van Dyke] does not see; he does not take the apostles’ standpoint; he does not take into view the vastly changed condition of the world; he does not seem to consider that whilst truth is fixed,… its application to distant ages, and differing circumstances, is so varying continually that a wrong direction given to the more truthful exegesis may convert it into the more malignant falsehood.”(7)
So it went into April 1861 and well beyond. The political standoff that led to war was matched by an interpretive standoff. No common meaning could be discovered in the Bible, which almost everyone in the United States professed to honor and which was, without a rival, the most widely read text of any kind in the whole country.

Mark A. Noll, The Civil War as a Theological Crisis (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2006), 2-4.
Are we condemn to repeat our past mistakes? It seems so, at least concerning this issue of homosexuality and how we handle Scripture, its application, and how we deal with one another. I’ve heard people say that we truly are in a national and cultural state so similar to the leading up to the Civil War that the possibility of yet another large scale civil conflict coming out of the Culture Wars (Red and Blue states mentality) could well come to pass.
——————
1.) Henry Ward Beecher, “Peace Be Still,” in Fast Day Sermons; or, The Pulpit on the State of the Country (New York: Rudd and Carleton, 1861), 276, 289.
2.) James Henley Thornwell, “Our National Sins,” in Fast Day Sermons,48, 44-[??]
3.) Henry Van Dyke, “The Character and Influence of Abolitionism,” in Fast Day Sermons, 137.
5.) M.J. Raphall, “Bible View of Slavery,” in Fast Day Sermons, 235-236.
7.)Tayler Lewis, “Patriarchal and Jewish Servitude No Argument for American Slavery,” in Fast Day Sermons, 180, 222.

What results do we see…

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Considering my last post, here is the link to the swan-song article written by Stephen Bates, the UK Guardian’s Religion reporter. Read the whole thing – he sums up the personal toll that all this “playing religion” we see in Anglicanism and American-Evangelicalism causes.
Hear is an excerpt:

This week’s meeting between Rowan Williams and the American bishops will be my swan-song as a religious affairs correspondent, after eight years covering the subject for The Guardian… There is also no doubting, personally, that writing this story has been too corrosive of what faith I had left: indeed watching the way the gay row has played out in the Anglican Communion has cost me my belief in the essential benignity of too many Christians. For the good of my soul, I need to do something else.

Or this:

I had no notion in 2000 that it would come to this: I had thought then that we were all pretty ecumenical these days. I was soon disabused of that. I had scarcely ever met a gay person, certainly not knowingly a gay Christian, and had not given homosexuality and the Church the most cursory thought, much less held an opinion on the matter. But watching and reporting the way gays were referred to, casually, smugly, hypocritically; the way men such as Jeffrey John (and indeed Rowan Williams when he was appointed archbishop) were treated and often lied about, offended my doubtless inadequate sense of justice and humanity.
Why would any gay person wish to be a Christian? These are people condemned for who they are, not what they do, despite all the sanctimonious bleating to the contrary, men and women despised for wanting the sort of intimacy that heterosexual people take for granted and that the Church is only too happy to bless. Instead, in 2007, the Church of England and other denominations jump up and down to secure exclusive rights to continue discriminating against a minority of people it does not like. What a spectacle the Church has made of itself! What hope of proselytising in a country which has accepted civil partnerships entirely without rancour or bigotry?

Of course, we know far too many self-professed Christians who will loudly claim that England and any other country or state that provides for equal treatment under the law (ETUL) for gay people are giving into Satan’s plan to destroy the family and the Church, since by allowing for ETUL for gay people means that they are denying the very essence of God’s truth and inviting God’s just retribution (judgment and destruction).
It is imperative, according to these people (and remember, I was one of them for the first half of my adult life, although the issue was less politicized back then), it is imperative that any notion of the naturalness or the rightness or the legitimacy of or any positive representation of homosexuals must be stamped out. For too many of those opposed to ETUL for gay people, if they had their way, homosexuality would simply be outlawed, period, and those caught in such a state would be punished. After all, the Levitical Code demands death for homosexuals, and, well, we Christians are a little more forgiving under Grace, so we won’t kill them (despite the clear direction to do so by God’s very Word). We will love them by doing all we can to contain them for their own good, and even if against their will we demand that they concede to their own healing to become their true God-created heterosexual selves. This kind of thinking is does not come from my imagination, but from experiences I’ve had personally.
Stephen writes about the response of his Evangelical wife (“who is a devoted evangelical and not merely a perfunctory one”) concerning this group of Christians:

The trouble with these people, my wife always says, is that they don’t read their Bibles, for they know nothing of charity. I think she’s right and I am in mortal danger of losing mine. It’s time to move on.

They don’t read their Bibles – a perfect response! Well, we certainly know this is true for far too many Christians due to the much publicized studies on biblical and religion illiteracy released a few over the last couple of years and as antidotal evidence shows.
While I didn’t always agree with everything Stephen Bates has to say, I respected his opinion. I wish for him the finding of a Christian community where he can again learn to be with God despite the idiocies of God’s self-professed children. I hope that his faith will be restored.

…inhuman… not fit to live

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UPDATE: It seems that this story and the quote by the bishop may not be on the up-n-up. It seems the story has been pulled from UPI’s website. This from The Living Church.
The latest news report of the natterings of a kind bishop from Nigeria:
From UPI

Cleric condemns homosexuals, lesbians
Sept. 2 (UPI) — Uyo, Sept. 2, 2007 (NAN) The Anglican Bishop of Uyo, Rt. Rev. Isaac Orama, has condemned the activities of homosexuals and lesbians, and described those engaged in them as “insane people”. “It is scaring that any one should be involved in a thing like that and I want to say that they will not escape the wrath of God,” he said. Orama told the News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) today in Uyo, that the practice, which has worsened over the years, was “unbiblical and against God’s purpose for creating man”. Homosexuals – 2 “Homosexuality and lesbianism are inhuman. Those who practice them are insane, satanic and are not fit to live because they are rebels to God’s purpose for man,” the Bishop said. He noted that the Anglican Church in Nigeria had continued to lead the fight against the practice especially in the US where it led the opposition to same sex marriages. “The aim of such fight is to provide a safe place for those who want to remain faithful Anglicans and Biblical Christians,” he explained.(NAN) NS/IFY/ETS

Well, what more can be said? CANA (those Episcopal Church congregations that have “left” and are now under the Church of Nigeria), I suppose, must support this bishop in his pronouncements. These are the kind of predicaments we get ourselves into when we run wily-nilly after what we think will get us our way.
Fr. Jake has a couple questions and comments.

Observing the changes in verbiage

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Over the past 20-30 years, the arguments and verbiage used by the anti-homosexual and ex-gay groups have changed dramatically. As I’ve said before, these groups and ministries keep having to change their arguments and explanations because they all are proven untenable after a while.
It used to be that these groups would present to the world the opportunity for homosexuals to be “healed from homosexuality.” Then, it was something like to “be free of homosexual desire.” Now, after reading a bit from a recent Focus-on-the-Family Citizenlink e-mail update, it is “ministry to help people who desire to leave homosexual behavior.”
Now, the verbiage has changed to focus on those who want to leave a behavior, not healing of or change in orientation. I still say that the Roman Catholic group Courage has been the most honest and forthright of all the ministries.

Old Jewish proverb

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Steve Greenburg, an Orthodox Rabbi and a senior educator at the National Jewish Center for Learning and Leadership in New York, spoke Monday at the College of Charleston on homosexuality in the Jewish tradition.
The “Charleston Post & Courier” ran an article about the lecture, and here is a few paragraphs where Greenburg tells an ancient Jewish

That two-way street illustrates a distinguishing characteristic of the Jewish faith: “God so loved us, He gave us Torah,” he said. He gave Jews the Book, and it is up to man to read it, learn it, interpret its meanings and apply its lessons.
“There is no such thing as (biblical) literalism,” Greenberg said. “Language is simply too slippery. Of course, that was understood from the beginning.”
To illustrate the point, Greenberg recounts an old Jewish proverb:
Three rabbis are arguing about the best method to purify an oven. One insists it’s already pure, the others – a majority – say it’s impure. But the dissenting rabbi is undeterred. In an attempt to prove he’s right, he calls on God for help.
The oven is pure as the aqueduct flows backward, he declares. And with a rumble, the aqueduct flows backward.
That’s no proof, say the other two, ignoring God’s intervention.
The oven is pure just as this tree uproots itself! Sure enough, the tree tears itself from the ground.
That’s no proof, say the other two.
So the dissenting rabbi calls on God one last time: “Send down a voice from heaven to tell my brethren the truth!”
And God, in a booming voice, speaks of the purified oven.
Even this is insufficient to appease the two rabbis, for purification is addressed clearly in the Torah: Divine revelation, then, is accomplished in the house of study, with an eye bent on the book, not turned to heaven.
When the dissenting rabbi tells God what has transpired, God laughs. “My children have defeated me!”
With this anecdote, Greenberg argues for the “rich possibilities” of sacred texts. Nothing is black and white, he said, nothing so austere that mankind can afford to forgo argument and exploration.

I truly desire to better understand the way Jews approach, interact with, understand, and apply the Torah (and all the Law and the Prophets). This will, or should, speak volumes to us as Christians as we approach, interact with, understand, and apply the Old Testament and all of the Bible.
via: Titusonenine

Brains, biology, sheep, and Christian ethics

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In my Christianity Today daily e-mail news update, there was a short article entitled “Re-engineering Temptation“ about the controversies resulting from the blog entry by Al Mohler, president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, KY, on possible Christian responses to ideas of preventing homosexuality through hormonal therapies that prevent prenatal homosexuality or negate the sexual temptation for one’s own sex in adulthood.
This short article dealt with the Christian ethics if a true biological component is confirmed in the establishment of a homosexual orientation (not preference).
In the article, the author mentioned a five years study being conducted at the Oregon Health and Science University by Dr. Charles Roselli. This paragraph really caught my attention, for one reason that the author of the article didn’t attempt to refute it.

“The story begins at the Oregon Health and Science University, where Charles Roselli studies homosexual sheep (about 8 percent of rams are gay). His research, now more than five years old, has confirmed a link between brain chemistry and sexual preference. But his data does not indicate whether chemistry or preference comes first.”

At least this seems to suggest that if we look to nature for signs of right theological definitions and concepts, then we will need to conclude that within nature, homosexuality is present and a normal part, even if in small percentages.
So, here are two links to press releases by the university concerning the research of Roselli:
BIOLOGY BEHIND HOMOSEXUALITY IN SHEEP, STUDY CONFIRMS
BRAIN DIFFERENCES IN SHEEP LINKED TO SEXUAL PARTNER PREFERENCE
If science is done well, it will tell us what is observably and verifiable factual. What we choose to do with that information, those theories, those facts, is the realm of ethics and theology.
Alan Chambers, president of the ex-gay umbrella group “Exodus International” commented in the article:

“People like me who struggled with it and found freedom are more than sufficient proof that we can overcome our genetics,” he said. “Science will never trump the Word of God.”

Frankly, I agree with him, with a caveat. Science and theology deal with two different realms of knowing. Each, rightly construed, should inform one another, not conflict. After all, good science will help us understand what God has wrought. Good theology will help us understand what to do with the knowledge.
Science will never trump Scripture, but Scripture rightly understood will never contradict good science. This was the thought of those ancient Christian monks who developed the beginnings of our modern understanding of science and the observation of the world as it is.
What science may well do is help us understand whether we have rightly interpreted and understood the Word of God! In this case, if science gives us reliable and verifiable evidence that there is in fact a biological determinate concerning homosexuality, then the way we approach, understand, and apply the Word of God concerning this issue may well need to change – not because God changes or the Word of God changes, but because we are wrong in our traditional understanding and application of the Word of God.
After the science, then theology comes into play. What shall we then do?

Continue reading →

Was it worth it?

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Well, the entire thread (the last two posts) has finally ended. The Titusonenine “elves” (those who mind the weblog) have shut us down.
I do understand what the guy is saying: the whole of Scripture speaks against same-sex relationships that include certain behaviors and that all examples of same-sex behaviors are negative and that there are no positive examples, either. So, whether there are positive qualities in same-sex relationships that include certain behaviors makes no difference, Scripture speaks consistently against all forms of behavior, period.
I contend that the presumption that all forms of same-sex relationships is a faulty premise to begin with and that this faulty premise clouds our right reading of Scripture, particularly of those few verses traditionally strung together to justify a anti-relationship position.
I agree that the examples of same-sex behaviors mentioned in Scripture are negative – but negative like: gang rape, in the progression of idolatry heterosexuals engaging in same-sex sexual behaviors contrary to their heterosexual nature. All examples present a negative image, but all the examples of negative behavior are in fact negative, whether engaged in by homosexual people or heterosexual people.
Of course, when Paul uses the word “nature” in Romans chapter 1, what does he in fact mean? “Natural Theology” had not been developed yet. And even if this were the case and we could look to all of nature, God’s creation, to discern what is proper and what is not, how does one neglect examples of same-sex sexual behavior among animals (I’ve seen plenty of male dogs mount other male dogs, etc.). What does one do with human hermaphrodites? And, if we are consistent, look at the violence within the animal kingdom. Do we want to take this as our example of a right ordering of human society? It looks more like “social Darwinism – survival of the fittest” than the call of Christ to love our neighbor as ourselves.
From what I understand, the prevailing Hellenistic (Platonic) definition of “nature” is more like one is left-handed by nature, blue-eyed by nature, tall by nature, a man by nature, etc. Thus, if Paul was trying to explain something to the people then, did he use a Platonic understanding of “nature?” If he did, then “nature” should be understood to imply “heterosexuals by nature” who are engaging in homosexual sexual acts contrary to the “nature,” likewise, if there in fact is a “homosexual orientation,” then if homosexuals engage in heterosexual sexual acts then they, too, are acting contrary to their homosexual “nature.”
But then again, lots of people disagree with this line of thinking. I don’t really know within a Jewish system what “nature” might mean. We can certainly assume that if the Jews of the time where obedient in obeying the Law, then men would not be engaged in things like what a man does with a woman with another man.
By the way in answering one of my many questions of him (which aside from this one he refused to answer), it was made clear that his method of engaging Scripture is within an interpretive system that is not Anglican. He seems to be a premillennial dispensationalist, which if fine if one wants to be because God only knows what the end will look like, but it is not an Anglican theological perspective. I wonder what he understands Anglicanism to be, and why he would attend and Anglican church, and why he finds it rewarding to post on an Anglican blog. Who knows.
Anyway, the Triduum continues, Easter is shortly upon us. The grave will not hold!