N.T. Wright is one of my favourite theologians. He inspires a lot of my favourite authors and has gone out of his way to try and help the regular listener, like myself, understand his deep theology. Since this blog seems to have taken a turn to one topic lately, I thought I’d post this along too to give some room for the other side of the argument. This article is coming from an interesting point of view as N.T. Wright is the Bishop of Durham and he’s involved as his church and the Episcopal Church are wrestling with homosexual marriage and ordaining ministers who are practicing homosexuals. It seems Wright strongly disagrees with Wink, but I still think this is making for a great conversation.

Update: Here is a rebuttal to N.T. Wright’s article that I thought gave a good perspective on the other side by a guy named Scott Gunn that seems to be involved pretty heavily with the church in question.

That wider tradition always was counter-cultural as well as counter-intuitive. Our supposedly selfish genes crave a variety of sexual possibilities. But Jewish, Christian and Muslim teachers have always insisted that lifelong man-plus-woman marriage is the proper context for sexual intercourse. This is not (as is frequently suggested) an arbitrary rule, dualistic in overtone and killjoy in intention. It is a deep structural reflection of the belief in a creator God who has entered into covenant both with his creation and with his people (who carry forward his purposes for that creation).

The appeal to justice as a way of cutting the ethical knot in favour of including active homosexuals in Christian ministry simply begs the question. Nobody has a right to be ordained: it is always a gift of sheer and unmerited grace. The appeal also seriously misrepresents the notion of justice itself, not just in the Christian tradition of Augustine, Aquinas and others, but in the wider philosophical discussion from Aristotle to John Rawls. Justice never means “treating everybody the same way”, but “treating people appropriately”, which involves making distinctions between different people and situations. Justice has never meant “the right to give active expression to any and every sexual desire”.

I have always loved Walter Wink’s approach to controversial issues and his perspective on the world. He was my big excitement for our Amidst the Powers conference this past year. This post did not let me down. What a brilliant explanation and argument. It seems holistic and true to the honest struggle that many of us are feeling. It is also full of proofs and reasons to help add to the academic conversation that surrounds these issues. Here are a few quotes or you can read the full article here. He gives reason after reason after example after example of different sexual preferences and mores throughout our Bible. Please however don’t read these quotes and judge the article, read these quotes in context of the full article.

Update: Andrew Fulford, a friend of mine from Tyndale, has a great response to Walter Wink’s article in the comments section of this post, you can read that here.

The crux of the matter, it seems to me, is simply that the Bible has no sexual ethic. There is no Biblical sex ethic. Instead, it exhibits a variety of sexual mores, some of which changed over the thousand year span of biblical history. Mores are unreflective customs accepted by a given community. Many of the practices that the Bible prohibits, we allow, and many that it allows, we prohibit. The Bible knows only a love ethic, which is constantly being brought to bear on whatever sexual mores are dominant in any given country, or culture, or period.

I agree that rules and norms are necessary; that is what sexual mores are. But rules and norms also tend to be impressed into the service of the Domination System, and to serve as a form of crowd control rather than to enhance the fullness of human potential. So we must critique the sexual mores of any given time and clime by the love ethic exemplified by Jesus. Defining such a love ethic is not complicated. It is non-exploitative (hence no sexual exploitation of children, no using of another to their loss), it does not dominate (hence no patriarchal treatment of women as chattel), it is responsible, mutual, caring, and loving. Augustine already dealt with this in his inspired phrase, “Love God, and do as you please.”

Christian morality, after all, is not a iron chastity belt for repressing urges, but a way of expressing the integrity of our relationship with God. It is the attempt to discover a manner of living that is consistent with who God created us to be. For those of same-sex orientation, as for heterosexuals, being moral means rejecting sexual mores that violate their own integrity and that of others, and attempting to discover what it would mean to live by the love ethic of Jesus.

In a little-remembered statement, Jesus said, “Why do you not judge for yourselves what is right?” (Luke 12:57 NRSV). Such sovereign freedom strikes terror in the hearts of many Christians; they would rather be under law and be told what is right. Yet Paul himself echoes Jesus’ sentiment when he says, “Do you not know that we are to judge angels? How much more, matters pertaining to this life!” (1 Cor. 6:3 RSV). The last thing Paul would want is for people to respond to his ethical advice as a new law engraved on tablets of stone. He is himself trying to “judge for himself what is right.” If now new evidence is in on the phenomenon of homosexuality, are we not obligated–no, free–to re-evaluate the whole issue in the light of all the available data and decide what is right, under God, for ourselves? Is this not the radical freedom for obedience in which the gospel establishes us?

Seriously, read this post.

Update: The exposure for this post has created quite a stir, both positive and negative, so I have written a bit more on the subject here to help clarify and explain some of this post and what was written in the comments.

My post today is part of a larger initiative of more than 60 bloggers all coming together to share their thoughts on how to bridge the gap between people of all sexual orientations and the church. You can check out the other blogs by clicking below. Blog List | Twitter Feed

I still remember one day during Grade 11 English class, when my teacher was at the back of the room wiping tears from her eyes. She wanted us to write a response to the situation when a Catholic high school student wanted to bring his same-gendered partner to prom. Instead of writing a response, I put up my hand and explained how crazy I thought she was that she would even make us respond to such a situation. I was convinced it was clearly wrong and I shouldn’t be subjected to her ideologies.

Then an argument broke out between us, right there in the middle of class. Most of the other students kept quiet. I don’t think homosexuality was on the forefront of any of their minds at the time so they didn’t say much. Perhaps many were apathetic and hadn’t allowed this controversial topic much personal thought. Or maybe they just decided to keep their views to themselves in spite of the present circumstances. However, as a result of my indoctrination by a charismatic church, I had already made up my mind on the subject. Like any good Christian, unashamed of his faith, I told her exactly how I felt: that it was sin. Within a few minutes, she was holding back the tears because of how insensitive I was.

Through tears, she told us that in university she took a class titled ‘Homosexuality in Shakespeare’ and that she was the only heterosexual student in the class. She went on to say that it was her favourite class not because of the subject matter, but because she was able to see beyond stereotypes and recognize a group of marginalized humans as people, no different than anyone else. Some of her best friends came from this class and she loved them dearly. I was indifferent. I was a sixteen year old, know-it-all who just had to make sure that she, and the entire class, knew what was right and what was wrong. It was a black and white issue for me.

That was seven years ago and I feel like I’ve come a long way since then. In fact, many friends think I’ve gone far too far in the opposite direction. I find myself way more empathetic with those who are gay and those pastors who would marry gay couples than I do with the majority of the church population that looks down upon it. Plenty of factors have gone into forming my new worldview.

For starters, the way I read the Scriptures now, and the way I understand the church and its role in the world has released me to not be so driven by what I think is right and wrong. When I stopped viewing the Bible as a moral code for my life and started seeing it as a story of a God who is passionately in love with his creation, everything looked different. Grace is becoming my language rather than rules, and this has changed the way I see sin and the spiritual condition of everyone around me. Humans are not a sum of their sins and the death and resurrection of Christ made sure of that. People are humans in need of grace and loved by God first. We can tack on whatever adjectives we want after but they don’t really help us define someone. My part in anyone’s journey is to love them and proclaim the Good News, not to explain to them where they fall out of line.

For me, sin is no longer reduced to individual acts of good or bad. We are all sinful beings. Furthermore, to reduce sin to a single personal action is to negate Christ’s death and focus on an individual pursuit of holiness by simply attempting to refrain from personal sinful acts. I think we do ourselves a disservice by identifying homosexuality as a specific sin. Personally, I’d rather just say we are all sinners, all of humanity, and leave it at that. Why do we insist on splitting up every individual action into categories and placing people into them?

As I begin to understand sex more, I have more grace for those who do not share the same sexual orientation of the majority. Most thoughts and actions in my own heterosexual relationships are full of selfishness, lust and improper desires. My wife and I have very different needs and desires that result in a daily struggle to understand each other’s point of view. When relationships disappoint, it is a natural reaction to look elsewhere, even outside societal norms, to fulfill these longings.

There is plenty of good in a relationship between two people of the same gender. No one would think twice if I had life-long committed relationships to the church or to another guy if we were strictly friends. But since there are reproductive parts involved we all of sudden deem this kind of commitment unthinkable. I fear that insecurity with our own sexuality has caused this uneasiness toward the homosexual lifestyle. Just because we hate the idea of homosexual sex, doesn’t mean we can toss out all the good parts of the relationship.

My relationship with my wife runs very deep and there are plenty of factors that play into it. If my relationship was all about sex, it would not be much of a relationship. We know though, that a part of marriage and relationships runs a lot deeper than just what happens with our bodies. One of the more beautiful parts of a marriage is the commitment and covenant to each other no matter what life brings. We should be affirming and blessing mutual covenants of love between any person and not denying them of a basic human need. We need to focus on what we affirm rather than what we want to get rid of. Why are we so bent on taking away all the good in a relationship? Is it just to prove our theology? Is it just to satisfy our own desires for holiness to be met around us?

What we really want to know is if God frowns upon homosexuality? Is it a sin? If you are coming from a Biblical perspective, it’s an easy response to point out that God intentionally created one man and one woman and the few verses here and there that reference it. May I offer a perspective that I think may be helpful?

Jesus reminds us over and over again that kingdom relationships look differently than the ones we have right now. If Jesus was serious in Matthew 22 that at the resurrection people won’t marry or be given in marriage, then this tells me that the future is a little out of the ordinary compared to where we are right now. The Sadducees tried to trap Jesus into questions about the rules and laws surrounding marriage. The Sadducees were using this woman as an example for their theological ideologies. Jesus threw out the entire question and told them that they were in error. How can you be in error by asking a question? Jesus seemed to have thought that the question was so flawed, that it wasn’t the question that was in error, but the actual people asking the question.

That’s what I am more inclined to do when it comes to the question of whether or not homosexuality is wrong and especially the question of how we are supposed to treat those who are homosexual. Throw out the questions entirely. It doesn’t really get us anywhere and only hurts the people we are talking about. We end up using homosexuality as a pedestal to spout off our ideas about the ways we think the world should be. In the meantime, we’ve hurt the people we are supposed to love in the pursuit of trying to force righteousness, something we know we can’t do anyway.

Instead, we could jump into the next few verses after this section when the Pharisees jumped in and asked Jesus what the greatest law was. The answer is obvious; blatantly obvious: Love God and love others. Our mandate as Christians is to bring God’s love, justice and mercy to the world; not the majority of the world, or one country of the world, or one race of the world. We are called to love our neighbour; all of humanity, regardless of sexual orientation.

Update: Since this post I’ve stumbled across some great reads like David Fitch’s post here, and Walter Wink’s article here. I also posted some more great posts from the Syncroblog here.

Geez Magazine this month was brilliant. It has hit me where I feel stuck in my faith as of late. I feel stuck because “standing up for what you believe in is awkward, especially when you yourself are part of the problem” as Will Braun puts it. I have been asked to stop being so vocal in my local paper because it makes me and my local community look hypocritical because we aren’t really living out all that well the words that I am speaking. I can’t stop. So I guess I’ll have to risk being a hypocrite while I strive to actually live out the kingdom that I believe in.

Go buy a subscription.

A few excellent quotes from a few excellent articles.

Violent means to peaceful ends: Computing Congo’s mineral war
by Dan Leonard
We need to own up to the fact that we are in the ironic situation of hugging our global partners with one arm and punching them with the other. It’s good that the British doctor was able to save a life via text message, but that doesn’t change the fact that for all the lives saved by cellular technology in eastern Congo, the extractive industry that cell phones require has played a role in killing millions of others. And the fossil fuels we are burning to get ourselves to these places to offer a helping hand may one day put the homes of the very people we want to assist either in parched land or under water. In many cases, we do-gooders use exploitation to work against exploitation.

So how can we do good in the world without fueling the same systems of exploitation we are trying to work against? Maybe the first step is to embrace the awkward silence created when we admit that our responses to the world’s problems are not adequate. We have no viable plan to make poverty history, stop climate change, end homelessness, or solve any of the other issues we privileged progressives speak so confidently about. The solutions we do offer are almost always tangled in problems.

Uneasy pause
So maybe what’s needed is the uneasy pause that often follows an apology, the silence of repentant people, tired of being on the wrong side of exploitation but not sure how to avoid it. We are trapped in riches every bit as much as others are trapped in poverty, and our collective liberation may just start by sharing an awkward silence. In this case it would be the uncomfortable hush of us privileged people admitting that after years of good intentions gone terribly wrong, we’re shit out of ideas.

I suspect that this quiet paralysis would create space in which the silenced and marginalized people, the ones who have been waiting so patiently and graciously in the midst of the endless noise of their oppressors, to finally speak a new word of liberation.

Dan Leonard works for an international non-profit organization and has traveled extensively in sub-Saharan Africa. He is a member of the Geez board.

Not one of those
by Brenda Melles
The troubling truth is that Christianity is the only religious language I know. And I am fluent. It is my mother tongue, seeped into me like warm spring rain in black earth. I can win a “sword drill” against the fastest Bible-verse-finding fingers in the country. Sit me down and ask me to tell you the big story, from Genesis to Revelation, and I will. Quote me the red letters, and I will say amen. But throw me into Buddhism, black magic or Islam and I would be a traveller without a map.

Like it or not, Jesus is the best way I know to understand who God might be and how God might have us live. Sure, I’ve tried some alternative terms to position me in this camp – person of faith, believer, even church-goer – but they seem so esoteric, so distant from this person of Jesus who I confess, has captivated me. And what does the term “Christian” mean if not one who acknowledges the reality of Christ?

So, Jesus, I’m with you. I’ll keep wearing your label. For now. And as for the rest of you folks that call yourselves Christians – all ye fundamentalists and liberals, emergents and evangelicals, backsliders and legalists, all ye gays and homophobes, wife-beaters and feminists, trickle-downers and socialists, the whole contradictory lot of you – I begrudgingly, painfully, hesitantly, humbly, hope-fully admit . . . we’re in this together.

Brenda Melles is a freelance writer and international development consultant based in Kingston, Ontario.

And of course, a quote we’ve used often.

Normal is getting dressed in clothes that you buy for work and driving through traffic in a car that you are still paying for – in order to get to the job you need to pay for the clothes and the car and the house you leave vacant all day so you can afford to live in it.
Ellen Goodman

I am an intentional non-voter. I never bought into the “duty” lectures or many other reasons why its important that I vote. David Fitch wrote a great post on not voting.
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Next Reformation quotes Reggie McNeal

The kingdom is the destination. In its institutional existence the church abandoned its real identity and reason for existence. read more…

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I like this separation. Teach the Bible or Preach Christ. It’s one of those things that I struggled a lot with growing up and this is another good way to approach it.
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Darryl is getting married on Saturday so I had the pleasure of throwing him a bachelor party this past weekend. We put a nice pink dress on him, put him on our electric scooter and made him drive back and forth while we shot him with an airsoft pellet gun. It was hilarious. Here are the pictures. It never stopped there, you can see the rest in the pics.
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Sarnia’s Wake-Up Call was a hit

When I was seventeen or eighteen, Relevant Magazine was just starting up their website to launch their magazine. I was subscribed to it right away and devoured its pages. Everything I read was ‘relevant’ and it was what I needed at the time. The conversation about following Jesus, understanding culture and living intentionally was exactly what was needed while I was sitting there as a youth pastor of a sort in a hyper-Pentecostal church. It was a breath of fresh air and my sanity. Over time though I got quite tired of it. I felt the article repeated themselves and they slowly sold out to more and more advertising and a some sort of branding. It was perfect for a time but I barely open my subscription (that I think runs out soon) and I certainly don’t save my e-mail newsletters from them like I did. It isn’t the first place I look when I do a study to preach to the youth.

Lots of things brought on the change. One was going to Tyndale and then to York. Studying theologians, and social theory and religious history helps bring a perspective that Relevant Magazine couldn’t exactly do. York helped me step out of my bubble and study from there where I felt in many ways Relevant kept me in my bubble and tried to understand it from there. Two different perspectives, neither were bad.

I started recently to subscribe to a new magazine called Geez. The latest issue has once again made me excited to get a magazine in the mail. The magazine is done in themes. One issue was based on living simply, another issue on housing and community and this latest issue on evangelicalism. You can read a few of the articles here (ones that I would recommend that are online would be Jesus was a Fatty, Fundamentally Divided and On Who is Right). I don’t think there was an article or idea in this whole latest magazine that hasn’t stuck out to me in a creative way. Whether it be the fact that they actually got the host of Way of the Master to write an article to them telling them why “Geez gets up his nose” because they wanted to value the dialogue that could come from criticism. This is from the editor of Geez in explanation of what the magazine is all about.

Here at Geez, we are perhaps prone to make sport of the excess and blessed sentimentality of the Jesus-in-my-heart-and-I’m-on-my-way-to-heaven- cause-the-Bible-says-so Christians. So, for this issue, we are taking a deep breath, steeling out belief in tolerance and engaging our evangelical neighbours in sincere dialogue. Forgive us if we slip from time to time.
-Will Braun, Geez Editor- (read entire article here)

Unfortunately, my favourite article in the whole magazine isn’t online (if you want to borrow my magazine, just e-mail me, but if you want to buy it, or heck, even subscribe, do that here). Here is a quote from “Salvation in ill-fitting blue pants by Jeremy John.

Where I was once cold and angry, focused on structures, I am now warmer and focused on people. I read and write less on politics, but I am more involved in groups working for change. I used to be very critical of political groups, and was therefore somewhat of a loner. Now, I forgive the faults as best I can and I just show up. I care less about facts or proving the current government has lied or manipulated than I do about working with people, for people. My belief in the need for social justice has not changed, but now I come from a place of love rather than a place of justice. What what is justice without love?
-Jeremy John, Salvation in Ill-fitting blue pants-

All that to say, that I love Geez. I think they do a great job at critically looking at their faith while still engaging in the faith that they came from. Their issues so far have been wonderfully put together, absent of all advertising, Canadian, creative and did I mention Canadian? So if I was to recommend one magazine for 2006, Geez would be the way to go.