So, I’ll admit that this week’s comic has been about a month in the making. It all started when I listened to a podcast that I usually love. On this particular episode, they brought in a guest who was a leading voice in the emerging church movement and now tries to help churches make necessary changes to break negative stereotypes about the church. Sounds great! He even recently wrote a book explaining the right way to read the Bible is to understand context, acknowledging the many ways a bad reading of scripture has done real damage. So you know me, I noticed that LGBT issues were largely absent from his conversation, so I had to do a deep internet dive to discover that he’s got a really open mind about a lot of things, but when it comes to gays and the Bible, “pro-gay Christians are elevating their personal experiences with homosexual friends and family over the clear teaching of the Bible.” Oh, okay. Cool. Makes a lot of sense.
This led me down the rabbit hole of investigating all the ways the church has changed its mind over issues that were previously deemed immoral. Now I know you could argue that Catholics and fundamentalists never change their mind on anything. But it looks like one thing everybody changed their mind on was usury...which for centuries Christians believed just meant “taking interest on a loan.” The Catholic Church and Martin Luther utterly forbade taking interest, but John Calvin argued that reasonable interest was good, and therefore the biblical concept of usury was condensed to mean only extortion. Eventually, this became the normal way to interpret usury. Still, one could argue that a “plain and simple” reading of Jesus’ teaching in Luke 6:34-36 makes it pretty clear that Christians should lend without collecting any interest at all. And I find this all very…interesting.
So I wrote the script for this week’s comic but then I just felt so angry and discouraged that I had to walk away from it for a while. I have one level of anger towards the incredibly legalistic Christians, the ones who never changed their minds, who still forbid women from ministry or from divorcing their abusive husbands. But I have a different anger reserved for my siblings in Christ who HAVE changed their minds on many moral issues addressed in the Bible, yet somehow continue to hold a special place in their hearts to dehumanize queer people.
Oh the logical acrobatics done in the name of defending the absolute moral teaching of the Bible…on this one particular issue!
Okay, so let’s assume that God is unchanging, and that God defines what is good and what is evil. At the same time, let’s receive the biblical narrative on its own terms: divinely inspired AND written by humans confined to their own, very limited context. Richard Hooker (16th c., England) argued that while God and scripture serve as the primary authority for the church, we must wrestle with the church’s traditions and use our reason to understand how an ancient sacred text can best be applied in new times and places. Hooker argued against an absolute certainty AND against an absolute relativism. In between dogma and lawlessness, there is a Middle Way led by the Holy Spirit. Here, Christians can practice prayerful discernment together to listen to the movement of the Spirit of God through history and straight into our present circumstances. Far from a cold, calculated legal dissemination, scriptural interpretation must be done with a pastoral heart. We discern what is God’s best for us by actually paying attention to the effects our principles have on one another in the messiness of society.
None of us are going to get it right 100% of the time. Because for all the Christ in our hearts, we’re still humans. Bound by our limits, our time, our place. So try a little humility in your biblical interpretation. God may be unchanging, but that’s not true about you. The church is killing queer people. People who desperately want to know and love God. And instead of providing a healthy moral possibility for gay marriage, the church pushes the queer community out into promiscuity and then blames them for their sinful lifestyle.
I know I am incapable of changing hearts or minds. I’m sure brilliant conservative apologists could tear my argument to shreds. But I benefit greatly from the blood, sweat, and tears of the queer community that has gone before me. Those who have struggled and died for the right to marry the person God blessed them to love. We’ve got the keys, church. It’s time to unlock some doors.