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A few years ago, I was invited to do a presentation for the board of a Christian campground and retreat centre on the topic of “Homosexuality and the Bible.” At the time, I was deep in the throes of writing my doctoral dissertation on this topic, a document I mentioned in an earlier post in this series. Back in those days, I was exploring the theme of hospitality, specifically, as a possible way for churches with a traditional sexual ethic to respond to the LGBTQ+ people in their communities. This Christian camp was seeking to develop policies around how they might respond if LGBTQ+ people wanted to rent property on their facility, and they were hoping my research might inform their efforts.
I prepared the presentation on the assumption that this particular ministry was looking for ways to frame a policy that allowed LGBTQ+ people to rent lots, and that the board members were aware that the tenor of my work was towards including and embracing LGBTQ+ people in Christian community. As the afternoon unfolded, however, it slowly began to dawn on me that this was not the case, that the board was intending to draft a policy that restricted “practicing homosexuals” from rental agreements with their ministry, and they were hoping that my presentation might give them ideas on how to frame these restrictions “biblically.”
They listened politely to my research, and many took careful notes, but towards the end of our time together, as it became clear that my thinking and their intentions were not especially well-aligned, someone in the audience explained to me that they had seen other churches that tried to be “hospitable” in a way I was proposing, only to become full-on-affirming before they were done. He warned his fellow board members of this danger and then made it clear to me that they had no intention of falling into this trap.
The discussion continued around the specific policy proposals they were considering, and how the idea of “hospitality” might relate to it, and, realizing I was losing the crowd, I final said: “Well, whatever your board decides, it should not be more stringent or more restrictive than your policy on renting property to divorcees who have remarried.”
I meant this sincerely, in good faith, assuming that a Christian ministry that was so concerned about being “biblical” when it comes to LGBTQ+ people must surely have a policy on the question of divorce and remarriage, too.
Someone sheepishly explained to me that they didn’t have any policy on the question of divorce.
I was quite startled: “How could you be considering a policy on ‘renting to LGBTQ+ people,’” I asked, “If you don’t have a similar policy on renting to remarried divorcees?”
The same sheepish someone tried to help me see reason: “Well,” he said, “of course we can’t have a policy on renting to divorcees. That would require us to ask all kinds of personal questions about people’s private lives that are inappropriate.”
The irony—and the hypocrisy—of this statement was entirely lost on the room, but I’ve never forgotten it.
I bring it up here, in a series on developing an “integrative perspective” on same-sex marriage and LGBTQ+ identities because—as with my previous discussion on pacifism and wearing poppies in church—it illustrates another challenging but significant issue that most Christians today have adopted an integrative approach to, despite the fact that the teaching of the Bible on the matter is—to use a phrase that many staunch non-affirmers often use—“crystal clear.”
Jesus made no bones about it, that anyone who divorces their wife “makes her a victim of adultery,” and anyone who marries a divorced woman likewise commits adultery (Matthew 5:32). In Mark 10:11, Jesus sharpens the opposite edge of this teaching, so that it applies similarly to any woman who divorces her husband and marries another man. It is true, of course, that he offers one explicit exception to this rule, that a man who divorces a woman because of “sexual immorality” is not considered to have committed adultery if he choses to remarry. It’s not exactly clear what he means by this (the Greek is somewhat ambiguous), but from the context it sounds like he’s saying that if a woman cheats on her husband and the husband chooses to divorce her as a result, he is free to remarry. (Note that there is nothing in any of Jesus’s teaching that explicitly applies the same principle to women whose husbands cheat on them. In Mark 10, Jesus broadens his teaching about remarried divorcees committing adultery to include women who divorce their husbands, but the “sexual immorality” exception is strikingly absent from that passage. It would make sense, I suppose, to assume that the “sexual immorality” exception applies equally to wives as to husbands, but Jesus never explicitly says that it does.)
There is one other “exception” passage when it comes to divorce and remarriage that most conservative Christians tend to reach for, in addition to the “sexual immorality” exception. In 1 Corinthians 7:10-11 Paul reiterates Jesus’s teaching that husbands and wives are not to divorce (even if one is a believer and the other not), however, he explains, if an unbelieving spouse leaves the believing spouse—if a Christian is married to a non-Christian, that is, and the non-Christian abandons them—the believer is “not bound” to the marriage in that circumstance, and is (presumably) free to remarry.
These two exceptions aside, though, the New Testament is otherwise explicit and clear that (a) divorce is not God’s intention for people, and (b) those who divorce and remarry are, in all other cases, committing adultery.
I remember speaking with a fellow pastor once, who was quite firm in their non-affirming perspective on same-sex marriage, and I asked them if they had ever performed marriages for divorcees.
This pastor indicated that, yes, of course they had.
I then asked if this pastor had taken time to vet the circumstances surrounding each of these divorces, to ensure that they met the conditions for one of the two exceptions—that it was a case of “sexual immorality” or “abandonment” that had led to the person becoming divorced.
This pastor indicated (somewhat sheepishly) that, no, they had never done so.
They did not have a very satisfying answer, when I asked why, in the one case (divorce and remarriage), they seemed so at peace about violating the direct teaching of the New Testament, and in the other case (same-sex marriage) they were adamantly unwilling to budge.
Today I would suggest that the reason most pastors are willing to perform remarriages after divorce, even in cases that do not technically meet the biblical exceptions, is because we have adopted an integrative approach to this issue, one that does not hesitate to say that divorce is not the Creator’s intention for marriage, but also compassionately acknowledges that there will be instances where the circumstances of a marriage may be so fraught, dangerous, painful, abusive or otherwise destructive that divorce is the better of two evils. In such cases—even if they don’t technically meet the explicit criteria for the “exceptions” provided in the Bible—it would be cruel, actually, to add to the pain and harm that the divorcee has suffered, by forbidding them to remarry and confining them to a life of singleness and loneliness as a result of their divorce.
On this issue, an integrative view says something like this: we have no doubt that the Creator’s intent for marriage was that it be a permanent, life-long union of mutual blessing and support, but we also know that human relationships do not always obtain to the Creator’s intent. When they don’t, we do not resort blindly to a strict application of the letter of the law, rather we look for the most compassionate, gracious, and life-affirming way forward, which may include the possibility of remarriage.
If we have adopted an integrative view on the question of divorce and remarriage, we may have some small precedence for having done so. In Matthew 19, when Jesus was asked if it is lawful for a man to divorce his wife, he points out that, on the one hand, God’s plan was that no one should ever put apart what he had joined together, but, on the other hand, God knew that human hearts were prone to hardness—cruelty and selfishness and exploitation—and so he directed Moses to permit people to issue their wives a certificate of divorce (in this case, the certificate of divorce would protect the rights of the abandoned woman, by proving her husband had left her and that she was free to remarry). In some ways, Jesus’s statement here is a bit of precedence for the kind of “integrative approach” I am proposing in this series. He clearly states the Creator’s intent for marriage, but he acknowledges that the human heart does not always neatly obtain to the Creator’s intention, and in doing so he suggests that the Torah’s guidance around divorce was Moses’ attempt to integrate these two realities: the Creator’s intent and the world as we experience it.
(Some might reach quickly to the doctrine of sanctification, and the idea that, while it was true that people in Moses’s time had hard hearts which made divorce a necessity, Spirit-filled Christians on this side of the cross should have Spirit-softened hearts, making divorce no longer necessary. To this I would only suggest that none of us have yet attained to the fullness of our sanctification, and so long as we are still this side of Heaven, all of us still have hard places in our hearts that need softening. On an anecdotal level, I would also say that some of the most painful marriages I’ve seen have been so-called “Christian marriages,” between presumably “Spirit-filled Christians.”)
Of course, this is not a series on the question of divorce and remarriage. It is a series on how we can acknowledge the witness of the Scripture when it comes to the question of same-sex sexuality and integrate it wisely with what we know about people’s actual lived experience of being LGBTQ+. As with my precious post on the question of pacifism, though, I think the question of divorce and remarriage is a helpful “test-case” for an integrative approach. It helps us imagine what integration looks like, and it provides us evidence that Christians do it intuitively when it comes to other issues, often without ever realizing we do it.
Some will find the integrative approach unsatisfying, suspect, perhaps even spiritually dangerous. In coming posts, I hope to explain why it is none of these things, and how I see it working in real life. For today though, I would simply say that if we are not prepared to adopt an integrative approach when it comes to same-sex marriage, we had better be prepared not to allow church membership for all remarried divorcees, excepting only those who had been abandoned by unbelieving spouses, or men who had been cheated on by their first wives.
To do otherwise—to refuse to embrace and honor same-sex marriages or LGBTQ+ identities while willingly performing remarriages for divorcees—would make us guilty of that sin which Jesus spoke most vehemently against in his time here on earth: hypocrisy.
Let No Man Put Asunder: Toward an Integrative Perspective on Same-Sex Sexuality (IV)
Three Times Holy, a song
Holy, three times holy, holy
Holy three times holy, holy
Holy, holy, holy
Holy, three times holy, holy
Blessed are the Peacemakers: Toward an Integrative Perspective on Same-Sex Sexuality (III)
Today is November 1. In just 10 days, our society will be observing Remembrance Day, the national day set aside to commemorate our fallen soldiers—especially those who fought and died in World War I and II, but also, more broadly, our war-dead from all of the many armed conflicts the nation of Canada has participated in around the world and across the decades. As this day approaches, I am faced, as a pastor, with the low-grade spiritual struggle I wrestle with every year in the lead up to November 11.
Should I wear a poppy to church or not?
A little back ground may be in order, if you welcomed the above question with arched eyebrows, wondering, either: “Well, why on earth wouldn’t you?” or “How on earth could you?”
You see: I believe that the Bible is the inspired, authoritative word of God, that it is useful for teaching us how to live ethically in God’s world (as Paul says, it is useful for training in righteousness). And I’ve read enough of the Bible to believe very strongly that it teaches that human beings ought not to kill one another. That killing is, in fact, contrary to the Creator’s intention for human life together, that more violence is not God’s way to respond to the problem of violence, that the same God who speaks against sexual immorality in the Scriptures also says, very clearly, that we shall not kill.
As an interpretive aside, I should clarify a few things. Occasionally people will argue that the sixth commandment—God’s prohibition against killing—is more accurately translated as “murder,” and it does not apply to other kinds of killing, such as capital punishment or killing in war. Certainly, there’s some small case to be made in this regard. The Ten Commandments first appear in Exodus 20, and the word used there that usually gets translated as “kill” in most English versions is the Hebrew verb râtsach. In the Hebrew Bible, râtsach is most commonly used to describe intentional, unlawful killing—murder—not killing generally (which is usually described by the Hebrew verb harag). Having said that, though, râtsach is also used throughout Torah when it has unintentional or accidental killing in mind (e.g. Numbers 35). It is also used to describe the killing of someone who has accidentally killed a close family member of yours (the so-called avenger of blood); and within certain contexts, this kind of râtsach, a revenge-killing, is presented as entirely lawful (See, e.g. Numbers 35:17), even when the death they are avenging was accidental. So we can’t settle the question of whether Commandment Six is referring only to unlawful murder on linguistic grounds alone. We need to look at the wider witness of Scripture.
When we do look at the wider witness of the Bible, the case seems pretty strong to me that in the overall arc of the story it tells, killing is not, and never was God’s intention for us. This is assumed in the story of Cain and Abel (Genesis 4:1-15). It is explicitly stated in God’s covenant with Noah (Genesis 9:5-6). And God’s prophets envision a time when God’s intention for peaceful human co-existence will be gloriously realized (e.g., Isaiah 2:1-12).
The case gets even more clear when we get to the New Testament, where the pacifist tendencies of the Scripture are reiterated and strengthened. Jesus blessed the peacemakers (Matt 5:9). He taught that the Old Testament prohibition against killing even included harboring hatred in your heart for your fellow human being (Matt 5:21). He commanded his followers not to (violently) resist the evil person and to offer the left cheek to the person who slaps them on the right. He famously warned his disciples that those who lived by the sword will die by the sword. And from the witness of the Book of Acts, it seems his first followers followed his teaching literally, and spread the Gospel in the face of intense violence, without ever once resorting to violence themselves.
The whole of the Scripture, in other words, is clearly oriented towards pacifism, the non-violent resistance of violent aggression. Its basic assumption is that this phenomenon of human beings settling their differences by killing one another was emphatically not something God had in mind when he created us in the beginning.
And yet, as I mentioned at the beginning, I wrestle every year with the question of whether I ought to wear a poppy in church. The source of my wrestling is this: on the one hand, the poppy commemorates the bravery, self-sacrifice, and loyalty of men and women who literally gave up their own lives, seeking by violent means to resist and defeat a violent aggressor. And our nation is a peaceful, prosperous, safe and secure place to live as a result of their sacrifice. It is good citizenship to acknowledge this, to express gratitude for it, to commemorate it and even (if solemnly) to celebrate it. I have known many Christians who have served in the military or have had loved ones who served. The FMCiC has ordained ministers who serve as chaplains in the Canadian Armed Forces. And many of the things that the poppy honors: fidelity, courage, self-sacrifice, faithfulness, hope, and love, are either explicitly Christian virtues, or, if not that, certainly “Christian adjacent.”
In the church circles I minister in, many folks would notice it if the pastor did not wear a poppy in church on or around Remembrance Day; it’s not impossible that some would comment on it disapprovingly. Certainly, no one would speak negatively about the pastor if he did wear a one. And few would bat an eye for a millisecond if the church service closest to Novemebr 11 included a moment of silence for the war-dead. Most would expect it.
All this is true, even though the poppy explicitly commemorates the fact that men and women, at the behest of the state, sought by violent means to resist and overcome a violent aggressor. It is a commemoration of war, worn in honor of our national war heroes, who used violence to preserve our freedom, our property, our way of life. And to whatever extent it does this, it is honoring something that—in terms of the clear and explicit teaching of our Lord Jesus Christ—is not the Creator’s intention for human beings.
I want to be clear here. Some Christian traditions are strictly pacifist, and would argue that a thing like a poppy, and more importantly, the sentiment that the poppy represents, has no place on the lapel of a Bible-believing follower of Jesus Christ.
I am not a pacifist. I am aware of the carefully articulated and nuanced theology of “Just War” that has developed among Christians over the millennia, which suggests that, even though killing contravenes one of God’s clearly stated intentions for human beings, still, there are times and circumstances where it is the better of two evils, so to speak. If, by acting with force, one might stop greater violence from occurring, such force can be seen to be theologically justified, provided it is deployed according to strict guidelines that reflect other biblical principles (that it’s not more forceful than necessary, for instance, or that all non-violent means of resolution have been exhausted).
For the most part, I find the arguments that underly the “Just War” tradition to be convincing. I am even able to identify many moral goods that can emerge in the midst of war—acts of courage and self-giving, loyalty to friends, commitment to a cause, resilience and fortitude. All these are virtues I am willing to honor unabashedly, even though I still roundly condemn the context of violence which brought them into being and made it necessary that they be modeled.
In other words, when it comes to war and the teaching of the Bible, I have done what almost all Christians do (excepting those who have opted to walk a path of true pacifism): we have integrated what we know to be the witness of the Scripture on the question of war, on the one hand, with our lived experience in the world, on the other. We know in general terms what our Creator’s intention for human life is—that none should kill, or feel the need to—but we also know by lived experience that the world simply does not always “live up” to the Creator’s intention for it, and it’s not always clear how, exactly, we should best live in relation to the witness of the Scripture on the question of violence.
And so, wise Christians try to find ways to hold these two realities in tension—the pacifist orientation of the Bible, on the one hand, and the apparent reality that, this side of the Second Coming, there are occasions where the pacifist option seems only to exacerbate and permit the evil of violence, that there are times when war may be the wisest Christian response to the horrors of violence, because our lived experience in the world does not always fit neatly into the clear categories of Scripture.
Christians going to war, in other words, or serving in the Armed Forces, or wearing poppies to honor those who have, are all instances of Christians taking an “integrative” perspective on the problem of responding to violence with violence: we don’t deny that the Scripture clearly teaches that its not God’s heart for us, but we have integrated this fact with our lived experience, which leads us to believe that, even so, sometimes it is necessary.
In framing the issue like this, I am not trying to argue, necessarily, that non-pacifist Christians are right to adopt this kind of an “integrative view” of war. I myself am not a pacifist, but my point here is only that, most of us do this kind of “integration” quite instinctively and without much reflection when it comes to the issue of war. It comes so naturally to us, in fact, that very few of us ever even stop to wonder why we are so ready to honor something that so clearly contravenes the heart of God as revealed in Scripture.
Of course, this series is about developing a wise, Christian response to the question of same-sex sexuality and LGBTQ+ experience, not about war. If you’ve stuck with me this far, however, perhaps you can see where I am going with this, and why I dove so deeply into the issue of war and pacifism. It’s because I am proposing that we can do something similar when it comes to the issue of same-sex sexuality and the Bible, holding together, without compromising either, our convictions about the biblical witness, on the one hand, and our lived-experience of real life in the Creator’s world, on the other. We can, and should, hold those two things in tension, and then wisely find a way forward that honors both: acknowledging that the Bible clearly presents opposite-sex sex as the creator's intention for sex, but also recognizing that our lived experience of our sexuality in the Creator's world is such that there may be circumstances where the wisest and most compassionate thing to do is to honor and bless relationships that lie outside this basic intention.
In coming posts, I will offer some other, real-life examples of times and places where Christians do this kind of “integrative work” without even realizing it, before moving on to what I believe an "integrative approach" might look like when it comes to the question of same-sex marriage and LGBTQ+ identities. I start with the question of pacifism and war, however, because that issue, it seems, has been settled for so long that it’s almost startling to have it pointed out how “integrative” non-pacifist Christians actually are.
I would hope that, if we can adopt an integrative approach to an issue as fraught and painful as the problem of war, we should be able to do something similar with the question of same-sex sexuality. I would humbly suggest that, if we can with the one but can’t with the other, we may be guilty of straining the gnat while swallowing a camel, loading burdens on the backs of others we ourselves are unwilling to bear, tithing on our dill and mint but leaving the weightier matters of the law undone; guilty, in other words, of plain, old-fashioned hypocrisy.
Labels: sexuality
The 3 Things and the 5 Things: Toward an Integrative Perspective on Same-Sex Sexuality (II)
In my previous post in this series, I sketched out a very cursive outline for what I am calling an “integrative view” of same-sex sexuality and the Bible. By integrative, I mean a view that attempts to take the things we know to be true about the experience of same-sex sexuality, on the one hand, and integrate them with the things we believe the Bible says about same-sex sex, on the other. I intend to suggest in coming posts that Christians intuitively do this kind of “integrative” work on all kinds of other topics and issues—issues that might be as fraught and complicated as the issue of same-sex sexuality, except that we have taken an “integrative view” of them for so long that it has become second nature and we hardly notice anymore that we are doing so.
Before we get to that, though, and as a first step in filling in the contours of an integrative view on same-sex sexuality, I want to begin by discussing what I call “the 3 things and the 5 things.” When I am asked to speak, as a pastor, on the question of the Church’s posture towards LGBTQ+ people and their experience, I usually start by laying out “the 3 things and the 5 things,” as a way of honestly and (hopefully) compassionately establishing a shared understanding as a starting point for any discussion of these matters.
Not everybody accepts the 3 things and the 5 things, and a blog post is not an ideal forum for presenting the kinds of rigorous research that would be necessary to convince the unconvinced that they are true. I will say that I have come across plenty of research, both quantitative and qualitative, to convince me that they are, and as a result, they profoundly shape my own thinking on this issue.
The 3 things are:
1. That LGBTQ+ people do not chose to be L, G, B, T, or Q.
By this, I mean that the many, diverse, non-heteronormative sexual identities and orientations that fall under the umbrella term LGBTQ+-- the experience of gender dysphoria, for instance, or same-sex attraction, the experience of being queer, or two-spirit, or asexual, and so on—is not, generally speaking, something that people choose. The unconvinced may want to reach for anecdotal evidence to the contrary of this statement, and no-doubt the reasons why people identify with non-heterosexual identities are complex and varied. I believe, however, that on the whole, research shows that people who persistently experience their sexuality in ways that don’t conform with the heterosexual majority, have not chosen to be this way. Personal experience bears this out. The suffering, sacrifices, turmoil and risks involved with “coming out” as LGBTQ+ is far to great, in most cases, to suggest glibly that those enduring them for the sake of being honest about their sexual identity are doing so as a fad, or on a whim, or as a matter of personal choice.
2. The experience of being LGBTQ+ is not subject to change.
People who are gay, or trans, or queer, in other words, cannot change their identities so that they are no longer gay, or trans, or queer. Although this statement may seem highly controversial in some conservative circles, my impression both of the research and my personal experience with LGBTQ+ people is that, generally speaking, these sexual orientations are as permanent as they are persistent. They are not subject to change, and efforts to “change” LGBTQ+ people into being “straight” are almost universally harmful (psychologically traumatic, emotionally scarring, damaging to relationships, financially burdensome, and a plain waste of time).
Again, the unconvinced may reach for anecdotal evidence that “so-and-so” was gay and he “prayed the gay away.” Besides being extremely rare, however, these stories are also unfinished, and many people who claim to have been delivered from their same-sex attractions find the change is neither total nor permanent, and the attractions return, often painfully and harmfully at later points down the road. Similarly, for every story of “someone who changed,” there are multiple dozens of stories of those who tried “changing” and suffered spiritual, emotional, and psychological trauma as a result. Stories of “gay people who changed” should certainly not be held up as a normative expectation, and the risks associated with so-called conversion therapies are so great that the possibility of change is not something responsible Christians should encourage LGBTQ+ people to pursue. It’s no accident that the vast majority of Christian conversion therapy ministries ignobly closed their doors in the early 2000s, after it became painfully evident that it was not only unrealistic, but inhumane, to try to “change” LGBTQ+ people.
3. LGBTQ+ people experience harm when they are not able in some meaningful way to integrate their experience of being LGBTQ+ with their sense of personhood.
This statement may cause conservative readers to scratch their heads, but what I am trying to say is that it hurts LGBTQ+ people—emotionally, spiritually, and psychologically—to believe that their experience of their sexuality is “abnormal,” “perverse,” “abhorrent,” “shameful,” or any of the other painful messages that LGBTQ+ people so-often come to believe about themselves when they first begin to discover that they are L, G, B, T, or Q. It is no coincidence that rates both of suicidal ideation and suicide attempts are higher among LGBTQ+ people than the general population. And, whether the non-affirming church wishes to accept this fact or not, the message that LGBTQ+ people typically hear from non-affirming Christians has been shown to exacerbate the harm (it’s one thing to think there’s something wrong with you for being gay; it’s quite another to think that God hates you because of it). Studies have shown, for instance, that among suicidal young people generally, having faith is a source of help that can mitigate and help manage the suicidal ideations; however, among LGBTQ+ youth, the opposite is true, and having faith tends to intensify and exacerbate their suicidality.
Christians may be tempted to try and sweep this fact away with platitudes about how Jesus never promised us a pain-free life following him, or how the most loving thing is to tell people “the truth” even if it hurts them—but my experience of ministering in conservative Christian circles for more than 2 decades now has been that as a rule, many (maybe most?) non-affirming Christians are irresponsibly unwilling to wrestle deeply with this plain fact: no matter how gently and lovingly we try to present it, the run-of-the-mill, non-affirming Christian message hurts a lot of LGBTQ+ people. A lot.
So those are the three things we know to be true about LGBTQ+ experience: it’s not chosen, it doesn’t change, and it hurts not to be able to integrate it with your sense of self.
The 5 things are more quickly and succinctly summarized. They are the basic “options” that LGBTQ+ Christians have—people who want to follow Jesus but their experience of their sexuality is described by those previous 3 things, I mean. What are they supposed to do? Especially if they are involved in a non-affirming church, or have been taught all their lives to believe non-affirming theology?
As far as I can tell, they only have 5 basic options:
They can:
1. Stay in the closet, denying that they are LGBTQ+ and suffering in silence
2. “Come out” as LGBTQ+ but resist their “temptations” and seek to live singly and celibately
3. Leave their non-affirming community and try to find an affirming church
4. Abandon their faith and give up on living as a Christian altogether
5. Re-examine and potentially revise their understanding of what the Bible really says about being LGBTQ+
In laying out these five options, I am not meaning, at this point, to suggest which of those 5 is best; though I will say that, in my mind, option 1 is out of the question (see thing #3 above); and as a Christian pastor, I hope that no believer, LGBTQ or not, will ever find themselves in a place where option 4 seems like the only viable way forward. So hopefully we can scratch at least those two off the list from the outset.
Beyond that, however, I am simply asking at this point that we wrestle humbly with these 3 things and these 5 things before we make any pronouncements on “what the Bible says about same-sex sexuality,” and “what LGBTQ+ people should do as a result.” My own wrestling has led me to adopt an integrative view, one that seeks to support and celebrate LGBTQ+ people as cherished children of God even though I remain unconvinced by many of the arguments that support an “affirming” reading of the scripture. As I’ve said, I intend to show how and why I do this in coming posts. In the final analysis, you may find this position—the integrative view—to be unconvincing or unsatisfying, but whatever view we adopt, I believe that it must include an honest and compassionate accounting for the 3 things and the 5 things.
Reading Ecclesiastes Together (VIII): In the Land of the Living
Labels: death, ecclesiastes, sermons
No Mere Hospitality: Toward an Integrative Perspective on Same-Sex Sexuality
One of the most persistent and emotionally weighty issues I deal with in my work as a pastor is the question of LGBTQ+ identities: how should the church respond to LGBTQ+ people, how should we understand and apply the teaching of the Bible when it comes to same-sex sexuality, and what is the most Christ like way to show love to our LGBTQ+ friends and neighbours?
I completed a Doctor of Ministry degree at Northeastern Seminary back in 2020, and this was, in fact, the topic of my doctoral thesis: what does meaningful ministry with/to/among LGBTQ+ people look like, and how do we do it well? At that time, I focused on the theme of hospitality, arguing essentially that as Christ’s people we are called to practice radical hospitality towards all, that the bedrock of Christian community is the hospitable welcome that God extends us in the cross, and that the moral imperative of hospitality requires us to practice radical welcome and inclusion of LGBTQ+ people in the worshiping community.
I have to be honest that oftentimes these days I wish I could disavow my doctoral dissertation. At the time when I wrote it, I felt it was offering a fresh way forward on this issue, and that it would perhaps help shed some light on the path my own denomination (the FMCiC) was journeying in seeking to adopt a biblical posture towards LGBTQ+ people. Looking back over the last four years since I published it, however, my sense is that my “hospitality thesis,” such as it was, did neither. I have some small assurance that it helped some (I certainly received multiple requests from people to read it). Even so, I know I would definitely write a different thesis a second time around, if I had to write it all over again (which, thankfully, I don’t).
In a nutshell, the problem with “hospitality” as way of framing the church’s posture towards LGBTQ+ people is that, as loving as it may seem, “hospitality” is a gesture of welcomed offered, especially, to the stranger. As I argued in my thesis: biblically, you cannot offer hospitality to a friend or a family member, because biblically, hospitality (xenophilia) is explicitly about loving and welcoming the stranger. Hospitality is perhaps a helpful starting point, but the obvious problem with it is just this: if our relationship with LGBTQ+ people is framed solely in terms of hospitality, it means that they will always remain, in some real sense, “strangers” in the community—always a guest and never a fully contributing participant.
So I would no longer make “hospitality” the controlling theme for shaping the church’s posture towards LGBTQ+ people. Instead, I have come to describe my position as an “integrative approach.” By “integrative,” I mean that I think Christians need to wisely and graciously “integrate” what they believe the Bible teaches about same-sex sexuality with what we have come to know and understand about the realities of having a non-heteronormative sexual identity, of experiencing same-sex sexual attractions or gender dysphoria, the real lived experience of LGBTQ+ people.
I do not know if I am the first to use this term—“integrative”—to describe a Christian view of same-sex sexuality. I have not encountered it in any of the many books on the topic that I’ve read, and I am not aware of any major thinkers on the issue who currently use it. This may be a sign that it is a fresh way forward, or it may be that it has already been considered and found wanting. In either case, over the next few weeks here at terra incognita, I intend to sketch out in broad contours what I mean by the term and how it shapes my own response to this particular issue in church life and ministry. You can judge for yourself whether if it’s a helpful way forward or just a novel take on old ground.
The term itself comes from the realm of Christian psychology. Since 2021, I have been completing a degree in Clinical Counseling at Tyndale Seminary, and one of the first things we were asked to do early on in our studies was to write an “integrative paper,” where we articulated how we integrated the findings of contemporary psychology with the teaching of the Bible, to show how we saw the relationship between them, and how we believed that relationship ought to direct Christian counselors in their practice.
It occurred to me then that the “integrative” approach we were being asked to develop when it came to psychology generally could be mapped onto the question of LGBTQ+ identities specifically, and that rather than a simple, one-size-fits all statement on “what does the Bible say about same-sex sex,” what we really need is a gracious way to integrate the biblical witness on this matter with what we now know about what it means to be gay, or lesbian, or queer, or trans.
If you’ve read this far, I expect you’re scratching your head with all sorts of questions: what on earth does “integrative” mean? What does it look like practically? And what do you think the Bible actually teaches on this matter?
I can’t promise to answer all those questions in a format like this—blog posts are not the best venue for presenting deep, thorough, carefully researched material—but over the next series of posts, I hope to at least give readers a sense of how I would develop a full fledged “integrative approach” if I had a whole book-length format to work with.
For starters, let me say that when I talk about an “integrative approach,” I mean something that is both conceptually, and in practice, quite different from the basic options currently on hand. As far as I can tell there are essentially three. One can be “affirming,” which is to say they are supportive of same-sex relationships and/or marriage, and they believe they have a biblical warrant for being so (either because they believe that the Bible passages that apparently prohibit same-sex relationships are talking about something different than modern same-sex marriages, or because they believe there are other biblical principles that “trump” these prohibitive passages). One can be "non-affirming," which is to say they do not support same-sex relationships or marriage, primarily because they are convinced that the Bible teaches that all same-sex sex is a sin. Or one can be “accommodating,” which means that they are willing to welcome gay people into community even though they believe the Bible teaches that same-sex sex is itself sinful. Those with an accommodating posture, you might say, “accept” same-sex relationships but do not “approve” of them.
The “integrative” approach that I will be arguing for in this series is not “affirming” in the technical sense, because, as we’ll see, it does not attempt to argue for a revisionist reading of the Scriptures, but neither is it “non-affirming,” because it does not say that same-sex relationships are intrinsically or inherently sinful. Of the three current postures, my “integrative approach” is probably closest to an “accommodating” view, but it is different in that it is willing to say more than just “we can accept same-sex relationships, even though we think they’re wrong”; rather, an integrative approach takes an honest, wholistic, compassionate view of same-sex relationships, and also engages in rigorous exegesis of the scriptures, and then attempts to integrate what we know to be true about both—the experience of being LGBTQ+ and the biblical witness, together—so that we can hold up what we believe to be the Bible’s teaching on the matter, in good faith, while still sincerely embracing, blessing, and celebrating the LGBTQ+ people who are part of our community.
This may sound like an impossible goal, to some. It may sound like a wishy-washy third-way approach, to others. But after more than a decade of working and reading, study and experience on this issue, I have come to believe that an “integrative approach” holds the most promise for a healthy way forward. I don’t offer it here as a final answer to this question, but I do hope it will help others take a next step in their understanding of same-sex sexuality, and especially in their willingness to embrace and include LGBTQ+ people in authentic ways in the life of the church.
Labels: integrative, LGBTQ, sexuality
A Theory of Everything, a song
About a year ago today, inspiration struck and I started a new songwriting project. A handful of songs grew into an album's worth, and then a double album's worth. After almost 9 months in the studio now, I'm happy to report that my latest musical outing is in the mastering stage and almost ready to head out into the world. It's an album in 2 volumes, an eclectic mix of folk, pop, hard rock, prog-rock, blues, jazz and more, a labor of love that I affectionately call "A Theory of Everything."
The whole album will be released this November, but if you're interested in a taste, here's the title track:
Enjoy!
A Theory of Everything
I never knew that gravity could make you feel so light
I never knew that light could press you down with such a weight
I always thought each action had its equal opposite
I always thought each heartbeat was without its duplicate
When space and time collapse
And reference points collide
And everything is relative to you
When all my reason’s gone
And logic’s crucified
I find the source of everything that’s true
I always thought that two lines parallel can’t intersect
And rainbows shine only when there’s white light to reflect
And I was taught that equal poles would always push apart
And every circle brought you in the end back to the start
When space and time collapse
And reference points collide
And everything is relative to you
When all my reason’s gone
And logic’s crucified
I find the source of everything that’s true
Before we met I never knew
What my whole world was orbiting
Or anything could be so constant
As the speed of light (before we met)
I never guessed
The universe might be unravelling
But now we have and now I find
I’m having to rewrite my theory of everything
Before we met I never knew
What my whole world was orbiting
Or anything could be so constant
As the speed of light (before we met)
I never guessed
The universe might be unravelling
But now we have and now I find
I’m having to rewrite my theory of everything