by Dr. U » July 29th, 2008, 3:34 am
I read through all the posts in this discussion, and have two additions to make.
(1)A couple times, a number of the verses in the Bible were cited that specifically name homosexual behavior as one of a number of sins God forbids. However, there is another passage that was (and often is) overlooked. When Jesus was asked about divorce, he said (Matt 19), "Haven't you read that in the beginning the Creator made them male and female, and said, 'For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh'".
This important teaching of Jesus cuts across dozens of cultural practices around the world and addresses them as not God's way: i.e., one man and one woman, not one man and four women or 10 women, or one man and the latest trophy wife, or one woman and two men, or one man and 100 prostitutes, or two men, or two women. Not only would this have been a direct assault on Greek homosexual practices - which dominated their culture - it also would have been a direct assault on Roman family practices, in which the father's authority extended into the marriages of all his grown children, even to the point of being able to mandate a divorce and strategic remarriage with someone else. (There's a distant echo of that paternalistic Roman world in the tragic Corleone family of the Godfather books/movies.) This short passage is RICH in insights and checks on the behavior of every person in every culture, and we ignore it at our ultimate loss.
Lewis devoted a whole chapter of Mere Christianity to the virtue of chastity, in the light of Jesus' words, and noted that it's always been the least popular Christian virtue - because it IS hard, it goes against all kinds of personal habits and preferences as well as whole cultures.
(2) One of the reasons this issue is not going away is because those who practice homosexual behavior are quite publicly frank that they intend to push legal acceptance of homosexual practice or legal penalties for those convicted of not sufficiently accepting these behaviors, into all areas of society. Churches and Christian organizations, including schools and charities are often named as targets. In the US there have now been quite a few lawsuits pitting a church or religious institution or organization's right to religious convictions about the nature of what constitutes sin against a secular non-discrimination conviction that views such convictions as evil that needs to be eliminated from society. Sometimes they have lost, and it hasn't always been Christian organizations alone. E.g., a Jewish seminary in NYC denied married student housing to a same-sex couple, and lost in court based on supposed discrimination, with the court requiring the seminar to give the same sex couple housing on campus.
It may even possibly mean that, over the long run, Christians in the "Western world" will have to develop more house-church and underground networks, perhaps including financial, rather than institutions that can easily be sued. I hope not, but it is something to start thinking about, how to make churches and Christian organizations leaner and less of a financial target to nuisance lawsuits that may arise from issues like legalization of homosexual marriages.
(3) Actually, one more comment. Someone a few pages back said something about "progress" in society, apparently defining it in their reply as when majority opinion has swayed to a new paradigm.
I'm modestly read in the history of "race" and racism. As the African slave trade grew in profitability for Europeans after the Renaissance, (the Muslim Arabs had already been capturing and selling sub-Saharan Africans for 800 years), there was a philosophical and theological chipping away at the biblical doctrine that humanity is one, until - hooray - "progress" won, and the idea of four "races", with the "white" race supposedly superior, became an unquestioned paradigm until after the mid-20th Century by almost everyone in the "Western world" except the most radical Catholics and Protestants. Generations of intellectuals laughed at the days when people had been so benighted as to have once believed that all peoples on Earth were created equally human by God from a common origin, when now "everyone" knew that, say "blacks" were scientifically proven inferior to "whites".
We need to be careful about majority opinion as an arbiter, even and maybe especially, majority opinion of whatever is in intellectual vogue in a given generation.