"But We Both Believe the Bible..."

The Same-Sex Mirage of Biblical Authority

One reason for the recurrence of Christian debates on issues which really ought not be “debates” at all, is the fog that is whipped up to enshroud the authority of the Bible.

A “Debate” about the Bible?

Debates over same-sex blessings/marriage, for example, appear to involve Christians on both sides who claim to affirm the authority of Scripture. Once both views are profiled and elevated as valid options, once enough people support them vocally, this creates a situation where an innocent or ignorant onlooker is likely to think something like this:

“Well, both sides mean well. I mean, both seem to love God, and both are honestly trying to make sense of the Bible. They just happen to come to different conclusions. Perhaps both sides might be right in different ways? What if they’re both looking at two sides of the same coin? Indeed wouldn’t it be arrogant of one side to assume that they are totally right and the other totally wrong? Who’s to say? After all, no one’s perfect!”

The clever confusion created by “the debate” is the heart of the problem. Not that debate is a problem, but that the terms of the debate, the foundations for discerning the conclusions of the debate, have been tampered with.

The “debate about same-sex marriage” sometimes appears to hang on the premise that it’s a debate ultimately about how to interpret the Bible. It isn’t about that at all.

The entire theatre of the debate is to obscure the Bible so that an extra-Biblical doctrine that directly contradicts the Bible can claim a place at the table of valid opinions for “well-meaning Christians”. What our imaginary friend says does have some validity to it: “No one’s perfect”. True. But someone is wrong.

We don’t like to come out and say someone is totally wrong, or totally lying, or totally deceived. We like to hedge our bets. That way no one can accuse us of being “unnuanced” or “unloving” in our assessment. Yet even this is a product of our fearful conformity to the mould of our society.

The Spirit of Social Pressure

Talk to many Christian leaders beyond the West and they will see this issue far more clearly. It is patently obvious who is wrong because they are acting in direct disobedience to Scripture. There is less appetite for indulging in endless synodical discussions and debates about it per se. In African nations there is less immediate social pressure for the Church to change its stance on particular moral issues deemed “immoral” by progressive society.

This gives you a hint as to why it might be more important for the Church to hold a strong stance against LGBT+ within society than we often think. If Christians relegate #Pride in society to a “socio-political” issue - a “cultural war” issue to be avoided - we should not be surprised if it comes to haunt the Church too. Indeed, the haunting has been underway for some time already.

African churches, by contrast, may well have issues of social discrimination against homosexuals to contend with, as well as coercive western societal pressure placed upon their society, but churches themselves tend not to face the same social pressure to change age-old Biblical beliefs which condemn homosexuality as inherently sinful. We do, however. And anyone who says they don’t is either lying down asleep or just plain lying.

Unbelief and Self-Deception

“But it’s not about social pressure,” say the same-sex marriage advocates. “We really do believe this is what God wants. We really do believe it’s Biblical.” I’m sure many progressives really have convinced themselves of this, believing the LGBT+ revolution to be a move of the Spirit that has helped us “interpret the Word afresh” for our time.

But the more reasonable will be aware that it is a categorically ludicrous stretch to call it an overtly “Biblical” belief. Away from the microphones and platforms, they must have their doubts that the Bible is really where this new belief of theirs came from.

It is a belief they want to be true. It is a belief they have been strongly encouraged by their society to make true. It is a belief that is increasingly inconvenient for people to not see as true. But it remains a belief which virtually all Christians ever would see as, quite literally, unbelievable.

One could draw an analogy to Romans 1, where Paul speaks of unbelief as “inexcusable” (1:20) based on what has been made known: “because God has shown it to them” (1:19). So too with Scripture on homosexuality (including that very chapter!). It is hard not to think of pro-SSM interpretations as anything other than a kind of ideological trance.

Those who wish to argue that the Bible is for homosexuality can only be seen as those who simply do not want to see. These have been hoodwinked by desire; they have become “futile in their thinking” (1:21), arguing what ought not be argued to justify doing what ought not be done.

The Age of Honest Liberals

You can almost look back with more respect upon the liberal Bible scholars of the 19th and 20th centuries who were a little more “straightforward” about their unbelief. When faced with a passage that was quite obviously out of sync with “modern values” they were far more content to say the Bible was simply wrong, that it was sexist or homophobic or primitively barbaric.

They had few qualms about saying so. Such liberals generally did not try to hide their disbelief in complex hermeneutics in order to make it “fit”. They had little desire to make modern approaches to sex and gender compatible with Biblical teaching because they knew it was a fool’s errand.

Today, however, it would appear the Church is overrun with very clever fools running all sorts of errands in an effort to render their folly a new kind of wisdom. Now we often hear that because the Bible technically never mentions same-sex marriage that it must be a valid option, not least when we have scores of people in church (sometimes leading churches) who are already in same-sex marriages. To argue against same-sex marriage from the Bible, they say, is thus “an argument from silence”.

When you point them to the many examples where any and every example of homosexuality is condemned in the Bible, they simply say it wasn’t talking about what they are talking about because there were no examples of monogamous lifelong same-sex relationships. When you point out to them that there might be a reason for that… they will tell you, again, that this is “an argument from silence”.

The Silent Erosion

And so, silence after silence, year after year, these brazen arguments against the text find a way of wearing down the unsuspecting Christian who, just a couple of decades ago, remembers thinking this used to be a rather straightforward issue.

Now, surrounded by so many very clever and sincere-sounding people who seem to think it’s far more complicated, they begin to quieten down their objections. After all, who are they to disagree with all these well-meaning people?

And then their mind goes back to those friends of theirs over at that liberal church across town, the ones who’ve been in a same-sex marriage for a decade. They’re still together, which is longer than many heterosexual marriages they’ve seen fail in that time. They’ve even adopted a child together; they seem very happy.

Perhaps it is us who were wrong after all, they begin to say? Perhaps it’s less clear than we thought? Surely the God of the Bible – the God of love, no less – couldn’t be against the love so clearly in evidence between these people?

Doctrine vs. Love?

This is where the false teaching creeps in to lure compassionate, theologically reflective people to take those complex real-life encounters and pitch them against the truth. These emotive earthy examples soon appear in their minds in sharp contrast to the mere “abstract doctrines” of the conservative, whose views now seem to be divorced from lived life, divorced from “love”.

At this point, when the issue has been successfully framed as “doctrine versus love” it can be surprisingly easy for someone to be convinced of the (genuinely absurd) notion that the fundamental message of Jesus – and thus, the fundamental message of the Bible – is that “love” trumps “doctrine”.

Think about a group of mean-looking Pharisees who know all the answers but do not care for some poor marginalised person who happens to have fallen afoul of “the rules”. You have just imagined what is going through the heads of many progressives when they see a conservative arguing that the Bible is categorically against same-sex relationships.

Their heads (and hearts) have already been turned to such an extent that they now genuinely believe same-sex relationships to be a “Biblical” idea.

Scripture Twisters

There are some progressives who are simply lying about this, of course. They do not stand beneath the authority of Scripture other than where Scripture already happens to agree with something they already believe.

But they do wish to gain something from those who do hold to Scriptural authority. Such people are charlatans using Scripture for their own advantage, even as it leads them (and others) further astray.

It is not always easy for us to think ill of such people. We ought to be gracious and charitable wherever possible. Yet we must also heed the warnings of Scripture itself against those who seek to undermine Scripture for their own ends. An especially pertinent example of this is seen in Peter’s caution about those who “twist” the letters of Paul:

“There are some things in them that are hard to understand, which the ignorant and unstable twist to their own destruction, as they do the other Scriptures. You therefore, beloved, knowing this beforehand, take care that you are not carried away with the error of lawless people and lose your own stability.” (2Pet. 3:16-17)

Whilst it’s unlikely that Peter is referring directly to Paul’s teaching on homosexuality in this instance, he is nonetheless speaking of holiness, that the believers “may be found by [Christ] without spot or blemish” (2Pet. 3:14); thus Paul’s warnings against homosexuality (Rom. 1:26-27, 1Cor. 6:9; 1Tim. 1:10) are hardly irrelevant to this.

As Peter notes, whether the progressive false teacher or adherent knows it or not, at root they are cultivating their own (and others’) instability unto their destruction. When people begin undermining clear Scriptural teaching in order “to suit their own passions” (2Tim. 4:4), the house is no longer built on the rock because the words are no longer being heard and put into practice (Matt. 7:24).

One of Us is a False Teacher

One of the particularly dubious postures from the reasonable (heterosexual) affirmer of same-sex relationships is their unwillingness to argue against the conservative view as a false teaching. As noted earlier, the tactic is more to enshroud the Biblical texts in the mirage of “debate” and thus to cast doubt on the plausibility that one side could ever be totally wrong.

“We’re just trying to understand Scripture, like you are! We just read it differently…” “Don’t be so arrogant to assume you can’t be wrong in your interpretation!” You see, the trick is, they know they cannot openly relinquish the authority of Scripture. It would be too revealing if they did so, and most of them wouldn’t want to anyway. Instead, they say they’re simply reading Scripture “in dialogue with” the real, lived experiences of people they encounter in the world, just like Jesus did.

It would be more consistent, however, if the progressive came out more exclusivistically. They ought to say not only that the conservative should tolerate/celebrate their alternative view as “a valid view”, but that the conservative (and all conservatives) are deeply misled by a false and harmful teaching that must be eradicated from Christianity altogether.

Surely this is what they have to think anyway? If you believe, in light of your nouveau exegesis, that the Bible is – deep down – pro-LGBT+, then those who still say it isn’t pro-LGBT+ must have a very serious problem. To the progressive, the conservative who excludes those whom God wishes to include must surely be under the spell of a heartless and evil delusion?

Such a false teaching would clearly have serious pastoral consequences for the victims on the other side who will undoubtedly feel excluded by the conservative embrace of that teaching, contributing to their ongoing marginalisation.

Even those innocently unaffirming without saying much about it would still be complicit in what could only be seen as a mass pastoral disaster. This ought to warrant very serious consequences, ought it not? Who should they excommunicate first?

The Awkward Problem

The problem is: such consequences would need to be levelled against virtually all of the Church for all time up to a generation or two ago, and including most Christians alive today. That is, before the Spirit apparently realised what had been going on this whole time and belatedly decided to stir some (western) people up about it.

Unlike other examples of progressive revelation about something in Scripture, or a particular element of the truth recovered or reclarified from one generation to the next, this move to try and affirm homosexuality as “not sinful after all” is more than a case of re-emphasis; it necessitates an outright renouncing of all that was written and all that was understood of what was written before our time.

Thus, it is not something of which the Church could legibly say: “Ah, we now understand something about the Bible which, beforehand, we only knew in part”. No, it would have to mean a direct contradiction of what all the Church has known/said about it on God's behalf for all of Church history.

It would have to mean that God has been grievously displeased with his entire Church this entire time. How dare we refuse to allow the love He apparently wanted His people to affirm all along (despite never telling us in so many words, what with all those words where he seemed to keep saying the precise opposite)?

The Canonisation of Experience

“But there you go again,” the progressive might say, “talking about abstract doctrinal speculations, living in the 2D, black & white world, rather than the ‘real world’ of human ambiguity and complexity.”

What I often observe in such interactions is that the progressive tends to bring up these real-life examples not as experiences to be interpreted by Scripture, nor as applications of Scripture, but as counter-texts to Scripture. A complex example of someone’s personal situation – a situation that likely does not appear to fit “the mould” – is effectively re-fashioned as a new canonical “text” to challenge the citing of a given Biblical passage.

Over the years I've been in many conversations about same-sex something-or-other where I might say “But Paul clearly says X...” and the response has been something like: “But my gay married vicar friend prayed for me and I really sensed a peace in my heart, and I can see the Spirit at work in his life. Now how do you explain that...?” Life beyond the text has become the new primary authority above the text. Sola Experientia!

Granted, there are also plenty of highly educated progressives who will be more than happy to keep talking about the actual texts too. This will be because they have been taught how to overtly deconstruct (or in Peter’s words: “twist”) what Paul clearly says. But for the average LGBT-affirmer the lived experiences will always prove more determinative than the “exegesis”.

The Great Distraction

Even if such people do cite Scripture in response to “Paul says X...” their chosen texts to refute it are never direct teachings. This is because – not to put too fine a point on it – there are no such direct texts in the Bible. And that, in turn, is due to the inconvenient fact that the only times the Bible ever mentions homosexuality, it does so in order to condemn it.

As such, vague references to texts that have little or nothing to do with homosexuality tend to be used in order to generalise this very obvious reality into oblivion. So, whilst you say “But Paul says this…”, they will say “But Jesus did this...”, “But God is love…”, “But the Spirit brings life…”.

To the untrained eye this may still look like it’s a conversation about what the Bible has to say about homosexuality. It’s not. It’s a conversation designed to distract you (and them) from heeding what the Bible really does have to say about homosexuality.