What if there’s no such thing as a homosexual (or heterosexual)? In that case, Albert Mohler and others like him are posing a question—“Is our purpose to make homosexuals into heterosexuals?”—that has little or no traction whatsoever. The pastoral question—“How does God make sinners into saints?”—eclipses the therapeutic one.

Just at the point of exhaustion and irritability, when we think the debate on homosexuality in the church has reached its end—with every position articulated, every line drawn in the sand, every constituency ghettoized—other voices emerge to remind us that the conversation must proceed. Despite anxiety for ourselves and the church, the conversation must proceed because God has called us to this annoyance as he has called previous generations of Christians to other annoyances; the interpretation of Scripture requires us to think deeply and wait patiently upon God; the shalom of the church is at risk if we close down the search for agreement; and, lest we forget, some of God’s precious children live upon the rack.

Three fresh and challenging voices aid us in their books: Wesley Hill’s Washed and Waiting: Reflections on Christian Faithfulness and Homosexuality (Zondervan), Jenell Williams Paris’s The End of Sexual Identity: Why Sex Is Too Important to Define Who We Are (IVP), and Oliver O’Donovan’s Church in Crisis: The Gay Controversy and the Anglican Communion (Cascade). Here’s a “gay Christian” and burgeoning New Testament scholar who pursues the vocation of celibacy (Hill), an anthropologist who questions our unexamined appropriation of sexual identity categories (Paris), and a British theologian who reflects on the troubles in his church without entanglement in America’s culture wars (O’Donovan). Two big ideas emerge from their writing. They who have ears, let them hear.

1. The moral status of homosexuality is (not) important.

Against those who regard the moral status of homosexuality as all-important—whether in condemnation or celebration—a minority of progressive evangelicals (Tony Jones, Brian McLaren, and Andrew Marin) have called for a public moratorium on judgments of any kind so that a space of reconciliation can develop between the church and its gay neighbors. They are right to insist that Christians should repent of heterosexism and love their “enemies,” if we conceive of homosexuals that way. But is silence on the moral teachings of Scripture the best way forward? Does respectability with the gay community come at the cost of biblical truth-telling, pastoral care, and church discipline? When Christians wear “I’m Sorry” T-shirts at Gay Pride events, are they apologizing for the church’s spiritual abuse of homosexuals or for the hard edges of the gospel?

Keeping with the church’s traditional consensus on the sin of homosexuality, Paris, O’Donovan, and Hill view the moral status of homosexuality as important but not all-important. Paris recounts an experience in graduate school when a bisexual, atheist classmate asked if she could handle going to a gay bar, even though she had never been to any bar before. Feeling “like a fish out of water or, more to the point, a conservative Christian out of church,” nothing about it shocked her. When this friend tested her—“Jenell, now that we’re on my turf, let me ask you this: Does Christianity really condemn homosexuality?”—she answered as most of us have answered with a simplistic message that affirms the sinfulness of homosexuality. Seeing the hurt and anger in her friend, regret followed. “I had stood up for my faith,” she writes, “so why did I feel like my faith had let me down?”

I didn’t know that proclaiming “homosexuality is a sin” is a poor representation of Christian teachings. I now see that statement as a judgment that served my needs. I needed to believe my religion was true, my sexual choices were proper, and my moral bearings were sound. Feeling unsteady in an unfamiliar environment, I stabilized myself by leaning on judgment instead of love. Now I realize that love is not synonymous with morality. Love and grace are not doled out according to our righteousness, but according to our belovedness. Jesus’ good news should sound like good news, because it is. … Instead of speaking for God so quickly, I wish I had introduced a pause in the rush to judgment.

Paris’s book is the answer she wished she had given to her friend at the bar—an answer that doesn’t turn biblical religion into a zero-sum game: “It’s not that it was wrong of me to say that Christianity forbids same-sex sex; that just shouldn’t have been the first and only thing I had to say.”

Faced with a potential schism in the Anglican Communion over homosexuality, O’Donovan also wants to get Christians away from thinking that a moral judgment is “the first and only thing” we need to say. Definitive pronouncements don’t settle the issue, but only heighten the tension and expedite schism. He confronts the bewilderment of “how such a destructive outcome could derive from such a trivial cause.” Christians view the cause as “trivial,” he argues, when they unbind the sexual dilemma from its cultural complex:

The point at issue—whether homosexuality, capitalism, colonial slavery, or something else—is never the whole of what is at stake. Nobody has to make a decision about that and that alone. It would be nice to purify the question to the point when it was about one thing and one thing only; but if we had done that, it would already be nine tenths solved. The question is always, what does it mean, in this constellation of circumstances, to approve or disapprove this or that line of conduct? What relations are present to us in and through it? How do the various refractions of the demand of love within the moral law come together to form an understanding of where we stand? So what looks “small” at first glance can become the subject of the day, the focus of everyone’s attention, the test of where each and every person is morally situated, the divide between old friendships and new ones. From outside the historical context it may be hard indeed to comprehend why; but it is part and parcel of historical understanding that we should recognize how one issue acts as a conduit for others.

To “cope with the history we have been thrown into, and reach such an understanding of it as we can,” O’Donovan exhorts us to “untangle the knot of associations, identify the strange gods, flush them out of their cultural hiding places and leave the question of homosexuality disenchanted of them, ready to be seen precisely for what it is and not as the bearer of some wider cultural decision.” Holding this question “open with real existential commitment” is nerve-racking for many Christians because of “anxiety about doctrinal revisionism”—a legitimate concern, to be sure, but one that prematurely closes down the exploration.

To ease the anxiety, O’Donovan advises what one might call a “seek, and ye shall find” approach to Scripture: “One must purposefully look to the source from which an answer is sought, an answer not already contained in the question, which is therefore capable of reforming and refining the question.” If the quality of biblical inquiry is measured by how our moral questions get reshaped by the text, then O’Donovan is asking much better questions than the hackneyed and, frankly, banal question that’s frequently used as a litmus test of orthodoxy—“Is homosexuality a sin?” He asks “how this form of sensibility and feeling is shaped by its social context, how it can be clothed in an appropriate pattern of life for the service of God and discipleship of Christ?” Borrowing from Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams, how does the homosexual Christian hear the good news of Jesus Christ and show Christ to the world? And finally, “What good news does the gay Christian have to bring the church?”

Read More

[Editor’s note: One or more original URLs (links) referenced in this article are no longer valid; those links have been removed.]