For better or worse…the Anabaptist tradition is rooted, not in Biblical inerrancy, but in a desire to live a rigorous Christian life. Since we Anabaptists have nothing other than scripture to make us Christian, we cannot turn to liturgical practices nor doctrinal solutions. Because of the nature of our tradition (Scriptural and Ethical) it is clearly easier to be LBG&T in an Episcopalian community than in an Anabaptist one.

Unfortunately this means the violent tribunal like arguments continue and that we (LGBT and advocates)must try to take the violence out of the process. This means engaging the argument on all fronts (logical, interpretive and humanitarian).

My prayer is simply this…one day we can pray all together.

Thanks for bringing some humanity back to this conversation. I certainly don’t want to make anyone feel like they are in a courtroom. This is something we all do from time to time, make others feel like their behaviors are on trial and I’m sorry if some of us have made people feel like that. We shouldn’t be in “accuse mode” all the time. It probably makes us feel good that “we” are not like “them”, we should be cautious.

It’s problematic to equate homosexuality with murder. It’s not murder nor theft. If, however, it was compared to other sexual sins like lust, adultery, pre-marital sex, or prostitution I think those people who wish to proclaim it as sin would serve their agenda better.

I guess I’d like to say is: If whatever we like isn’t sin, then what did Christ die for?

Jesus didn’t preach Goodness, he preached Holiness. And for as great of a teacher as Jesus was, He was much, much more.

I won’t say whether or not I believe homosexuality to be sin or not. I would, however, caution us all to be wary of political, cultural, & social agendas which make us alter scripture to serve purposes which are not God’s.

I leave with this:

If homosexuality is sin, God’s grace is enough to cover that and we shouldn’t make it appear like we do not want homosexuals in church.
If homosexuality is not sin, then we should be wary to turn the church into a political machine to meet some secular agenda.

Thanks for taking the time to write Comment #38. I think you’ve done a good job of laying out how this kind of discussion makes you feel and why it isn’t life giving. As always, you’ve got vivid metaphors that deepen my understanding.

I hope that we can some how (against all odds) move towards making this a space for having those other kind of conversations you mention in your last sentence. Perhaps in some way this thread can help that happen. In the future we can refer SWM’s back to this thread to spend all the time in the courtroom they want.

I’m very very grateful for TimN and Isaac and others who can enter into and lay out rational Biblical-based arguments explaining why I’m different than a rapist and murderer. Truly I am. But (sigh) when these discussions that have to do with some aspect of queer people generally not at all related to whether they’re horrible sinners or not veer off into the exact same four Bible verses that we’ve talked aboutt 100 times already, I always feel like I’ve been lifted from a public discussion and sent into a hidden courtroom in a shady dictatorship where a “trial” is about to take place to “argue” whether my life deserves to continue or not. I am extremely grateful that (to continue the tribunal metaphor) some lawyer snuck in with me who can take part in this argument. But I resist the whole presence and authority of this style of tribunal. The topic suddenly shifts from being about my life and the lives of others like me and suddenly becomes about some absolute authority that a few esoteric words of questionable translation hold.

I’ve certainly entered into such discussion before. They might even be useful sometimes. But they really rarely are. There can be a bit of back and forth and then - WHAM - off to the concentration camp for you after all, thanks for playing yet again. So I, like most people who have faced countless tribunals like this, can hardly ever stomach taking them seriously on their own terms. Right now (as in, through the course of the various related threads on this blog and in other similar contexts) I’m experimenting with different ways of subverting their existence and authority, to greater or lesser effect.

If you think that the conversation about queer people is about four Bible verses, then you are speaking from a position of absolute privilege, plain and simple. It means next to nothing to you. For others it’s about our very LIVES and/or the lives of people we dearly love.

TimB, thanks for sharing your perspective. I do sincerely appreciate it. You have good advice about effective ways to speak to straight white males. But - in defense of Katie - as dear as SWM’s can be, and believe me, I have very very deep affection for the SWM’s in my life - sometimes we just want to have a conversation that doesn’t focus on SWM’s and their concerns at all. We just want to talk about something else, not arguing for their powerful support one way or another, just about something else. We get pissed when it all gets interrupted and has to be shut down to deal with the SWM’s issues yet again, on SWM’s terms, using only the kinds of arguments SWM’s are comfortable using. We get pissed not because these conversations happen - they definitely should - but because there are very few spaces in which any other kind of conversation can ever happen.

1) I’m not sure why you think I’m suggesting we not use Mennonite resources. If it was my joke about YAM, I apologize for not explaining it better. The M in YAM stands for Young Anabaptist Moderates, not Young Anabaptist Mennonites. I was trying to explain that this blog is not about defending the status quo (as you are doing) but about challenging it.

You’re assessment of the early Anabaptist risks confusing them with the fundamentalist movement of the 20th century. The early Anabaptist weren’t killed because they took the bible to literally. They were killed because they had the crazy idea to live the words of Jesus out in their lives in a way that directly challenged the power of the state and the established church by refusing to take up the sword and baptize their children. There’s was the opposite of the fundamentalist project.

I find the Anabaptist Network core convictions to be helpful in understanding Anabaptism. I worked with them for two years in the UK and for the first time was able to understand some of the distinctives from my own tradition. Two of the key ones is:

1. Jesus is our example, teacher, friend, redeemer and Lord. He is the source of our life, the central reference point for our faith and lifestyle, for our understanding of church and our engagement with society. We are committed to following Jesus as well as worshipping him.

2. Jesus is the focal point of God’s revelation. We are committed to a Jesus-centred approach to the Bible, and to the community of faith as the primary context in which we read the Bible and discern and apply its implications for discipleship.

For me, a Jesus-centred approach to the bible is different from a fundamentalist approach in that it focuses on understanding the rest of the bible through the lens of Jesus teachings and ministry rather then simply as a flat book in which all passages carry the same weight. Isaac’s done a good job of taking on the passages you quote already, but I’d also point you to Biblical Perspectives on Homosexuality by Walter Wink

2) I’m not sure why you’re trying to hide behind anonymity as a defense from acknowledging your privilege. Your no strangers. Those of us who went to Goshen College all know you as the guy always up for arguing the conservative side of the argument. I respect that, but in this case it’s not a theoretical argument. It has very real implications for the lives of some of us in this discussion. Recognizing the privilege I bring to the discussion as a straight, white, married, male is not an attack on me. It’s a necessary part of understanding the power relationships at play.

3) Luke was making a very important point about you and others ignoring the 99% of his article about LGBTQ folks and making it about yourself . Your response of restating your hurt and feeling of being attacked simply strengthens his argument

Thank you, Isaac, for providing Biblical texts to support your view on the matter in a manner that we can all understand. This is, after all, a religious website and having a religious perspective is certainly helpful to understand differing points of view, isn’t it?

Anon, thank you for your explanation of how MCC views leadership. I would generally agree that leadership operates bottom up, we regard leaders as those we respect, not those that force themselves on us. (I wonder if God would agree…? He certainly gave us Moses, David, Joseph. All leaders who were not chosen by people, but anointed by God.)

Katie, a shame you don’t want to justify yourself. The only way to be heard is to justify yourself. It’s tiring, yes. Yet, I can’t help to think that Matt isn’t saying you are less of a person, just that he believes your lifestyle is sin. If you had explained it like Isaac you might win someone over but casting blame one straight white males earns enemies. Don’t be so quick to condemn us, while hardly perfect we have contributed much to society. The space program, the computer you use, the car/bicycle you drive, central climate control, much of modern medicine. We are flawed, yes, but don’t take us for granted. It was, after-all, straight white men who spearheaded inclusion of minority groups into public spaces. Don’t discount our influence. It is greater than yours. History has shown we make powerful allies, and vile enemies. You seem to think we are the latter, which we will be if you make it so. It’s more in your hands than you think.

A shame Matt laid out what he saw in a concise, consistent fashion only to be told off and acted rudely to. I thought anabaptists prided themselves on hospitality to the stranger? Yet here, in this space, Matt is the stranger and his point of view was reacted to in a vile way.

I hope our guests get a warmer, patient, more understanding greeting in the future.

Matt, I appreciate that you take the bible seriously. So do I. I’m a Mennonite pastor so I have to or else my congregation would run me out of town! But here’s the difference between us: where you see clarity (”the Bible’s message is clear”), I see a mess of interpretations. In order for you to see the mess, you’ll have to dig a little deeper into the texts you quote. In the Pauline passages you mention, there are two words that you have to take more seriously: “arsenokoites” and “malakos.” The translators you quote give words like “homosexual” or “effeminate.” They make us think that the translation process is so simple. That’s far from the case, especially with words that occur so few times in Scripture. So sometimes we have to take the bible more seriously than the translators want us to.

“Arsenokoites,” sometimes translated “homosexual,” has no clear meaning. We don’t have enough textual evidence from the 1st century to know what the word meant. If we had to make an educated guess, the best scholarship tells us that the word has to do with sex trafficking: “some kind of economic exploitation by means of sex, perhaps but not necessarily homosexual sex” (Dale Martin). It’s also a word used to describe rape. So, if you feel passionately about this Scripture, your best bet would be to join the International Justice Mission or Word Made Flesh Ministries and go join their fight against the worldwide network of pimps. Or volunteer at a rape crisis center near you.

“Malakos,” sometimes translated as “effeminate,” has even less occurrences. We are even further in the dark. Some of Paul’s contemporaries use the word to describe people who don’t work hard. Josephus uses the word to describe people who are weak in battle. In popular Greco-Roman culture, the word was used to describe men who tried to look good in order to attract women!–so it can describe heterosexuals as well. In his Symposium, Plato disparages the “malaka.” But contrary to what we would think, these are men who pursue women (again, heterosexual desire)–they suffer from “malakos” because they desire women, and that’s a sign of weakness! The preferable love, according to Plato, is for a man to love a man. That kind of desire indicates that a man has no “effeminate” desires within him. That’s not what us modern readers would expect.

All this to say, those passages reveal a complicated world. I don’t know how to make sense of it all just yet. The jury is still out. I do know that I shouldn’t form convictions based slim biblical evidence. I admit that part of my problem is that I don’t have any close homosexual friends who are Christians. I need such friendships as a context to think deeply and spiritually about theses issues. This is not an issue that can be discerned by solitary readers. We need communities of interpretation, and ones in which people who think and live differently than me can argue their case as persuasively as possible. But Anabaptists know this already: we call it the hermeneutical community. It all depends on who you want to sit and patiently listen to. But this can’t take place on a blog. It needs to happen at church, with a community of people who are trying to follow Jesus and listen for the Holy Spirit who moves in unexpected places.

Matt, here is a list of the best resources I’ve read on the issue of sexuality and church. I haven’t worked everything out. But these are the sources I continually think through:

Dale Martin, Sex and the Single Savior (2006). He primarily wrestles with NT biblical texts.

Eugene Rogers, Sexuality and the Christian Body (1999). He’s a theologian.

Douglass Campbell, The Quest for Paul’s Gospel (2005). He has an interesting read of Romans 1.

peace,
isv

Matt, I doubt we’ll be able to (or that anyone will have the energy to) have a substantial and constructive discussion about this *again* through cyberspace. So I’m not really going to try (sorry, Luke). (Anyone can feel free to prove me wrong.) I, for one, am a committed Mennonite at a Mennonite seminary who believes strongly that the Bible is wholly fallible and certainly errant. I don’t agree with your creedal appeal to the 13-year-old Confession of Faith as if it’s normative (where instead it’s descriptive), and I beg to differ with your claim that I can’t be an “Anabaptist Radical” because I recognize that sin entered into the writing (and translating, and certainly the use) of the Bible.

Perhaps it would be useful if you would read the many other discussions we’ve already had about both homosexuality and the use of the Bible. That way those of us who have been here for a long time won’t have to re-hash the same arguments again and again.

(1) Lukelm, please don’t make assumptions about me or attach a label to me after I have made only one post. You do not know whether I am “privileged” and I have not made such assumptions about you. Further, I offered constructive criticism and you attacked me. This was hurtful and I hope that we can move forward in respectful dialog.

As to the substance of this issue, it deserves further discussion, but I realize that this is probably not the proper forum or discussion thread.

(2) TimN, I apologize for approaching this issue using Mennonite resources. Certainly, all Anabaptists are not Mennonites. Allow me to refocus the scope of prong 2 of my above comment:

The founding Anabaptists believed that the Radical Reformation did not go far enough to reform the church and bring it in line with their theology. They believed that Christians needed to be radical and relentless in their adherence to God’s word as manifest in the Bible. I hopefully presume that this group of young Anabaptists has the same mission.

Thus, I have been disappointed by this discussion’s absence of Biblical analysis. Deferring to the Bible, I cannot comprehend a group of young Anabaptist radicals championing homosexual marriages.

Here is what the New Testament says about homosexual marriage:

Romans 1:24-27 (NASB) → [24] Therefore God gave them over in the lusts of their hearts to impurity, so that their bodies would be dishonored among them. [25] For they exchanged the truth of God for a lie, and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator, who is blessed forever. Amen. [26] For this reason God gave them over to degrading passions; for their women exchanged the natural function for that which is unnatural, [27] and in the same way also the *men abandoned the natural function of the woman and burned in their desire toward one another, men with men committing indecent acts and receiving in their own persons the due penalty of their error.*

1 Corinthians 6:9-11 (NASB) → [9] Or do you not know that *the unrighteous will not inherit the kingdom of God?* Do not be deceived; neither fornicators, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, *nor effeminate (i.e. effeminate by perversion), nor homosexuals,* [10] nor thieves, nor the covetous, nor drunkards, nor revilers, nor swindlers, will inherit the kingdom of God. [11] Such were some of you; but you were washed, but you were sanctified, but you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and in the Spirit of our God.

1 Timothy 1:10 (NASB) → [8] But we know that the Law is good, if one uses it lawfully, [9] realizing the fact that *law is not made for a righteous person, but for those who are lawless and rebellious, for the ungodly and sinners,* for the unholy and profane, for those who kill their fathers or mothers, for murderers [10] and immoral men *and homosexuals* and kidnappers and liars and perjurers, *and whatever else is contrary to sound teaching, [11] according to the glorious gospel of the blessed God,* with which I have been entrusted.

1 Corinthians 7:10-11 (NASB) → “[10] But *to the married I give instructions, not I, but the Lord, that the wife should not leave her husband* [11] (but if she does leave, she must remain unmarried, or else be reconciled to her husband), and that *the husband should not divorce his wife.*

The Bible’s message is clear: homosexuality is a sin, just like lying, murdering, and adultery. The GOOD NEWS is that God has atoned for our collective sins by sending His son, Jesus, to die on the cross and then rise from the dead.

Please present the other side of this argument. Before responding, please consider the underpinnings of my argument (and my faith): I believe, as the early Anabaptists did, that the Bible is infallible, if not inerrant. Absent such a belief, I doubt very much that one can be “radical” in an Anabaptist sense.

Majorities can obviously be wrong. Most people who stand against civil rights aren’t aware of any personal hatred or bigotry but are just following how they’ve been taught to view the world. But that doesn’t make the actions that those majorities carry out less bigoted or hateful.

Again, why does the subject shift? Why is it such a classic pattern to ignore everything I said in my post about LGBT people and focus all of the discussion on the 1% of it that had to do with the identities of the majority of people who’ve never thought twice in their lives about whether they might have the legal right to marry the person they want to?

Your point 2) - we’re talking about it for the same reason that crazy radicals used to talk about woman being pastors.

Many of us are not in the position to change the order of things, we have trusted leaders and servants to that for us. If you do not trust the leaders of the denomination to make the correct decisions how can you be a part of the organization?

It is unfair and prejudicial to denounce as “hateful” a democratic majority’s affirmation of marriage as heterosexual-exclusive.

Woh… really? So just because the majority voted to approve of something that means it isn’t hateful? Democracy can often lead to hateful things… as the slavery mentioned above shows.

I don’t understand why homosexual marriage is an issue among Mennonites.

Just because most of us are Mennonites does not mean that we agree with EVERYTHING in The Confession of Faith in a Mennonite Perspective. I am a Mennonite because The Confession of Faith in a Mennonite Perspective comes closest to what I believe, not because I believe and affirm everything in it.

the democratic majority can do horrible and hateful things to the minority. In fact, there’s a long history of it. For decades in this country the “democratic majority” affirmed the institution of slavery. There’s nothing inherently sacred about the results of a given election result.

As for why we are advocating for the rights of our LGBTQ brothers and sisters, it’s because we’re YAR, not YAM.

Tim - My view on giving gay couples the same rights as married couples is pretty well summed up in my comment #7 above (assuming that’s what you meant? There are a lot more rights & benefits that come with marriage than just tax-related ones.) To state again in a different way: it doesn’t really matter what it’s called, but the notion of separate but equal is always suspect. I think the solution is to come up with a name for the legal/civil aspects of marriage that is neutral and that people won’t be as offended by if it’s extended to include everyone - maybe “Title 9″ could be it! Let religions, communities, families, social networks have back full control of the word “marriage.”

In other words, leave to Ceasar what is Ceasar’s (extending the legal and civil rights & duties associated with civil unions) and to “God” (or people who claim to speak in God’s name) what is God’s.

I suspect that a lot of straight people would find this very liberating too. I know a lot of them who decide it’s best to have a civil union but really don’t want to get involved in all the social & religious connotations of marriage.

Thanks so much for this post. I loved your paragraph on the gifts gay people offer to society (it reminded me, almost word for word in parts, of the role that I’ve been told winkte, or gay, people traditionally had in Lakota society). Even more, I’m in awe of the patience and kindness with which you’re handling the (yes, it is) bigotry that you knew would come.

Thanks for your example,

Carl

If the American public allowed gays to file to Title 9 do you think that would appease most homosexuals?