Script Out Passages: Script Out Principles
Hespeler, 22 November, 2015 © Scott
McAndless
2
Timothy 3:10-17, Romans 1:26-32, Psalm 19:7-14
T
|
oday we come to the end of what I
think is the longest series of sermons that I have ever preached. Since the
beginning of September we have been looking at what I call the Script Out
passages of the Bible – passages that we love to hate and often wish weren’t
there in the Bible at all. I’m going to confess that I am kind of glad to bring
this series to a close on this, the last Sunday in the church year. It can be a
little bit difficult to spend all that time focusing on Bible passages that you
don’t really like. Next week, the first week in Advent, I am going to be very
happy to turn to some more traditional themes of the Christian gospel.
But I hope that
you have picked up that, even if it is hard, I do think this kind of work is
important. If we are people who believe in the Bible and take this book
seriously, we have to be willing to invest the energy to struggle with those
parts of the book that may make us feel uncomfortable or that we just plain don’t
like. You cannot pick and choose which passages to follow.
But even more
important than that, I think that we need a better general understanding of how
we can approach this book that we say is so important to us. One of the reasons
why I felt I had to tackle the Script Out passages of the Bible was because I
was hoping to develop some basic principles that we could use to apply whenever
we come across passages that challenge us or give us trouble because this
is
just something that is going to keep happening and we may even find that, as
times goes by, there will be more passages that we stumble over for various
reasons.
A perfect example
is a request that comes to us this year from the highest governing body of our
denomination: the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church in Canada. The
General Assembly has asked the congregations and sessions of our church to
discuss and get back to them on a somewhat thorny social issue of our time.
They want us to talk about how we include (or perhaps fail to include) LGBT
people in the church. Just to be clear, LGBT stands for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual
and Transgender. So it is simply a reference to a group of people who for
various reasons, don’t quite fit into what might be called the traditional
approach to how to live out sexuality.
But the reality
is that, if we are going to be Christians who take the Bible seriously, we have
to grapple with what the Bible says even if the discussion is uncomfortable.
There are only a few passages that speak directly to these questions and I want
to look at how we are going to approach them. I don’t mean to do this in order
to tell you how you need to understand these passages or what you ought to
think about the question in general. I just want to offer you some helpful
approaches to keep in mind.
But before we
look at any particular passages, I want to start with some basic Biblical assumptions.
You have heard the argument made (seriously by some, ridiculed by others) that
the Bible does not support same-sex marriage because, and I quote, “It was Adam
and Eve, not Adam and Steve.” There is actually a valid point in that, at least
when you understand what it is saying, and we need to take it seriously.
What it is saying
is that there is a certain assumption about what is normal or common in human
relationships and specifically about the relationship between men and women in
the Bible. This isn’t just something that we see in the creation story but an
assumption that runs through much of Scripture, that the male/female
relationship in marriage is normative and that it is the kind of relationship,
from the perspective of Biblical society, that everyone is simply expected to
engage in. And of course that was true. Everyone in Biblical times was expected
to participate in so-called traditional marriage.
Of course, what they called traditional marriage (as we
saw a couple of weeks ago) was a little bit different from what we are used to.
It included things like arranged marriages that had nothing to do with love,
polygamy, female slavery and concubinage, rape victims who were forced to marry
their rapists and all kinds of other things that we would never find
acceptable. But there was an expectation that, one way or another, everyone
would fit into the basic male/female marriage relationship somewhere and that
was really whether they wanted to or not and whether they desired that kind of relationship
or not.
So it is true
that the Bible takes male/female marriage relationships for granted and,
indeed, as the basic foundation of society. And I see absolutely no problem
with that. Even today, such relationships represent the norm in the sense that
it is the kind of relationship that the majority of people will fit into in one
way or another. What’s more, such relationships are very good and even
foundational to society as a whole.
But just because
the Bible only sees one kind of relationship and calls that relationship good,
that doesn’t mean that it is the only kind of relationship possible or the only
one that can be good. I mean, just
because the Bible assumes that everyone wears tunics and sandals doesn’t mean
that such a mode of dress is the only one that anyone should wear today.
Sandals and tunics being good doesn’t mean that a suit and tie is necessarily
bad.
One of the
principles that we discovered during our discussions over the last few weeks
had to do with something called proof texts. Proof texts are short Biblical
texts that clearly lay out some Biblical policy. We saw, for example, that
there are a few verses that, in former times, were regularly used to defend the
practice of slavery. But the fact that there were a few verses in the Bible
that clearly declared that slavery was an acceptable practice did not stop many
Christians from using the Bible to argue against it. They discovered that,
despite those few proof texts and despite the fact that the Bible took the
institution of slavery for granted throughout the whole text, the overwhelming
narrative of the Bible was about a God who was committed to bringing his people
freedom from slavery and all oppression and that that story was more important
than a few proof texts.
Does that principle
apply to the discussion of the place of LGBT people within the church? It is
true that there are a few verses that are clear proof texts against
homosexuality – six verses by most people’s count. Their meaning is not really
open to a great deal of interpretation though we can look at them. Does the
existence of those proof texts (assuming we are correctly understanding them)
mean that any sort of conversation about how to include LGBT people is already
over – that there’s nothing more to say?
Well, I would
say, given where we stand on slavery, we cannot possibly say that. We can never
say that a proof text is the end of a conversation. Of course, that doesn’t
answer the question of what the overall narrative of the scriptures is. Is it
one of including outsiders or is it one of judgment of people who don’t fit in.
That is another discussion and one that you need to decide on for yourself as
you read the Bible.
Now, turning to
those so-called proof texts, the clearest one is found in Leviticus chapter 20:
“If a man lies with a male as with a
woman, both of them have committed an abomination; they shall be put to death;
their blood is upon them.” It is, like many proof texts, a passage that
doesn’t seem to leave much room for interpretation and many would point to it
as the clearest Biblical rejection of LGBT people.
But here again,
another of our Script Out principles does apply. Way back when we started this
series and looked at the Biblical prohibition against people getting tattoos,
we noted that that law really doesn’t apply to today because it was part of a
particular law code that was intended to set the people of Israel apart from
their neighbours by forcing them to have a distinct culture.
And when we
looked at that ancient law against tattooing, I made this note: “We have to be consistent. If we don’t worry
about one verse that we don’t like for a good reason, but then find another
verse that we maybe do like that has a lot in common from the verse we
rejected, be can’t just choose to dump one and keep the other. We have to think
it all through critically.”
The law against
tattooing and the law against men lying with men are only one chapter apart in
the Book of Leviticus. The two laws have a great deal in common and seem to
have the intention of setting the people of Israel apart from their neighbours
culturally. The tattooing law seems to reject the funerary practice of the
Israelite’s neighbours and the law against men lying with men is likely
rejecting the cultic prostitution practices of their neighbours but neither one
is really reacting to cultural practices that are part of the world today. This
leaves the question of whether either one really applies today at all open.
There are only a
few passages in the New Testament that touch on the question at hand. There is
nothing at all in the Gospels. Jesus himself never said anything on the
subject, possibly because the
issue just never came up for him. At the very least, this seems to indicate
that the matter wasn’t really a big concern for him. We have said before, in
connection with some of the other Script Out passages, that Christian doctrine
teaches us that God’s ultimate revelation of Godself to the world is not in a
book like the Bible but is to be found in the living person of Jesus the Christ.
Jesus’ lack of attention to this issue may be an indication of where it lies on
God’s priorities. Something to keep in mind.
The issue does come up in the letters of
the New Testament: in Romans, in 1 Corinthians, in 1 Timothy and in Jude. We
don’t have the time to go through those passages one by one now. People have
certainly differed down through the centuries over exactly what they mean. And
I am not going to tell you what you ought to do with them. You are smart
people. You have seen some of the various principles that I have been talking
about that help us to deal with those parts of the Bible that we don’t like or
that we often avoid. I would like you to encourage you to apply them for
yourself. We will also offer an opportunity in the New Year to study these
passages and the larger issues in discussion.
But I want to be clear here – I’m not
trying to tell you what you should think of these passages. I’m trusting you to
come to your own conclusions and understandings. I do expect that, though we
will agree on some things, we will not agree about it all. But I think that is
okay. In the history of the church it has happened too often that a majority
(or sometimes a powerful minority) have imposed their thinking or their
Biblical interpretations on everyone else. It is past time for that to stop.
I don’t know exactly where this whole
discussion will lead us in the Presbyterian Church in Canada. My hope and
prayer, though, is that we find a way to create an environment where everyone
feels the freedom to act according to their understanding and convictions and
where we can respect the understandings and convictions of each other.
In the Second Letter to Timothy, we are
told that “All
scripture is inspired by God and is useful for teaching, for reproof, for
correction, and for training in righteousness, so that everyone who belongs to
God may be proficient, equipped for every good work.” If we really believe that – that all scripture (both the parts that we
like and the parts that we don’t like) are given to us by God for our good, we
will not be afraid to struggle with the scriptures, to question them and find
some way to embrace them. What is at stake in these discussions and in other
difficult discussions that may come is that we are a people who take all scriptures as a gift of God –
sometimes especially the parts that we struggle with.
Passages referred to in the sermon:
Leviticus 18:22, 29; 20:13
Romans 1:26-27
1 Corinthians 6:9;
1 Timothy 1:10;
Jude 7.
Script Out principles:
- Be consistent. You can’t just pick and choose which verses you like. Apply the same critical thinking to them all.
- Pay attention to what is actually being said.
- God never intended for us to turn our minds off and just take our moral truths from proof texts. You must never take your eyes off of the overall narrative of scripture.
- God knew that the Bible would always be limited by the humans who transmitted it. So God chose to reveal himself in a way that could not be corrupted by human transmission. God revealed himself in a person: in Jesus the Christ. The living revelation of God in Christ always comes first.
- Is this God’s final word on this subject or does the Bible have more to say elsewhere?
- Understand the intentions of the people who first used this story.
- Understand what the underlying assumptions are.
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