The Little Friar

1.  Apples and Oranges Similar to the Copernican Revolution, when we came to recognize that the earth revolves around the sun, humanity has only just come to recognize sexual orientation as a durable and intrinsic feature of human sexuality.  That is, sexual orientation is not a choice and it's not amenable to change. Consequently, when the biblical authors, in both the Old and New Testaments, observed sexual activity they could only explain what they were seeing through the only lens they had, that of disordered and excessive sexual desire.  That was the only reasonable explanation, in the eyes of the biblical writers, for why men would desire sex with men.  Or women with women.  What was being condemned in the Bible was this excessive and disordered sexual desire, desires deemed, given the science of the time, as being "contrary to nature". We're in a very different situation today with our modern understanding of sexual orientation.  When a teenage ...

Two stories, same lesson.  First, from this morning's Facebook feed, comes the story of the church in Tennessee who excommunicated (my word, not theirs, though this is practically what they've done) a family who was in support of their (same-sex) married daughter.  The logic of the church:  Sin is sin, and it's so disgusting that we must exorcise it from our midst as God's pure people. Second, also from this morning's Facebook feed, an article written by Thabiti Anyabwile, " The Importance of Your Gag Reflex When Discussing Homosexuality and 'Gay Marriage' ", that attempts, unapologetically, to elicit and then direct feelings of revulsion and disgust toward gay persons.  Now, I don't know either of the parties involved here.  Nor do I know anything about The Gospel Coalition.  But both articles interest me in what they're saying. Since the material on the excommunicating church is scant at the moment, let me deal with the ma...

A few years ago, I participated in a panel discussion on sexuality in the Church at Emory & Henry College.  At that time, I tried to point out that using human sexuality as the criteria for defining who we are is rather flawed.  Perhaps, I tried to demonstrate, there's a way of being sexual that is also compatible with being Christian. The problem, of course, is that Christians are far from a unified mind about human relationships generally, and sexual relationships specifically.  Sure, we have a base-line (what I called yesterday "righteous relationships"), but that base-line requires a lot of working in order to arrive at a biblical understanding of being human. Which set me to thinking. I'm aware that certain moral, doctrinal and theological accommodations may create too much of a rupture for the interpreting community.  But does my claim that human sexuality is too thin a category for defining who we are meet that standard?  You'd think so, based o...