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BILL HOLDRIDGE: Our next address will be by Rev. John Rankin. John is
the president of the Theological Education Institute, located in Hartford,
Connecticut, and has traveled all over the country holding Mars Hill
Forums, debating and discussing many different issues from many different
points of view as he has continued his ministry, and is soon to be
releasing a book that he has been working on for a while now called "First
the Gospel, Then Politics." Many of you are familiar with his ministry and
with his approach. So would you please welcome John Rankin.
[applause]
JOHN RANKIN: Good evening. And Carl thank you so much. I
think the reason that we're looking at this issue, the question "Is
homosexuality a gift of God?," is because for the first time in church
history, the question has been posed of the church. In mainline
denominations, whether the Protestant Episcopal Church or my home church,
Presbyterian Church [USA] -- though I'm ordained in the Vineyard, I'm one
of these oxymorons -- anyhow, we see the question being raised and put to
us. And I think it's an exceedingly important question that has to be
asked.
I think just in brief response to one of Carl's questions
here about should we address all the other issues, absolutely yes. And
hopefully I'll be doing that by my look at Scripture. I also think that
the question of how we view Scripture is absolutely important. And I want
to do it not by being a stereotypical conservative or evangelical. I
almost never use the word "liberal," because I'm not interested in
stereotyping people who might disagree with me. Rather, the language I
want to use is the language of being biblical. And then we can ask
ourselves what does it mean to be biblical. Being an evangelical who did
my post- graduate work at Harvard Divinity School and doing it in feminist
ethics, I was certainly in a minority position there. I did that in order
to make myself accountable to the toughest questions I could find. And so
some of the observations that I'm about to make are those I made in my
thesis at Harvard, those I made in the presence of professors who did not
accept my evangelical assumptions, and yet this is common ground. And it
is from this common ground that I wish to address this issue about
homosexuality.
The first point of common ground is that if we're
going to take Scripture on its own terms, regardless of how we view its
inspiration -- totally inerrant, partially, or pure myth, however we view
it -- to respect Scripture on its own terms is necessary if we're going to
call ourselves Christian or call ourselves Jewish, because that's the root
for what it means to be Jewish and Christian. In Genesis chapters 1
through 3 we have the three all- defining doctrines of Scripture
introduced there. And the doctrines are very simply creation, sin and
redemption. Or as I like to speak about them, the order of creation, the
reversal of that order which is sin, and the reversal of the reversal. The
whole trajectory of Scripture from Genesis 3:15b to Revelation 22:21 is
the contest between sin and redemption and the ultimate victory of
redemption. But we do not know what redemption is and the height of
redemption until we know first the depth of sin; and we do not know the
depth of sin until first we know the order of creation. And therefore if
we're going to ask ourselves what is the image of God, what is the nature
of man and woman, what is the nature of faith, we have to root ourselves
in the order of creation. As the scholars very well know, if you can throw
out Genesis 1 through 3, all of Scripture falls apart. It is all dependent
upon those scriptures. Jesus himself appealed to the order of creation
when talking about man and woman, because he came not to go beyond the Old
Testament law but to fulfill it, and to move us back to the original
promises in the order of creation. Therefore, I spend very much of my time
in the order of creation, and that's where I'm going to focus most of my
energies tonight.
In the order of creation we have four subjects
that are introduced to us, very simply these: God, life, choice, and sex.
I will submit to you that these are the four all-defining subjects in all
of life and all of human history. Every other subject or issue is a
sub-category or a cognate of these four terms. In Genesis chapter 1 it
says "in the beginning God," and that's the starting point of Scripture.
The eternal good nature of the creator. And so the sovereignty of God's
the starting point, and the trajectory of Genesis chapter 1 is the
creation of man and woman as God's image, human life, the lower forms of
life, but then finally when God gets to the crown of his creation, as it
says in Psalm 8, he breathes into us his spirit and we are distinguished
from the rest of life. Everything is meant to serve man and woman as God's
image bearers, as stewards over the good creation he's given to us. Then,
the first words in human history are words of God to Adam in Genesis 2:16,
where he says, you are free to eat any tree that's in the garden. Or as
the Hebrew says, "akol tokal," in feasting you shall feast. The idea is
that God gives to us an unlimited menu of good choices. But then he says,
you can eat of anything in the garden but don't eat the forbidden fruit.
The forbidden fruit is forbidden because to know the knowledge of good and
evil, an Hebraicism, means the knowledge of everything. And only God can
know everything. And only God can know evil in its totality and not be
polluted by it or tempted by it. And so what God is saying to Adam and to
Eve, he's saying you have an unlimited menu of good choices in the moral
and aesthetic realms, as you fill and subdue the planet, but if you eat
the forbidden fruit you're disobeying the good God who made you and his
rules. If you try to eat what will destroy you you will have no more
freedom. You can not understand evil without being destroyed by it.
Therefore, the first words in human history are words of freedom or
choice. God, life, choice.
And then after that we have the gift of
woman. And what's very interesting about the order here is in Genesis 1,
we have man and woman being made theologically as equal image bearers in
the sight of God. In Genesis chapter 2, chronologically God first makes
the man after declaring everything else is good, that it's not good for
man to be alone, which is remarkable in the order of creation. And then
once he says it's not good for man to be alone, he asks Adam to go out and
name the animals. And what I find so interesting about this is that Adam
I'm convinced is a mathematical genius. The reason is there's no sin in
the universe yet. And he can count all the way up to two. And he notices
that the animals are in twos, he's in ones, he's lonely, he doesn't want
to mate with any of them. So from the beginning, and this is theologically
very important, God is saying to man you're not it. You are not the
complete image bearer of God without woman, someone who is your moral
equal but also your complement. As the French say, vive la difference. The
bottom line is, women bear babies and men don't. And that's where so much
of the sexual wars surround that, and I think because of a lot of
chauvinistic attitudes of men towards women, they don't respect their
image-bearing status. As Paul gently reminds men saying Adam was made
first, but men don't get uppity. All of you were born of woman. Which is
to say, the mutual submission ethic of Ephesians 5:21. Adam was not it. He
was not the image bearer of God without woman. And the reason for this is
that God's power, distinct from every pagan origin text on the face of the
planet where the petty and finite gods and goddesses are destructive, and
human beings are a byproduct of their dissatisfaction and a bother to
their promiscuous wars they have between themselves. Contrast that with
the God of the Bible whose power is the power to give, men and woman is
the height of creation, and his goal is to give to us so well we will give
to one another and give back to God.
Now, you do not give and you
can not receive unless you have needs to give and receive. And that's why
God made us man and woman, male and female, not only physically but also
emotionally and many other levels. God made man and woman for each other.
This is the order of creation. God, life, choice, sex. And the power of
procreation, and why the most important choice in the order of creation
was who we marry, and even now it's our most important choice, because in
the covenant of marriage we have the power to pass on to our children the
gifts of life, choice, and sex, to pass on the image of God.
And
so this is the order of creation. The reversal of the order is instead of
God, life, choice, and sex, and sex defined as one man, one woman, one
lifetime from the assumption in Genesis chapter 1 and 2, the reversal of
that is sex, choice, life, God. I will argue the greatest evil hands down
in all human history is any act of sexuality outside of faithfully married
man and woman. [applause] And if you take a look, I was talking with a
friend of mine with the National Council of Churches local affiliate. He
said, John, why are you so interested in sexual politics, when there are
people dying in the streets from gang warfare and drugs and so forth. And
that's a terrible evil he was pointing out. And then I said, well have you
looked at the recent studies, this was about two years ago, that for those
men incarcerated for serious, violent crimes in jail today, that between
70 and 90 percent of them grew up without Dad, functionally or de facto
without a father. And I said, are you going to tell me that AFCD, abortion
on demand, homosexual-rights movement, and other laws like this that
denigrate marriage, do not have an effect? If you want to make a
difference on violence in the inner city, let's have men that are faithful
to women as wives and not have promiscuity. And the inner city's not the
only place promiscuity happens. It happens everywhere. The bottom line is
that once you break the trust between man and woman, you do not have the
modeling between the sexes which is necessary for a boy or a girl to learn
from his or her earliest years. And once you don't have the
complementarity necessity between man and woman, then all brokenness goes
from that point on forward. And what I see happening today is a reversal
of God, life, choice, sex. It becomes sex, choice, life, God. Sex outside
of God's boundaries, and then choice becomes a servant to justify it which
in many and varied ways can destroy life, an affront against
God.
Another element we can bring to bear here in terms of
Scripture, and with Father Hansen being an Episcopalian. I was raised
agnostic Unitarian but I was converted through the Episcopal liturgy some
thirty years ago. And John Wesley, who most of us think of as a Methodist.
He died an Anglican. But John Wesley as an anglican, talked about the
quadrilateral basis for the faith, four elements we base our faith on:
Scripture, tradition, reason and experience. And his assumption was very
clear. Scripture as the Word of God and whatever tradition in or history
is consistent with Scripture, we honor that. But whatever is unfaithful we
jettison. And there's a lot to jettison in the last two thousand years.
And then third is reason. The mind is given by God. We are to examine the
wonder of his creation. We are to ask the toughest questions. But the only
place to have an honest intellect rooted is in a biblical worldview in
honoring Scripture on its own terms. And then finally there's experience,
even as the Westminster Catechism says, that what is the chief end of man
but to love God and enjoy him forever. And many times I wonder if we
Christians really understand what it is to enjoy God and his presence.
Experience is excellent, but it must have its tether, it must have its
root.
My experience, to use that phrase, in this whole debate, is
that many people who argue for homosexuality as a gift of God are putting
human reason as the number one hermeneutic, the number one interpretive
device. And it becomes experience, then some reason, then some tradition
and maybe a little bit of Scripture thrown in at the end of the process.
When I was doing a forum at Yale a couple of years ago with Bishop Jack
Spong or John Spong, Episcopal bishop in Newark, New Jersey, I made
argument that he was reversing the Wesleyan quadrilateral. And he said,
no, he wasn't. And the rest of the evening he argued in my experience, in
their experience. Now experience is important, but we have to ask the
question, does it become our interpretive device for what scripture is
acceptable and what is not? And if it does we have reversed the Wesleyan
Quadrilateral.
In the order of creation we have the definition of
the image of God. And the image of God is central and it's important. I
like to define the image this way. All of us are made for what I call the
POSH L's. P, O, S, H, and then the four L's. We are made for peace, order,
stability and hope; we are made to live, to love, to laugh and to learn.
Even for those who commit suicide in the two terrible experiences I've had
in my life in pastoral ministry dealing with suicide tragedies. In both
cases those who killed themselves were looking to gain some peace, some
order, some stability and hope in some frightfully fractured lives. And
you see, this is the nature of the image of God. We're looking for those
qualities.
And so from my perspective as a heterosexual Christian
who believes that heterosexuality, one man, one woman, one lifetime is the
order of creation, my goal is not to say no to someone who has a
homosexual identity as a human being. My goal is to affirm their humanity.
And for those who are familiar with my work, I don't want one inch more
freedom politically or in public conversation than I first give to those
who disagree with me, whether they are identified as homosexual or
otherwise. In fact I don't even look at homosexuals as homosexuals. I look
at them like I look at everyone, sinners in need of the grace of God, as
human beings, as image bearers of God, that we are pursuing those
qualities of peace, order, stability and hope, to live, to love, to laugh
and to learn. But there's one very crucial criterion. And that is do we
accept the fulfillment of God's image and the pursuit of it on God's
terms, or do we rewrite the terms. So for example, Jesus says come unto me
all you who are weary and heavy laden and I will give you rest [Matthew
11:28]. But Jesus also says come to me on my terms [verse 29]. And so
often I think many of us will accept 80 or 90 or 98 per cent of what the
Bible says, and jettison a couple places in our lives where we don't want
to submit to God. And that's not just an issue for homosexuals. It's an
issue for a lot of Evangelicals and Orthodox Christians as well. So we
have to ask ourselves, are we faithful to honoring Jesus on his own terms,
the Bible on its own terms. And regardless of our view of the inspiration
of Scripture, if we don't accept the Bible and its self-understanding, why
call ourselves Christian? Why call ourselves Jewish at that point? Why not
just go become a pagan, you know, or secular or something like that? And
so I think it's crucial that we understand Scripture on its own
terms.
Now, there are six ethical components that I like to talk
about in terms of what it means to be a Christian. And this is so
important before I begin to look a little bit about the nature of
homosexuality. And the reason it's important is because these are the
ethics by which I conduct myself in the face of controversial debates such
as this.
Number one is the power to give. God's nature is to give,
to bless and to benefit you and I, man and woman, made in his image.
Therefore, we as believers are to do everything we can to give no strings
attached to other people, homosexuals, it doesn't matter who they are. We
give no strings attached. Now, in giving no strings attached that doesn't
mean that we accept. God sent his Son to die for us when we were yet his
enemies. He didn't accept our sin and rebellion, and didn't accept us as
enemies. He loved us as enemies and gave to us. The question is, do we
respond to him on his terms or not. But since God is the judge and since
we're not the judge we are to give, no strings attached whatever we can.
The second ethic is the power to live in the light, which means
that we are called to live openly, honestly, above reproach, no ulterior
agendas, no machinations, no political deception whatever. Put our cards
-- that's a bad metaphor -- but put our agenda on the table honestly in
the sight of other people to understand. We live in the light, we do not
live in the dark.
The third component is the ethics of choice. And
this is very important when we come to dealing with the issue of
homosexuality. And that is that God gave us the freedom to choose whether
or not to accept the order of creation. And I'm still stuck in the order
of creation. He gave us the freedom whether or not to accept his rules for
what male and female was all about and what it is to fill and subdue the
earth, a uniquely male and female complementarity. And so if we understand
that we are given freedom as the first words in human history, we also
need to understand the ethics of choice, or boundaries. If we choose to
eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, we have chosen to say
no to the Lord. We have chosen at that point disobedience and are we
willing to embrace the consequences.
Fourthly is the love of hard
questions. This is a good question. We need to look at the toughest
questions and be willing to be accountable to them.
Number five is
the love of enemies. And so often in the political debate today we have
those who are called enemies. We as Christians have no enemies who are
human beings if we're truly biblical. The only enemy we have is the devil
and his demons. [end of tape 1 side 1] ... disagrees with us, no matter
what rebellion they might be in, child sacrifice, bestiality, Adolf
Hitler, whatever, we are to love our enemies. God is the judge. Love
covers a multitude of sins if we would but believe in doing it. But that
doesn't mean we accept someone who's doing those acts.
Number six
is the power to forgive, which means what we are aiming for in all our
relationships, is to export the same forgiveness that we have received in
Christ to others.
Now on that basis let me look very briefly at the
issue of homosexuality and I think the most important question that we
have to look at tonight. And that is, in order to say that homosexuality
is a gift of God, I believe it is incumbent on Father Hansen or anyone
else, to demonstrate that homosexuality is present in the order of
creation, implicitly or explicitly. Because the whole rest of the
Scripture is based on the assumptions of the order of creation. When you
get into the laws in Leviticus, you're dealing with a theocratic community
that's based on choice. Joshua said, if it seems more reasonable to you to
serve other gods, the Amorites or Egyptian gods, go for it. In other
words, don't become a part of God's community unless you agree his laws
are good. And so the laws were moral and cultural. He was setting apart a
cultural people that would not buy into certain cultural baggage of pagan
cultures for whom astrology and child sacrifice along with sexual orgy and
worship was the height of their identity. And so, all the way through, God
is saying at this point, I am not going to force you to accept my laws,
but if you want to come into my presence, you will come into my presence
accepting my laws. And the laws very simply from the beginning is that God
made us male and female.
Now we have about four or five or six
passages in the Bible that deal with homosexuality. Leviticus 18:22 says
that a man shall not sleep with one of the same as he does with a woman.
In the Septuagint it says that an "arseno" shall not "koitai" with one of
the same. "Arseno" is a third-level word for male in the Greek. The Greek
[Septuagint] is the translation, the Greek translation of the Old
Testament. And "koitai" is a second- or third-level word for sexuality.
And in 1 Corinthians 6:9 Paul says that an "arsenokoitai" shall not
inherit God's kingdom. And many people have debated what this word means.
Paul took it straight from the Greek translation of Leviticus 18:22 and
20:13. Leviticus 18 deals all with sexual immorality. And in the midst of
that, God is saying, basically, he's putting social structures and driving
us back toward the order of creation, one man, one woman, one lifetime.
Now, Jesus said Moses gave you divorce because of the hardness of your
heart. Certain things happen, polygamy among some of the wealthy
Israelites. But it's not part of the order of creation. Nor is it the goal
that Paul celebrates at the onclusion of redemption of one man, one woman,
one lifetime.
Well, many other issues surrounding homosexuality
itself. But I think the real crucial gift is this. Crucial gift, the
crucial question is this. Maybe I'll make the question into a gift. And
that is, if homosexuality is a gift of God, we have to define, who is God?
How do we know who God is? If we claim to be Jewish or Christian and root
ourselves in the Hebrew scriptures and the New Testament scriptures, then
we have to find in the order of creation homosexuality as a gift of God.
If it is not there, then why do we hold any pretense to calling ourselves
Christian and saying at the same time it's a gift of God? It may be a gift
of god, but not the God of the Bible. Thank you. [applause]
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