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Closing Statement by Father Hansen

CARL HANSEN: To take Scripture on its own terms is exactly what I try to do and the whole tradition tries to do out of which I come as a Christian. What John is doing, and it is reflective of a different tradition, is not to take Scripture on its own terms, but rather to take Scripture on twentieth-century, historical, scientific ways of thinking that have grown out of the movement of renewal in the church that is part of the evangelical tradition and the literalist tradition and all of that that says that if you don't accept it as being absolutely historically true in every detail, then you can't accept any of it. That is not the breadth of Christian faith, and to suggest that it is is really to lead people astray. It's OK to believe that, but to say that you're not a Christian if you don't believe that is my argument. It's not a matter of experience. I've quoted the Bible several times. I've quoted Jesus many times. It's on the basis of the revelation of Scripture, of Jesus, that I am raising the issues that I've been raising. Scripture itself has internal conflicts. It has different theologies. It has different kinds of questions that are raised. It is our God-given responsibility to use our minds. Yes, you can call it experience, but it's really the gift of intelligence, isn't it. To try to do our best to see woven through what's in the Bible, the golden thread of truth and revelation that is there, which comes to its fullness in the person of Jesus Christ, who confronts his own religious community about the problem that they have of using Scripture in an inerrant way. He confronts that in them. He says you believe this, but I tell you this. Jesus was not accepted by the scribes and the Pharisees who knew the Scripture well. Because he asked questions. He probed them to think deeper. He challenged them to not believe that they were the only ones loved by God. He even challenged them to believe that sinners could be loved by God. And were as acceptable to God as they were. Yes, they needed to repent too. But he was talking to the ones who thought they didn't need to repent, because they believed in the inerrancy of Scripture. It's a moot point. If we had this at All Saints probably you wouldn't get a large turnout, and you don't see very many people here tonight from All Saints, because in our spirituality, and again this is not me, it's not just All Saints, but in that kind of spirituality, these are serious questions but they're not essential to our faith to know exactly what the historical circumstances are. To run around in circles and try to figure out ways to reconcile all of that and to account for it as historically accurate is just a waste of our time. We ought to be looking at how can we be more faithful and how can we serve the Lord best and how can we grow in our faith and our relationship with him. That involves Scripture as our beginning, but it also involves learning from the wider community of Christians, not just our own tradition. And it also involves the use of our intelligence. So John's been bringing up homosexuality, whipping me with it just to remind you that here's the guy that also believes you can be a homosexual and be a Christian. I want to ask you, John, and I want to give you time to answer it. You know, I raised it last time and you never answered it. We underscore Leviticus 18:22. Well, if you think Leviticus is inerrant, why don't you live by the first seventeen chapters of Leviticus? You don't. JOHN: Will you allow me? Because you're giving the conclusion. CARL: I'll let you have the last word. JOHN: OK. Very simply, I haven't used it as a whipping boy, the issue. Rather, you said earlier that the Bible has many moral errors in how its treats things. And I was saying that whether we view the Bible on its own terms, or by our own post-biblical interpretation affects moral issues. I brought up that issue because we had discussed it. I didn't want to bring up an extraneous issue and bring up something we hadn't discussed. So I raised it as respect to you, that we had talked about that issue. And it's very simple. And my book goes into detail on this. And that is, that what you have is, God is setting aside a holy people to prepare the Messiah. And he had to separate them from the cultures that believed in the triad of sorcery, sacred prostitution and child sacrifice. And to do so and to set them apart culturally he had to give them both cultural laws that were historically time-bound in order to protect eternal laws in that cultural situation. And so the reason they said no to various practices that we don't believe in now, such as different threads mixing together or not eating shrimp and things like that, is because he was separating them from the local pagan cultures for the eternal purposes. And it's very clear, in my estimation, again my book goes into depth on this, in distinguishing between the two. And Psalm 106 is an example. It says because you followed the pagan customs, you sacrificed your sons to demons. And so the reason we don't follow the customs is because we're in different cultures right now. Those customs were in service to the same eternal law. The same eternal law says no to homosexuality for the same reason I argued, that if homosexuality is a gift of God, it must be present in the order of creation for God to redeem us to it. It's not present in the order of creation, marriage is. Well you gave me the last word... CARL: Like a lot of experience. JOHN: A lot of experience based on Scripture's interpretation of my experience, not my experience's interpretation of Scripture. And I think we have polar opposite angles at that point. BILL: Well I have to admit that approaching this particular forum I had misgivings. I had some apprehensions. Like Carl suggested I wasn't sure what good it was going to accomplish. I expected a theological ping pong to be played, and that's kind of what's happened here. But I do appreciate the fact that Carl, you came. It shows guts if nothing else. And I didn't anticipate the audience being as it has been. Most of the questions were directed to you and to your position. I appreciate you being willing to be here to field those questions. The issues of course are very important issues. And it comes right down to what think ye of Christ, whose son is he. And as we were going through the earlier part of the forum I was thinking about the words of the Jewish Rabbi Gamaliel. He said, be careful lest you find yourselves in the position of arguing against God. And so, depending on the position we take, whether we agree with Carl and disagree with John, or agree with John and disagree with Carl, the issue really comes down to that. Are we going to be finding ourselves in the position of arguing against God, one way or another? This is an eternal issue. So no matter what side each of you are on, I would encourage you to study to show yourself approved, to find out exactly why you believe what you believe. Get to the facts, get to the truth and let the truth itself speak. Thank you for coming and I've appreciated you as an audience. Let's give these speakers a well-deserved round of applause. [applause] Back to Contents