| Social and Prophetic Reflections | ||
|---|---|---|
Peter BarnesLiberal Theology and the Ordination of HomosexualsHOMOSEXUALITY has been in the news lately — not just in Oxford Street, but also in what professes to be the Christian Church.In Canada the Anglican Church seems determined to become as bankrupt morally as it is financially. In England, the homosexual Dr Jeffrey John has just been persuaded to withdraw from his appointment as Bishop-elect of Reading. Meanwhile, the Uniting Church in Australia has allowed what it has winked at for some years — the ordination of homosexual ministers. The Anglican Primate of Australia, Archbishop Peter Carnley has claimed that ‘the debate itself is testimony to the complexities of the interpretative task.’ He calls for honesty and humility in dealing with what he says are ‘hotly disputed texts’. Finally, we are told, that ‘A civilised and reasoned discussion can be welcomed as a sign of vigorous life’. So the first issue that we need to deal with is the Bible’s view of homosexuality. Actually, the biblical texts are not as difficult as Archbishop Carnley likes to make out. In the Old Testament, Sodom is described as a city whose inhabitants were ‘exceedingly wicked and sinful against the Lord’ (Gen 13:13). It is from Sodom that we derive the name of the sin ‘sodomy’. Although there were other sins involved (see Ezekiel 16:49), it is clear that the widespread practice of sodomy was the main reason for Sodom’s destruction (see Genesis 18-19). ‘Sodom’ became a by-word for God’s terrible wrath on hardened sinners (see Deut 29:23; 32:32; Isaiah 1:10; Amos 4:11; Zeph 2:9; Luke 10:10-12; 17:29; 2 Peter 2:6; Jude 7; Rev 11:8). To retain the biblical perspective, however, it needs to be pointed out that the sin of rejecting Christ’s representatives is worse even than the sin of Sodom (Luke 10:12). Old Testament law is quite specific: ‘you shall not lie with a male as with a woman. It is an abomination’ (Lev 18: 22). The civil penalty was the most severe possible: ‘if a man lies with a male as he lies with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination. They shall surely be put to death. Their blood shall be upon them’ (Lev 20:13). ‘Abomination’ is a strong word that is found five times in Leviticus 18 (vv. 22, 26,27,29,30). As Gordon Wenham explains, ‘An abomination is literally something detestable and hated by God.’ The New Testament moral teaching is no different. In Romans, the apostle Paul speaks of God’s revelation of Himself to the Gentiles through the creation (Rom 1:20). When this clear revelation is rejected, the result is that people worship idols rather than the Creator (Rom 1:20-23). The road is all downhill from there, and three times it is said that ‘God gave them up’ Rom 1:24,26,28.When people are ‘given up’, one likely result is homosexuality. ‘For this reason God gave them up to vile passions. For even their women exchanged the natural use for what is against nature. Likewise also the men, leaving the natural use of the woman, burned in their lust for one another, men with men committing what is shameful, and receiving in themselves the penalty of their error which was due’. —Romans 1:26-27 Homosexual unions are invariably promiscuous, and tend to be plagued by health troubles such as chronic incontinence, urgency of defecation, and, of course, AIDS. The ‘due penalty’ can be severe indeed. Unrepentant homosexuals are included amongst those whose lifestyle reveals that they will not inherit the kingdom of God (1 Cor 6:9-10). To believe otherwise is to deceive oneself. Homosexuals are also listed amongst those who are lawless and insubordinate (1 Tim 1:8-10). Heterosexual desire is corrupted by the fall; homosexual desire is corrupt in itself. One wonders how God could have made Himself any clearer. The law of God excludes homosexuals from God’s kingdom. Yet the Bible also speaks of the wondrous grace of God. In the cosmopolitan, sex-obsessed city of ancient Corinth, there were homosexuals who came to faith in Christ. Paul writes warmly of these converts: ‘and such were some of you. But you were washed, but you were sanctified, but you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus and by the Spirit of our God’ (1 Cor 6:11). Grace is offered to all who confess sin as sin, and come to Christ in faith. The second issue that we must deal with concerns how such a situation has come about that professing churches will not submit to the plain meaning of Scripture. Let us confine ourselves to the Uniting Church of Australia (UCA). This was formed in 1977 as a result of the union of most of the Methodist, Presbyterian and Congregational Churches. The Basis of Union was presented to the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church of Australia in May 1973. This states that ‘The Uniting Church acknowledges that the Church has received the books of the Old and New Testaments as unique prophetic and apostolic testimony, in which she hears the Word of God and by which her faith and obedience are nourished and regulated’. It also praises the scientific enquiry into the Scriptures that has characterised recent centuries, and speaks of learning from contemporary thought. If one reads this carefully, one could accept it even if one only believed, for example, that a man called Jesus once lived on earth. Liberal theology — which refuses to accept the full authority of Scripture — provides enough loopholes for anybody and everybody to justify what they are doing. Given the liberal Basis of Union, the acceptance of homosexual clergy was only a matter of time. This leaves us with the third issue, which concerns where the Churches go from here. Dorothy McRae-McMahon is excited: ‘I believe that this may well be the century when the Holy Spirit calls the churches to a new truth and a vision of a much grander God.’ That surely belongs in the cuckoo clock. God does not call on us to pursue any socalled ‘new truth’ but to ask for ‘the ancient paths’ (Jer 6:16) and to ‘preach the Word’ (2 Tim 4:2). Gordon Moyes is one of the leaders of the evangelical wing of the Uniting Church, known as EMU. He has argued against Dorothy McRae-McMahon, yet he writes: ‘I love our denomination … I am committed to remain within the Uniting Church and change it.’ In my view, that is naïve, and EMU ought to rename itself OSTRICH. A better response would entail the setting up of a truly Wesleyan and Methodist Church. May God bring it about quickly! Liberal theology has led to our present state of moral paralysis and deadness. The time has well and truly come for a call to arms. Gordon MoyesWhy the Evangelicals will winIN THE Uniting Church of Australia there is spiritual warfare (Ephesians chapter six). The battle is with spiritual and dark forces in high places. It is a battle primarily for the Bible’s place in the life of a believer and its authority within the church. Although the issue has been fought over whether clergy living in homosexual relationships outside of marriage could be ordained as clergy within the Uniting Church, the bigger issue is what role has the Bible in the Uniting Church today and what is its authority.It is a battle the Evangelicals with their high view of scripture must win - but it is a battle that they will win. You might well ask why will they win? Here are ten reasons why the Evangelicals will win: 1. Evangelicals are better equipped for spiritual warfare.They may be naïve politically and have been out manoeuvred by the tactical nous of the church’s multitudinous regulations that are constantly used against them. The battle essentially is a spiritual one and that is where the evangelicals are better equipped because they possess the whole armour of God. They know how to use the sword, which is the Word of God both in attack and defence. Although reluctant to get into the nitty gritty of spiritual warfare, the evangelicals have realised that they are equipped for such spiritual warfare.2. The Evangelical giant has been aroused.The decision made by the 2003 Assembly of the Uniting Church in Melbourne to approve the ordination of practising homosexuals has shocked the grass roots membership of the church. Thousands of ordinary members have now joined at crowded protest rallies held all across Australia. Evangelicals had to lose the vote at the Assembly in order to awake the slumbering giant within the pews of the churches. It is the same in the United States where the evangelical and conservative membership has turned the tide, which for twentyfive years has been successful in winning every liberal change brought about in the main line churches.3. Old-fashioned liberalism in Australia is already a spent force.There is a lack of leadership within the Uniting Church in Australia. We are all mates together and every now and then we get someone whom we elect as first mate. The Uniting Church is like a cruise ship that keeps going round and round in circles. The small gay lobby ingratiated themselves into the church’s bureaucracy. Even the President admitted that he was “greatly surprised” with the reaction of the grass roots membership. People who worked in the paid bureaucracy of the church are often greatly surprised by the grass roots majority. It is the sign of just how out of touch they are in spite of holding high office.4. Para church ministries.Para church ministries have taken the interest, the time and the money of evangelicals but now they are helping their evangelical colleagues by encouraging those within the Uniting church to stay there and fight for their rights as Christians whose time, interest and prayer has made the Uniting Church what it is today.5. Evangelicals are younger, richer and more energetic.If you look at the old time liberal clergy in the Uniting Church you will discover that most of them were trained in the 1950’s and 60’s. None of them can stand up and point to any significant growth in any congregation, which they have led as old time liberals. The average age within the Uniting Church is over 66 years and the clergy suit an aging and dying membership. But among the evangelicals, and charismatic Christians within the Uniting Church it is the young adults who are making the pace. All of the growing churches in Australia are evangelical. The largest congregations are evangelical. While the average age of all the people that attend Uniting Churches is 66, the average age of the thousands of people who attend services at Wesley Mission Sydney is 31 years. The evangelicals across Australia are younger with more disposable income and are willing to put their money where their mouths are. They do not want their church hijacked by minority lobby groups.6. There is a new ecumenical coalition coming into being.There is a commonality of doctrine and viewpoint on many of the great issues facing facing the church today found among Roman Catholics, Anglicans, Orthodox, Protestant and Pentecostal Christians. They have great concerns for the issues of quality of life, of faithfulness in marriage and celibacy in singleness in being opposed to liberal, abortionist, and euthanasia advocates. Those Christians across all the denominations are networking and they stand united and strong against the advance of homosexual clergy.7. The Bible is never outdated.There are people who always want to talk about their interpretation of the Bible and who are willing to treat the Bible as a book of interesting characters and information with as much authority and inspiration as a telephone director y. But evangelicals know something that has been forgotten: “you have been born again, not of perishable seed, but of imperishable, through the living and enduring Word of God.” For, “all men are like grass and all their glory is like the flowers of the field; the grass withers and the flowers fall but the Word of the Lord stands forever. And this was the word that was preached to you” (1 Peter 1:23-25). Dean Paul Zahl of the Cathedral Church of the Advent in Birmingham, Alabama, USA, recognizes that the recent election of the Episcopal Church’s first openly homosexual bishop has profound theological implications. He says the action “demolishes the Good News of salvation…. It demolishes salvation because it asserts that what Scripture calls sin is not sin. When there is no sin, there is no judgement. Without judgement, there can be no repentance. Without repentance, there is no forgiveness. The decision fashions a god who is oblivious to sin. It thus denies the redemption of the world to a whole category of persons.”8. You cannot fool all of the people all of the time.The history of fifteen years of dialogue and discussion over the homosexual issues within the church reveals a litany of church cover-ups, lies and secret meetings. But the grass root membership of the Uniting Church has woken up. They are aware of immorality in high places, of lesbian sex, heterosexual adulter y, homosexual partnering among church leaders and they have had enough of it. They are no longer fooled by church bureaucratic cover-up and secret meetings. To our shame, clergy, living immorally, have even been recommended to more significant positions.Evangelicals have now drawn the line in the sand. 9. The fear tactic is losing its power.For many years ministers have been fearful about future placements, about their housing and superannuation but there is now a new sense of freedom. Ministers are standing up in public protest meetings saying “For years I have been fearful of my job because I know that if I speak out on these issues the church bureaucracy will fail to appoint me to any new church. I was fearful of my career; but not anymore. I realise I cannot be silent but I must speak out for the faith once and for all delivered to the saints.”In the same way churches were fearful of standing up against the trends of bureaucrats, however they are no longer frightened of the threatening talk that they would lose their property and that the church bureaucracy holds the titles. Many congregations have walked away from their properties and those who haven’t are determined to stay in and fight for their rights as people who have both paid for and prayed for their church facilities. Evangelicals are no longer afraid of taking legal action to preserve their rights. Legal opinion at the highest level is being engaged. Class action suits are possible. 10. Evangelicals are learning to play the liberal game.For a long time the liberals counted on the evangelicals remaining silent or leaving the Church in disgust. Evangelicals are not known for their political cunning nor for their willingness to engage in long debate and bitter dispute. Now they are no longer leaving and remaining silent. They are prepared to speak up and fight for the truth. But they do so clad in the whole armour of God, “each piece put on with prayer”.That prayer power cannot be underestimated. COMING TO A CHURCH NEAR YOU!The battle will be fought in all of the mainline denominations. In the United States and in the United Kingdom the great mainline churches, which have been losing membership and significance in society for decades, have found revival and renewal through the younger more committed evangelicals. The same will happen in Australia. That is why the evangelicals will win.Scott StephensDeparting from the FaithEditorial Disclaimer: In publishing the following we would make it absolutely clear that we do so NOT because we agree with it in any way, but simply to give you some idea of how far a one time godly movement has departed from the “faith once delivered to the saints” (Jude verse 3) – PPGay row obscures point of Jesus’ lifeMY FIRST response to the controversy surrounding Rollan McCleary’s research into Jesus’s (sic) sexuality was: “Haven’t we witnessed this precise scenario before?” In August 1989, rightwing US Senators Alphonse D’Amato and Jesse Helms charged the National Endowment of the Arts with using American’s (sic) tax dollars to support art that was blasphemous”, “obscene” and “pornographic”. They insisted that the US government must ensure that such “tax dollar-funded perversity” not be allowed to continue.The piece at the centre of the commotion was, of course, Andres Serrano’s Piss Christ, a Cibachrome photograph of a plastic crucifix immersed in the artist’s blood and urine. In October 1997, this photograph would, go on to achieve a certain infamy in Australia when George Pells, (sic) then Catholic archbishop of Melbourne, applied for an injunction to prevent the National Gallery of Victoria from exhibiting it, on the grounds that doing so would constitute an act of blasphemous libel. Justice Harper’s ruling was preempted when two youths attacked Piss Christ while on display at the gallery forcing its director, Timothy Potts, to close the exhibition. The media coverage of McCleary’s research seemed to follow the same script. Both The Courier-Mail and the ABC’s 7.30 Report focused on the scandal of using tax dollars - the figure cited was $51,000 - to fund a doctoral thesis which suggests, at least in passing, that Jesus was gay, along with some of his disciples. The 7.30 Report’s coverage was then garnished with hackneyed commentary by Fred Niles (sic) and a conservative bishop from the Anglican Diocese of Sydney. Several primary issues arise from this controversy. First, it was insinuated that McCleary was given exceptional funding for his thesis. In reality, he received an Australian Postgraduate Award (a meagre, but very common government stipend of around $18,000 a year) like many other postgraduate students at Australian universities. Of greater concern, however, was the suggestion that any government funded research should be submitted to the public for the final verdict on the merits of the research. This would effectively cripple research in this country, particularly in the humanities. The inevitable public outrage over any non-conventional suggestion about Jesus, or any other matter of faith, raises a greater issue: to what extent should the church take steps preemptively to oppose research into matters of faith by individuals who are considered unorthodox? From one perspective, McCleary’s proposal must be regarded as pretty tame, relying on his putative “discovery” of Jesus’s (sic) astrological birth chart, and thus of the dates of Jesus’s (sic) birth and death, and of his sexuality. McCleary says that while it is doubtful that Jesus engaged in samesex sexual activity, his orientation and spirituality must be regarded as distinctly gay. My fundamental question here is very simple: where is the true scandal? Jesus’s (sic) sexuality has been the topic of far more controversial publications, from Barbara Thiering’s Jesus the Man (1992) to Stephen Moore’s God’s Beauty Parlor (2001). The true scandal is not McCleary’s rather weak proposal regarding Jesus’s (sic) sexuality/spirituality, but rather that he effectively conceals the significance of Jesus behind an esoteric obscurantism that fails to recognise the cold reality of Jesus’s (sic) political vision. Jesus sought to dissolve the fundamental social and political ties that determined so much ancient Mediterranean life, and establish a new, robust society that is characterised neither by ethnocentrism and racial violence, nor by the oppression of genders and social stratification. The fact that Jesus consequently died the death reserved for political insurrectionists contains its own judgment upon every political organisation that sustains itself by violence. To this extent, I would suggest that Serrano’s Piss Christ captures something of the essence of Christianity, by its uncanny fusion of the real of the human waste and the appearance of a golden aura. Jesus’s (sic) significance lay in the very appearance of failure. McCleary’s reduction of his life to the determination of inert celestial bodies is the most scandalous element of his thesis. Lastly, I do not support the censorship of unorthodox research into matters of faith in any way. My reason simply is that, even in the post-Christian West, Christianity remains part of our social space, endlessly cited in literature, television and film. This is precisely the legacy of robust Christianity: to find its true place in the middle of contemporary culture, working, debating and liberating - not to remain protected in advance by ecclesiastical privilege. It is vital to preserve precisely this legacy, because, to paraphrase the European philosopher Slavoj Zizek, the authentic Christian legacy is much too precious to be left to New Age obscurantists and fundamentalist freaks. Scott Stephens is a theologian at Garden City College of Ministries, Mt Gravatt. [ TOP ] ... [ BACK ] Appeared in Issue CETF NR MONTH YEAR |
Details HERE...  Order HERE.. |
|
-Last revised-