On "Our Mutual Joy"

Because it came out in early December, I really haven't had time to read religion writer Lisa Miller's now famous article in Newsweek about homosexual marriage, "Our Mutual Joy," until today. For the most part, Christian scholars and journalists tend to be very respectful of the work done by those outside of Christianity, even when they tend to violently disagree with one another. I understand why they are so. It promotes an atmosphere wherein discussion can continue because emotional and intellectual walls have not been erected by differences that would prevent further communication in the hopes that one might be able to swing unbelievers to Jesus. While I commend that, I am not a scholar nor a journalist.

Plainly said, this article has to be the foremost example of Scripture twisting that I have read on the subject of homosexuality since the Rev. Walter Wink's article on "Homosexuality and the Bible". Not only that, but Ms. Miller is pretty adept at rewriting history as well. This article is ultimately about inclusion. The author has used just about every possible postmodern approach to not only argue for the acceptance of homosexuality and same sex marriage, but to accept just about every existing religiously held belief as well.

She wields a fair amount of skill to argue the way she does, I'll give her that. However, there are only certain people who are going to be swayed by her arguments. 1) Those people who already believe the way that she does and exist as a cheering section 2) Those people who don't know their Bible and history well and believe her flawed arguments make a kind of sense and 3) People who are sympathetic to others beyond a sense of practical reason. This is not a comprehensive list, and these four groups for the most part overlap one another.

Ms. Miller expends a good deal of effort to discredit the thinking of people who present a case against homosexuality and gay marriage from the Scriptures. That means the Scriptures are naturally what take the biggest beating in Ms. Miller's painfully misguided sense of hermeneutics. She writes, "A mature view of scriptural authority requires us, as we have in the past, to move beyond literalism. The Bible was written for a world so unlike our own, it's impossible to apply its rules, at face value, to ours." Two prominent concepts about Scripture in her article are these: 1) The Bible does not say at all what conservative Biblical scholars say that it does [meaning she believes homosexuality is not a sin] and 2) Any objection to gay marriage is not to be found in Scripture but exists rather in tradition and culture alone. She accomplishes that in several instances by quoting what "progressive" scholars think has heretofore been missed in Scripture and goes on to rearrange the meanings of different passages into something entirely different than what they truly are. Of course contextually, as in Walter Wink's article, there is absolutely no genuine foundation for what is being changed. All of this leads to the main drive of her article, positing that what the Bible teaches about love actually supports the gay lifestyle and gay marriage, not denouncing it in any way.

What about this passage? "Matthew 19:4 And he answered and said unto them, Have ye not read, that he which made them at the beginning made them male and female, 5 And said, For this cause shall a man leave father and mother, and shall cleave to his wife: and they twain shall be one flesh 6 Wherefore they are no more twain, but one flesh. What therefore God hath joined together, let not man put asunder." Viewed in light of where other passages deal with homosexuality, one has to jump through the kind of hoops "progressive" scholars do to get the Scriptures to where they want them to be.

I think that, for me perhaps the most disturbing way she goes about achieving this goal is the way that she represents not just Paul, but the Lord Jesus Himself. "The New Testament model of marriage is hardly better. Jesus himself was single and preached an indifference to earthly attachments—especially family." Indifference? Hardly, but this is what comes of "red-letter" hermeneutics. Scripture must be viewed in light of the whole. Isolating one passage or passages from others presents a jaded view of the truth. As a God, Jesus went willingly to the cross for His family. As a man, He valued and honored family enough to make arrangements for the care of His earthly mother to be taken care of---from the cross, just as the Spirit of Jesus inspired Paul and Peter to pen words of compassion and care in love for parents and their children.

What Ms. Miller carefully tries to wend her way around is the existence of sin and the consequence for it. She misses entirely what the consequence for sin says about not only God's justness, but about precisely what the Bible teaches us about God's love, and about His grace. Because God is infinite truth, His word shows mankind with all of his warts and blemishes. Ms. Miller points out that Abraham slept with Hagar, Jacob had two wives and slept with servants. David, Solomon and the kings of Judah and Israel were all polygamists she writes. What Ms. Miller seems to do with that is to take the kindergarten approach toward their sin and say, "These men were heroes of the Bible, and look at what they did?"

Abraham was his family's spiritual leader. He compromised and sinned when he slept with Hagar. Jacob sinned by taking two wives. David and his family paid a huge price for his sin of polygamy. Solomon did too, and so did his subjects. Because he took wives for political considerations, he compromised and sinned allowing the corruption of idolatry to flow into Israel like a river. Let's go back to kindergarten for a moment. Two wrongs don't make a right.

Ms. Miller even dregs up the tired old nonsense about the relationship between David and Jonathon being possibly (in the eyes of many worldly people) a homosexual one. After Jonathan's death David wrote: "2 Samuel 1:26 I am distressed for thee, my brother Jonathan: very pleasant hast thou been unto me: thy love to me was wonderful, passing the love of women."


She defers what happened between those two great men of the Bible privately to be left to; "history and our own imaginations". Why would we need to do that when the Bible represents them well enough already. Why should a deep sense of closeness between men indicate necessarily something other than a platonic relationship? I have a male friends whose passing would cause me deep grief, even though I am confident that they will be with the Lord when they pass from this world. This kind of stereotypical thinking about male relationships is just beyond me.

There is so much wrong with Ms. Miller's thinking contained in her article that I could write a much larger article than a simple blog post like this to address it, but I will address just one final set of statements that she made. She wrote; "The Bible endorses slavery, a practice that Americans now universally consider shameful and barbaric. It recommends the death penalty for adulterers (and in Leviticus, for men who have sex with men, for that matter). It provides conceptual shelter for anti-Semites." Not one of those three statements is accurate. They are not even intellectually honest for one who thinks the Bible is a living document.

The recent trend toward equating the denial of the "right" to gay marriage to the right to freedom denied to slaves here in America is just nonsense. The Bible does not endorse slavery. I can't tell you how many people I have heard say that in the last few years. It simply is not true. The kind of "slavery" that went on in the Old Testament was contractual. People had free will then as now. They entered into agreement, much like Jacob did with his deceptive father-in-law Laban. In the case of such bond-servitude, an agreed upon end came to one's indentured-ness, and there were high penalties to pay if one mistreated one's "slave". Where this practice was concerned, God patiently brought people out of the practice, and that can be seen revealed through the course of Scripture. Jesus accomplished this by turning his followers into brothers and sisters. Paul's letter to Philemon is a good demonstration of this.

The third statement in the set is just tragic. It applies misunderstanding to logic. Jesus loved His people. He loves all people so much that He died to make a way for them to be able to have eternal life with Him, if they should so desire it. Anti-Semitism is something the world practices generally, not the people of the Most High God.

Finally, the second of those three statements. Yes, God's holy word demands the death penalty for adulterers, and for those who practice homosexuality. It would perhaps shock some people to know that God's position has not changed one bit since Leviticus was penned. His justice still demands that adulterers and practicing homosexuals be punished with death. He also demands the same of those who blaspheme, who lie, who steal, who covet, who fornicate, who carouse, who cause strife and who do many other evil things. That's what Ms. Miller doesn't understand. She doesn't understand why Jesus came to earth. He didn't just come to bring some sort of soft and peaceful understanding of social justice to earth because He cared about poor people. He didn't come to earth to heighten our sympathy toward those who say that despite what the Bible says that they are good and kind people.

When He was on earth, He demonstrated that no one is without sin, save Him. He made it clear also that no one may get to heaven and to the Father except through Him. Not one of us is worthy of Him, and that means we are not worthy of heaven either. The good news is that because of His willingness to take our place on the cross, and the punishment which is due for our sins, and because He paid that price with His death, that we can go to heaven after all. The thing is, we must repent of our sins, and we can't ask Him to forgive those sins if we won't admit to ourselves and to Him, that we are sinners in the first place.