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So why do I care about this stuff in the first place? Mostly it’s because so many of us have friends whose example of a loving, committed homosexual partnership is a huge challenge (and sometimes, quite frankly, an embarrassing wakeup call) to people who hold negative views about their living and loving arrangements. For me, that evidence has demanded a verdict. We need to know where we stand with them.

Before we finish, here are some questions and final thoughts which I didn’t manage to shoehorn into the rest of this series.

William J. Webb says that although we don’t punish homosexuals with death today, we should still see homosexuality as a grave sin because it was one of only two sins which were punishable by death (the other is bestiality). But this seems like a huge irony to me. Surely a righteous punishment then should be a righteous punishment now? Uganda is currently trying to push an antigay bill which, if enforced, will mean that offenders receive the death penalty (for ‘aggravated homosexuality’) or life imprisonment (for ‘the offense of homosexuality’). Of course, Jesus transformed our view of punishment (‘turn the other cheek’ instead of ‘an eye for an eye’), and our culture wouldn’t dream of killing homosexuals. But if Leviticus’ ancient world punishment seems abhorrent to us – culture-bound – might the crime also be culture-bound? Of course, the Israelites believed that God had ordained both crime and punishment. If they were wrong about the punishment, might we be wrong about the ‘crime’?

2. Some Christians (like Webb) hold the view that sexual acts are separate from orientation. But Jesus’ words in Matthew 5:28 (that lust equals adultery) suggest that when we lust after someone, we’ve already acted. Homosexuals are often encouraged to be celibate to guard against homosexual sin. But do Jesus’ words make celibacy pointless for homosexuals? Are they ‘being gay’ just by thinking? If we all fall short of the glory of God in our thinking, what does that say about choice and orientation?

3. Paul’s words in 1 Corinthians 6 about not being ‘one flesh’ with prostitutes suggest that ‘marriage’ is more about sexual union than wedding ceremony. Some Christians are (tentatively) for gay marriage on the basis that it’s better for homosexuals to get married than to burn with lust. Being a Christian, I’m all for the marriage ceremony, but why don’t we insist that all heterosexual couples get married? Are we applying a double standard?

Final thoughts:

In my experience, whenever the conversation ‘Is gay OK?’ comes up, the first issue people have in their minds is infidelity. For a long time, self-confessed anti-gay preachers have been all over the news for ‘shameful’ homosexual acts. They get demonised by Christians, treated with a mixture of sympathy and disdain by every one else. I don’t for once approve of those who have left their families for same-sex relationships, but let’s not forget that leaders also leave families to pursue opposite-sex affairs. It’s just that those stories don’t make the news. For me, their discovery of homosexual feelings is not the issue; after all, bisexual men and women live faithful, monogamous, ‘heterosexual’ married lives all the time. My impression is that these leaders are ‘coming out’ (albeit in spectacularly sinful style, if they were married): expressing sexualities which their theology has forced them to repress. The real shame is that families are broken over this issue. In my opinion, the issue is the repressive message these ministers work so hard to preach – a message which becomes increasingly impossible to live by. They’re taught to read the Bible a certain way – to accept condemnation as Biblical truth – and are led by that interpretation to deceive others. So they deceive themselves, their families, and their churches. Ultimately, I think we have to accept some responsibility for dictating who they should have married.

We need to talk about Westboro. For those who haven’t had the dubious pleasure of witnessing their anti-homosexual, anti-liberal, anti-everything-else antics, here is a link to their church homepage: http://www.godhatesfags.com.

Now, you could say that Westboro Baptist Church preaches an evil, fundamentalist brand of Christianity. If you’ve made it this far through this series, you’re nothing like them. But my view is that regardless of all their other messages of hate, their position on homosexuality is the logical conclusion of ours. They’re applying a legalistic Christianity which rejects the full redemptive spirit of the Bible. Their religion is lifted straight from Leviticus, and my view is that even a moderate version of that religion is not enough. A slightly more moderate version is the ‘ex-gay movement’, but the lack of ‘success’ there is well documented. Evidence suggests that people who emerge ‘cured’ are either repressed homosexuals, or bisexuals who consequently married a woman so that they could claim ‘cure’ and get Christians off their backs. Similarly, lots of cripples are ‘cured’ by the Church, only to find out later that they’ve been carried part of the way by wishful thinking. A lot of us have rejected the faith-result equation: the more faith I have, the more results I can expect.

It’s my view that LGBT people are being persecuted on a level that the early Church simply didn’t see; otherwise the issue might have appeared among the divisions at Corinth, initiating further redemptive movement. I hear about rejection from family, bullying at school and in the workplace, violent homophobic attacks, and more, all the time – by both Christians and non-Christians (contrary to popular opinion, secular culture is very far from fully accepting). It’s extremely difficult to ‘come out’; people have done themselves damage doing so and trying not to. It doesn’t sound to me like anyone’s choosing a way of life. Who would go through this much suffering if they could avoid it? Constant arguing about nature / nurture is beside the point if we engage in it simply to get a pat on the back for our own biblical views. I want the persecution to end. Many Christians have imagined that homosexuals have an anti-Jesus agenda, and they simply don’t. LGBT people want access to the same faith, the same marriage, as us. They often feel rejected by the Church for obvious reasons, and (again for obvious reasons) that can look like hostility – they may reject churches, and Christians. But they never chose their rejection from us.

Webb writes about the obvious dangers of allowing contemporary culture, ‘the spirit of the age’, to govern one’s theology. I hope that I’ve guarded myself against that during this series, by being faithful to scripture, first and foremost, and by allowing it – along with my culture – to govern my convictions. In any case, I don’t see LGBT issues as ‘the spirit of the age’; alternative sexualities have been around forever. If there has been a ‘spirit of the age’ since, perhaps, the civil rights movements of the 60s, it’s one of realisation: the LGBT person is my neighbour, and we cannot allow prejudice to continue in any way, shape or form. I also see the danger of conflating God’s will with our own culture-bound ‘rights’. But I don’t see equality with LGBT Christians as a newly-invented ‘right’ either. I see it as a fundamental responsibility if we’re going to realise the full reality of Jesus’ command to love our neighbour and embrace the disenfranchised, whether under our Church roof or outside it. You might want to question the phrase ‘equal rights’, but equality is both subtly and massively different: it’s a Godly value, and (for me) the “ultimate ethic”.

Last time, I left you with a long quote from Webb. In his book, that long quote is immediately followed by this one:

Paul worked out Jew-Gentile equality in his generation. Much of his ministry was given over to seeing Jew-Gentile equality fleshed out in concrete and tangible terms – terms that embraced sociological implications. Why did Paul place such an emphasis on the Jew-Gentile component of the “in Christ” list? From a pragmatic standpoint, ethnic equality meant success for the gospel. Without it, there would probably be no universal gospel today. If Christianity was to expand beyond the boarders of Palestine, if it was to become a worldwide religion with a message of salvation for all peoples, it needed to embrace equality between Jew and Gentile. What was redemptively true needed to become a practical reality. The ontological or salvation equality needed to transform the functional level. Otherwise, the roots of Judaism would strangle its own offspring.

I’ve quoted all of this because I love it. But what Webb says next is a massive stretch. ‘Conversely,’ he says, ‘for Paul to press for social implications in the slave and the female categories might have been detrimental. It would likely have done more damage than good. Clearly the Jew-Gentile issue was the greatest stumbling block for the gospel in Paul’s day.’ Are we really to believe that Paul wisely decided to hold back the full extent of equality because it was right to do so? Paul was passionate about grace, and the transformation of previous relationship dynamics. Would he have wanted to keep the status quo? I don’t want to accuse him of chickening out, but in any case, what’s true is this: our culture eventually did decide that pressing for social implications in the slave and the female categories was far from “detrimental”. We eventually decided it was essential – and we did so without Paul’s full approval. Jesus himself didn’t challenge every status quo of his day (war / dictatorship / occupation), but he did give us a pattern by which to do it.

To borrow Webb’s words, this anti-homosexual ‘purity law’ is doing infinitely “more damage than good” today. Gay / straight inequality is probably our greatest stumbling block for the gospel. This fact should be leading us towards the “ultimate ethic” of homosexual acceptance on the grounds that ultimate equality will mean “success for the gospel”. We know that homosexual people simply want to love one another (I only have to point to the success of homosexual marriages [or equivalent] compared to heterosexual ones). Many of us, in our own Churches and homes, have decided that Paul was extreme in his near-enforcement of celibacy and disapproval of marriage; to enforce these, we say, wanders away from Creation theology. For me, it follows that homosexual people shouldn’t have to live celibate unless they wish to, and for whatever reason.

The Law, and its theological underpinnings, served a purpose in its day. That was to establish the people of Israel: a specific, chosen nation. Old Testament theology of the land has been written about by experts, and I’m not one. But basically, in Joshua 13-19, land is an inheritance given to Israel by Yahweh, a gift to be passed on from generation to generation. Leviticus kicks off a theme which follows through the Old Testament: Israel must be distinctive in every way from surrounding pagan nations (Canaan, Babylon, Samaria etc.), especially when it comes to cultic practise. Purity laws, circumcision and the Sabbath, were signs to show this distinctiveness. This theme follows through to the New Testament: Christians must still appear different, in terms of belief and practice, to those who worship other Gods. I’ve identified areas where this separation theology was disintegrating with the example of Paul and Jesus (who turned our relationship with Samaritans upside-down).

Although this ‘separation theology’ started to be radically challenged and changed, it still permeates certain New Testament passages, like 2 Corinthians 6:14–18, which begins: ‘Do not be yoked together with unbelievers. For what do righteousness and wickedness have in common?’ But I think two others can be compared, and I’ll explain why. Romans 1:18-32 looks back to humanity’s (Israel’s) past sins: sexual impurity, intermarriage with non-Israelites, pagan nations, and all the rest. The Israelites ‘exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images made to look like a mortal human being and birds and animals and reptiles. Therefore God gave them over in the sinful desires of their hearts to sexual impurity for the degrading of their bodies with one another. They exchanged the truth about God for a lie, and worshiped and served created things rather than the Creator’ (verses 23-24).

Hebrews 11 looks back on Israel’s accomplishments ‘by faith’. But just as Hebrews looks back on an Old Testament forward ‘trajectory’, the Romans passage looks back on the same Old Testament journey. Its list of sins is based on the land theology which, throughout Israel’s journey, gave them the onus to separate themselves from surrounding nations (am I saying that this should soften our views of all the other sins? No, but I wouldn’t appeal to this land separation theology to condemn them either; I can go elsewhere for that). In Romans 1, Paul still includes homosexuality in the ‘every kind of wickedness, evil, greed and depravity’ in verses 29-31. The connection between homosexuality and the national divide (reaching through Canaan, Babylonian Exile, into the hatred of Samaritans) hasn’t been fully eliminated. I would argue that the penny hasn’t dropped.

But Hebrews blows open our concept of a promised land. Our own Exodus is leading us through the ‘now’ into the ‘not yet’. We are separated from our promised land by time, not geographical boundaries. In Christ, there are no longer any physical or geographical boundaries that define who is ‘in’ or ‘out’ of the journey. Our “purity laws” are meant to be spiritual ones, unless (like Jesus said) they do harm to our neighbour. Hebrews calls Jesus ‘better than Moses’ because the Law was inadequate to redeem sins. It is my belief that the “redemptive spirit” of this will embrace, and transform, every scripture which prohibits homosexuality on separation theology grounds. Our Church body is the Temple now, and inequality of any kind is no “ultimate ethic”. There is now no necessary connection between homosexual love and pagan practices. By looking at the reasons for the homosexuality purity law in the Old Testament, and the examples from Jesus (primarily) and Paul, we can find reason to say that full equality in our world today is the Bible’s “ultimate ethic”, based on the new paradigm of grace after the Law, which Paul set in motion but didn’t finish in his day. The blueprint for us to move on, I would argue (and so does Webb), is there in the text.

In his book The Word of God?: the Bible after Modern Scholarship, Keith Ward encourages us to ask these questions of every Biblical text we read:

 “How did these people see God?”

“What did they think God’s purposes were?”, and

“How adequate was that view?”

I’ve answered them the best I can at this point.

My opinions and arguments have ranged from strong to fairly weak (I acknowledge that transgender issues need further thought; gender studies have gone much further than I can). But overall, all of this, for me, puts paid to any rules governing who we are, or aren’t, allowed to love. I also think that which of us should live as male or female, as long as mutuality is celebrated (‘difference’ isn’t a word I like), is likely a pointless argument while we live in the ‘now and not yet’ of this earth. Should these examples be taken on a case by case basis? Of course; I haven’t promoted promiscuity, for example. But tell me an ethical issue where that isn’t true. In any case, homosexuality hardly approves promiscuity any more than heterosexuality does. If you’re in any doubt about that, Jesus said: “You hypocrite, first take the plank out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to remove the speck from your brother’s eye.” I argue we should get rid of these prejudices and discriminations in exactly the same way as disability arguments have argued against the exclusion of disabled people.

Finally, my arguments fulfil Webb’s criteria in that although they follow different Biblical trajectories, involving different ‘key words’ (which we might call ‘Separation’, ‘Grace’, ‘Inclusion’, ‘Equality’), my trajectories follow the same direction of movement set by Scripture, and involve “same-topic texts” (and related texts) along the way. What I have found is that there’s no less biblical justification for the keeping of slaves and the subjugation of women than for prejudice against LGBT Christians. The justification for all three has the same theological roots. Our question should be: which assumptions about Genesis should we take forward into New Creation theology? In this case, being pedantic about how to read an allegorical / symbolic story (except in what Christ affirms) is fruitless in the New Creation. And I think that if he lived today, the apostle Paul might be happy with that kind of reasoning when it comes to communicating the full “redemptive spirit” of the gospel to our world.

So, I am still a Christian who affirms and accepts the LGBT community.

Why?

Because I’m a cripple. Because I was once condemned under Levitical law. And because I’m not condemned anymore. The curtain has been torn. “It is finished.”

In Galatians 3:28, Paul says: “There is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus” (not under The Law). Many of us have added “neither disabled nor able-bodied” to this list of equalities, without asking why, or even whether it was OK. We just did it. Why do we struggle to add “neither gay nor straight”? Especially when “Gay-Straight” is possibly the greatest divorce the Church has suffered since the first century “Jew-Gentile”. Why don’t we see the full implications of “neither male nor female”? Especially when the breaking down of patriarchy, a major concern of Webb’s, is also one of the LGBT community’s biggest concerns? Especially when LGBT Christians (it isn’t an oxymoron: ‘straightening out’ our sexuality or gender has never been a prerequisite of belief) are being rejected, mentally and physically abused, and pushed to suicide by the Church itself?

I’ve heard plenty of objections to adding ‘neither gay nor straight’ to Paul’s list in Galatians 3:28. One of them, from Webb, is that ‘Paul is not talking about “in Christ” equality in terms of sexual orientation. Rather, he says, ‘the “neither male nor female” statement is focused upon the existing and predominant social stigma between these two groups due to inequality in power and status. This understanding… coordinates well with the other two categories selected (slave-free and Jew-Gentile).’

So, the context of Paul’s list is the “power and status” dynamic: In Christ, I can’t flaunt my power and status over you because ‘I was here first’. I can’t flaunt my status over you because I’m free. I can’t flaunt my status over you because I’m a man. But while we keep adding other divisions to the list simply because it makes sense to, I don’t buy the objections. Why: because although we can’t add any kind of pairing to the list, we can add any relationship which falls under the power-status dynamic today: I can’t flaunt my power and status over you because I’m able-bodied. I can’t flaunt my power and status over you because I’m straight (which is a bit like “because I was here first” but with the added qualification “when Christians were straight”). What is this status? The status of being a beneficiary to the “ultimate ethic” of equality found in Christ. We’re all one, and no one is exempt unless they’ve rejected Christ. The fact that biblical religious culture didn’t fully realise this equality in its day doesn’t mean that there is not sufficient biblical reason to do so today. Otherwise we could still justify slavery, as we did only decades ago. The spirit of Paul’s message is bigger than the power-status dynamic. It extends to all harmful and oppressive dualities themselves.

We can add the ‘lower-status’ cripple and homosexual to Paul’s lists because in our “in-Christ” culture, they fall under Webb’s power-status dynamic. We can add them because the physical temple is fallen away, and so are ancient pagan cultic practices (which Webb acknowledges) and any laws to do with them (which he doesn’t acknowledge, because Paul didn’t… quite). Of course, we still have paganisms and ‘false gods’, but we now know that homosexual behaviour isn’t associated with them any more than eating the wrong foods, child sacrifice, bestiality, or any other evil associated with the enemies of Israel. Lastly, we can add them to the lists because they are being persecuted. Paul stood staunchly against persecution, and told us to bear it only if it was perpetrated by enemies of the faith. He’d be rolling in his grave to know that we were perpetrating it. That was the world Paul was fleeing: one which was so Pharisaic and legalistic in its application of scripture that murder was a valid option (Westboro Baptist Church, anyone?). Paul reversed this dynamic.

Here’s a seriously long quote from Slaves, Women and Homosexuals. Webb writes that in Paul’s day:

Gentiles were physically partitioned off from the rest of the Jewish cult and ethnically restricted from any involvement in the priesthood. They were outside of the covenants of promise (Eph. 2:12; cf. 3:6). Also, purity boundaries played havoc during social gatherings between the two groups (Gal 2:11-14). However, “in Christ” the inequality was eliminated; the two became equal partners. In the worship setting, believing Gentiles became equals with believing Jews. They enjoyed an equally shared possession of the covenants, which had formerly been granted to the Jewish nation. Furthermore, the new relationship between Jew and Gentile “in Christ” brought about changed attitudes regarding the eating of meals together in various social settings.

I’ve mentioned that this new relationship hadn’t yet brought about enough “changed attitudes” to result in the abolishment of slavery. That didn’t start to happen until February 1990, in the case of apartheid. Neither had the subjugation of women been abolished completely. My opinion is that if we consider either of these “ultimate ethics”, we only do so in retrospect. We think it should have happened because it did.

The New Testament author who most often lambasts homosexuality is the apostle Paul. He condemns it in several passages attributed to him: Romans 1:18-32, 1 Corinthians 6:9-11, Timothy 1:9-10, 2 Peter 2:7-8, and Jude 7. Whereas in Leviticus, Creation theology is the elephant in the room, much of the New Testament explicitly uses it in the radically modified form of a New Creation theology. But originally, it was based in Genesis 19:1-29. This is the beautiful story of one-flesh union which we’ve often summarised in this old chestnut: “It was Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve.”

In a very interesting part of Webb’s book, he explains that Leviticus 18:21 (sacrificing children to Molech) is sandwiched between three prohibitions which are relevant to child-bearing, and two non-child-bearing ones. The Molech example, he says, was placed smack-bang in the middle because child sacrifice to Molech was a possible consequence of heterosexual activity. What follows that are sins which are much worse; these are abominations to God. One of them is homosexuality. Some have argued that homosexuality was inherently tied to Canaanite temple practise; this might mean that the prohibition is irrelevant today. For Webb, that’s irrelevant. The issue is whether offspring were produced or not. Non-child-bearing sins are ‘abominations’. It’s a good argument on the surface; at the end of the day, though, although we can’t say that homosexuality was equated with cultic practice, we can still safely argue that the two were related in the Israelites’ minds. Why: because what was being established in Leviticus is the separation of the Israelites from the Canaanites, who indulged in pagan practises. We can also say that if the issue is child-bearing and not cultic practice, the basis for the homosexuality ban is not original to Leviticus at all, but found somewhere else: Creation theology developed from an Israelite understanding of Genesis. And for us, that fact possibly shifts the importance of its message away from Leviticus, and back into Genesis.

You’ve heard the arguments, I’m sure (William J. Webb attempts to tackle most of them in the ‘Persuasive Extrascriptural Criteria’ section of his book). One is that we were designed male and female because those are the puzzle-pieces that fit to make the prettiest picture. Anything else is a deviation from a natural process. William J. Webb writes:

The very fact that gay couples have to employ a third-party womb/egg and lesbian couples must use third-party sperm should tell us something about the magnitude of departure from natural processes.

I have reasons to be unsatisfied with this. Firstly, it makes any marriage that doesn’t produce children (including disabled couples who simply can’t conceive) of a slightly lower standard, like a civil partnership. Secondly, I find the argument offensive because of the assumptions it makes: that there is a necessary ‘natural’ physical picture of parenthood. The disabled / infertile body fails to satisfy a religious / cultural normative. Culturally, we’ve moved beyond this. The Church even affirms marriages which don’t produce children (even though many childless couples still sense the whiff of judgment in their churches). Why have we clung onto this aspect of Creation theology in the abstract? Is it because we’ve changed our minds on so many other elements (evolution, for example) and feel the need to keep one? There has to be a better excuse than that.

Before we were told to ‘go forth and multiply’, we were designed for companionship. Man was lonely, so woman was made as a helper for him. In my view, their gender is immaterial. According to the story, they are the first two humans in existence; of course they were male and female! If they’d been male and male, how would the biblical writers explain where everyone else came from? The idea that this prescribes a ‘natural order’ has given rise to some dangerous theologies, not least of which is patriarchy and the subjugation of women. But Genesis’ greatest message is that we are made in the image of God, for mutual, monogamous, ‘one flesh’ companionship. Any marriage which fulfils that original commandment passes the quality test. And Jesus reinvigorates the redemptive spirit of that in ‘the greatest commandment in the Law’, closely followed by the second (Matthew 22:37-40).

As a cripple, my main objection to traditional readings of Genesis is this: isn’t the crippled body a deviation from God’s ‘image’ on a much more inherent, basic, fundamental level than sexuality? I would say so. In fact, Leviticus itself apparently agrees with me, having at least as much to say for the ‘uncleanness’ of certain individual bodies as for any bodily-unions. Before humans were paired up and told to ‘go forth and multiply’, we were each formed from dust. God stood back, looked at us, and saw that we were good: one at a time, as individuals. Can we imagine Adam having Muscular Dystrophy? Eve crawling around with Spina bifida? I’d be surprised to find out they did. And if they did, we’d better revise thousands of years of religious tradition. You get my point: it doesn’t bode well for God’s eye for detail. Plus, disability is a more pervasive problem than any sexuality: sex can be controlled, or prevented; but people just keep being born disabled – keep acting disabled! – and they won’t abstain, no matter how hard we try to make them.

The Levitical condemnation of the cripple is relevant because if we are cursed by simply existing, we all fail when put under God’s holy microscope. There is no bodily perfection in this world; we’re all simply designed differently, and – as we saw earlier in the social model of disability – physical flaws exist on several spectrums which go in infinite directions. BUT… if we all fall short of God’s exacting standards, we are also, all of us, beneficiaries of God’s grace. Somehow, most of us have decided that God’s grace renders my guilty-by-being-disabled status obsolete. I’m a Christian, despite my body not being what God apparently intended. But have we decided this primarily from biblical evidence?

I don’t think we have. I think we’ve decided it because it just makes sense. Our culture views disability differently than ancient Israel, or even a first century Palestine one. Under the social model of disability, we now understand that bodies are simply made differently; there isn’t a ‘wrong’ body, and there should never be a despised or unwanted body. The disabled have achieved in the same ways the able-bodied have. We’re not an underclass (as we were in the Bible) but a contributing part of a vibrant society. These are our culture’s findings, and many of us in the Church have allowed them to shape our theology about the body despite what we find (or don’t find) in Genesis or Leviticus, and despite Jesus’ or Paul’s very indirect addressing of disability.

Paul said a lot about suffering and persecution. One passage that’s often used as a ‘disability text’ is 2 Corinthians 12:7-10. Paul says that God gave him a ‘thorn in the flesh’, a ‘messenger from Satan’, to torment him, and didn’t take it away, despite Paul’s pleading to God (‘My grace is sufficient for you’ was his only response). Is Paul referring to his blindness following his conversion on the Damascus road? Possibly. Traditionally, it’s been said that this passage speaks to disability: it’s true that God can work in and through the disabled body, and it’s also true that God might choose not to heal us for that reason (the ‘jars of clay’ in 2 Corinthians 4:7 might be another ‘thorn-like’ metaphor, if you choose to read the passage this way). Whether God has or hasn’t healed us says nothing about a lack of status or favour in Christ.

Others have said that it’s unlikely that Paul is talking about any kind of disability. There’s no other suggestion that he would have seen disability as a ‘messenger of Satan’, and ‘the flesh’ is a metaphor for our sinful nature. Paul is talking about temptation. He’s very interested in the battle between the mind and the flesh: “I do not do what I want to do” (Romans 7). His views about woman have traditionally been considered very negative; the extent to which that’s true has been called into question, but nevertheless, he doesn’t seem to support partnership with women either, in what he says, or in the tone he expresses himself. It has been suggested that this is why he, being unmarried himself, is so quick to recommend celibacy, and marriage only if ‘they cannot control themselves… for it is better to marry than to burn with passion’ (1 Corinthians 7:9). Surely if he means heterosexual passion, marriage is fine? He is also thought by some to have provided a blueprint for ex-gay ministry.

Many Pauline texts give the impression that Paul’s ‘thorn in the flesh’, his constant struggle, might be a gay orientation. Some have said that in the midst of preaching a message of grace, Paul might be unknowingly propagating legalistic Christianity while repressing his orientation (‘sinful nature’), having come from a Pharisaic tradition where heterosexual marriage was expected. The homosexual prohibition was steeped in history, and had become a huge stigma in all walks of life, social, political and religious. Whatever you think, this ‘flesh battle’ is one that Paul is constantly, even neurotically, obsessed with.

The fact is, this theory is as good as any. There’s quite a few, and they’re all speculative. Let’s be honest about that. Is God’s grace sufficient for all of these, or just some of them? What are the criteria for coming up with ‘thorn’ theories: are these theories based on what our own grace is sufficient for? Have we decided the ‘thorn’ is a disability because that’s easy to accept? And if so, why is disability – a deviation from God’s original design – so easy to accept? We could answer this by saying that disability isn’t a sin, homosexuality is. But we still have to tackle where Paul’s assumptions came from: why he felt the need to add so many guards and prohibitions against homosexuality which Jesus never seemed interested in. Is it possible that Paul is being followed by the ghost of his old Pharisaic stance on this issue?

Now let’s look at cripples.

Even if you do buy William J. Webb’s hermeneutic, I don’t think there is significant movement in attitude towards cripples in the Bible; no reason to think we are any less despised in the New Testament than we were in the Old. Sure, Jesus healed a lot of us, but that isn’t the same as accepting us as we are (he did accept us as we are, but we have to look elsewhere for that). His healings carried a related, but different, point: the spiritual Kingdom of God was being ushered into this physical world. Palestine culture, by and large, held very phobic attitudes towards disability, and their theology encouraged those attitudes.

So why don’t we still despise disability now? Webb doesn’t say, just that the Levitical rules applying to ‘commoners’ can’t be related to the rules for priests because those are found in their own section. I don’t buy this. Why: because the prohibition against cripples performing the highest priestly duty shares the same Creation theology basis in Genesis as the rule against homosexuality for ‘commoners’. Speaking of which, it also shares the same basis with a positive view (potentially) of hard gender hierarchy, dominion and slavery. Basically, it’s this: God holds us to physical ideals, and a normative bodily makeup is the highest ideal. Elsewhere in the Old Testament, this idea was coupled with that other ‘highest ideal’, money. Ladies and gentlemen: prosperity theology (last season’s anti-gay theology?).

But here’s the thing: God’s grace in Christ reconfigures these ideals quite considerably.

How might this connection between homosexuality and disability be broken? Webb makes the point that some cultural attitudes were simply a part of the entire ancient world; they just knew no different. Those aspects, he says, are much more likely to be culture-bound, and negative attitudes towards disability might fall into that category. But where other options existed in the ancient world – as they did with homosexuality – it was more likely that Christians looked around, weighed up various stances, and settled on a view. Thus their conclusions are more likely to be transcultural. But this seems to ignore the fact that the Church might weigh up options, consider views, but still arrive at an ethic which is counterproductive to the gospel because of the exact same theological views which established ‘normality’ in other areas. Throughout history (and ancient history), the Church has repeatedly done exactly that. For example, if you view the choice not to vote as a vote for apathy, the early Church could be blamed for promoting slavery on the grounds that it didn’t see fit to abolish it. Is Webb making excuses for a lack of action?

Keith Ward concludes his book The Word of God?: the Bible after Modern Scholarship by describing scripture as “a record of developing (and sometimes decaying) insights into the nature and purposes of God, from which we can learn, but which we must test against the highest biblical standard we can find.” Webb’s “highest Biblical standard” seems to be his own construct, which he imposes upon the text from above. By focussing so much on these “redemptive movements”, he reduces the most crucial redemptive movement – the radical paradigm shift of grace, thanks to Christ’s fulfilment of the Law – to a lesser priority. Homosexuality doesn’t apply to this paradigm shift because his hermeneutic stands in the way of letting it apply.

My view: we are no longer living under Levitical condemnation. Christ has ushered in a brand-new ‘code’ by which to live. This code has its own challenges, its own ‘rules’, like the old code, but with radical differences: we are now told to follow Christ, and in him there is no condemnation, not under Law criteria. And if the Law is transformed in Christ, it follows that its theological basis – Creation theology – is also transformed. The question remains: ‘to what extent is it transformed?’ But Webb would agree: in some ways, Genesis is still an open book. There are more “ultimate ethics” to arrive at. This is my “highest Biblical standard”. My hermeneutic isn’t a “static” one according to Webb’s definition because it doesn’t just take isolated texts as evidence (a trap which, ironically, Webb appears to fall into by following the hermeneutical pattern rather than the particular trajectories it apparently dictates; therefore, it sometimes feels like he’s deciding for his readers which are the most relevant texts). My “highest Biblical standard” is the example of Christ, and the new paradigm of grace that he brings after the Law. In my opinion, a hermeneutic which fully embraces this will bring slaves, women, disabled people and homosexuals out of the dark of the ancient world’s discrimination, and into the light of Christ’s acceptance.

I’ve left this question hanging: if healing isn’t necessarily acceptance, what did change for cripples in the New Testament? Christ’s treatment of cripples is revolutionary, I think, in two ways. One is demonstrated in John 9:1-3: ‘As he went along, he (Jesus) saw a man blind from birth. His disciples asked him, “Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?” “Neither this man nor his parents sinned,” said Jesus, “but this happened so that the works of God might be displayed in him.”’ What a beautiful revision of an old theological idea! The other is what Jesus said when another blind man approached him in Mark 10:51: “What do you want me to do for you?” Blindness is so often physically obvious that it’s perfectly reasonable to think that this man’s would have been. But Jesus offers him a choice: stay as you are, because you are accepted anyway, or have your faith honoured by my healing of your suffering. This was about the alleviation of suffering and the confession of faith, not about physical improvement so as to conform to some societal or religious normative. (Remember, the Levitical law prohibited cripples from performing priestly sacrifices on Creation theology grounds. The idea that the command was meaningful only for priests is a fallacy; commoners just aren’t included in sections to do with the priesthood. Priests aren’t mentioned where commoners are either.)

The fact is, Jesus said little on the subject of disability itself. What he did was demonstrate his acceptance of the disabled body (as opposed to ‘the flesh’) in exactly the same way that he said a lot about love, lust, promiscuity, and the limits of divorce (Matt 19:1-8, which for its own reasons bases itself on Creation theology) but nothing about homosexuality. The Samaritan woman at the well was ‘called out’ and forgiven for her infidelity. The Samaritans were Enemy Number 1 for people of Jewish lineage; in Jesus’ day, they were a unanimously despised people, considered ‘half-Jews’ for having intermarried with foreign nations; Christ overlooks that, only wanting to know about her infidelity (this will be very important later). Mary Magdalene was forgiven for her sexual promiscuity (if you accept the idea, given to us by religious tradition, that she was a prostitute at all) thanks to her recognition and worship of Christ. What remains true is that Christ’s mission involved welcoming to the table those who had been marginalised, rejected, and despised by traditional religious culture. He still called sin as he saw it; but more often than not, the guilty party were the people we least expected, including the religious establishment – most famously the well-respected ‘experts in the Law’, the Pharisees.

But while Jesus said little about homosexuality, are we sure that he or his apostles didn’t encounter it? No. There’s a reasonable possibility that the centurion Jesus met and blessed in Matthew 8 and Luke 7 was partnered with his servant, whom Jesus healed. The question revolves around the word pais. The literal meaning of that word is ‘servant’, but historical Greco-Roman texts show us that it was also used as a popular idiom for a homosexual male partner – something like ‘boyfriend’. If this centurion was gay – and his fondness for the servant seems clear – this meeting is crucial, because his faith was honoured, and his relationship blessed. So to me, this healing might carry a similar connotation to the blind man’s: “What do you want me to do for you?” No judgment was made. The fact is, if Jesus did have dealings with a gay man in relationship, it matters. How we read this story will have consequences for what we believe about homosexuality.

There’s also a possibility that the Ethiopian eunuch of Acts 8 may well have been a gay man who wasn’t told by Philip to change his orientation at his conversion. That debate centres on what exactly was meant by ‘eunuch’. Was it always a castrated male? Other ancient texts suggest that less commonly, a eunuch may have been impotent or celibate. We know that they were often put in charge of harems because they were deemed ‘safe’ in the company of women; they were uninterested in them sexually. So, evidence points to a possibility that Philip’s eunuch may have been homosexual.

Is this all speculation and conjecture? Of course it is; but not without reason, and my feeling is that our theology of disability – and how it relates to our thoughts about inclusion – is often based on just as little. If we know anything for sure, it’s that God heals (and we love that one, don’t we?), but what else? I’ve based mine on two things I know well: 1) Romans 8:1 says, “Therefore, there is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus”, and 2) we are no longer living under the Law; Christ fulfilled it, refined it, and redefined it. The fact is, while in the New Testament cripples are certainly not condemned anymore (as we were under the Law), neither are we explicitly accepted and affirmed as fully-redeemed, vital members of the Church (not by Christ’s disciples, and almost certainly not by the Pharisees – ‘experts in the Law’ – either). That’s why some people still believe that if you’re a cripple it must be because you’re enslaved to sin and need to confess (that’s perfect Pharisaic mainline theology, that is). Thankfully, the rest of us have dropped these old cultural and religious ideas which were based on ignorance, prejudice and separation. Why: because that was simply a good idea if we were to continue loving our neighbour into another year, decade, and century. Those old prejudices condemned us, and they just didn’t hold water. Disability just happens. It’s not ‘unclean’, it’s a neutral reality. I can’t choose to be able-bodied any more than I could choose to be homosexual.

Now that I’ve set my agenda, let’s look at a book which deals with Leviticus: William J. Webb’s Slaves, Women and Homosexuals (2001). Webb aims to address this issue: how do we decide which biblical instructions apply to today, and which are restricted to the culture of the Bible? We’re talking hermeneutics: put simply, how we interpret what we read.

It’s the most important question for any reader of the Bible to think about, and Webb proceeds to answer the question by laying out what he calls a “redemptive-movement hermeneutic”, which tries to find the “redemptive spirit” of the text and discern what still applies today. He compares his “redemptive-movement hermeneutic” to a “static” hermeneutic that doesn’t see the movement of scripture. A static hermeneutic looks at isolated words, but not the direction in which the scriptures are moving. So, a static hermeneutic can even justify slavery, as long as it’s the kind of slavery in the Bible. But if we read it according to its “redemptive spirit”, we’re not limited to isolated texts. God’s aim throughout the Bible is to move his people gradually towards what is more righteous and just. What they will eventually arrive at, Webb argues, is an “ultimate ethic”.

Webb tackles a lot of valuable issues as he applies his hermeneutic, looking at many scriptures including some in Genesis, the Levitical law, and the New Testament. But his main argument is that over the course of the Bible’s pages, there is a gradual shift, a liberalisation, of attitudes towards women and slaves. These movements have led us towards an ‘ultimate ethic with regards to these topics: we can’t now justify a hard stance on either issue today. But the same can’t be said for views on homosexuality: while they don’t get harsher as the Bible moves forward, neither do they get more lenient. In fact, they stay pretty much the same, indicating that Christians today shouldn’t stray much from biblical cultures on that issue.

I probably don’t need to tell you that I don’t buy Webb’s “redemptive-movement” hermeneutic. I find it a needlessly complicated system for developing a moral stance (eighteen ‘criteria’ to apply to every text: ‘Persuasive Criteria’, ‘Moderately Persuasive Criteria’, ‘Inconclusive Criteria’, and ‘Persuasive Extrascriptural Criteria’). Although many of the criteria are very worth tackling, Webb’s hermeneutic as a whole relies on the fallacy that there are reliable trajectories in cultural attitudes from one point of the Bible to another, when more often than not, the Bible reads more like a heart monitor of high and low points, particularly in its attitude towards disability. To say that the Bible has a general story arc is a different point, which N.T. Wright makes beautifully when he speaks of ‘the whole sweep of scripture’. But stories within stories are haphazard and unpredictable. Their beginnings and endings are imposed by us, or our particular Bible translation.

Assuming there are “redemptive movements” through the scriptures, though, ‘homosexuality’ is only one category of ‘search word’. There are others which suggest other trajectories. To follow those, we just need to choose a different ‘search word’. For example, ‘Grace’ follows its own trajectory: from our understanding in the Old Testament to our gradual transformed understanding into the New. I’m quite sure that Webb would acknowledge these other trajectories; his hermeneutic is supposed to deal with any issue we wanted to look at (and he does caution against a misuse of his hermeneutic: the trajectory must go in the same direction of movement set by Scripture, and must involve same-topic texts). But would he acknowledge that another trajectory might override one of his? Or, to be less confrontational, that some “topics” might lead us to arrive at a better “ultimate ethic” than others?

For example, we won’t see women redeemed by looking for every mention of the word ‘woman’, and hoping that each biblical treatment of women is better than the last. (When Jesus’ reprimands the crowd stoning a woman caught in adultery, we cheer him on not based on the words in the text, necessarily, but because we know that Jesus is worth listening to, not the men who were simply doing what the Law permitted). Forget the biblical ‘players’ for a second; what about the views of the writers? One only has to read Revelation’s frequent use of ‘whore’ as a symbol for ultimate sexual depravity to see that religious tradition has sullied our view of women as much as any biblical text. That the Church in Revelation is a ‘bride’ is little consolation. The whore is no less worthy of condemnation than Eve. By this reading, the literary archetype for evil is woman. (So were Paul’s words about freedom in Galatians 3:28 written during a more culturally-liberal time than those in Revelation? So much for a trajectory.) The writers of instructions and epistles had the very same negative stereotypes and prejudices as the writers of allegory, poetry and apocalyptic literature. Today, religious culture has a responsibility to challenge these prejudices in conversation with the wider culture. We don’t just need to redeem our understanding of texts; we need to recognise where the assumptions behind a text itself might need redeeming.

My last disappointment with Webb’s book is the notion that these “redemptive movements” are moving us closer to an “ultimate ethic” we can apply in our own culture which may, or may not, move us away from its cultural bounds. Webb misses the fact that ultimately, only God grasps an “ultimate ethic”. One day, we’ll see the end to all ethical debate, speculation and conjecture. In the meantime, we’re simply called to interpret the best we can. Surely, any “ultimate ethic” we arrive at by following whatever biblical trajectory will be our finding? God has not necessarily ordained our arrival, or the directions we took along the way. About the ultimate ethic of slavery, Webb writes:

The underlying spirit / movement of the slavery texts holds multifaceted implications for our modern work world. It certainly includes an employee at times choosing to go beyond what the contract calls for. It also takes into consideration the incredible movement of Scripture, compared to the ancient world, in that it betters the working conditions and treatment of slaves. This aspect of redemptive spirit eventually leads to the abolition of slavery altogether. (My emphasis)

But does it? Like Webb, I’m glad that it has. But surely the trajectory might have led us elsewhere? When slavery was at its height, there were those who believed – based on the Bible – that slaves should be treated with dignity and their version of equality because of the same passages we’re reading now. But we now know that although they would have seen some redemptive movement in scripture, they were unprepared to take it any further towards the “ultimate ethic” until a few figures (not all of them Christian) became increasingly angry, and finally started to address the injustice. And that was a long time coming: the dismantling of Apartheid didn’t begin until February 1990. We can only celebrate the realisation of that “ultimate ethic”, the total abolishment of slavery and apartheid, thanks to hindsight.

My name’s Mark. I’m a poet usually, and a writer generally. I’ve been invited as a guest blogger to Faith and Stuff to post a series on a subject close to my heart; there are a lot of words, so I’ve separated them into sizeable chunks which I’ll blog here in a series of seven posts, one for each colour of the rainbow. This series began life as a single post on my own blog, which had a surprising response (an unprecedented eight replies on my blog, and about the same number of Likes and shares on Facebook). It’s clearly an issue which concerns many of us.

These posts will contain my own personal views, aimed at generating a reasoned theological response and conversation. They should not be considered the views of Faith and Stuff, just me. I’ve written them not to prod at an open wound, but to contribute something meaningful to a debate which, for me, is more vital than ever.

If you’re allergic to religion or sex, feel free to pass this by. But if like me you’ve ever felt the pang of frustration which trying to live as a Christian sometimes brings, you might want to read on. There may well be errors, and / or further areas for debate (I haven’t dealt specifically with the hotly-debated sins of Sodom, for example, although I do have views on that). Let me know of any mistakes. Pull me up on certain points. And let’s carry on the conversation.

First, three disclaimers:

I was born with Spina bifida and Hydrocephalus. I’ll be using the words ‘cripple’ (often shortened to ‘crip’) and queer. Every disabled person will have their own preferred terms, but ‘cripple’ is not disability-specific, and people with all kinds of conditions have used it. ‘Queer’ has been redefined by queer theory: it is now an umbrella term for sexual minorities that are not heterosexual, heteronormative, or gender-binary. Generally, both of these un-PC words have been readopted by their communities as positive terms of identification.

I’m not saying that queerness is a disability. As an advocate of the social model of disability (named in the early 1980s, and now the primary force behind disability writing and thinking), I wouldn’t even see disability as ‘condition’ in the traditional sense. The body simply exists on several spectrums which move in all directions. There’s no such thing as ‘normal’, only ‘normative’, and that is an ever-shifting social construct. The social model of disability says that it’s society which disables us: prejudice, discrimination, the lack of access to buildings, services, even relationships. If those barriers disappeared, so would the inequality between ‘able-bodied’ and ‘disabled’ people.

For the last thirty years, queer theory has developed these insights: 1) Helped by the Kinsey Scale developed by Alfred Kinsey (1948), it has established that sexuality exists on a spectrum which moves between gay and straight, with various shades in-between. 2) The word ‘queer’ encompasses LGBT because, moving on from Kinsey, queer theory rejects the traditional gay / straight duality. In a sense, it says, we are all queer because we all move through and between this colour gradient. This suggests that the only people making a ‘choice’ are people who reject queerness, for religious or other reasons. Whether we buy that or not, evidence strongly suggests that homosexuality is no more a choice than heterosexuality. If we are not born gay, we are not born straight either.

If these insights make a lot of sense to me (and they do), how do I negotiate that as a Christian?

I am a Christian who affirms and accepts the LGBT community.

Why? Because I’m a cripple.

Here’s the crux of it: queer and cripple, we are both condemned under Levitical law. Leviticus 18:22 and 20:13 both forbid homosexuality.

Here is where I am implicated as well.

Leviticus 21:16-23 lays out an elaborate list of physical deformities found nowhere else in the Bible. Priests afflicted with any one of these deformities, it says, aren’t allowed to approach the temple altar to offer sacrifices. (Leviticus also contains a whole bunch of other rules – about food [“God Hates Shrimp” is a popular Internet meme] and other stuff – but our reasons for dropping many of those are fairly well documented [e.g. the food laws are obsolete], so I won’t bang on about them here.)

Some have said that the prohibitions for crippled priests aren’t that bad; cripples are allowed to do some stuff. But whether or not these priestly rules are only relevant to the offering of the sacrificial ritual itself (and not, for example, eating the priestly food in the sacred precincts) is hardly the point. It doesn’t soften the blow. These prohibitions are based on fundamental cultural prejudices which, because Jewish society and religion were intertwined, became theological principles which the Jews once adhered to (and some Christians still do). These held wider implications, for everyone, based around what physical makeup is, and isn’t, acceptable to God, or to put it more mildly, which combinations of physical attributes are more, or less, holy in the sight of God.

Since first century Palestine the Church, for various reasons, has softened in its fear and vehement loathing of the grotesque, unclean, disabled body. Many of us have embraced something close to the social model of disability, moving away from that which equated disability with ‘affliction’. I find it more than confusing that we’ve stubbornly held onto such negative attitudes towards the LGBT community.

Why one and not the other?

“What does God want?”

“People to hear the gospel and become Christians”

“And then what?”

“To go out and tell other people so they become Christians”

“And then what?”

“To go out and tell other people so they become Christians”

(note that this could go on for quite a while …)

“So what does God want when everyone becomes a Christian?”

“The Bible says that won’t happen”

“So does that mean what he wants never goes beyond people hearing the gospel and becoming Christians?”

“Well, no … not exactly … that can’t be all he wants … obviously”

“So what else does he want?”

“He wants … people to glorify him”

“Meaning, what, exactly?”

“Well, praise and worship, and … well, glorifying him, y’know …” 

“So is there anything that God wants, beyond evangelism and Church services …?”

“Hello …?”

It’s been said that Christianity is not just about being saved from something – it’s also about being saved to something.  The question is … to what?  Well-meaning evangelism can sometimes fail to put enough focus on the ‘to’ aspects of the question.

Certainly it must be about being restored, through Jesus, to enjoying relationship with God– theologically, being made ‘at one’ with God (restored a state of ‘at-one-ment’, which is what the word ‘atonement’ means).

The Westminster Shorter Catechism makes this point, that man’s chief aim (note that this was written before the days of gender-neutral terminology) is to glorify God and to enjoy him forever.  Let’s focus on the first of these, though.  What does it mean to ‘glorify God’?

No doubt it means a number of things, to which a short blog cannot hope to do justice.  One thought, though, is that it means – or at least must include – doing what Jesus did.

A recent popular question has been “What would Jesus do?” (WWJD for short) – a question that is simple to ask but a little complicated to answer, given the significant distance between first century Palestine and contemporary life.  There’s the further complication that Jesus was the incarnate Son of God, which (to some extent at least) must make direct comparisons somewhat invidious!

So what do we know, about what Jesus would do?  Well we certainly know something about what Jesus did.

John 5:19-20 quotes Jesus as saying that he does only what he sees his Father doing.  Whatever the Father does, the Son also does.  He goes on to explain that the Father ‘shows the Son all he does’ and, that ‘he will show him even greater works’ (than those that Jesus has been doing).

What are we to make of this?  Well, to state the obvious, what the Son sees the Father doing, and hence does himself, is works.  This is a curious thing, because most Protestant Christians have been taught that ‘works’ are a bad thing.  However, we have two very different contexts here.  This is not ‘works’ as an alternative to ‘faith’, as some kind of qualification system for heaven.  Whether that was ever true of first century Judaism has been called into very serious question by most recent scholarship, but be that as it may, one would not accuse the Son of it, still less the Father whose works he was seeking to emulate.

It was this troublesome idea of works – and specifically, grappling with the difference between works as ‘brownie points for heaven’ and works as the natural reflection of wanting to ‘do what Jesus did’ – that lay at the heart of the problems some of the Reformers had with including the book of James in the canon.

The newest version of the NIV probably helps the situation here by translating ‘works’ as ‘deeds’, thus taking some of the sting out of it.  Consider this from James 2:14-18:

What good is it, my brothers and sisters, if someone claims to have faith but has no deeds?  Can such faith save them?  Suppose a brother or a sister is without clothes and daily food.  If one of you says to them, “Go in peace; keep warm and well fed,” but does nothing about their physical needs, what good is it?  In the same way, faith by itself, if it is not accompanied by action, is dead.

But someone will say, “You have faith; I have deeds.”      

Show me your faith without deeds, and I will show you my faith by my deeds. 

It should surely be clear that ultimately ‘what God wants’, the question we began by asking, is … good.  Faith as an end in itself is (as James puts it) ‘dead’.

God is good, he loves what’s good and he wants us to do good.

Another way of putting it would be that he loves what’s right, he wants us to be right with him and right with one another, and he wants us to do right in this world.

Would that not be the most comprehensive meaning of ‘righteousness’?

There’s no suggestion here of good deeds as achieving merit; rather, it’s doing good as the natural reflection of a changed heart, of having new priorities (serving God and others rather than just serving ourselves and our interests) and wanting to do what Jesus would do.

Confusing the two ways of conceiving of good deeds (or good works) is more than unfortunate.  It means that we miss something important – by failing to see that, one day, when all the bad is taken away, there will still be something left.  And what will be left is good.

How much more should we start practicing now?

The best way to glorify God is to allow the Spirit’s transforming power to change us from one degree of glory to the next.  A process in which we need to obediently co-operate (he won’t ‘change us’ by imposition).  I would submit that the intended locus of the glory of God was always in the people he made to be in his image and likeness.  The restored imago dei.