Great stuff. My favorite Q/A (bolding mine):
HR: This seems to be the testimony of some gay Christians: “Once I embraced my sexual identity and began practicing it, I then drew closer to Christ.” You have chosen a different route, operating with an entirely different logic. It seems to me as though your testimony could be expressed in this way: “Once I embraced my sexual identity and surrendered any hope of practicing it, I then drew closer to Christ.” Is this an accurate assessment? How would you account for the disparity in these two testimonies? Are both equally valid options?
WH: One of the things we have to face up to honestly as Christians is the fact that behaviors and choices that, on a traditional Christian account of things, are “sinful” are also, nonetheless, liberating and peace-giving for some people.Remember Psalm 73: righteousness doesn’t always lead to observable flourishing! Sometimes when we seek to communicate the gospel, we feel that we need to “unmask” the peace and happiness that unbelievers say they experience before we can talk to them about Christ. “Your life is really miserable,” we say, “so you need to come to Jesus.” But is that right? What if the person replies, “But my life isn’t miserable! On the contrary!” I wonder if Bonhoeffer’s reflections on “religious blackmail” could help us here as we ponder how to speak to gay people about the historic Christian teaching on sexual ethics without attacking their own gay partnerships as just obviously ”bad” for them. To someone who is in a loving partnership, that attack will either ring hollow or be profoundly hurtful or offensive. I think of a passage from Robert Jenson’s Systematic Theology in which he says that we Christians ought to be able to recognize that some people who are rejecting Christian truth often live quite “healthy” lives, when you judge them by the standard of, say, the mental health profession. “Conversions to other religions or yogas or therapies may,” Jenson writes, “in their own ways be describable as ‘forgiveness’ or ‘liberation’ and so on. To such possibilities the gospel’s messengers can only say: ‘We are not here to entice you into our religion by benefits allegedly found only in it. We are here to introduce you to the true God, for whatever he can do for you — which may well be suffering and oppression.” Applying this kind of perspective to homosexuality, I’d like to say that gay partnerships may provide a measure of “liberation” for some and that following the historic Scriptural teaching on either marriage between one man and one woman or celibacy may be quite difficult and not obviously or empirically “good” for us, even though we trust that, in the long run, obeying God does enable true flourishing — and celibacy can indeed be joyful and life-enhancing, even in the meantime.
I was having a rather down day a couple days ago about how no guy to my knowledge has ever liked me (kinda petty, huh? haha). But then after I wrote some things down, I just prayed, “I’m going to trust You.” And that just brought such peace to my heart.
It’s true. This isn’t gonna be easy. Even if there are studies that show that gay celibate Christians have higher rates of suicide and depression, that living this way may not be “obviously or empirically ‘good’ for us,” it is true that I have gained so much already from living like this. It may not always be so. In those times, it just comes down to trust.
My second favorite Q/A:
HR: Back to the issue of the Bible and homosexuality. Many gay Christians are reading the passages on homosexuality differently from you. When it comes to homosexuality, are the Scripture texts muddled? Is there hermeneutical space for differing interpretations?
WH: Those of us who maintain the “traditional” viewpoint on this — that the church ought not to bless same-sex marriages — need to help people see that the historic Christian opposition to same-sex sexual partnerships does not simply rest on a few isolated prooftexts, like Romans 1 and 1 Corinthians 6 (as vitally important as those texts are!). It is, rather, part of the larger fabric of Scriptural teaching on marriage, procreation, child-rearing, celibacy, friendship, etc. So Genesis 1-2, Matthew 19, and Ephesians 5 are just as crucial, or even more crucial, for forming Christian sexual ethics than Romans 1 is. Chris Roberts, in his excellent book Creation and Covenant, has shown how all the major strands of the Christian tradition have upheld the significance of sexual difference (our creation as male and female) for the moral theology of marriage, and that that has been the basis of their opposition to same-sex partnerships. If we could help people see this more holistic vision, then perhaps the church’s continued opposition to gay marriage wouldn’t seem to rest on such an arbitrary, flimsy basis. It isn’t just about picking and choosing a few random verses and building a sexual ethic out of such fragments. It’s rather about a coherent vision — a kind of seamless garment — of Christian teaching about our creation in God’s image and the vocations that flow from our creation and redemption.
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