Professor Malachi, Dean of Discernment and Judgment at The University of Heaven, tapped a file resting on the middle of his desk. “Let’s consider this candidate for heaven right here,” he said. “The man is homosexual. Do we allow him into heaven?”
The student angel Arthur shifted uncomfortably in his chair. Finally he said, “No, we don’t.”
“We don’t? Are you sure?”
Arthur paused in case he wasn’t. He almost desperately wanted to impress Professor Malachi, who had unexpectedly invited him into his office for this chat. “Well, the Bible clearly states that homosexuality is a sin.”
“Does it? What’s the first thing we teach here about sin, Arthur?”
Arthur remembered his Introduction to Judgment class. “That it’s contextual.”
“Exactly. When is it not a sin to kill?”
“When it’s done in the service of a greater good. In defense of the weak. In self-defense. Or even if it’s an accident.”
“Very good. So despite the fact that the Bible says, Thou shalt not kill … ?”
“We consider the context in which any killing has occurred before determining whether or not that killing was a sin.”
“Right. And if a woman tells her best friend that the Christmas cookies she made for her were so delicious that she ate them all, even though she really threw them in the garbage because they tasted like dead cat?”
Arthur laughed. “No sin.” He recalled his time back on earth, when he told his Grandma how much he loved the bulky purple and green sweater she’d knit him.
“Even though the Bible says very clearly Thou shalt not lie?”
“Even though. Because the larger good was served by her showing affection to her friend.”
“And the poor man who steals a loaf of bread from the kitchen of a rich man to feed his starving children?”
“No sin.”
“Despite the very clear words of the Bible’s Eighth Commandment, Thou shalt not steal” ?
“Still no sin. Because there is no judging of sin without first judging that sin’s context.”
The professor smiled. “We’ll make a master angel of you yet, Arthur.”
“Thank you, sir.” Arthur took a moment to look at the vast shimmering empyrean everywhere around the two of them.
“Quite a sight, isn’t it?” said Malachi.
“Even when I dreamed of it on earth, I never imagined anything like it.”
“Speaking of those not yet here amongst us. Right off the bat, Arthur, do you vote thumbs up or thumbs down for our gay applicant?”
“Well, I know that as a Christian on earth I definitely believed that homosexuality was a sin. That’s all I was ever taught.”
“You died in your mid-twenties, Arthur. Had you continued to hold that same belief up until the time of your accident?”
“No, I didn’t. I mean, not exactly. By then the whole issue had grown more complicated. All I ever heard growing up was that being gay was extremely sinful. I learned that basically there was no such thing as a homosexual: that gay people were really just straight people who needed to get right with God.”
“You believed it was possible to, as they say, ‘pray away the gay.'”
“I did believe that, yes.”
“As did most Christians. Did you continue to believe that?”
“Well, over time it became pretty obvious how wrong that was. It became clear that nobody could just pray away their gay—that some people really were just born gay, the same as some people are born left-handed or red-headed.”
“Ah. And what was the general Christian teaching after that became the common Christian understanding?”
“Then we were taught that while it might not have been possible for a gay person to stop being gay, it was possible for any gay person to resist the temptation to give in to their homosexual tendencies.”
“And what exactly does that mean, you think, to ‘give into one’s homosexual tendencies’?”
“I guess it means to engage in homosexual sex. To actually, physically, be gay. I mean, what else could it mean?”
“Nothing that I can see. So the new Christian idea became that gay people could, and should, will themselves to resist being at least physically intimate with others of their kind—to never, in short, have life partners in the way that straight people do. To never marry, for instance.”
“Yes. Just like everyone else, they were supposed to resist the sins that they personally were tempted to commit.”
“So by that reasoning—the reasoning that all people are sinful and need to resist whatever urges they have to sin—gay people were deemed to be no different from anyone else. Now it was inherently no more of a sin to be gay than it was to be straight. All were then understood to start out on the same moral footing. All were then innocent, in other words, until proven guilty.”
Arthur thought for a moment. “That’s right. That’s how it was.”
“So tell me, where has all this left you on the gay issue?”
“Still a bit confused. I honestly don’t know what to make of the whole question of the sinfulness of homosexuality.”
“Then let’s reason it out, shall we? If I correctly understood you, you no longer hold to the idea that it’s a sin just to be gay, any more than it’s automatically a sin to be, as you said, left-handed, or red-haired—which is to say, any more than it is to be straight. Yes?”
“Yes.”
“So a person’s sinfulness is no longer determined by what they are, but rather solely and exclusively by what they do. No manifest sin exists, in other words, before a sinful action is actually committed. Correct?”
“Correct.”
“So—and forgive my redundancy; I just want to be absolutely certain we’re on the same page—virtually the only way to judge if anyone, gay, straight, or otherwise, has done something sinful, is by evaluating what they actually did. There is simply no other way to determine sinfulness.”
“Yes. That does make sense.”
“And what do we know to be the indispensable tool for judging the morality of any given action?”
“Context.”
“Context. Sometimes killing, lying, and stealing is a sin; sometimes it’s not. It depends on the context. And when we look to context to determine morality, what two qualities do we look for?”
“Harmful intent and harmful action,” said Arthur. “At the motives behind the action, and the harm that resulted from the action. Or, as you put it in one of your lectures, To find the sin, look within.”
Professor Malachi brought his hand to his heart. “How it touches me to learn that one of my students has listened during class. So, what does our beloved Bible say about the context of homosexual sex?”
Arthur thought for a long moment. “The Bible says virtually nothing about any sort of contextual situation relative to homosexuality. It just lists homosexuality as a sin. It refers to no context at all.”
“Which means that the Bible can, in no way, tell us whether or not any given act of homosexuality is a sin, yes?”
“Yes. It doesn’t do that. It can’t do that.”
“But we do know that being a homosexual, in and of itself, is not sinful. We know that we can only judge acts, not God-given states of being. And we know that devoid of context, we have nothing upon which to base those judgements, do we?”
“No, we don’t.”
“Which brings us back to the question of our gay applicant. Do we accept him into heaven, or do we reject his application?”
“Well, I guess I couldn’t say. Not at this point, anyway. In order for me to make that call I would first have to know the man—really know him—as a person.”
“Yes!” cried the professor. “That is exactly right, Arthur! Exactly right. You have reasoned through to the very heart and truth of the matter. And so you will leave this office a wiser and kinder angel than when you entered it, simply because you were willing to do that reasoning. And God bless you for that willingness, son.”
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