David Gushee’s embrace of gay marriage

Much is being made of evangelical ethicist David Gushee’s announcement that he now thinks same-sex practice can be as Christian as married heterosexual sex.  Jonathan Merritt celebrates it at Religious News Service, where Gushee is said to lament, “I am truly sorry that it took me so long to come into full solidarity with the Church’s own most oppressed group.”

Really?  The Church’s most oppressed group?

I don’t mean to dismiss the real suffering of gays and lesbians, who undoubtedly suffer because of their disordered desires.  It has wreaked havoc emotionally and physically, and many, perhaps most, have suffered rejection from family and friends because of it.

But in terms of numbers, they are fewer than the millions of babies aborted each year all over the world.  Abortion caused many, perhaps most, of them pain as their lives were being snuffed out.  And many of us would say the aborted are members of Christ’s church.

And what about the millions of Christians who are suffering for their faith today–hiding and running from ISIS, the North Korean regime, Boko Haram, and numerous radical Muslim groups and governments?  Some are being tortured, others killed in hideous ways.

I was struck by the lack of biblical argument by Gushee in articles I read.  But that was probably the fault of the articles, I surmised, not Gushee.

Yet then I read Robert Gagnon’s commentary on Gushee’s announcement.  Gagnon is perhaps the most learned scholar in the world on the Bible and same sex practice.  His book, The Bible and Homosexual Practice, is the go-to book on the subject, even for scholarly supporters of gay marriage.

Gagnon reports that several times he suggested to Gushee by private email that Gushee read short articles which Gagnon had written on  biblical passages that are critical to Gushee’s position.  Gagnon says Gushee seems not to have read them, explaining that he did not have time to read everything in a variety of languages.  But Gagnon was not asking for that.

Gushee continues to say that the apostle was writing only about exploitative relationships, not same-sex physical relations in general.  This is a familiar interpretation made by revisionists that is unsupportable.  In Romans 1, for example, Paul says “women exchanged natural relations for those that are contrary to nature, and the men likewise gave up natural relations with women and were consumed with passion for one another” (1.26-26).

The emphasis is on the act of same-sex relations, not the motivations for it.  There is no mention of age or psychological dynamics.  Only the act, and the act is called para phusin, contrary to nature.

Bottom line: there is nothing new here.  Gushee has not discovered something no one else has seen.  He is repeating old mantras of previous revisionists, whose arguments have not succeeded in New Testament scholarship.

Perhaps the fact that his sister is a lesbian has something to do with his public change of position–which I had suspected he had made some years ago privately, based on his book with Glen Stassen.

As Walter Wink (a proponent of gay marriage) wrote in effect some years ago in the Christian Century, “We revisionists must be intellectually honest. We cannot make an exegetical case for same-sex practice.  The texts do not allow it.  We must make a theological case instead.”

Why a theological and not exegetical case?  Because the Bible is clearly against same-sex practice, in both Testaments.  Only ignorance or inattention can claim otherwise.