Homosexuality in Sunday School

In my Sunday school class, we’ve been working through Scot McKnight’s book The Blue Parakeet, which is very useful in helping stimulate discussion of a very important topic: Christians, even self-proclaimed “Bible-believing Christians”, do not “believe the whole Bible” and/or “take it all literally.” Scot helps readers, even conservative Christian ones, to recognize that Christians not only do but always have discerned that certain things that are fairly clear in the Bible we are nevertheless not going to practice. He challenges us to be honest about this and to reflect on how we go about this process of discernment, and to not simply leave it up to instinct, “common sense” and assumptions.

It was inevitable that sooner or later we would move from examples of topics that Christians view as “settled” – such as circumcision and slavery – to ones where Christians are currently engaged in debate and draw very different conclusions. I waited until such a topic was raised by the members of the Sunday school class, since that would indicate some readiness and willingness to talk about the subject.

And so next Sunday we’ll be looking at the subject of homosexuality. I already know that this is a topic on which people who are in the class disagree. I encouraged those who were in class to come prepared to discuss not only the Bible, but also any other considerations that may be relevant.

I will probably post about the discussions here. One point I’ll raise now for discussion, which may also come up in the Sunday school class, is this. We noticed that we tend not to regard as relevant any longer commandments and teachings the purpose of which we cannot figure out. If we can’t figure out why it was prohibited to boil a kid in its mother’s milk, we are likely to eat Stroganoff without any pangs of guilt. Likewise if we think a command was aimed at an issue that is no longer current, then we tend to ignore it or consciously set it aside. And so an important question is to ask whether we can figure out why certain Biblical authors viewed homosexual intercourse negatively. If we can’t answer that, or if it seems to have been based on the same principles as other Levitical laws we no longer follow, or was aimed specifically at some aspects of Canaanite worship practices, then presumably we should do with these commandments as we do with other such materials.

I’ve discussed some of the relevant passages and issues on this blog before, and encourage those interested to search for some of those older posts. Some of them may get reposted in the near future, if they are old enough and yet seem relevant to the discussions we’ll soon be having in my Sunday school class. In the mean time, I’d value input from others who have facilitated discussions between people of differing views on this subject!