I point people to that passage and ask them to explain to me why Jesus would say that the Creator made them male and female. That adds nothing to the conversation about divorce. The reason Jesus did that was to teach the religious leaders a lesson not only about divorce, but to teach them about the nature of marriage, that it’s male and female.
Yah, even going back to Genesis 1, we see God make these opposites which complement each other all throughout the creation narrative. You have the sky and the land; the day and the night; the water and the land; and then the birds that fly and the fish who swim, and the animals that crawl. There’s this complementary relationship in creation, and the crowning peak of that, then, is these men and women who bear the image of God — both bearing the image in a different way, and they go together. You can’t make ocean to go with ocean, or land to go with land. They just don’t fit the way God has made creation to function. The hard part for me is not coming off as a hateful bigot. You kind of have an advantage here because you can say, ‘I experience this, I can’t be hateful to myself when I say these things!’
Whereas someone like me, when someone asks me what I believe about homosexuality, I want to ask, ‘Well how long do you have?’ Because this conversation isn’t just about homosexuality, it’s about hermeneutics and it’s about anthropology and how we view God, how we view Scripture, how we view creation.
That’s the problem with answering that question briefly: People want the sound-bite answer, but I think we need more than that. This is why your book is so helpful because it gives this vast context to [answer] that question. It says this conversation isn’t really even about homosexuality or same-sex attraction. This conversation needs to zoom way out from that and ask, how did God make humans to be? How did He make the world to work?
You’re exactly right, Ethan, because I think what’s going to happen in everyday life is you’re going to come across friends or coworkers or people on the street, and they’re going to find out you’re a Christian and you’ll end up getting into more deep questions. It is very likely that they will ask your thoughts on people who are gay — they’ll probably ask it that way, because they don’t have a paradigm for people who have same-sex attraction. They may ask about same-sex marriage or the LGBTQ community. And you got it exactly right because, at the end of the day, the most important thing is not to convince someone of morality, but the most important thing is to talk about these deeper, broader issues like God, like anthropology (who we are), about ethics and about knowledge. I can’t really give an answer [to] what I think about this without explaining what I think about those four things. That’s my premise, my presupposition.
Yah, it’s almost like you need to write a book about it…
Right?
But I think that when we talk about those presuppositions, that is much less volatile because when you simply say, “I think it’s a sin,” well you’ve just created an enemy. You made them think that you are this Luddite caveman who’s completely clueless. You are a racist, homophobic whatever and they start labeling you all these things. So instead, let’s have this discussion where we say, ‘before I can tell you about this, let me tell you what my framework is which I see things through. I believe in a God; I believe Scripture is authoritative; I believe that truth is absolute, and so on.’
We need to have those discussions because when you start there, you can then have that conversation, because, with a stranger or an unbelieving acquaintance whom you may know a little bit but not super well, you want to actually have a conversation, not a shouting point here. You don’t want “zingers.” There are so many problems I see in our culture today and we’re getting to the point that we’re not able to have conversations because we want to have those one-line zingers that say ‘I got you.’ I think this is partly due to social media where everything has to be 140 characters, but in general, we’re getting less and less personal.
So as Christians, we need to recognize that and avoid it and grow more personal by, as you said, stepping back, getting the broader perspective, and you don’t have to answer that specific immediate question because that’s not the most important part. The most important thing is to talk about God. Then from there, to understand authority. Where do we get knowledge? Those are the things that are really key.
Exactly. And then two hours later, you can actually start talking about homosexuality.
[Laughs] That’s right!
