In 2011, the PCUSA officially ended its policy of excluding gays and lesbians from ordination. This was a long, hard-fought battle for many of us, but there was no time for celebration, because there were casualties. Our evangelical brethren and sistren have started leaving the church, claiming that the PCUSA had transgressed the bounds of Biblical morality. One of those leaving was a dear friend from seminary, a man I love as a brother, but who believes, as does his church, that the PCUSA had strayed from Scripture and traditional Christianity in a profound way.
The denomination tried to accommodate all positions. Ordination of LGBT folk is voluntary, subject to the will of the council responsible for the jurisdiction in question. A church’s session could decide not to ordain gay elders, and a congregation could decide not to call a gay minister. A presbytery could decide it would not call or ordain LGBT pastors.
I confess being mystified by the position of those pastors who are leaving. We went to the same seminaries! We were taught by the same professors! None of them are biblical literalists! All of them understand that scripture is a product of both divine act and human limitation, and therefore in need of interpretation!
I could understand if they felt we were denying the resurrection or Lordship of Jesus. Why is this issue, the subject of about nine verses of the whole Bible, the “make or break” topic which brooks no freedom of interpretive difference?
Is the Bible Wrong?
LGBT ordination is about God’s love, and grace, and inclusion, and sexuality, and morality. But it is also about how we interpret the Bible in post-modern America, and that is why, more than anything, it is an issue that generates so much heat in the Christian community.
My old evangelical cohorts in college, for instance, were no fans of the Bible classes at Hampden-Sydney, where literary-historical criticism of Scripture was standard fare. Many of them were in Inter-Varsity Christian Fellowship (IVCF), probably the best of the “para-church” groups, whose roots are in England and a strong evangelical intellectualism.
If you were an IVCF officer, you pledged to believe in the “verbal plenary inspiration” of Scripture. That means that every word of the Bible is directly from God. It also means the Bible is “inerrant,” by which is generally meant that in all matters–whether faith, history, or cosmology–the Bible is literally true. To give themselves some wiggle-room–since a universally-recognized concern is that there are so many differing versions of ancient scriptures–inerrantists will add the caveat “inerrant in its original form”–suggesting that someplace out there is a “first text,” the source for all that have come since, but which we will almost certainly never find.
Literary-historical criticism tears down such notions of Scripture’s authority. It presents the Bible as a document with very human origins, a product of its culture, a library of books and sources gathered over centuries that reflect, not a unified picture of God’s dealings with humanity, but an often contradictory one. The Bible presents a view of God’s work in the world that seems to have grown and evolved and changed, rather than emerging fully formed from God’s mouth to the authors’ pens.
I Don’t Recommend Biblical Marriage!
The way the Bible looks at sex is a good example. The Ten Commandments say, “Thou shalt not commit adultery,” right? Pretty clear.
Or is it? What is adultery in a polygamous culture such as that of the early Hebrews?
As it’s explained in the Levitical laws, adultery is a crime almost impossible for a man to commit, but very possible for a woman. Men were justified in having sex with other women in any number of situations, but women could have sex only in the context of marriage (or engagement) to one man, the one who was to be her husband.
In fact, all the way through the Bible, in both Old and New Testaments, polygamy was a practice taken for granted by Jewish society. The “one-man, one woman” model that Genesis seems to portray as from the beginning of time was almost never common practice through the entire Biblical period.
Here, it needs to be pointed out, we have a common Biblical practice that was considered a federal crime when Texas Rangers raided the Fundamentalist Church of the Latter Days Saints in Eldorado, Texas, and several “child brides” were taken into custody by the Texas Child Protective Services.
In fact, when US Christians laud “traditional marriage,” by which they mean “one man, one woman,” they take for granted that they are defending a “Biblical” position, when they have almost no “literal” foundation for it!
Bringing Your Brain to the Bible
And yet, it is reasonable and faithful to make the case that though “one man, one woman” marriage was rarely practiced in the biblical period, it is still right for us to claim it is the proper “Christian” model. Just because polygamy was commonly practiced in the Bible doesn’t make it right.
Likewise slavery, which also was common practice throughout the Biblical period, and only at best obliquely condemned in Scripture, is commonly held to be antithetical to Christian faith.
Monogamy and the the injustice of slavery are not literal readings of the Bible. They are interpretations, based on larger principles of Scripture garnered over time and considered acceptable by the vast majority of Christians–so acceptable, in fact, that most would be shocked to know that they are not explicitly from the Bible.
Even literalist Christians have never held that the Bible is to be taken literally in every instance. All believers, and all Christian traditions, have practiced biblical interpretation. This is actually to be expected. If the Bible is a living document, like the US Constitution, and if the Holy Spirit is continuing God’s work in the world, as we believe, then of course believers are called to interpret Scripture, and apply our brains to holy writ. As a living document, it is only relevant so long as it can address the challenges of today, which are very different from those in which it was written; and as people who believe in the living presence of the Spirit in this moment, believers don’t hold Scripture as an absolute rulebook, from which we vary at risk to our souls, but as the authoritative guide to understanding the Spirit’s work in the world today.
Yes, Virginia, There is a Holy Spirit
Many of us student preachers struggled with this in our first days at Union Seminary in Richmond. Our profs were very aware that by introducing us to scientific interpretation of Scripture our faiths would be greatly challenged. My favorite Bible professor was Dr. Paul Achtemeier, and I always remember the way he led us into the topic. “For us to believe that the Bible is the Word of God,” he said, “we also have to trust in the movement and activity of the Holy Spirit in the process that gave us the Bible in the first place–that the Spirit is not only in Scripture as an end-product but in the process, the people, the cultures, the events, that gave us the Bible we have today; and in the way we continue to use and interpret the Bible.”
To me, and to a lot of my peers, Dr. Achtemeier had introduced grace into a process that could have been frightening and confusing. But this way of thinking also introduces uncertainty, and that makes literalists uncomfortable.
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