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I’ve commented once on Jonathan Stone’s my struggle with homosexuality.  But some of the subsequent comments–and Tanya’s last one in particular–beg some response.  It’s rather like the geotechical engineer and contractor Lazarus White’s reaction to certain technical papers on pile driving: after reading them, "the result was that my sleep was very much disturbed."

Let me start with this one:

I remember my youth pastor telling our youth group interracial dating was wrong. He gave us some scriptures and as we all know, had a good foundation traditionally. I was pretty disturbed because I’d just been reading scriptures that I thought said quite the opposite. When I asked him about them, he hemmed and hawed and was unable to resolve the differing perspectives in the texts. While today I know he would never come up with a sermon like that, it’s not because his scriptures have changed; instead his perspective has.

His idea about interracial dating is taken from the Old Testament, and reflects one of the long-running weaknesses of American Evangelicalism: the desire to create a synthetic Judaism rather than New Testament Christianity.  The Jews were exhorted to avoid marrying outside of Judaism, the descendants of Abraham.  But that reflects the basically different nature of the old covenant versus the new.  The Jews were God’s chosen people by birth.  Christians are by adoption.  Put another way, the Jew’s blood line was human, and the Christian’s blood line is Jesus Christ’s own, which he shed on the cross.  The results is as follows:

Never lie to one another. Get rid of your old self and its habits, And clothe yourselves with that new self, which, as it gains in knowledge, is being constantly renewed ‘in resemblance to him who made it.’ In that new life there is no distinction between Greek and Jew, circumcised and uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave, freeman; but Christ is all!–and in all! (Colossians 3:9-11)

The actual New Testament counterpart to this is for Christians not to marry non-Christians.  Tanya’s youth pastor should have focused on this; Christian churches have been highly remiss on that subject.

Let me turn to another comment:

Essentially we’re saying, ‘You can’t be in the club unless you have sex like we do; if you really want we can train to have our kind of sex. Otherwise, you don’t get to have any. Ever. At all.’

Other than reminding me of a speech I put in my first novel, what strikes me about this is that it overlooks the opposite possibility: that people would be forced to have sex, "pluriform" sex (to use a good TEC revisionist word) in order to belong.  How this inversion happens is the result of the relationship of morality and community standards, something I discuss in The Trouble With Morality.

And, with pieces like that, perhaps I can disturb someone else’s sleep.

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Update:  well, not yet.  But I continue to try to add to this discussion, which is, in reality, a life or death issue for Christianity.

Jonathan Stone knows how to select a hot topic in his post my struggle with homosexuality.  For you Anglicans that visit regularly, you know I deal with this on a regular basis, and many of the Anglican/Episcopal blogs and websites do so even more.  The premier Anglican (IMHO) blog, Titusonenine, does so regularly, but will generally close comments on a post dealing with the subject.  In fact, it’s gotten so bad with churches seceding and what not (they hold the property the same way we do in the Church of God, which only fuels the slugfest) that Kendall Harmon, whose blog Titusonenine is, actually shut off comments on everything during Holy Week, the tone had degenerated so badly!  And these are the Episcopalians and Anglicans, previously “God’s frozen people!”  Just think about what we could do if we ever got started!

In any case, I felt compelled to respond to his posting, and he’s come back with one question in particular that I think needs some detailed treatment:

I want to know if there is any room to have some constructive dialogue between Pentecostals and the LGBT community. I am therefore interested what the ‘conditions’ might have to be for such a conversation to take place, as well as what the potential fruit might be. I would think that such a conversation would only be possible on the Pentecostal side if it was clear that there was, and would continue to be, a firm commitment to the stance that the practice of homosexuality was a sin. What I do not know is whether anyone from the LGBT would be interested in a conversation with that particular condition.

Based on what I’ve seen with the Episcopalians and Anglicans, I’m not optimistic, but I need to explain this in more detail.

Let’s start with the LGBT (I guess I’ll have to rearrange my use of those initials) community first: they’re definitely interested in conversation.  Frank Griswold, TEC’s (The Episcopal Church’s) former Presiding Bishop (isn’t is amazing we’ve adopted that title,) used to love to engage in “deep conversation” but the results were still the same: the consecration of V. Gene Robinson in 2003 and the continued fights over the property of seceding parishes, something which his successor, Katherine Jefferts-Schori, has only ratcheted up.  The problem for them is that they (especially their leadership) are very one-sided in the way they see the issue.  Whether they are inside or outside a church, their idea is not a libertarian “live and let live” paradigm but a “you must accept and love us and what we do” paradigm.  (There are a few exceptions, but most of them don’t have the visibility and get trashed by others in the LGBT community.)  And they will use whatever resources they have at their disposal to force the issue.

Put simply, I don’t see them accepting a dialogue based on your precondition of “a firm commitment to the stance that the practice of homosexuality was a sin.”

Turning to the Pentecostals, one reason why we’ve avoided having this dialogue at all is because of the income distribution of the two sides.  TEC and other “Main Line” churches have faced this issue first is because, traditionally, they have attracted people in the upper income levels, and as a group the LGBT community is an economically advantaged one.  For our part we have done the opposite.  To my way of thinking, this is a sure sign that Pentecost is from God, but the humble roots have instilled an (undeserved) inferiority complex in many of our people.  (Why people in a movement who have swept Christianity the way modern Pentecostalism has would have an inferiority complex is beyond me.  Everybody else is busy taking lessons from us!)  This manifests itself, among other places, in the highly unbudgetary way we do many of our building projects, as I pointed out in my reply to the posting of Rickie Moore’s prophecy on MissionalCOG.    Going into a dialogue with this idea is dangerous; it’s one reason why, for instance, Tony Richie’s visit to the World Council of Churches last summer bothered me so much.  Our traditional isolation has bred into us a hunger for acceptance, and it’s one that the LGBT community could well exploit.

That leads me to make another point: we need to quit spending so much time over going over where we’ve (well, many of us, this blogger excluded) come from and start thinking about where we’re going.

Let me touch on three other things.

1. The first is “homospirituality.”  I’m not completely sure what you’re referring to, but back in September I posted an article entitled The Paradox of GLBT People and the Church, which featured a scholarly article on the relationship between the development of Anglo-Catholicism in England and homosexuals in the church.  Anglo-Catholicism and Pentecostalism have one thing in common: a strong emphasis on the aesthetic and emotional appeal of worship forms, albeit the aesthetic and emotions are completely opposite one from another.
2. The whole movement to accept homosexuality needs to be understood as an adjunct to the breakdown of the Christian sexual ethic in our society and, to an extent most don’t want to admit, in our churches.  This is an important issue; it’s one I explore most fully in, of all places, my novel The Ten Weeks.   To specifically demonise homosexuality without including fornication is simply not correct.
3. I try to reflect my Saviour as much as I can on this site and the others I comment on.  I don’t always succeed; I have definite positions on many topics, and in a society that is as paranoid as ours is on people being “judgemental” I don’t always come across as pleasing.  But I think that Christians should avoid being rude to the greatest extent possible, and be a little more “pastoral” in the way they deal with others.