Praying:
CoC - Kneel if you want to be stared at.
EC - Kneel or die.
Go, read, now!
Update: It would help if I actually put the link in...
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Christianity. Philosophy. Liberalism.
Investigating the liberality of ... um ... Jesus.
4 comments:
Very interesting blogs. I share some views!
Thanks for visiting, Ryan. You oughta do something about that head wound, though.
Paper towel, maybe? ;)
Pushing back to your previous post, I think the topic "Why homosexuality is a gender issue" is an interesting one.
When we were discussing creation stories/myths ("Extemporaneous gender," Sept. 13), I suggested that the creation of woman as a "help" for man means that God created two sexes specifically because they're different, meaning each contributes things to human life that the other cannot. Presumably this would include but go beyond sexuality.
Shane said no, the essence of the passage––at least for our interpretive purposes––is the need for humans to be in community, generally, with other humans. My impression of Shane's position (though perhaps he will want to correct me) is that the imporant thing about the woman is not that she's female, but that she is an "other" when compared with the man.
So back to Matthew's assertion about homosexuality and gender: if we take Paul's claims in Romans that homosexuality is "unnatural" as being at least somewhat grounded in the creation story, then I'm curious if Shane's interpretation of Genesis pulls the rug out from under Paul's argument there.
If it's a fundamental Christian assertion that males and females were created specifically to be two sexes that are fundamentally different from each other (thus one's gender is bound to one's sex), and that sexuality was made to bring these two very different sexes into a union, then it's no big stretch to suggest that forming that kind attachment with the same sex goes against what God was trying to establish. I'm not saying the argument is a slam-dunk, just that it's plausible.
But if people are just people according to our interpretation of Genesis, then to me it doesn't seem that difficult to argue that a person of, say, another race is sufficiently different from me to fulfill what God was trying to accomplish. Or for that matter, we might claim that every other indivdual is different enough. At the very least, I meet men every day who would seem more different from me than any woman I would be likely to marry.
If this is the case, then it would seem harder to claim that a Christian evaluation of homosexual sex could be related to what is "natural," as Paul has it. It would also remove the biblical basis, I think, for claiming that homosexuality is, in fact, a gender issue.
I think you could still make a clear case from Leviticus, augmented by a couple of theological points from the NT, that homosexual sex is wrong in terms of the purity and holiness of the individual believer as well as the body of Christ.
But I wonder if Shane's interpretation of Genesis would force the would-be conservative interpreter to jettison arguments about nature that we typically take from Paul.
Heh! If only he'd visited a catholic church too :-)
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