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Please view both panels above.
Welcome back to Part 14 of A History of Incompatibility. In this series, we explore the development of Christian beliefs around human sexuality, particularly as it relates to present church schisms over LGBTQ inclusion. If you are just now joining the story, I recommend going back and starting at Part 1.
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While the first two movements of this story focused on history, we are now turning our attention to theology. On the first page of this series, my narrator, John, told the two young people, “My goal is not to change your mind, but to share the possibility that gay inclusion can also be faithful to Scripture and Tradition.” John sets up that he will explore the history around the church’s excluding gay people from ordination and same-sex marriage, saying, “You’re already very familiar with the reasons the church says “No” to the queer community. I take those reasons very seriously. And here’s why I changed my mind.”
You’re welcome to look elsewhere for apologetics and reasons why so many Christians reject homosexuality. It’s quite easy to find those arguments, as they tend to be the loudest and the most unwilling to consider the lived experience of countless LGBTQ Christians. Every week they pop up in the comment sections of my Facebook page. To some degree, I’m starting at the same place as those unaffirming Christians: the glory of God. I will not presume to know the motives of unaffirming Christians, but I do think by and large most of them want to honor and glorify God. I also think that it is common for unaffirming Christians to assume that affirming Christians do not take Scripture or Tradition seriously, and therefore are elevating human will over God’s will. Perhaps that is true of some affirming Christians, but many of us have become affirming exactly because we DO take Scripture and Tradition seriously, and exactly because we would rather believe the fruits of the Spirit we see alive and well in LGBTQ Christians.
This week’s comic is actually meant to be a two-page spread (still hoping I can get published!), with John and his followers being swept out of their baptismal waters by seraphim wings, where they behold the wonder and beauty of the cosmos (inspired by the most recent NASA photos!). Christians have long believed that the vast Creation holds a natural revelation, sparking humanity to wonder at the mystery of the Creator who made it all. The universe is not God. It cannot even contain God. So how could we dare to make any claims at all about this Infinite One?
Because nature is not the only revelation. God wants to be known, so God speaks. God forms. God connects. God makes covenants. As Christians, we turn to Scripture because this is where we find words of life, everything necessary for salvation. Scripture gives us the language to dare speak of mystery, because it is full of the stories of God’s movement towards Creation. Scripture gives us the language to interpret our own experiences in contexts vastly different from the Ancient Near Eastern people who put these words to parchment.
Evangelical Christians believe that we can have a relationship with this God…that God still speaks. We talk about that “still small voice,” or as John Wesley once put it, the heart “strangely warmed.” This is quite literally a spiritual way of talking about human experience. The Christian faith is experiential, not just a magic formula for salvation, not just a special prayer that gets you out of hell. We experience the movements of God’s Spirit still today, and Wesleyan Christians believe that we can truly become more like Christ every day.
We can believe that God is unchanging AND that God has quite the history of challenging human expectations about how God should or should not act. Whether you choose to believe it or not, God called Abram out of all the people in the world, and blessed him to be a blessing for all.
Whether you choose to believe it or not, God came into the world as an infant born of a woman.
Whether you choose to believe it or not, God the Son became closest friends with sinners and outcasts, and most vehemently spoke out against religious leaders who thought they knew God best.
Whether you choose to believe it or not, the only reason ANY of us non-Jewish Christians are saved is because faith in Christ alone is the requirement.
Whether you choose to believe it or not, “God, who knows people’s deepest thoughts and desires, confirmed this by giving them the Holy Spirit, just as he did to us. He made no distinction between us and them, but purified their deepest thoughts and desires through faith. Why then are you now challenging God by placing a burden on the shoulders of these disciples that neither we nor our ancestors could bear?” (Acts 15:8-10).
Whether you choose to believe it or not, God is saving LGBTQ people by grace alone through faith alone. If you choose not to believe it, then you will find no argument from me that could ever convince you to think differently. If you believe that a person must become straight in order to be truly saved, then I would encourage you to please take on all of the Torah and hold yourself to the same standard, a standard that the Apostles Peter and Paul themselves utterly rejected.
But if you think you can trust the witness of the Spirit, even if you don’t understand it, please do come back for more of this series. We will not all agree, and we will most certainly go our separate ways. There will be a church, perhaps even the majority of Christians, who will continue to reject LGBTQ people to varying degrees. But there will also be a church that believes the witness of the Spirit today, and reinvents itself to provide pathways for holiness for all people.