First, let’s take a look at what the Bible says in general about capital punishment, using this lecture featuring eminent theologian Wayne Grudem.
About Wayne Grudem:
Grudem holds a BA from Harvard University, a Master of Divinity from Westminster Theological Seminary, and a PhD from the University of Cambridge. In 2001, Grudem became Research Professor of Bible and Theology at Phoenix Seminary. Prior to that, he had taught for 20 years at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, where he was chairman of the department of Biblical and Systematic Theology.
Grudem served on the committee overseeing the English Standard Version translation of the Bible, and in 1999 he was the president of the Evangelical Theological Society. He is a co-founder and past president of the Council on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood. He is the author of, among other books, Systematic Theology: An Introduction to Biblical Doctrine, which advocates a Calvinistic soteriology, the verbal plenary inspiration and inerrancy of the Bible, the body-soul dichotomy in the nature of man, and the complementarian (rather than egalitarian) view of gender equality.
I am tempted to say that this is the best podcast I have ever heard on the Unbelievable show. Do anything you have to do in order to listen to this podcast.
Details:
Prof Robert Gagnon has become a well-known voice advocating the traditional biblical view on sexuality. In a highly charged show he debates the scriptural issues on sexuality with Jayne Ozanne, the director of Accepting Evangelicals who came out as gay earlier this year.
If you can only listen for 15 minutes, then start at 49 minutes in and listen from there.
The following summary is rated MUP for made-up paraphrase. Reader discretion is advised.
Summary:
Intro:
Speaker introductions
Gagnon: scholars who support gay marriage agree that the Bible doesn’t support it
Gagnon: scholars who support gay marriage agree Jesus taught male-female marriage
Ozanne: I went to the hospital because I was sick from trying to suppress my gay desires
Ozanne: Doctors told me that I would die if I didn’t act on my gay desires
Ozanne: I decided to reinterpret the Bible to fit with my gay desires
Ozanne: According to my new interpretation, Jesus actually supports my gay desires
Segment 1: Genesis
Ozanne: In Genesis the Bible says that Adam needs a woman to complete him
Ozanne: I reinterpret this to mean that Adam needed a “complementarian human being”
Ozanne: Genesis doesn’t say whether Eve was complemented by Adam in that chapter
Ozanne: It’s not critical that men are complemented by women, a man could complement a man
Ozanne: Genesis 2 doesn’t talk about children, it’s all about adult needs from a relationship
Gagnon: Genesis 2 has never been interpreted that way in all of history
Gagnon: Genesis 2 language specifically implies a human being who is opposite/different
Gagnon: Genesis 2 language translates to complement or counterpart
Gagnon: Genesis as a whole teaches that the sexuality is for male and female natures
Gagnon: The extraction of something from the man that is given to the woman is complementarian
Ozanne: I think that people can be complementary outside of male-female Genesis language
Ozanne: I don’t want to discuss specific words and texts and Greek meanings
Gagnon: the text has always been read and interpreted to support male/female complementarity
Gagnon: the male-female nature argument is made because the two natures are complementary
Ozanne: the text was interpreted by patriarchal males who treated women like property, it’s biased
Ozanne: what is important to me is how Christ interprets Genesis (?? how does she know that?)
Ozanne: I am passionate about my interpretation of Scripture which supports my gay desires
Gagnon: just because a person is passionate about their interpretation it doesn’t make it right
Gagnon: I am not arguing for the male-female view based on passion, but on scholarship, evidence and history
Ozanne: both sides are equally passionate about their interpretations (?? so both are equally warranted?)
Ozanne: the real question is why God “allowed” two different interpretations of Scripture
Segment 2: Is homosexuality a sin?
Gagnon: Jesus affirmed traditional sexual morality, which forbids homosexuality
Gagnon: Jesus teaches that marriage is male-female, and limited to two people
Gagnon: No one in history has interpreted the Bible to say that homosexuality was not immoral
Ozanne: Jesus came to bring life, and that means he supports homosexuality
Ozanne: I was dying, and embracing my gay desires allowed me to live, so Jesus approves of me
Ozanne: God says “I am who I am” and that means he approves of me doing whatever I want
Ozanne: There is an imperative to be who I am, and that means embracing my gay desires
Gagnon: Jesus argued that the twoness of the sexual bond is based on the twoness of the sexes
Gagnon: Jesus did not come to gratify people’s innate desires, he called people to repent of sin
Gagnon: Jesus did reach out to sinners but he never condoned the sins they committed
Gagnon: Jesus’ outreach to tax collectors collecting too much and sexual sinners is the same: STOP SINNING
Ozanne: I don’t think that Romans 1 is talking about homosexuality
Ozanne: I think it’s talking about sexual addiction, not loving, committed gay relationships
Ozanne: Paul was condemning pederasty in Romans 1, not loving, long-term, consensual sexual relationships between gay adults
Gagnon: nothing in the passage limits the condemnation to pederasty
Gagnon: the passage was never interpreted to be limited to pederasty in history
Gagnon: rabbis and church fathers knew about committed two-adult same-sex relationships, and said they were wrong
Gagnon: the argument for marriage is based on the broad two-nature argument, with no exceptions
Gagnon: the condemnation is not limited to exploitative / coercive / lustful / uncommitted relationships
Gagnon: even pro-gay scholars agree the passage cannot be interpreted Ozanne’s way (he names two)
Segment 3: The showdown (49:00)
Ozanne: I don’t care how many pages people have written on this
Ozanne: God says that “the wisdom of the wise I will frustrate” so you can’t use scholars, even pro-gay scholars, to argue against my passionate interpretation
Ozanne: I am not interested in the text or history or scholarship or even pro-gay scholars who agree with you
Ozanne: what decides the issue for me is my mystical feelings about God’s love which makes my sexual desires moral
Ozanne: you are certain that this is wrong, but your view does not “give life” to people
Ozanne: your scholarship and historical analysis is “a message of death” that causes teenagers to commit suicide (= you are evil and a meany, Robert)
Ozanne: “I pray for you and your soul” (= opposing me will land you in Hell) and “I hope that listeners will listen with their hearts” (?? instead of their minds?)
Ozanne: you can prove anything you want with research, even two mutually exclusive conclusions, so you shouldn’t rely on scholarship and research since it could be used to prove my view as well
Ozanne: instead of relying on research, you should rely on your heart and your feelings about God’s love to decide what the Bible teaches about sexual morality
Gagnon: you are distorting the gospel in order to make your case
Gagnon: attacking my “certainty” is an ad hominem attack to cover your dismissmal of the scholarship and history
Gagnon: you distort the gospel to make it seem like Christ just wants us to get what we want, when we want it, with who we want it with
Gagnon: Christ calls us to take up our cross, to lose our lives and to deny ourselves
Gagnon: you have a notion of what “fullness of life” is, but it’s not reflective of the gospel
Gagnon: Paul’s life was much more troubling than yours, mine or anyone else around here
Gagnon: Paul was beaten, whipped, stoned, poorly sheltered, poorly clothed, poorly fed, shipwrecked, and anxious for his churches
Gagnon: on your view, he should have been miserable and angry with God all the time
Gagnon: but instead Paul was constantly thankful and rejoicing to be able to suffer with Jesus and look forward to the resurrection
Gagnon: I have suffered too, but the suffering we go through never provides us with a license to violate the commandments of God
Ozanne: “the ultimate thing is what people feel God has called them to”
Ozanne: My goal right now is to tell young people that homosexuality is fine so they don’t commit suicide
Ozanne: the view that homosexuality is wrong is “evil and misguided”
Gagnon: the greater rates of harm in the gay community are intrinsic to homosexual unions, not caused by external disapproval of homosexuality
Segment 4: Concluding statements
Gagnon: gay male relationships on average have more sex partners and more STDs
Gagnon: female relationships on average have shorter-length relationships and more mental issues
Gagnon: the greater rates of harm are because there is no complementarity / balance in the relationships
Gagnon: everyone has some disappointment or suffering in their lives that hurts them, and that they are tempted to break the rules to fix, but we should not break the rules in order to be happy
Ozanne: both sides are passionate, so no one can be right, and evidence proves nothing
Ozanne: only feelings about “what God is doing” can allow us to decide what counts as sin or not
Ozanne: the main thing that is at stake here is to make people like us, not to decide what the Bible says about sin
Ozanne: my message to people is to do whatever you want, and ignore mean people who don’t affirm you
Ozanne: we should be more opposed to mean people who make non-Christians feel unloved than about doing what the Bible says
In my last job, I had two interesting encounters, first with a secular Jewish leftist man and second with a New Age prosperity gospel feminist Christian woman.
So let’s talk about the two people.
The man who thinks that conservative Christians are stupid
The first kind of person who tried to shame me for being a Christian is the person who thinks that Christianity is stupid. This kind of person invokes things that he hears in secular leftist pop culture as if it is common knowledge that theism generally, and Christianity in particular, is false. He’s watched a documentary on the Discovery channel which said that the eternally oscillating cosmology was true. Or maybe he watched a documentary on the History Channel that said that Jesus never presented himself as God stepping into history. He presents these things that he reads in the New York Times, or sees on MSNBC or hears on NPR with the authority tone that Ben Carson might take when explaining modern medicine to a witch doctor.
Here is how things usually go with him:
Me: here are two arguments against naturalistic evolution, the origin of life and the Cambrian explosion.
Him: but you don’t believe in a young-Earth do you? I mean, you believe in evolution don’t you?
Me: let’s talk about how proteins and DNA is sequenced, and the sudden origin of Cambrian body plans
Him: (shouting) Do you believe in evolution? Do you believe in evolution?
And this:
Me: there hasn’t been any global warming for 18 years, and temperatures were warmer in the Medieval Warming Period
Him: but you don’t deny climate change, do you? everyone on NPR agrees that climate change is real
Me: let’s talk about the last 18 years of no warming, and the temperatures during the Medieval Warming Period
Him: (shouting) Do you believe in climate change? Do you believe in climate change?
He asks these questions so he can either label me as a nut, without having to weigh the evidence I’m presenting, or have me agree with him, without having to weigh the evidence I’m presenting. It’s all about ignoring the evidence, so he can get back to his busy, busy practical life – and get back to feeling smug about being smarter than others. I think a lot of men are like this – they don’t want to waste their valuable time studying, they just want to jump to the right conclusion, then get back to doing whatever they want – like running marathons, or driving their kids to hockey practice, etc.
So how do you respond to a man who gets his entire worldview from the culture, but never deals with peer-reviewed evidence? Well, I think you just defeat his arguments with evidence and then present your own (peer-reviewed) evidence, and then leave it at that. If the person just wants to jump to the conclusion that all the “smart” people hold to, without doing any of the work, then you can’t win. There are atheists out there who believe in the eternal oscillating universe they saw Carl Sagan talking about in their elementary school. You might try to argue for an origin of the universe by citing new evidence like the CMB and light element abundances. But sometimes, they won’t care. Carl Sagan said it 50 years ago, and that settles it. It doesn’t matter that the new evidence overturns the old theories, they don’t care.
Do you think that Christianity will make non-Christians like you?
1 I charge you in the presence of God and of Christ Jesus, who is to judge the living and the dead, and by his appearing and his kingdom:
2 preach the word; be ready in season and out of season; reprove, rebuke, and exhort, with complete patience and teaching.
3 For the time is coming when people will not endure sound teaching, but having itching ears they will accumulate for themselves teachers to suit their own passions,
4 and will turn away from listening to the truth and wander off into myths.
5 As for you, always be sober-minded, endure suffering, do the work of an evangelist, fulfill your ministry.
15 but in your hearts honor Christ the Lord as holy, always being prepared to make a defense to anyone who asks you for a reason for the hope that is in you; yet do it with gentleness and respect,
16 having a good conscience, so that, when you are slandered, those who revile your good behavior in Christ may be put to shame.
If you have orthodox theological beliefs in this day and age then you are going to be shamed, humiliated and reviled by people. And it’s not just having an orthodox view of who Jesus is that annoys them (e.g. – deity, exclusivity of salvation, morality, etc.). No, their disapproval spreads on into politics, especially abortion and gay marriage – basically any kind of rules around sexuality. That’s what’s really bugging these people, I think.
The woman who thinks Christianity is life-enhancement
This one is especially difficult when you are a young man, because we naturally look to women for approval and respect. You find yourself sitting in church or youth group, hoping for the approval and respect from the Christian women for your sound theology and effective apologetics. Little do you know that many Christian women understand Christianity as life-enhancement, designed to produce happy feelings. God is their cosmic butler whose main responsibility is to meet their needs and make their plans work out. Although you might be keen on sound theology and good apologetics arguments, she doesn’t think that’s important.
So how to deal with this unmet need for approval and respect from women in the church?
First thing, be careful that you don’t attend a church where the pastor in preaching and picking hymns that give you the idea that God is your cosmic butler. Second, read the Bible very carefully, and understand that with respect to God’s purposes for you in this world, your happiness is expendable. You cannot be looking to attractive Christian women that you happen to meet in church to support you, as many of them have long-since sold out to the culture. They are not interested in learning evidential apologetics to defend God’s reputation, or in defending the unborn, or in defending natural marriage, or in defending the free enterprise system that supports family autonomy from the state, etc. Those things are hard and unpopular, especially for those women who were raised to think that Christianity is about life enhancement and peer-approval.
1 This is how one should regard us, as servants of Christ and stewards of the mysteries of God.
2 Moreover, it is required of stewards that they be found faithful.
3 But with me it is a very small thing that I should be judged by you or by any human court. In fact, I do not even judge myself.
4 For I am not aware of anything against myself, but I am not thereby acquitted. It is the Lord who judges me.
5 Therefore do not pronounce judgment before the time, before the Lord comes, who will bring to light the things now hidden in darkness and will disclose the purposes of the heart. Then each one will receive his commendation from God.
4 No soldier gets entangled in civilian pursuits, since his aim is to please the one who enlisted him.
Or, since I like Ronald Speirs from Band of Brothers so much:
This is the situation in which we find ourselves, so get used to it. And believe me, I have to deal with this, too. So I have all the sympathy in the world for you. Resign yourself to the fact that no one is going to approve of you for being faithful to the gospel of Jesus Christ; not secular men, not Christian women. There is no cavalry coming to rescue you.
WINTERY KNIGHT 