[TruthTalk] Bible Perverts

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This is a WorldNetDaily printer-friendly version of the article which follows. To view this item online, visit http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=47123 Saturday, October 29, 2005 TESTING THE FAITH Theology pair flips Bible upside-down on sexuality 'We must reject at the outset any notion of the supreme authority of scripture' Posted: October 29, 2005 5:35 p.m. Eastern © 2005 WorldNetDaily.com If a pair of visiting scholars, speaking this week at Florida Southern College's annual Bible Symposium, are correct, practically everything most people believe the Scriptures teach about sex is wrong. The topic of this year's symposium, the Lakeland Ledger reported, was "Sex, Love and Marriage in Scripture and Tradition." Two of the presentations, however, were less than traditional, and many would say, unscriptural. James L. Crenshaw, professor of Old Testament at Duke Divinity School, questioned Scripture's authority to govern matters of sexuality – the Old Testament text, he argued, was written over 12 centuries under a variety of shifting circumstances. It is the reader, he argued, that determines the text's meaning. "We possess no statement describing a normative practice" of sex and marriage, he told the attendees. Crenshaw cited divorce, easily obtained in early Hebrew society but discouraged in later prophetic and rabbinic writings, to illustrate what he described as the Bible's shifting standards. Likewise, in the Song of Songs, "the lovers defy convention in the way lovers have always done." Given the lack of a cohesive approach to sexuality in the Bible, Crenshaw argued "those who practice alternative sexual lifestyles" should not be condemned. While agreeing that homosexuality is forbidden in passages of Leviticus, Crenshaw said those prohibitions should not be taken as the final word. "We must reject at the outset any notion of the supreme authority of scripture. ... Even those who take most literal interpretation of biblical texts, who claim to believe everything literally, nevertheless sit in judgment on their meaning at every juncture because readers determine meaning," he said. "Is God more interested in our sex lives than in our integrity, our good deeds and our chaste thoughts?" Crenshaw's Duke Divinity School is associated with the United Methodist Church, which permits gays to be members of its congregations but prohibits them from being ministers. The second speaker, L. William Countryman, professor of biblical studies at The Church Divinity School of the Pacific, is an ordained priest in the Episcopal Church and has been outspoken in debates over homosexuality in the clergy of that denomination. For Countryman, it is the gospel, – "the good news that God made us all alike and loves us all equally" – that has primacy. He has chastised those Anglicans opposed to the consecration of openly homosexual Gene Robinson as bishop of New Hampshire, for "their arrogance in commandeering Scripture as their peculiar property." At the Lakeland symposium, Countryman offered his own "peculiar" take on the well-known passage on homosexuality found in the first chapter of Romans. The apostle Paul wrote: "Therefore God gave them over in the sinful desires of their hearts to sexual impurity for the degrading of their bodies with one another. They exchanged the truth of God for a lie, and worshiped and served created things rather than the Creator – who is forever praised. Amen. Because of this, God gave them over to shameful lusts. Even their women exchanged natural relations for unnatural ones. In the same way the men also abandoned natural relations with women and were inflamed with lust for one another. Men committed indecent acts with other men, and received in themselves the due penalty for their perversion." "The language is harsh," Countryman conceded, "but Paul doesn't say explicitly that it is sinful. ... All we can say is that the case isn't very strong. For myself, I'm frankly unconvinced," he concluded. "Most important of all, the gospel doesn't enter into it." Passages like this, Countryman said, have to be interpreted as part of Paul's entire message in Romans – that Jews and gentiles should not feel superior toward each other. "We still hear Paul as agreeing with our own prejudices, whether for homosexuals or Jews. Never underestimate the ability of human beings to get things wrong," he concluded.