LGBTQ+ inclusion is growing steadily in churches in America, non-denominational or mainline. The United Methodist Church (UMC) recently removed language from their Book of Discipline that could prevent practicing homosexual clergy. Notably though, it didn’t add any new language to prevent discrimination against LGBTQ+ clergy. The same can be said for many churches where the national stance is affirming, but at a congregational level, it might not be as welcoming. National level organizations tend to not like to make stands on controversial issues in tangible ways if that could offend those in the majority. This choice, however, is made at the expense of the marginalized.

A case is often made that a congregation has a diverse set of opinions and they wouldn’t want to be overt about their stance on LGBTQ+ affirmation at the risk of excluding conservatives in the congregation. While I think this position often comes from a genuine place, it’s misguided. After all, if we truly believe that sexual orientation and gender identity is not a choice, then excluding LGBTQ+ folks is the same as excluding those of a different race.

During the Civil Rights movement, there needed to be church-wide education that racism is not Christlike. There needed to be pastoral discipline for those who were unwelcoming to Black congregants until a critical mass was reached. At some point, those with bigoted views either repented and changed their mind, stopped talking about it, or left the church. The result was a majority of churches today that are openly welcoming to all races.

I think in an effort to be inclusive to all people, many churches neglect to see that they are catering to those who think and act in ways that are exclusive. By not taking a stand with the marginalized, be they folks of a minority race, women in church leadership, or LGBTQ+ image bearers of God, a church’s silence invites bigotry. In Galatians, Paul recounts a story where he opposed Cephas (Peter) to his face. Why? Because he distanced himself from uncircumcised Gentiles in favor of those who were circumcised. He wasn’t taking a stand for full inclusion and because of this, according to Paul, “he stood self-condemned.” (Galatians 2:11 NRSVue)

For good reason, progressive churches tend to be very careful, even avoid, church discipline. This can be a double-edged sword though because if churches are not correcting bigoted and exclusive behavior and opinions in the church, they are building a culture that is, in fact, exclusive to the “least of these.” Does the church need to be the thought-police? Absolutely not. However, if the church is not preaching practically about what it means to live like Christ as it relates to controversial topics in an effort to remain apolitical and inclusive, they are allowing external sources to influence their views of LGBTQ+ people.

We have to realize that in this connected world, the local church is no longer the only source of theological opinion. Nowadays people can get their Biblical views from Facebook posts, Youtube conspiracies, and misogynist preachers online. If that’s what they are consuming throughout the week, they will naturally bring those opinions to church. If their church is affirming by denomination, but they don’t hear any counter-narratives about how Christ wants them to live, their position will become more solidified. When that happens, their actions will inevitably affect how they treat people in church who they have been conditioned to be suspicious of during the week. This creates an exclusive environment for the marginalized among the congregation.

This isn’t only for LGBTQ+ people but for other marginalized groups as well. Think of the last time people in your church—or one you were attending—were suspicious of an unhoused person, or unwelcoming to someone of a different race or ignored someone of a different socioeconomic class than the majority of the church community. If the church doesn’t address the problem of exclusion openly, directly and regularly, worldly influences will creep in naturally. Followers of Jesus are meant to be the salt and light of the earth, and this is what that means: being a beacon of light for true inclusion and justice, even if that means making those with exclusive views feel uncomfortable.

During this Pride month, if you go to one of these churches where the church’s stance is inclusive, but the hegemony is silent on Christlike justice issues, I’d encourage you to take steps to correct this. Specifically with respect to issues of gender and sexuality, consider recommending the following practical steps, or doing them yourself!

• Talk to people in your church about issues like this. Ask your friends where they stand and hear them out. Try to understand where they are coming from but this is a place where speaking truth in love is applicable.

• Request that your pastor or leader pray for specific marginalized groups from the pulpit.

• Request your pastor be more specific about the kinds of harm that Christians can and do cause to LGBTQ+ people and include that in the confession.

• Recommend a book club that reads through books that try to dispel myths that the Bible condemns homosexuality. I might recommend:

  • “Changing our Minds” by David P. Gushee

  • “Unclobber” by Colby Martin

  • “God and the Gay Christian” by Matthew Vines

• Suggest your church display a Pride flag somewhere visible. This could be as simple as a sticker on door that explicitly states this is an affirming and inclusive church.

These are just some ideas, and every church is different. However, the common theme I’ve seen for many supposedly inclusive churches is a lack of awareness that they are excluding the marginalized in an effort to make the majority comfortable. Church should not be comfortable, it should challenge us. Loving others, even our enemies is not easy, yet that’s what Christ calls us to. I believe the church can change, and oftentimes it needs to happen from the inside. So if you’re in a position to do something, especially if you are straight and/or cis, you have a responsibility to do something. Go and love others in the name of Christ.

Happy Pride!

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Let’s take a look at the passage in context to get an idea what’s going on:

Now I desire to remind you, though you are fully informed, once and for all, that Jesus, who saved a people out of the land of Egypt, afterward destroyed those who did not believe. And the angels who did not keep their own position but deserted their proper dwelling, he has kept in eternal chains in deepest darkness for the judgment of the great day. Likewise, Sodom and Gomorrah and the surrounding cities, which, in the same manner as they, indulged in sexual immorality and pursued unnatural lust, serve as an example by undergoing a punishment of eternal fire. Yet in the same way these dreamers also defile the flesh, reject authority, and slander the glorious ones. — Jude 1:5-8 NRSVue

There’s two Greek phrases to notice here:

• ekporneusasai: (indulged in sexual immorality) The emphasis here is on the extreme nature of the sex due to the ek prefix. This prefix means “out”, and similar to English, enhances the magnitude of word it’s prefixing. e.g. outdo, outgoing, outstanding.

• sarkos heteras: (unnatural lust) The KJV gets this right when it translates it as “strange flesh”, but most others say simply “sexual immorality” (without the emphasis) and then either “unnatural lust” or “perversion”

As a refresher, the story of Sodom in Genesis 19 is about the attempted gang rape of two angelic visitors. Their visit was to determine whether Sodom should be saved or destroyed as a result of its pride, opulence, not aiding the poor or oppressed (Ezek 16:49-50). Lot harbors these visitors, while all the men, young and old, of Sodom come to try to “know” them. This was obviously not because they were just such good looking visitors that the men couldn’t resist, but their goal was to sexually humiliate them. We can see how they felt about foreigners in how they treat Lot. When Lot tries to stop them from taking the visitors, they become enraged.

But they replied, “Stand back!” And they said, “This fellow came here as an alien, and he would play the judge! Now we will deal worse with you than with them.”

—Genesis 19:9 NRSVue

In the context of the Sodom story, strange or different flesh seems to refer to the angels who, presented as foreigners. There’s a double meaning of both angelic flesh as well as foreign, or unknown flesh. If the author wanted to convey the homosexual nature of interaction, he would have simply used the word, andres (men) instead of sarkos heteras (strange flesh). That’s an odd choice that only exists here in the entire Bible, so we should pay attention.

We can see that the author was primarily thinking about the angels in the story of Sodom because all the surrounding verses also speak about angelic beings.

• v6: Fallen angels and their punishment

• v7: The story of Sodom features angelic visitors

• v8: Dreamers are rejecting angelic beings (doxas)

• v9: The archangel Michael referenced from the apocryphal myth, The Assumption of Moses

• v10: Slandering of “whatever they do not understand” in reference to the previous verse slandering even a fallen angel.

If we go to the next verse, we see a reference to “Balaam’s error”, we can look back into Num 22:4-35…and oh look! Another angel reference. Balaam didn’t see an angel in his way while he was about to directly disobey God, so he beat his donkey, who talked back to him. It’s an odd story, but worth the read.

So what’s up with all these angel references here?

In second temple Judaism and early Christianity, they viewed angels as ministers of God. His agents who reported back to him to goings on of human affairs. (1 Cor. 11:10, Heb. 1:14,13:2) Therefore, giving angels respect as the agents of God was a big deal. The sins of the church Jude was pointing out had to do with denying Jesus as Lord, sexual immorality, (v4) gossip, complaining, greed, arrogance (v15-16) and taking advantage of the church’s hospitality (v12). In doing so they were disregarding angels’ authority and presence just like Balaam. (v8)

Whatever kind of sexual immorality specifically that was going on here is unclear, but if it was anything like Sodom, it had to do with taking advantage of outsiders, or the oppressed (perhaps even former slaves or sex workers in the church) and/or violent sexual advances. This passage has nothing to do with loving monogamous homosexual relationships.

To recap, Jude is talking about disregarding angels’ heavenly authority and he uses several stories about angelic beings from Jewish apocryphal myths and the Old Testament to do so. He is NOT talking about attraction or desire for the same sex, nor a loving same-sex relationship. If we are to determine how Christ wants us to understand issues around LGBTQ+ inclusion, we must use wisdom and the love of Christ as our lens, applied to our modern context. We cannot anachronistically assume a first century author thinks about homosexuality in the same way we do.

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$14 Million is a lot of money, especially for two super bowl ads. Christians on the right viewed the “He Gets Us” ads with derision as too “woke”. Matt Walsh even came out on X saying it was heresy. Christians on the left were appalled at the seeming bait-and-switch, due to the anti-LGBTQ and anti-abortion stance of one of the ad campaign’s main backers, Hobby Lobby CEO David Green.

When we think about wealth in the Gospels we typically think of Jesus telling the rich man to sell his possessions and come follow him:

When Jesus heard this, he said to him, “There is still one thing lacking. Sell all that you own and distribute the money to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; then come, follow me.” But when he heard this, he became sad, for he was very rich. Jesus looked at him and said, “How hard it is for those who have wealth to enter the kingdom of God! Indeed, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God.”—Luke 18:22-25

We usually hear this tale spiritualized in sermons in capitalist America. Money is an idol for this person, the pastor says, and we all must recognize the idols in our own lives and give them up to follow Jesus. Yes and amen, says the wealthy white crowd. We take lots of things literally in the New Testament, like Paul’s metaphors of the atonement, or Jesus’s parables about Hell, but for some reason, this one seems like it MUST NOT be literal. To be clear, Jesus could have been talking about idols as well, but he paid special attention to wealth, power and fame throughout his ministry. As did Paul. So maybe we shouldn’t ignore it.

It seems everywhere you go in America, you’ll find a mega-church using money in a sort of Machiavellian way to “seek and save the lost”. I grew up in the Inland Empire of Southern California where Greg Laurie’s Harvest bumper stickers were on nearly every car we saw. Interestingly, it was always Greg’s name and never Jesus on those cars. Most of them lifted pickup trucks. His church sported a massive campus, with a coffee shop, book store, multiple big screens, and event space for things like stunt shows with professional skate boarders. All of this with the goal of bringing in people by way of money. This is typical for Evangelical mega-churches in America.

These churches function and thrive under the capitalism in America. They are all very well-oiled business machines, taking in donations, investing in strategies that bring in more people, build bigger spaces to accommodate those people, give them content that they want, so they can give more donations. It’s a tried and true method and it works, which is why it continues. The problem is that it’s antithetical to the Way of Jesus. When you attract people to Jesus with money instead of his cruciform message of self-emptying love, you’ll end up with the same warped view of Jesus and the Gospel as the people who sold you on it.

If our gospel message requires selling instead of serving, we’ve rejected the Way of Christ for the way of capitalism, the modern day Babylon. If we’re selling the message of Jesus with wealth, power and influence, what we’re saying is that his Way is in fact inferior to the power that got them to listen to us. This is one of many distortions that has lead America straight into the cold embrace of Christian Nationalism. When we say yes to wealth and power as a means of spreading the message of Jesus, we’ve already rejected the message of Jesus.

So how should we think about wealth? We should see it as a tool to steward and use wisely to serve others. As Jesus said:

distribute the money to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; THEN come, follow me

But this shouldn’t be done foolishly either. We do still live in a Capitalism and money does beget money. Simply giving it away may solve a problem well one time, but it also doesn’t steward the “talents” well. As Paul says:

For I do not mean that there should be relief for others and hardship for you, but it is a question of equality between your present abundance and their need, so that their abundance may also supply your need, in order that there may be equality. As it is written,

“The one who had much did not have too much, and the one who had little did not have too little.” — 2 Corinthians 8:13-15

The goal is equality. Not too much not too little. The churches in Paul’s day were given the task of distributing wealth amongst themselves with the goal of equality, and then also giving to other churches if they needed money. The goal was never for a single church to thrive over and above others as we see in capitalist mega-churches, but for the love and message of Christ to thrive.

To be specific, the problem with using wealth for Evangelism is that is skips a very crucial step: service. The “He Gets Us” campaign shows images of Jesus washing the disciples feet with the goal of showing people what kind of person Jesus was. The irony is that the backers do not, in fact, wash the feet of the oppressed and marginalized. In that same story of Jesus washing feet in John 13, Jesus says this:

I have set you an example, that you also should do as I have done to you.

—John 13:15

Jesus calls his disciples not to run a PR campaign for him, but to serve others in his name. We can’t control what other people think when they see Jesus, no matter how much money we throw at the problem. What we can control is how we use our time, talents and treasures. Are we going to use them generously to wash feet? Or are we going to buy air time sell Jesus?

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One of my favorite songs to sing when I was deep in the Young Restless Reformed movement, Acts 29 to be specific, was In Christ Alone. In the second verse of the song, we hear:

'Til on that cross as Jesus died
The wrath of God was satisfied
For every sin on Him was laid
Here in the death of Christ I live, I live

I found in this song, a comprehensive systematic theology that encapsulated what I thought the gospel. That God in his perfect justice demanded a sacrifice to forgive sins because his wrath had to go somewhere, and thus was poured out on Jesus, is a major tenet of the gospel story for Reformed folks. They might even say this idea is equivalent with the gospel itself. It’s certainly not something you can question.s I came to learn after I left my church though, this “atonement theory”—Penal Substitutionary Atonement (PSA) to be exact—is only one of many ideas throughout church history to explain the cosmic impact of Jesus’s death. Said another way it tries to answer the question: “Why did Jesus have to die?”

If you’re like I was, you may be thinking, penal substitution is the Biblical answer to this question. It’s right there in Romans and Hebrews. How could anyone believe anything different? Well, as it turns out, it’s really only Reformed and Evangelical Protestant Christians who hold the PSA theory of atonement.

After reading a lot of early church fathers, and hearing what they had to say about God and forgiveness, I started to think, maybe God doesn’t actually need a sacrifice to forgive. For those of you who aren’t protestants reading this, this may be a “Well duh” moment for you, but for me it was like waking up and seeing God for the first time.

PSA didn’t come around as a mainstream Christian idea until the Middle Ages under Anselm’s satisfaction theory, which imagined God as a feudal lord whose honor was impugned by sin and needed to be satisfied. John Calvin, a lawyer a few hundred years later, took this idea further. This time it was God’s justice and wrath that needed to be satisfied by a substitution of a perfect sacrifice: Jesus.

temple theology

The idea of the atonement ritual comes from Leviticus 16, and for those of you who haven’t read this yet, it may seem a bit bizarre. Remember this is from a culture over 2000 years ago, so we need to try to set aside our modern sensibilities to understand the intention of this practice. Why was it done in the way it was done? Before we get into the atonement, it’s important to understand how the temple, was laid out. Each component has deep symbolic significance representing the cosmos as ancient Israel understood it.

• The Holy of Holies was a small room that held the Ark of the Covenant, on top of which was the “Mercy Seat” surrounded by angels. This represents heaven, and the throne room of God.

• The Holy Place just outside and separated by a thick curtain between God’s world and ours, represents the created world as it should be. Eden if you will. Where God’s presence dwells with his people. Here we have a lampstand, which has seven branches and gives off unending light representing the seven days of creation and light God brought to the world, taming the chaos. There’s more here too, but we’ll address that another day.

• The rest of the Temple represented the created world that we live in, particularly God’s chosen people of Israel.

None of should be particularly earth shattering, the symbolism is fairly obvious once you think about it. What’s not so obvious, at least to me, and probably Calvin as well, is what the ritual of the atonement was for.

We tend to think of sacrifice in a pagan sense from the influence from GrecoRoman mythology. Frankly I think many early Christians did as well. The conclusions that Christian theologians came to about Jewish customs were often assumed based on non-Jewish tradition. This is an area where anti-semitism is woven into our DNA sadly.

yom kippur

The ritual associated with the Day of Atonement, or Yom Kippur in Hebrew, is described at length in Leviticus 16 but its referenced at length metaphorically in the Epistle to the Hebrews in the New Testament. This is where we get the most clear defense of the PSA stance, but only if we come at the word sacrifice with the pre-supposition that the sacrifice is TO God and the killing of the animal is a substitute for us, who God should have killed.

The basic ritual goes like this:

When the High Priest donned his white clothing, he symbolized a direct messenger of YHWH, a “son of God”, who needed to be first purified with blood, which represented life and provided atonement, restoration to God. (Lev 17:11) In the ritual, the high priest played the role of YHWH for a day, as Fr. James Alison puts it.

The act of spreading blood around the temple was symbolic of God coming out of his high throne, walking among us as in the Garden and healing the created world from the chaos brought by sin.

In this ritual or even liturgy, God is restoring order and peace to a broken world.

THEN the sins of the people were confessed to the scapegoat by the High Priest and NOT killed, by the priest but sent away.

What we tend to think of as the animal being killed in place of Israel is not actually part of the ritual. The blood was a symbol of purification, and the ritual was a symbol for the people of God restoring the world to the way it should be and forgiving (bearing) their sins away.

God does not NEED a human sacrifice to forgive, like pagan gods, he does so freely if we ask.With this interpretation, try reading Hebrews 8-10 with fresh eyes and see if you can spot the symbolism.

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Sources and further reading:

• Stricken by God? Nonviolent Identification and the Victory of Christ — James Alison (Chapter 5)

• Atonement: The Rite of Healing - Margaret Barker

In Matthew 25:46 we see Jesus saying:

And these [who mistreat the “least of these”] will go away into everlasting punishment, but the righteous into eternal life.

Aionios and Aidios

The word for eternal AND everlasting here is aiōnios. Which is only one of two words in Greek translated to eternal or everlasting. The other is aïdios.

The difference, according to Ilaria Ramelli, is that aiōnios is QUALITATIVE of the life after death, as in “other-worldly” and aïdios is QUANTITATIVE, as in actually “without beginning or end”. The Bible NEVER uses aïdios to refer to punishment of humans. So why do we have “eternal” in our translation and believe Hell is eternal? In large part it’s because in the Latin translation of the Bible, the Vulgate, the two words are blended into one: aeternus.

Punishment or correction?

The second word to note is punishment. In Greek this word is kolasis, which according to the early church, was corrective punishment, not retributive. If the author wanted to portray retributive punishment, he would have used timoria. Clement of Alexandria says it like this:

God does not punish [timoria] — because punishment is a retribution of evil for evil — but chastises [kolasis] to help those who are chastised — Clement (Stromateis 7:16:102:1–3)

Does it make sense to say “eternal corrective punishment”? Of course not, for punishment to be corrective, it must have an end point at which you have learned from the punishment. You cannot give a prisoner a life sentence where they will never see the outside of a prison, and also say it’s corrective or restorative. It’s retributive by definition if they are never restored to society. Same thing applies here.

Augustinian catalyst

One of the first and the most prominent church fathers to advocate for hell as eternal torment was Augustine. As it turns out, Augustine was not very proficient in Greek and so built his theology upon the Latin Bible. When he read verses like Matthew 25:46 instead of aiōnios, he read aeternus. So it made sense to him that this punishment for the wicked would be “eternal”, not “otherworldly”, because aeternus does mean eternal how we think of it. Then he wrote popular books about it and influenced the church.

So there you have it. When you read “eternal” or “everlasting” in your Bible (except Romans 1:20 and Jude 1:6 which do use aïdios), in your mind you can switch it to “otherworldly” and probably get a better feel of what the author is saying. Even more than that, we can have hope that, at least according to the authors of the Bible and early church fathers, God is truly just and would not punish humanity eternally for sins committed in a finite lifetime.

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Sources:

• “On First Principles” — Origen

• “City of God” — Augustine

• “On the Soul and Resurrection” — Gregory of Nyssa

• “A Larger Hope, Vol. 1” — Ilaria Rameli

• “That All Shall Be Saved” — David Bentley Hart

Quick Overview

This is just a quick recap of the article, feel free to skip if you’ve read it

The author, Bernard Howard, a pastor of a church in Birmingham, Alabama, poses the question of whether “Gentle Parenting” is Biblical or not. Let me first say that the beginning of the article Howard did a good job up front of acknowledging that there is a wide swath of opinions out there on gentle parenting, and he even agreed with the main premise of the paradigm, which is connecting children with their feelings.

I love those suggestions, and I love the general principle of being aware of children’s feelings and seeking creative ways to avoid treading on them unnecessarily.

However, he sadly went straight into constructing a straw-man of gentle parenting by painting a picture with gentle parenting claims he considers “unbiblical”, and therefore wrong:

1. Bad behavior is caused by feelings produced by environmental, external factors

2. Rewards and punishments only modify surface behavior without addressing inner feelings

You may see these two points and think, “Well yeah those are obvious, how can they be unbiblical?” From Howard’s, and many Evangelical Christian’s point of view, not only does the Bible claim we are sinful from birth, so we are not inherently good, but also that punishment and rewards “are a vital part of that shepherding”. We’ll get to this analogy a bit later.

Howard then goes into a defense of corporal punishment, laying out a frankly terrible exegesis that compares the parent’s role to that of civil authorities and then using such passages as Romans 13:3–4 and 1 Peter 2:14. For the uninitiated, these passages have absolutely nothing to do with parenting nor should they be used as such. He then predictably, links corporal punishment to every possible passage he can find on discipline, and of course the verses in Proverbs about use of the “rod” and it’s his imagined implication that it refers to spanking.

Now let’s get into it a bit.

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Spanking in Proverbs

One of the points Howard makes regarding Proverbs is the “requirement” of using a rod. By this he means spanking or some form of corporal punishment.

Loving parents are biblically required to make use of that rod (Prov. 13:24), and physical punishment is one way to fulfill that requirement.

Howard is quoting the following passage:

Those who spare the rod hate their children,
but those who love them are diligent to discipline them. — Prov. 13:24

However, there’s an even clearer and more direct passage referring to the “rod” that gives a bit more light onto what the above passage is referring to. It’s not surprising, Howard tried to pacify Proverbs by avoiding this passage though:

Do not withhold discipline from your children;
if you beat them with a rod, they will not die.
If you beat them with the rod,
you will save their lives from Sheol. — Prov. 23:13–14

There’s two Hebrew words here which are, in my opinion, horribly interpreted: rod and child/children. Before we dive into these verses, notice that nowhere does it say “spank”, “swat with a hand”, “use a spoon”, etc. It intentionally says to “beat with a rod”. So what is a rod?

This word in Hebrew is shebet and in this context more literally translates to “a large stick with the primary purpose of inflicting violence”. Let’s take a look at the word’s usage throughout the Old Testament.

And [Beneniah] killed an Egyptian, a man of great stature, five cubits tall. The Egyptian had in his hand a spear like a weaver’s beam, but Benaiah went against him with a shebet, snatched the spear out of the Egyptian’s hand, and killed him with his own spear. — 1 Chron. 11:23

You shall break them with a shebet of iron and dash them in pieces like a potter’s vessel.” — Ps. 2:9

Even though I walk through the darkest valley, I fear no evil, for you are with me; your shebet and your staff, they comfort me. — Ps 23: 4

Notice though that the shebet (or rod) is juxtaposed to the staff. The staff was used for gently leading sheep, but the rod was used to ward off wolves and predators of those sheep. It was never used against the sheep.

Each of these passages views the rod/shebet as a violent force of correction against enemies of God or those who sin against him or innocent people, in David’s case (the writer of these Psalms) there was that incident with Bathsheba. Now let’s look at the word in Proverbs for child/children to get some context.

There are a few words translated to “child” in Hebrew, most notably: yeled and na’ar. With very few exceptions in the Hebrew Bible, na’ar is a young man capable of marrying and going out to war and a yeled is a baby, toddler, or little kid. Generally what we think of as a child. Some examples:

And the na’ar [Shechem, the guy who raped Dinah] did not delay to do the thing because he was delighted with Jacob’s daughter. Now he was the most honored of all his family. — Gen. 34:19

Immediately he called to the na’ar who carried his armor and said to him, “Draw your sword and kill me, so people will not say about me, ‘A woman killed him.’ ” So the na’ar thrust him through, and he died. — Judges 9:54

Then the king [David] said to Joab, “Very well, I grant this; go, bring back the na’ar Absalom [the son who tried to kill David].” — 2 Sam. 14:21

This word na’ar is the one used here in Proverbs, not yeled.

To recap, a na’ar in the mind of the writer of this proverb, is old enough to be capable of rape, murder, and usurping a king. The proverb is addressing very serious issues in a wayward young man, that are probably criminal in nature, or at least trending in that direction. That’s why the writer adds you will save him from Sheol, the Hebrew word for the land of the dead.

So na’ar is not a little kid, toddler, or an infant. A rod is not spanking. You cannot take the rod as a “symbol” and also ignore that the target of that “rod” is not who want to use it on.

Now let me be clear, this idea is prevelant in Evangelical circles. Howard referenced a book by Tedd Tripp called “Shepherding a Child’s Heard” which uses his same logic with Proverbs to justify spanking children as young as 8 months old! Here’s a quote from Tripp’s book that Howard endorses:

When your child is old enough to resist directives, he is old enough to be disciplined [spanked]… Rebellion can be something as simple as a small child struggling against a diaper change or stiffening his body when you want him to sit on your lap. Your temptation will be to wait until your children are speaking and able to articulate their rebellion before you deal with it.

When our oldest child was approximately 8 months old…obviously he was old enough to be disciplined [spanked].

— Tedd Tripp, Shepherding a Child’s Heard pp 151–152

Nothing about the “discipline procedure” Tripp outlines for spanking, is Christ-like. This is unabashed child abuse masquerading as “Biblical Parenting”. All this is doing to a baby or toddler’s brain is telling them you, as a parent, cannot be trusted. This is fear based parenting, which is — if I may borrow the phrase — “unbiblical”.

There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear; for fear has to do with punishment, and whoever fears has not reached perfection in love. We love because he first loved us. — 1 John 4:18–19

Jesus as a Gentle Parent

It fascinates me how quickly Evangelicals use a few Old Testament verses to normalize their desire for violence and exclusion, and ignore the example of Jesus. If we want to follow Jesus we must take his example of self-sacrificial love and justice for the oppressed seriously. Hitting a child whose brain has not fully developed (or any other kind of violence) is diametrically opposed to the teachings and example of Jesus.

The best example of gentle parenting in the Bible is shown through Jesus’s interactions with his disciples, they certainly messed up over and over again. Did he ever hit them or use violence of any kind? Abosolutely not.

When one of the disciples attacked the servant of the High Priest in Luke 22:50–51, did Jesus slap him upside the head? Did he take the sword and cut off the disciples ear because, as Howard claims:

From the Bible’s point of view, it’s impossible to shape a child’s character without demonstrating the seriousness of wrongdoing through retributory punishment.

Quite the opposite. In fact, Jesus says:

“No more of this!” And he touched his ear and healed him.

Jesus stopped the cycle of violence with forgiveness and gentleness. That’s the point of gentle parenting.

Many Christians seem to not think of children as fellow people. It’s like Jesus’s commands to “love one another” (John 13:34) or “do to others as you would have them do to you” (Matt. 7:12) stop applying if the “other” is your child. The old adage that children should be seen and not heard is palpable in the behaviorist logic that comes with spanking. Tantrums are a natural part of a child’s brain development, it’s how they are communicating their emotions. Jesus knew this about children, and yet he said:

Let the children come to me, and do not stop them, for it is to such as these that the kingdom of God belongs. Truly I tell you, whoever does not receive the kingdom of God as a little child will never enter it.— Luke 18:16–17

It’s our job as parents to help our children regulate those emotions in a healthy way. It’s our job as Christians to view the Bible through a Christ-centered lens.

We can find any passage in the Bible that we want to justify any number of heinous acts from beating our children, to owning and beating slaves (Exodus 21:20–21), to stoning our own child if they are stubborn and rebellious (Deut. 21:18–21). We don’t have to disregard these passages, but we must read them in the historical context of a violent and tribal society of the Ancient Near East. We can’t just pick and choose which Bible verses we want to apply to our context because they align with our existing biases and identity politics.

About gentle parenting…

So does the Bible support gentle parenting as we know it today? Of course not. It was written thousands of years ago in an extremely different culture. Hopefully we’ve advanced beyond using Proverbs from the 5th century BCE for parenting advice today. The Bible can provide wisdom, but we also must use wisdom to determine how, and if, to use certain passages in our context.

We can use wisdom to say, maybe there are definitely some good aspects to gentle parenting. Maybe this child psychology thing is worth listening to. Maybe, perish the thought, Child Psychologists might know more about child brain development then the conventional wisdom of the patriarchal and violent Ancient Near East…or your local evangelical pastor.

These same folks, who know far more than Bernard Howard or Tedd Tripp about the brain, say that spanking has the same effect on a child’s brain as more severe child abuse.

We know that spanking is not effective and can be harmful for children’s development and increases the chance of mental health issues. With these new findings, we also know it can have potential impact on brain development, changing biology, and leading to lasting consequences.

As Christians, we center our lives around the person and work of Jesus. And Jesus showed us through his example what it meant to not exchange violence (like a tantrum) for violence (a spank). If we are truly following Jesus, we will take up our cross, not our rod.

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1. Homosexuality as an orientation is a modern concept

2. This passage is about ethics not salvation.

3. The word Paul uses doesn’t imply a blanket prohibition of all same-sex intercourse for all time but HIS view of what it meant in HIS time.

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Before we start, let’s look at the passage in question out of context as so many tend to do. Then we’ll add context as we go:

Or do you not know that the unrighteous will not inherit the kingdom of God? Do not be deceived: neither the sexually immoral, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor men who practice homosexuality, nor thieves, nor the greedy, nor drunkards, nor revilers, nor swindlers will inherit the kingdom of God.

— 1 Corinthians 6:9–10 ESV

homosexuality and modernity

First and foremost the term “homosexuality” is a modern term only really invented in the 1800s and baked into its definition is the understanding that people can be solely attracted to the same sex. This is a very modern idea that would have been foreign to Paul. In fact the word homosexual(ity) wasn’t added to the English Bible until 1946 in the RSV, then eventually removed in the NRSV as mistranslation. That’s not before other modern Bibles like the NLT and ESV used the RSV as a baseline and kept the word alive. In Paul’s day however, same-sex interactions meant something very different than they do today. The idea of a consenting monogamous gay or queer relationship wouldn’t have even crossed his mind.

So as a thought experiment, do I believe Paul would have supported gay marriage if he time-travelled as an adult to 21st century? No, probably not. But then again I also don’t think he’d support capitalism, mega-churches and lots of other modern ideas. However, I do believe that if Paul was born in today’s culture and had his conversation experience in modern times, he would have been affirming of monogamous same-sex relationships. They can, and often are, in line with Christ’s message of loving one another sacrificially, the same way monogamous heterosexual relationships can be, so there would be no reason not to.

salvation or ethics?

1 Corinthians 6:9 is not about salvation. Paul is not, at least primarily, talking about heaven here or who gets in, nor is he talking about behaviors that limit one’s ability to be a Christian. If he was, it would be in direct opposition to his primary thesis Romans and Galatians that we are saved through faith in Christ and not by works of the Law. This verse however, is set within the larger context of 1 Corinthians 6:1–11, which is all about the very practical matter of who can settle disputes among believers.

Paul had the idea that the kingdom of God was not some far off place, or even the afterlife, but it would come to earth, even in his lifetime, and that believers would meet Christ in the clouds to usher in the kingdom.

According to the Lord’s word, we tell you that we who are still alive, who are left until the coming of the Lord, will certainly not precede those who have fallen asleep. For the Lord himself will come down from heaven, with a loud command, with the voice of the archangel and with the trumpet call of God, and the dead in Christ will rise first. After that, we who are still alive and are left will be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air. And so we will be with the Lord forever. Therefore encourage one another with these words.

— 1 Thessalonians 4:15–18

Notice how he uses the word “we” including himself among the those who are left until the second coming. He further thought that believers in Christ would have a special role in this new kingdom to execute judgments and even judge angels.

If any of you has a dispute with another, do you dare to take it before the ungodly for judgment instead of before the Lord’s people? Or do you not know that the Lord’s people will judge the world? And if you are to judge the world, are you not competent to judge trivial cases? Do you not know that we will judge angels? How much more the things of this life!

— 1 Corinthians 6:1–3

The idea he was trying to get across to the Corinthian church is that the ethics of the Kingdom of God is higher than that of the “ungodly” and if they can’t judge fairly between themselves, how are they going to do it in the Kingdom? So with that in mind 1 Corinthians 6:9–10 is a list of types of people who, to his audience, would obviously not share this kingdom ethic. But homosexuality stands out like a sore thumb in that list if we view it from our own lens. What was so wrong with it?

first century homosexuality

Paul uses two words here to talk about homosexuality: malakoi and arsenokoitai, literal translated “soft” and “male-bedders”. Top and bottom so to speak. Arsenokoitai is only used twice in the Bible, here and 1 Timothy 1:10, and only in lists of ungodly behavior so it’s hard to get an idea exactly what it means. It seems to have its roots in Leviticus 18:22 and 20:13, the prohibition against male-male intercourse from the the Septuigint (Greek Old Testament): arsenos (male) and coites (bed).

It seems obvious he’s talking about male-male intercourse, but what kind of behavior would he have in mind that would prevent a person who engaged in this behavior from judging fairly? To see that, we need to look at two things:

1. What was prohibited in Leviticus? If Paul is referring to it, it must have something to do with Leviticus.

2. Why was this relevant to Paul’s day? His audience must have had some idea what he meant and it would have been relevant to them.

If we look at the larger context of Leviticus 18:22 and 20:13 we see that they are in a section of Torah called the Holiness Codes (ch. 17–26). Zooming in, we see both these sections are surrounded by both cultural taboos like incest and idolatry, like offering children to Molech or beastiality. While we can’t say for certain, it seems that the primary concern of the prohibition of same-sex behavior in Leviticus is more about idolatry than a taboo, though it was certainly that as well.

Side tangent: the word often translated to “abomination” is the word toevah, which was something that was taboo or unclean from a particular culture’s point of view.

They served him by himself, the brothers by themselves, and the Egyptians who ate with him by themselves, because Egyptians could not eat with Hebrews, for that is toevah to Egyptians. — Genesis 43:32

We can see idolatry is probably the bigger concern here, not only because these passages are both in the same section as idol worship, but because idolatry is a central theme throughout the Old Testament both in the Torah and Prophets. There were many cultures surrounding ancient Israel and even that captured it that were known to have idolatrous cultic same sex practices, such as Babylonians, Assyrians and Hittites.

Guess what?

The same is true for Corinth, the target of the letter to the Corinthians.

Many cities in the ancient Hellenized world had protector gods. For the Corinthians, that was the goddess Aphrodite, of sexual love and beauty. Her cultic worshippers would frequently meet to engage in orgies that often involved same-sex prostitution.

According to Strabo a Greek philosopher and geographer:

The temple of Aphrodite [in Korinthos in the days of the tyrant Kypselos] was so rich that it owned more than a thousand temple slaves, courtesans, whom both men and women had dedicated to the goddess. And therefore it was also on account of these women that the city was crowded with people and grew rich; for instance, the ship captains freely squandered their money, and hence the proverb, ‘Not for every man is the voyage to Korinthos.’ . . . Now the summit [of the Akrokorinthos] has a small temple of Aphrodite; and below the summit is the spring Peirene . . . At any rate, Euripides says, ‘I am come, having left Akrokorinthos that is washed on all sides, the sacred hill-city of Aphrodite.’ — Strabo, Geography 8. 6. 20 (trans. Jones)

These temple slaves, or prostitutes, would have included young men or boys. This may be why Martin Luther translated this word to die Knabenshänder (boy violator) in his 1534 translation to German. Even though he had his own biases toward homosexuals, he still chose this word for this passage as well as the passage it references in Leviticus.

Wisset ihr nicht, daß die Ungerechten das Reich Gottes nicht ererben werden? Lasset euch nicht verführen! Weder die Hurer noch die Abgöttischen noch die Ehebrecher noch die Weichlinge noch die Knabenschänder — 1 Corithians 6:9 (LUT)

Paul more than likely understood same-sex intercourse in his time and place as something that was intimately related to idolatry, prostitution and domination. Not exactly kingdom ethics or loving someone else as yourself. And therefore, and this is the point, not someone you’d want to have settling disputes between people who were part of the kingdom.

So can someone be a practicing LGBTQ+ Christian? In my opinion, absolutely. The same ethics of self-sacrificial, covenantal love apply to queer and cishet Christians alike. The only thing that determines someone’s standing before God is faith in Christ. As Paul says in Romans 10:9

If you declare with your mouth, “Jesus is Lord,” and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved. — Romans 10:9 NIV

There’s no condition of heterosexuality. Everything we read in the Bible must be read in historical and linguistic context, if we are to take the text seriously. It takes WISDOM to take an ancient letter like this one and apply its message to our lives today. We must try to understand its context and interpret what it is saying in light of Christ’s command to love one another as ourselves.

Sources and further reading:

• “Bible, Gender, Sexuality” — James Brownson

• “Changing our Minds ”— David P Gushee

• “Unclobber” — Colby Martin

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context

Any time you read the Bible, you can’t just pluck verses out of context. If you want the true meaning, you need to read them in light of the rest of the chapter and book in their historical context. So with that said let’s look at Roman 1-3 in context.

• Rom 1:16-17 Paul makes his intro about righteousness and faith in God

• Rom 1:18-32 Paul describes the consequences of not being faithful to God. This section is referencing a list of known awful behaviors that both Jews and Gentiles would have seen as obviously unjust.

• Rom 2:1 flips the script and and specifically says “you have no excuse, everyone of you who judges because you are no better”

• The rest of Rom 2 talks about how Gentiles often do the law well without even having a law but sometimes Jews who have the law don’t do it.

• This is all leading up to his main point, illustrated in Rom 3:23 where he says “for all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God”, then poses the solution to the problem of sin in the person and work of Jesus. It might help to think of this this as “both” as in “both Jews and Gentiles have sinned”.

There’s a lot to unpack here but for now what’s important is understanding that Paul’s key message is uniting Jews and Gentiles in a diverse church under the single banner of Christ understanding they are all in need of a savior. All this to say that Rom 1:26-27 is just a very small part of his larger point, and certainly not his main point.

injustice & idolatry

Now that we have an overview of the context, let’s go back to v18 and talk about that word unrighteousness. In English this gives the impression it’s talking about personal piety like not sex before marriage, etc. but in Greek this work is adikia which more accurately translates to injustice or treating someone else poorly or unfairly. The impious don’t get off the hook either because the word before it, asebia, does actually mean impious. But it’s important to understand the distinction.

So in v18-23 Paul is saying that because of their injustice, they suppressed the truth of the goodness of God replacing it with idols and God gave them up to the lusts of their heart. So idolatry is primary here and all the following sins are in that context. As an aside, it’s interesting to note here that when Paul refers to wrath of God (orge theou), as he does in the rest of Romans, he’s using that phrase to describe earthly consequences of sin here and now, not eschatology. Not hell.

back to the torah

Now for verse 26. Women exchanged natural relations for unnatural. On the surface this looks an awful lot like he’s talking about lesbianism, but that would be the only place that was addressed in the entire Bible. In the Torah however there were two other types of unnatural relations for women, namely incest and bestiality in Lev 18 and 20 so that’s what would have come to mind for the Paul’s Jewish audience.

In verse 27 he references men having sex with other men, also likely harkening back to Lev 18 and 20 so we need to understand what this meant in this context. The priestly holiness codes in chapters 17-26 were designed to separate Israel from its surrounding neighbors, many of which engaged in male cult prostitution, as a form of idolatry. This lines up with the idolatry requirement but is that really what was going on in Rome at the time? Maybe but maybe not. This could be referring to the dominant form of same sex relationship at the time which was pederasty or it could be a bit more specific. 

what is caesar’s

We don’t know precisely what Paul was referring to but it absolutely was not referring to homosexuality. The reason we know this is simple. Homosexuality is defined as an attraction to the same sex and not to the opposite. Gay men do not switch from being attracted to female to males, yet that’s exactly what’s happening here. Being homosexual is not the result of idolatry or passion, yet that’s what Paul is talking about.

In v27 it says the men gave up, or abandoned relationships with women, this presumes they had them before. This indicates Paul is talking about something more akin to sexual gluttony or insatiability, sort of like a sex addiction. Imagine someone who is straight that has sex with anything that walks simply because they can. It’s about power, lust, idolatry and domination.

One phrase in here that’s also always bothered me until recently is at the end of v27 where it says they received the due penalty for their error. I was wrongly told that this was referring to STDs or something, but there’s no evidence to show that people from the first century had any idea that STDs could be related to homosexual acts, or even that STDs of that kind existed. This is what’s called an eisegesis, or using interpretation that introduces a presupposition. So what does this phrase actually mean? Frankly it’s just not clear.

One theory that I think is compelling comes from Neil Elliot’s book  “The Arrogance of Nations”. He suggests that Paul is referring specifically to the Caesars in Rome who at the time were known for their flagrant disregard of justice and sexual morality, but particularly Gaius Caligula. The Jewish historian Josephus speaks at length about how he not only had insatiable lust, but slept with his sisters, had domineering sex with men in his court and was murdered for it just before the letter to the Romans was sent. 

Paul’s point is to find the worst of the worst that everyone knows is bad, in the first chapter, as a setup before 2:1 saying, you are no better, you who judge because all have sinned and are in need of a savior, who is Jesus Christ.

Any way you look at it, if you think about it for just a minute, especially with some historical context, this passage is not talking about a monogamous, consensual homosexual relationships. This passage is about unity through the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. Jesus is Lord, not Caesar.

One of the things that I believe has done significant damage to the world is Christians taking the Bible passages out of context, especially when we weaponize them to cause harm to others. Whether that means keeping women in subordinate positions in the house or church, justifying racial injustice, marginalization of the LGBTQ+ community or just generally taking Christ’s name in vain by emphasizing judgment and sin over love and compassion. Misuses of the Bible on a grander scale have lead to the Crusades, Spanish Inquisition, Salem witch trials, Holocaust, Christian Nationalism and persecution of non-Christian religions. This has to stop.

So to start, allow me to briefly introduce myself and my faith journey. I was raised in a conservative but divorced Christian home, my mom was a devout conservative Calvinist and my dad, a more liberal Presbyterian. I went to a Calvary Chapel high school and a Baptist university where I frequently defended tenants of Calvinism including total depravity, predestination, and penal substitutionary atonement (if you don’t know what that means, I’m sure we’ll get to it). 

Over the past several years I’ve been rethinking a lot of what I believe and recently left a fundamentalist evangelical church after I could no longer support their stance on several secondary theological issues which they made primary to the faith. This made me start asking questions, deconstructing my faith, reading tons of books, and scholarly research around theology, the early church fathers, GrecoRoman time period, and Judaism. As a security engineer professionally, I also took this opportunity to read the source code of the Bible, as it were, and learned Hebrew and Greek (though I’m still very much a beginner).

The first thing God uses to describe his creation in the Genesis poem (Gen. 1) is tov (good). He uses this word at the end of each day and finally, after he made humanity, he calls his completed creation tov meh’ode (exceedingly good). Humanity is made in God’s image. We are very good. Christ showed us the true extent of what that means when he died on a cross for the sins of his enemies showing the epitome of sacrificial love. Yet the most hateful vitriol I see often on social media comes from Christians, and often toward other Christians.

As a security engineer, I’m often using a terminal, you know the black and green screen you see in all the cheesy hacker movies. In several operating systems there’s a special operator called the “pipe”, which is represented by a straight vertical bar “|”. This operator will take whatever the output of the program on the left and “pipe” it to the input of the program on the right.

I call this space tov | theology as a reminder of who we ALL are, image bearers of God, and that we should “pipe” that conscious awareness into every corner of our theology.

The Christian church has too often traded tov for power, and the tools to gain it are fear, guilt and shame. We seem to have missed Jesus’ warnings to the hypocrites and don’t realize that the only path to salvation is through trusting that Jesus is Lord and following his command to sacrificially love one another. As Jesus himself said in Mark 12:29-31:

“The most important [commandment],” answered Jesus, “is this: ‘Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one. Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.’ The second is this: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ There is no commandment greater than these.

The apostle John goes further and shows that these two are inseparable in 1 John 4:19-21

We love because he first loved us. Whoever claims to love God yet hates a brother or sister is a liar. For whoever does not love their brother and sister, whom they have seen, cannot love God, whom they have not seen. And he has given us this command: Anyone who loves God must also love their brother and sister.

My goal is to de-weaponize the Bible and read it in context. Through that, hopefully, we can find the tov at the heart of scripture again and learn to love one another as Christ first loved us.

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