"What's that?" you gasp. "A topic that the Bible doesn't conclusively address? A monstrous suggestion!"
Well, not really. Of the controversial topics which have occupied a good deal of my professional and personal life, very few can be said to have the benefit of a clear body of biblical material which one can easily apply in sorting them out. Advice and opinion from equally fair-minded Christians has been all over the map. These issues include, in no particular order:
- Whether there is a Christian way of doing business. Canada's richest and most successful Christian businessperson says that there is not.
- Which political party to support, or even whether to vote at all.
- Whether one should bear arms or participate in war. My conscientious objector father-in-law, and my father who fought in WW2 and later became a cop, might see the matter differently.
- The acceptability of abortion under any circumstances.
- Ditto with euthanasia and physician-assisted suicide.
- Contraception. My Roman Catholic friends have a well-worked out opinion on this which I don't happen to agree with.
- Labour relations and the role of the strike weapon, particularly in the public sector (e.g., strikes by teachers and nurses).
- Vast areas of business ethics.
- Setting up independent, faith-based institutions (I taught at evangelical Trinity Western University for eighteen years, and worked for five years for the Christian Labour Assoc. of Canada, a Christian labour union) versus living out one's faith with integrity within secular and pluralistic systems (I have been a public school trustee for twenty-seven years and lectured at the Univ. of British Columbia).
- Bankruptcy. I wrote a book on this topic and encountered vastly different opinions on its morality both among people of faith and in society generally.
- The role/status of women in church and the family. While this issue is not what it once was (thank goodness), there are still many churches here in Abbotsford (which has over 100 such institutions for a city of approximately 140,000 citizens) where the muzzle is for all intents and purposes still firmly applied when it comes to women preaching/teaching and giving church leadership.
- Capitalism versus socialism versus some other 'ism'. My wife's Mennonite cousin in Waterloo Ontario told me that Mennonites in his area typically vote NDP based on their commitment to social justice. He was gobsmacked when I told him the Mennonites here in British Columbia more often vote Conservative.
- What constitutes "the Gospel".
- Divorce and remarriage.
- The acceptability of drinking alcohol. I side with Jesus on this one and indulge in all forms of the grape. A former academic vice-president at Trinity Western clearly saw such behaviour as sinful and only recently was the outright ban on TWU employees taking a drink finally lifted.
- Whether Hell or Heaven is the default destination for all human beings from birth.
Which brings me back to matters LGBT. What I hope that I've demonstrated is--while taking a high view of the infallibility and relevance of scripture--that whether all forms of sexual relations between people of the same gender are unacceptable to God is not nearly as clear cut as those who boycotted World Vision for a day or two see it to be--quite the opposite in my opinion. When explicit teaching is missing, we have to go with principles, values, and objectives underlying biblical material, and with the broader context within which the teaching occurs.
I know that some of you, despite my best attempts to dissuade you, will go right back to Leviticus and its "unambiguous" teaching in chapters 18 and 20. So I want to take one last crack at the dangers of using of Old Testament legal material to define present-day morality. And I want to do this for the following reason:
Taking Leviticus at its word, we have to say that there were times when Jesus must have been, in his Father's eyes, unclean.
I hope this whets your appetite to read on.
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