A New Kind of Christianity - Brian McLaren [87]
The constitutional reading of the Bible has been amazingly resilient. After vehemently rejecting the proposals of Copernicus and Galileo, its defenders learned to ignore the texts their forefathers had previously used against the astronomical innovators (Eccl. 1:4–6; Pss. 93:1; 104:5; 2 Kings 20:11; Josh. 10:12–14). Later defenders also learned to forgive their leaders and founders for being “men of their times,” and along with forgiving they often forgot how wrong their leaders had been. So Protestants forgave Luther, who called Copernicus “an upstart astrologer” in a 1539 “table talk.” And they forgave Melanchthon, who accused the “pernicious” defenders of Copernicus of being deluded by “a love of novelty, display of ingenuity…a lack of honesty and decency.” Calvinists forgave Calvin, who asked, “Who will venture to place the authority of Copernicus above that of the Holy Spirit?” And Catholics forgave the Congregation of the Index of the Roman Catholic Church, which in 1616 banned Copernicus’s ideas as “false and altogether opposed to Holy Scripture” and incompatible with “Catholic truth”—a ban that was not reversed until the nineteenth century. Forgiveness of this sort may be kind. But isn’t failing to learn from the mistakes of our heroes and founders a rather important missed opportunity? Doesn’t that kind of amnesia about our leaders’ mistakes increase the odds that we might repeat them?
Practitioners of the constitutional approach have repeatedly followed a four-stage pattern regarding several appearances that turned out to be reality: the discovery of fossils indicating an ancient earth; Darwin’s theory of evolution; slavery, segregation, and apartheid; and the rights of women to vote and lead in state and church. First they oppose, condemn, and reject new approaches. Then they modify and make small concessions. Then they go silent for a while, and finally they tolerate and accept what they once condemned.6
There’s evidence this pattern is at work regarding homosexuality today. Many of us remember when nearly all conservative Christians said homosexuality was simply a perverted choice and therefore a damning abomination. Case closed. Oppose, condemn, reject. Then more and more leaders modified their previous view by acknowledging that there is an unchosen orientation involved—orientation being a category completely unrecognized in Scripture, by the way. During this stage there was a lot of “love the sinner, hate the sin” talk. Initially, these Christian leaders asserted that the orientation must be healed through prayer and therapy. But then when a large percentage of purported healings proved temporary, religious authority figures capitulated to a “cross to bear” approach in which the orientation must be borne through celibacy, repression of the homosexual urge being the goal rather than healing, as before. Now some have begun to reduce the vehemence or frequency of their pontifications on the subject, and many have gone silent altogether. Many leaders have told me they privately dissent from the conventional view, even though their silence maintains the appearance of support. During this latency period, the abomination-become-orientation is being destigmatized, so gay unions are increasingly seen as inevitable