A New Kind of Christianity - Brian McLaren [88]
3. The image of God as violent or even genocidal comes into play when people claim that God chooses one tribe and rejects or considers inferior other classes or types of people simply for being who they are—whether they’re Gentiles, Jews, women, nonwhites, non-Christians, or gays. Although this kind of favoritism may seem unfair, the line or argument goes: “God is God, and so whatever God does is automatically fair. Who are you to question it?” This “might makes right” kind of argument may seem arbitrary, but it’s simple, and it can be defended by a constitutional reading of the Bible.
You won’t find many motivations more visceral than fear of an angry God, especially the fear of being demoted by God from the high, bright status of the elect and elite to the low, dark status of the apostate and damned. And if your view of God involves a lot of smiting, it’s all the more risky to change it. So if God considers homosexuality a smiteable abomination, sympathizing with the damned takes either a lot of courage or a lot of stupidity. Either way, under the influence of that vision of God, it’s much easier to stay loyal to the lucky heterosexual tribe favored by the tribal God, letting the chips fall where they may for those so unfortunate as to have been born different.
But if our view of God is transformed by seeing Jesus the crucified as the image of God in whom the fullness of God dwells in human form (as Paul does in Col. 1) and as the radiance of God’s glory and the exact representation of God’s person (as in Heb. 1), then God has been best self-revealed not in the smiter, but in the one being smitten. In a crucified man, God demonstrates supreme solidarity not with rejecters and excluders, but with the ones who are rejected and excluded, not with humiliators and shamers, but with the ones who are humiliated and shamed. And in that light, it becomes more difficult to cast the first stone at the “sexually other.”
4. The issue of Jesus’s identity as ultimate Word of God comes into play as well. If Jesus’s life and example are simply textual data on equal par with Leviticus, and if Jesus can make no claim to be Lord and teacher over Paul, then perhaps the conventional approaches win.7 But if Jesus represents the zenith of God’s self-revelation and the climax of a dynamic biblical narrative, rather than simply one article in a flat and static constitution, Jesus’s treatment of the marginalized and stigmatized requires us to question the conventional approach. We have many examples of Jesus crossing boundaries to include outcasts and sinners and not a single example of Jesus crossing his arms and refusing to do so.8
5. Sexual issues also demand reconsideration when we review the meaning and purpose of the gospel. If the purpose of the gospel is to solve the problem of original sin so souls won’t go to hell, and if homosexuality is seen as a heinous symptom of original sin and therefore a hell-qualifying offense, then homosexuality is indeed a problem that must be solved. But if we discern the purpose of the gospel through Exodus, Genesis, and Isaiah, we discover the dynamic story of God as liberator, creator, and reconciler. From this vantage point, homosexuals and heterosexuals stand equally in need of liberation. Both groups look to God as their creator. And both groups are called to repentance and reconciliation with God and one another in God’s kingdom. The question is complexified from “Is homosexuality right or wrong?” to “How should gay and straight people understand and treat one another in God’s kingdom?”
6. As we saw in the preceding chapter, the previous five questions have a radical bearing on what the church will be and do. The conventional set of answers postures the church as an inherently conservative and change-averse community; the other, as an inherently creative and change-catalytic community. As a change-averse community, the church sees the increasing acceptance of gay folk as yet another slide down a slippery slope toward moral relativism and decay.