(This tile is in honor of the fact that I'm an incurable "yinzer" [those who say "tinz" rather than "y'all"] from Western Pennsylvania. That's the way we talk, and it means, "And that")
Life in a fallen world batters all of us in one way or another and there is no escape from this condition so long as we have pulses and continue to engage in the respiratory exchange of carbon-dioxide for oxygen. And while this may sound like some controversial theological assertion, it is one so well attested across the broad spectrum of life that even Sir Mick and the Rolling Stones have observed that, "you can't always get what you want, but if you try real hard, you will find, you get what you need."
The interplay of this notion combined and re-combined with current events and popular sentiment have been bouncing around the inside of my skull for the better part of this past Spring and unfolding Summer. It has all un-spooled in my head as I watch and hear a seemingly endless stream secular and ecclesiastical advocacy and counter-advocacy proposing or opposing establishment and recognition of homosexual marriage in the civil and sacred spheres. This has been doubled and re-doubled within this past week as Chick-Fil-A founder and CEO S. Truett Cathy’s comments in opposition to homosexual marriage have sparked a veritable barrage of charges, counter-charges and salvos of either boycott threats or enduring promises to eat only “Christian” waffle-fries and fried chicken sandwiches.
Now for me, a theologically-orthodox and conservative mainline Protestant clergyman (almost an oxymoron by definition), living in an increasingly libertarian/libertine secular Western nation, these discussions are of the highest importance because of their capacity to harm a great many people who cannot (in my estimation) perceive their own peril.
I know, recognize and appreciate that the tide of the civil debate is turning against me and that increasingly I am culturally, philosophically, theologically and politically “on the other side” of these issues. And, in and of itself, this doesn’t particularly bother me; I’ve spent so much time outside of the main-stream on so many different issues that I’m fairly comfortable living my life on the margins — the fringe.
In argument, discussion and debate, I am generally able to make at least a semi-competent and somewhat persuasive case for my contrastive and competing intellectual/philosophical positions. The “rough-and-tumble” of debate has never bothered nor dissuaded me from articulating the positions I hold, and I even relish a good argument when conducted within the bounds of common civility, the basic laws of logical discourse and the mutual respect owed to all human beings possessed of the Imago Dei (the Image of God) resident within each of us — no matter how badly defaced by our common fallen nature it may have been rendered.
I can even be a gracious loser when I’m not in the majority — or, at least, I am in the sense of being the loyal gadfly and a loving but frustrated announcer of jeremiads (kind of like British minority parliamentarians giving the Prime Minister a collective “Razzberry” during the weekly “Question time”).
But then this Summer IT happened. We officially “flashed over” in our collective definition of “tolerance” from its being a mutual toleration of each others existence, views and peculiarities without violence or undue molestation to a new definition that stresses our need to “fully accept, embrace and even applaud” those peculiarities — even when we disagree and seriously believe that critical warnings against immanent danger and harm are required. From a practical standpoint, this means that those of us who do not support the notion of homosexual marriage equality because we find it [a] nonsensical, [b] logically and ontologically (the reason for being) non-existent, and [c] dangerous to the temporal and eternal well-being of the very people seeking its institution, are labeled as “haters” and “fear-mongers” for the very reason of our disagreement.
This may sound reactionary on my part (and in some measure it probably is), but let us consider several latent facts lying-about on the ground around us. For the better part of the past three decades the made-up term “homophobe” has been bandied about and applied to anyone who disagreed, for any reason, with the progress of normalization and intellectual assent (not mere toleration) to homosexual practice and its attendant lifestyles (yes, I’m fully willing and ready to admit that the “LGBTQ community” is far from monolithic). Now, let’s look at the definition of the term asserted: “homophobe” means “fear of homosexuality and of homosexuals.”
I have never feared homosexuality nor homosexuals in the way in which many of society's and the church's most strident “movement-advocacy” groups and individuals have asserted. I do not believe that if I come in contact with a gay or lesbian individual that I am somehow polluted, corrupted or infected. I will not suddenly become gay the day-after-tomorrow.
The other “big accusation” against those of us protesting this process of normalization is that we are “haters”. Haters of what and of whom? I realize that the very term “hater” has come into vogue in the standard English lexicon, but it is such a ridiculous and monumentally inexact “verbal-noun” that its very premise is fatally flawed when used against anyone other than such misanthropes (haters of humanity) as a Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot, or Kim Jong-Il who genuinely detest what it means to be human apart from their warped and un-natural definition.
And, again, I have never hated homosexuals.
I will, however (for the sake of argument) admit to being a “hater” — if that is the term folks insist on applying to those who detest and oppose a set of lifestyles choices that we find morally objectionable and eternally dangerous.
Now, let me “un-pack” what I just said: I find homosexuality, as a self-embraced and practiced lifestyle to be “detestable” because of the harm it is capable of causing (I believe at an eternal and ontological level) to people about whom I care greatly and for whom I have profound respect on account of that very “Image of God” within them. I fear that they are harming themselves. Similarly, I detest the “lifestyles” of murderers, molesters, alcoholics, idolaters, adulterers, fornicators, thieves, perennial gossips, cheaters, frauds, misanthropes, etc. of every stripe and kind. But this opposition to any of the above-enumerated behaviors is rooted not in self-adulatory or self-righteous moralism. It is, instead, utterly rooted in my self-awareness and-understanding as a horrible sinner saved by God’s grace alone extended through the propitiatory (that which removes God’s anger) sacrifice of Jesus of Nazareth upon a Roman cross at the instigation of the Second-Temple Jewish Sanhedrin.
To have such a self-awareness and -perception means that one is desperately far from considering him-or herself any better than anyone else. Rather, it means that the individual in question sees him- or herself as having been rescued from a life of “eternal spiritual and moral death and decay” by someone else. This self-understanding further requires an entirely new lifestyle of worship, thanksgiving, gratitude, positive discipleship, a constant repentance for the grievous wrongs we commit everyday, and a new and developing desire to act differently and proclaim the hope we’ve found to those who have not yet heard that great and abiding news.
This is precisely the understanding, awareness and attitude commended by the Apostle Paul to his disciple and protégé, Timothy, when he says in I Timothy 1:8-17 (ESV):
Life in a fallen world batters all of us in one way or another and there is no escape from this condition so long as we have pulses and continue to engage in the respiratory exchange of carbon-dioxide for oxygen. And while this may sound like some controversial theological assertion, it is one so well attested across the broad spectrum of life that even Sir Mick and the Rolling Stones have observed that, "you can't always get what you want, but if you try real hard, you will find, you get what you need."
The interplay of this notion combined and re-combined with current events and popular sentiment have been bouncing around the inside of my skull for the better part of this past Spring and unfolding Summer. It has all un-spooled in my head as I watch and hear a seemingly endless stream secular and ecclesiastical advocacy and counter-advocacy proposing or opposing establishment and recognition of homosexual marriage in the civil and sacred spheres. This has been doubled and re-doubled within this past week as Chick-Fil-A founder and CEO S. Truett Cathy’s comments in opposition to homosexual marriage have sparked a veritable barrage of charges, counter-charges and salvos of either boycott threats or enduring promises to eat only “Christian” waffle-fries and fried chicken sandwiches.
Now for me, a theologically-orthodox and conservative mainline Protestant clergyman (almost an oxymoron by definition), living in an increasingly libertarian/libertine secular Western nation, these discussions are of the highest importance because of their capacity to harm a great many people who cannot (in my estimation) perceive their own peril.
I know, recognize and appreciate that the tide of the civil debate is turning against me and that increasingly I am culturally, philosophically, theologically and politically “on the other side” of these issues. And, in and of itself, this doesn’t particularly bother me; I’ve spent so much time outside of the main-stream on so many different issues that I’m fairly comfortable living my life on the margins — the fringe.
In argument, discussion and debate, I am generally able to make at least a semi-competent and somewhat persuasive case for my contrastive and competing intellectual/philosophical positions. The “rough-and-tumble” of debate has never bothered nor dissuaded me from articulating the positions I hold, and I even relish a good argument when conducted within the bounds of common civility, the basic laws of logical discourse and the mutual respect owed to all human beings possessed of the Imago Dei (the Image of God) resident within each of us — no matter how badly defaced by our common fallen nature it may have been rendered.
I can even be a gracious loser when I’m not in the majority — or, at least, I am in the sense of being the loyal gadfly and a loving but frustrated announcer of jeremiads (kind of like British minority parliamentarians giving the Prime Minister a collective “Razzberry” during the weekly “Question time”).
But then this Summer IT happened. We officially “flashed over” in our collective definition of “tolerance” from its being a mutual toleration of each others existence, views and peculiarities without violence or undue molestation to a new definition that stresses our need to “fully accept, embrace and even applaud” those peculiarities — even when we disagree and seriously believe that critical warnings against immanent danger and harm are required. From a practical standpoint, this means that those of us who do not support the notion of homosexual marriage equality because we find it [a] nonsensical, [b] logically and ontologically (the reason for being) non-existent, and [c] dangerous to the temporal and eternal well-being of the very people seeking its institution, are labeled as “haters” and “fear-mongers” for the very reason of our disagreement.
This may sound reactionary on my part (and in some measure it probably is), but let us consider several latent facts lying-about on the ground around us. For the better part of the past three decades the made-up term “homophobe” has been bandied about and applied to anyone who disagreed, for any reason, with the progress of normalization and intellectual assent (not mere toleration) to homosexual practice and its attendant lifestyles (yes, I’m fully willing and ready to admit that the “LGBTQ community” is far from monolithic). Now, let’s look at the definition of the term asserted: “homophobe” means “fear of homosexuality and of homosexuals.”
I have never feared homosexuality nor homosexuals in the way in which many of society's and the church's most strident “movement-advocacy” groups and individuals have asserted. I do not believe that if I come in contact with a gay or lesbian individual that I am somehow polluted, corrupted or infected. I will not suddenly become gay the day-after-tomorrow.
The other “big accusation” against those of us protesting this process of normalization is that we are “haters”. Haters of what and of whom? I realize that the very term “hater” has come into vogue in the standard English lexicon, but it is such a ridiculous and monumentally inexact “verbal-noun” that its very premise is fatally flawed when used against anyone other than such misanthropes (haters of humanity) as a Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot, or Kim Jong-Il who genuinely detest what it means to be human apart from their warped and un-natural definition.
And, again, I have never hated homosexuals.
I will, however (for the sake of argument) admit to being a “hater” — if that is the term folks insist on applying to those who detest and oppose a set of lifestyles choices that we find morally objectionable and eternally dangerous.
Now, let me “un-pack” what I just said: I find homosexuality, as a self-embraced and practiced lifestyle to be “detestable” because of the harm it is capable of causing (I believe at an eternal and ontological level) to people about whom I care greatly and for whom I have profound respect on account of that very “Image of God” within them. I fear that they are harming themselves. Similarly, I detest the “lifestyles” of murderers, molesters, alcoholics, idolaters, adulterers, fornicators, thieves, perennial gossips, cheaters, frauds, misanthropes, etc. of every stripe and kind. But this opposition to any of the above-enumerated behaviors is rooted not in self-adulatory or self-righteous moralism. It is, instead, utterly rooted in my self-awareness and-understanding as a horrible sinner saved by God’s grace alone extended through the propitiatory (that which removes God’s anger) sacrifice of Jesus of Nazareth upon a Roman cross at the instigation of the Second-Temple Jewish Sanhedrin.
To have such a self-awareness and -perception means that one is desperately far from considering him-or herself any better than anyone else. Rather, it means that the individual in question sees him- or herself as having been rescued from a life of “eternal spiritual and moral death and decay” by someone else. This self-understanding further requires an entirely new lifestyle of worship, thanksgiving, gratitude, positive discipleship, a constant repentance for the grievous wrongs we commit everyday, and a new and developing desire to act differently and proclaim the hope we’ve found to those who have not yet heard that great and abiding news.
This is precisely the understanding, awareness and attitude commended by the Apostle Paul to his disciple and protégé, Timothy, when he says in I Timothy 1:8-17 (ESV):
- “Now we know that the law is good, if one uses it lawfully, understanding this, that the law is not laid down for the just but for the lawless and disobedient, for the ungodly and sinners, for the unholy and profane, for those who strike their fathers and mothers, for murderers, the sexually immoral, men who practice homosexuality, enslavers, liars, perjurers, and whatever else is contrary to sound doctrine, in accordance with the gospel of the glory of the blessed God with which I have been entrusted.
- “I thank him who has given me strength, Christ Jesus our Lord, because he judged me faithful, appointing me to his service, though formerly I was a blasphemer, persecutor, and insolent opponent. But I received mercy because I had acted ignorantly in unbelief, and the grace of our Lord overflowed for me with the faith and love that are in Christ Jesus. The saying is trustworthy and deserving of full acceptance, that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners, of whom I am the foremost. But I received mercy for this reason, that in me, as the foremost, Jesus Christ might display his perfect patience as an example to those who were to believe in him for eternal life. To the King of the ages, immortal, invisible, the only God, be honor and glory forever and ever. Amen.”
Paul here announces his own culpability, the mercy and grace that have been extended to him, the commission entrusted to him to share this same news with others of like-mind to his former condition. Paul is seen here to be anything other than the misanthropically bigoted misogynist and curmudgeon he is so frequently portrayed as being. Rather, he is the proclaimer of his own sinful idiocy “striving for all he’s worth” to proclaim to other “sinful idiots” that there is genuine hope of real change, healing and life eternal in place of a pre-existing sentence of condemnation and eternal death.
Consider these things in the following manner:
A man or woman may, theoretically, saved him- or herself from choking while sitting in a booth at a restaurant by performing the Heimlich maneuver upon him-or herself against the table’s edge. This would be akin to society’s never-ending affection for self-help and self-improvement schemes. That said, I defy anyone to show me a single case in which someone suffering cardiac arrest has ever performed CPR upon him- or herself. It is not only improbable, but utterly impossible. And this is precisely the place in which every man woman or child who has ever lived finds themselves morally and spiritually. Unless that grace and mercy are applied to our dead, decayed carcasses by an alien and external propitiation and righteousness, we remain dead.
Now, I will here make several concessions for the sake of honesty:
- There are always sinfully self-deceived and self-righteous people who are essentially moralists parading as Christian believers saved by the grace of God alone. They stand as condemned as any other until they receive the grace extended by Jesus Christ alone. Fred Phelpps is incapable of extending grace because he has so obviously never received it himself.
- Such discussions as this one will always engender difficulty, discomfort, distrust, and disharmony, but if we are to honestly understand each other and practice genuine toleration rather than a merely anemic and truncated “tolerance”, then we MUST grapple with them and extend to each other the acceptance of the Imago Dei in each other.
- Many poly-theists, agnostics, non-theists, atheists, secularists, Non-Trinitarian Theists and others will reject my essential Trinitarian Theistic starting premise --- that God is self-existent and has created all of humanity in His own image, and that this created universe (and all within it) are irretrievably fallen and broken apart from God’s grace and forgiveness. Because of this, many will, by good and necessary consequence, reject the notion of the Imago Dei; and yet, unless and until they invent some other similar construct, we will never arrive at mutual respect and care for each other as people.
These are the core beliefs that I hold, promote and pronounce. For me, they are the very sine qua non (that without which, nothing) of my existence. I have been placed in the very town in which I graduated from college because, at some cosmic level, God has a sense of humor and decided to return me to “the scene of the crime”, even as He sent out Paul to announce that same Gospel before me.
So to return to my opening theme, I realize fully that “I can’t always get what I want”, but I DID “get what I need”. I may well lose the battle against civil and ecclesiastical recognition of homosexual marriage, but my core conviction remains un-altered because I must offer allegiance to my King, Jesus Christ. Similarly, those who oppose where I stand will not get what they want, either. I remain unconvinced that homosexual marriage is an ontological possibility, and I will stand opposed. But I hope and pray that they will find that same grace that was freely given to me by God when I did not deserve it, and I continue to hope this precisely because I care so deeply for them. And, when it comes to genuine hatred and INTOLERANCE (of the classical variety) handed to any, I will stand with them against it!
May the Triune God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, of His great and enduring mercy extend grace to us all in genuine encounters with Him.
