What does god think about gays
How Should Christians Respond to Gay Friends or Family Members?
Caleb Kaltenbach (M.A. ’07) is an alumnus of Biola’s Talbot School of Theology, lead pastor of a large church in Simi Valley, Calif., and a married father of two. He’s also an emerging voice in the discussion of how Christians should engage the LGBT community. That’s because Kaltenbach has an insider perspective, having been raised by a dad and mom who divorced and independently came out of the closet as a gay bloke and a sapphic. Raised in the midst of LGBT parties and self-acceptance parades, Kaltenbach became a Christian and a pastor as a young mature person. Today, he manages the tension of holding to the traditional biblical education on sexuality while loving his queer parents.
Kaltenbach’s unique story is detailed in his new novel Messy Grace: How a Pastor with Gay Parents Learned to Love Others Without Sacrificing Conviction and landed him on the front page of the New York Times in June. Biola Magazine reached out to him to talk about his book and his perspective on how Christians can surpass navigate the complexities of this issue with truth and grace.
In your novel you say that it’s time for Christians to hold the iss This article is part of the What Did Jesus Teach? series. In a 2012 article for Slate online, Will Oremus asked a provocative question: Was Jesus a homophobe?1 The article was occasioned by a story about a gay teenager in Ohio who was suing his elevated school after school officials prohibited him from wearing a T-shirt that said, “Jesus Is Not a Homophobe.” Oremus was less concerned about the legal issues of the story than he was about the accuracy of the statement on the shirt. Oremus suggests that Jesus’s views on homosexuality were more inclusive than Paul’s. He writes, While it’s logical to assume that Jesus and his fellow Jews in first-century Palestine would have disapproved of gay sex, there is no record of his ever having mentioned homosexuality, let alone expressed particular revulsion about it. . . . Never in the Bible does Jesus himself propose an explicit prohibition of homosexuality. Oremus seems to suggest that since Jesus never explicitly mentioned homosexuality, he must not have been very concerned about it. There are at least two reasons that we should be skeptical of this view. The following blog is written by Greg Coles. Greg is part of The Center's collaborative team and is the author of the book Single, Homosexual, Christian. “Is God anti-gay?” Many people expect the answer to this question to be a simple binary, either yes or no. If you’re a conservative (in the totalizing sense of the word), the respond is absolutely yes: God must be anti-gay, because same-sex sexual behavior is forbidden in the Bible. And if you’re a progressive (in the equally totalizing sense), the acknowledge is absolutely no: God can’t possibly be anti-gay, because God loves all people. But the assumption shared by everyone across the board seems to be that we comprehend what the question means—that a simple answer, yes or no, ought to suffice as a response. For me, though, the interrogate of whether God is “anti-gay” has never been a simple one. I’ve heard it asked so many different times, in so many different ways, by so many diverse people (myself included). And each time, it seems to mean something slightly different. When someone asks, “Is God anti-gay?”, they might mean, “What does God have to tell about same-sex sexual ethics?” They might mean, “What is God’s stance on the politics of “You shall not lie with a male as with a woman; it is an abomination.”[1] It is not a surprise that this verse seems to say that gay male sex is forbidden in the eyes of God. The dominant view of western Christianity forbids queer relations. This verse is one of the clobber passages that people cite from the Bible to condemn homosexuality. This essay first looks at the various ways the verse is translated into the English Bible and then explores some of the strategies used to create an affirming interpretation of what this corridor means for the LGBTQ community. More specifically, it presents the interpretation of K. Renato Lings in which Lev. 18:22 refers to male-on-male incest. While Lev. 18:22 is used to condemn homosexuality, we must see that the legal title “homosexuality” was only recently coined in the English language. So did this term exist in ancient Israel? Charles D. Myers, Jr. confirms that none of the prophets in the Hebrew Bible mention homosexuality.[2] He also contends that in ancient Israel same-sex relations were viewed as an ancient Adjacent East problem. The ancient Near East tradition included pederasty and relations between an older guy and Silence Equals Support?
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Leviticus 18:22