Response to summary

Peter, thanks for attempting the summary - it’s helpful, though the discussion doesn’t really stay still long enough to summarize.

The church is a ‘sign’ of the kingdom, but not its full expression…

I said that the church is a ‘sign of the ultimate renewal of humanity’, ie. of the new creation, not of the kingdom. I think they would be two rather different things, and I am beginning to suspect that when we talk about the kingdom what we actually mean is the anticipated renewal of creation. I would now associate the term ‘kingdom’ much more with the eschatological crisis at the end of the age of second temple Judaism, the kingdom which is given to the Son of man, the freedom given to the church to serve him openly, acknowledge him as Lord, no longer subject to oppression.

With regard to your point 3: this translation is taken from my post on the other thread: ‘whoever sleeps with a man (arsenos) the marriage-bed / sexual intercourse (koitÄ“) of a woman has done an abomination’ (cf. ESV: ‘If a man lies with a male as with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination’). The ESV phrase ‘lies with a male’ is more complicated in the Greek: koimÄ“thÄ“i meta arsenos koitÄ“n = ‘sleeps with a male the marriage bed’. You virtually have Paul’s word there: arsenokoitÄ“s.

4. The viewpoint as developed then also concurs with the strongest possible condemnations called down upon homosexual expression, especially in the Romans passage.

5. It is difficult then to see how any acceptance of homosexual practice would be possible in the church.

My suggestion was that the strictness of Paul’s condemnation of homosexuality had to do with the eschatological status of the early church. The church was facing judgment, the wrath of God upon the ancient world (cf. Rom.1:18; 2:5). Paul’s concern was that it should be a pure church that stood before Christ at his parousia, partly because his own ‘success’ as an apostle was bound up in that, but more fundamentally because those who suffered during this period of tribulation would inherit the kingdom of God. If this is a valid argument (it may not be), then perhaps we can say that we do not need to carry this strict exclusionist attitude over into the post-eschatological church, the overriding purpose of which is not to avoid imminent historical judgment but through its internal life and activity in the world to be a sign of the grace of God and the reality of new creation.

This is not to ‘condone’ homosexuality exactly. I am looking for a way to understand homosexuality that recognizes:

i) that it is contrary to creation (in that sense a ‘distortion’), which is presumably, in response to Paul’s point above, the fundamental theological basis for differentiating between homosexuality and lefthandedness: the lifelong intimacy of man and woman is central to the creation narrative and presumably has something to do with being in the image of God - lefthandedness doesn’t appear to have the same significance;

ii) that it is (apparently) an unavoidable element of a fallen creation and for many gay people the only way of expressing a long-term intimate commitment to an other. Perhaps this is one reason why homosexuality is different from our involvement in other aspects of humanity’s fallenness: we also have a powerful created urge not to be alone, to be in close relationship with another person - though it seems to me much harder to distance ourselves from social injustice than Peter suggests;

and iii) that it is not ‘wickedness’, it is not intrinsically harmful to others.

The few gay people that I know did not, to the best of their knowledge, choose their disposition, nor was it a psychosis which arose from childhood experiences. Neither are they monsters who wish, by promiscuity and self-indulgence, to live a lifestyle of promiscuity and overthrowing the moral order.

If that’s genuinely the case (it is not always genuinely the case), then perhaps they are not called to change. But would it not be possible, in principle, whenever the need arises, for gay people to acknowledge that God originally created us to be one flesh as male and female? The presence of homosexuals in the church would then be a sign of our forgiveness expressed concretely through the acceptance and love of other believers, a sign that God has forgiven our fallenness, forgiven the rebellious at the heart of each of us that has produced the distortions that run through every level of human nature. The tension remains, I agree - this may not be the sort of unconditional acceptance that most homosexuals are looking for. But I do think it may offer a way out of the stalemate that currently prevails in the church: it allows us to maintain the hope of a renewal of creation while at the same recognizing that we act and relate to one another in this world only through God’s grace.

With regard to James Allison’s argument about Romans 1-2, surely Paul’s quarrel with the Jew, if that is who he is addressing in 2:1-11, is not that they are wrong for being judgmental but that they are wrong for doing such things - the law is of no benefit to them if they do what the idolatrous Gentiles do: ‘Do you suppose, O man - you who judge those who do such things and yet do them yourself - that you will escape the judgment of God?’ (Rom.2:3).