The passage of California’s Proposition 8 which outlaws same-sex marriage continues to stir up controversy all over the nation. The ballot measure passed six months after the state’s highest court ruled that state laws banning same sex couples to marry violated the state’s constitution (in effect, the voters amended the constitution to outlaw gay marriage.) Gay rights activists and their supporters throughout the country have cried foul and have strongly criticized the state of California for denying - as they see it - a basic civil right to gay and lesbian Americans. Newsweek waded into the controversy last week with a provocative cover story, taking the side of the gay and lesbian movement. Its religion editor, Lisa Miller, argues that religious conservatives are simply wrong when they maintain that the Bible unequivocally condemns gay marriage. Rather, she asserts that there is plenty of Scriptural evidence that suggests that gay marriage should be encouraged and not demonized. Fundamentalist Christians, she concludes, base their opposition to gay marriage not on an accurate reading of Scripture, but on an irrational prejudice against homosexuals. For reasons that I will set forth, Ms. Miller’s argument is utterly preposterous.

            In the interests of fairness, I would like to summarize the case she makes (the entire article, of course, can be found at www.newsweek.com.) Miller  asserts that  Old Testament and New Testament examples of the so-called “traditional family” are scarce to be found. Polygamy, she points out.was practiced by Abraham and the Patriarchs - not exactly a model that most modern Americans would find attractive. Jesus is single and so is Paul - in fact, Paul goes to great lengths to defend the virtues of celibacy. His admonition that it is “better to marry than to burn” with passion is hardly a ringing endorsement of the institution of marriage, she concludes.  Relying on these examples, Miller concludes that the Biblical examples of marriage  prove that the Bible is not relevant to the manner in which the institution of marriage has evolved in the modern world.  Therefore, arguments which cite Scriptural authority as the basis for opposing gay marriage should not be taken seriously.

            Miller does admit that the Bible does condemn homosexuality in a number of places. However, she artfully explains them away with two arguments. First, the OT reference to homosexuality as an “abomination” (Lev. 19:18), she contends, is located within a Levitical code filled with various regulations regarding dietary practices, treatments for leprosy,  ceremonial cleansing, laws regarding slavery and punishments for crimes and so forth.. Many of these practices described here are no longer practiced today in America (such as slavery and the death penalty for crimes like adultery). Since we modern people have rejected “antiquated” Biblical notions such as slavery, she reasons, why should anyone take seriously a claim that homosexuality in general - and gay marriage in particular - should be condemned simply because the Bible says so?  Second, the  Pauline passages (esp. Rom. 1:26-27) refer only to extreme level of perversion and depravity (of the caliber practiced by wicked Roman emperors such as Nero and Caligula). Paul, Miller assures us, is not speaking against gay couples who are in long-term, loving, and committed relationships; rather, he is condemning wreckless promiscuity.  The gospel, she contends, is a message of love and acceptance, not condemnation. Jesus accepted those who were considered the outcasts of society in  his day. If he were walking the Earth  today, she implies, he would be welcoming gays and lesbians into the fold, not condemning them as sinners. The reason  fundamentalists refuse to accept gays and lesbians as equals, according to Miller, stems from their insistence on a “literal interpretation” of Scripture and an irrational prejudice against homosexuality that transcends all theological argument.

            Time and space will not allow me to respond to all of the errors in Lisa Miller’s article - they are too numerous.  Rather, I want to highlight what I see as the essential premises that her article is based on and why they are fundamentally flawed.

            1.Ms. Miller’s thesis is based on a fundamentally flawed view about both the origin and authority of Scripture. An essential staple in contemporary discourse from so-called “progressive” theologians is to attack the authority of Scripture. Miller pretends that the only choice we have is to either believe that the Bible descended from the heavens in completed form or it was written by men over long periods of time. And since the first option is “ridiculous” in her view, we are left with the second as the only logical alternative. Since the Bible came from men, it unavoidably takes on all the prejudices, biases, and backward thinking that typified the culture in which it was written. Her conclusions fail to take seriously the claims that the Bible makes about itself. “Above all, you must understand that no prophecy of Scripture came about by the prophet’s own interpretation of things. For prophecy never had its origin in the human will, but prophets, though human, spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit” [ (2 Pet. 1:20-21). Today’s New International Version]. Miller’s reasoning presents her readers with a false choice: either believe the Bible dropped out of heaven like a meteorite, or it is a set of cleverly crafted fables conceived of by men. God used  men over a period of hundreds of years to record the Scriptures for us.

            2. Closely linked to the first assumption is a simplistic view about Biblical interpretation.

Again, Miller presents readers with a false choice - on one hand, people must either adopt a “literal” interpretation of the Bible or an approach that seeks to glean “universal truths” from Scripture while dismissing some of the Bible’s messy details that do not comport well with modern society. Fundamentalists, she asserts, are guilty of a literal reading of Scripture that prohibits them from embracing evolving cultural mores about homosexuality and the institution of marriage. She turns literalism into a straw man in order to bolster her own argument. Yet, her analysis is premised, once again, on creating a false dichotomy between literalism and so-called “progressivism.” Truly sophisticated interpretation relies not only on a single school of thought (“literalism” vs. “progressivism”), but rather utilizes a variety of approaches (e.g. literalism, understanding the historical context in which a text was written, considering the audience to whom it was written, the meaning of the Greek and Hebrew texts, etc.). Yet all of these methods of Biblical exegesis are of limited value if they are not premised on the individual submitting one’s heart and mind to the leading of the Holy Spirit. “The person without the Spirit does not accept the things that come from the Spirit of God but considers them foolishness and cannot understand them because they are only discerned through the Spirit” (1 Cor. 2:14).

            Furthermore, while the Bible clearly reflects the culture in which it was written, it emphatically makes claims about its central truths that apply throughout eternity (Acts 4:12: Heb. 10:10: Heb. 13:8). Miller paints the Bible as a flawed document written in a hopelessly  backwards culture that  is loaded with anachronistic, unscientific, and premodern ideas and institutions. Thus, it is the task of “modern, progressive” people to rescue the Bible from its inauspicious  moorings to derive some useful principles from it  that we can apply to our lives  in the present. Yet, those who hold this view of Scripture fail to provide a coherent rationale that is consistently applied for why some parts of the Bible are acceptable while other parts must be discarded.  Like her contemporaries, Miller provides no such rationale either.  As a result, her arguments amounts to a “buffet style” approach to the Bible which picks and chooses which menu items she will accept as “true” and “from God” while discarding every teaching she either dislikes or finds to be inconvenient.

            3. Building from the flawed premises cited above, Miller makes a third error - assuming that simply because a practice or institution is mentioned in the Bible, it must be condoned by the Bible. For example, the fact that polygamy and slavery are found in the Old Testament does not mean that these are divinely approved institutions. Rather, they reflect the cultural and social practices that existed when the Bible was written. To the extent that these institutions possessed many undesirable characteristics, they illustrate the bitter fruits of the fall of Man described in Genesis 3. In other words, these various forms of oppression are the logical consequences of sin.  God intentionally created the institution of marriage in Genesis 2 between a man and a woman -  therefore, the examples which appear later in Scripture of polygamy and men with numerous concubines must be viewed as deviations from God’s original design, as Jesus reminded the Pharisees (Mat. 19:1-8).

            The three premises discussed above allow Ms. Miller to explain away Biblical verses that clearly contradict her worldview and to dismiss religious objections to homosexuality as simply anachronistic ideas  rooted in tradition and prejudice rather than sound doctrine. Her view also requires her to take Biblical verses out of context in many instances to argue for the opposite of what Scripture teaches. In some cases, it causes her to draw some rather absurd conclusions - such as her assertion that Paul is only condemning a peculiar form of depravity practiced by Roman emperors such as Nero and Caligula in Romans 1:26-27 (as opposed to mature, committed gay love more generally). But this verse is contained within a discourse that begins by declaring that the wrath of God is revealed against “all of the godlessness and wickedness of human beings who suppress the truth by their wickedness“. (Rom 1:18).  In fact, the underlying argument from Rom 1:18 -3:23 is that all of us - regardless of whether we are Jew or Gentile - are guilty of sin and have fallen short of the glory of God. To restrict the application of Rom. 1:26-27’ to a form of depravity that applied only to the Roman emperors of the day violates the context of the passage. Moreover, it would have made no sense to Paul’s readers who. before their conversion to Christianity, had engaged in the same conduct that Paul identifies as sinful.

            4. Miller’s article presents a distorted view of the Gospel. Like many so-called “progressives,” she presents the Gospel as a message of love and acceptance - which it is. They analogize the gay and lesbian communities to the outcast groups who existed in Jesus’ time and assert that Jesus would embrace gays like he embraced women, lepers, tax collectors, and prostitutes. While the Gospel is indeed a message of unconditional acceptance, it is also a call to holiness. While Jesus offered acceptance to the Samaritan woman in John 4, he did not tell her, for example, that it was okay that she had had five husbands and was currently living with a man she was not married to. Nor did he tell Zacchaeus the tax collector that he could keep overcharging Jewish taxpayers even while calling himself a disciple of Jesus (Luke 19:1-10).Finally, when the Pharisees wanted to stone a woman they caught in the very act of adultery, he did not say that what she did in her bedroom was her business and nobody had the right to judge her Rather, he commanded her, “Go, now, and leave your life of sin” (Jn. 8;11). Miller would have us believe in a God who accepts us no matter what and allows us to define for ourselves what is right and what is wrong. That is not the God who is revealed in the Scriptures.

            Gay rights proponents make a fair point when they point out that conservative Christians place undue emphasis on  homosexuality - to the exclusion of other sins. On this score, many churches must plead guilty. The Bible condemns a whole host of behaviors - greed, idolatry, covetousness, heterosexual immorality, gossip, lying, fits of rage - but churches often place too much emphasis on a handful of behaviors such as homosexuality. This argument forms a crucial part of a larger critique of the narrowness of the political agenda of the Religious Right which tends to focus on a handful of issues (e.g. homosexual rights, abortion, creation vs. evolution) to the exclusion of others (e.g. war, poverty, racism, environmental degradation ). Not surprisingly, the views of conservative Christians on issues such as gay marriage are dismissed as simply right-wing political apologetics. But the aversion of progressives to political conservatism leads them to another logical fallacy - the conviction that because “they [meaning conservatives] are wrong, we must be right.” The church is wrong when it places undue emphasis on some sins and either willfully (or unconsciously) ignores others. But this failing only proves that the church is an imperfect institution filled with imperfect people. The church’s shortcomings do not validate the political ideology and/or theology of those who willfully twist the Scriptures to teach the opposite of what the Bible plainly says.

            This article hardly exhausts all of the various dimensions of this issue, nor is it intended to.  Proving that the Bible condemns homosexuality does not, in and of itself, resolve all of the thorny legal and constitutional questions regarding the rights of gays and lesbians. Furthermore, despite the denials of some on the Religious Right, our constitutional system is intentionally a secular one; therefore, this fact leaves open the question of how the rights of gay and lesbian Americans are defined within a religiously pluralistic society. My principal objection here is to the outrageous assumption that the Bible supports gay marriage. It does not. Perhaps the Constitution does. The proponents of gay marriage would be better served by grounding their arguments in a theory of the Constitution rather than trying to make the Bible say something that it never meant to say.

POSTSCRIPT: I want to applaud President-elect Barack Obama for choosing Pastor Rick Warren to give the invocation at the inauguration. I also encourage the president-elect to resist the criticism of gay and lesbian activists who have roundly criticized him for choosing someone who is “anti-gay” and was an outspoken proponent of Proposition 8.  What the gay and lesbian movement and their supporters refuse to admit is that they are just as close-minded as those hated fundamentalists they love to lampoon. They preach a doctrine of “tolerance” and “political correctness,” yet they tolerate only those who agree with them and try to silence their critics. They are just as hypocritical as the Religious Right whom they constantly vilify.

            Moreover, it is foolish of them to pick a fight with Obama over this when there are far more important issues to tackle. There are many Americans like Obama who agree that gays and lesbians should be entitled to certain basic civil rights and liberties like other Americans. But many of them support civil unions, not marriage, largely for religious reasons. As I have argued here, these are not inconsequential objections. The gay community would be wise to recognize this; otherwise, they run the risk of alienating people who otherwise might be their allies. Just offering friendly advice.

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