Sharks, jellyfish, and the bad news
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:status: draft
:date: 1970-01-01T00:00:00
:category: faith
:tags: LGBT, homosexuality, blue ocean, centered faith
Couple of comments while reading `this blogpost`_ by Dave Schmelzer and
linked `position paper of Vineyard USA on LGBT issues`_.
.. _`this blogpost`:
http://theblueoceanblog.org/jesus-good-hijacked-todays-controversies/
.. _`position paper of Vineyard USA on LGBT issues`:
http://vineyardusa.org/site/files/PositionPaper-VineyardUSA-Pastoring_LGBT_Persons.pdf
First completely nonsensical nitpick: as far as I know (and I may
be wrong, but if I recall correctly I read it in some book by
Philipe Cousteau) sharks have to swim because they don’t have
operculum so they have to make water flow through their gills,
otherwise they suffocate_ . Not that it would matter that much
for Dave’s argument.
.. _suffocate:
https://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20090820085118AAaL3jP
But to the more interesting stuff. From the position paper:
William Shakespeare in his play, Twelfth Night, said this: Be
not afraid of greatness: some are born great, some achieve
greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon them.
This is funny. Did they actually read the Twelfth Night or did
they see it in a theater? Do they recognize that this whole
quotation was not meant seriously but just as a bait for
Malvolio? And if we ignore this strangeness, when following their
argument, they could say just as easily that they want to discuss
LGBT issues, because everybody else does it. I am not sure that
it is the right reason, but anyway.
OK, this is too long. I won’t have time to read all ninety
pages. So back to Dave.
I completely accept his argument that we should live in the
centered set, but it seems to me it is a bit difficult to see the
proper point of the post without getting lost in the juicy world
of the relationship between homosexuality and the Christian
faith. One strikingly interesting thing (at least for me) is that
the whole post is completely meta-discussion. It does not discuss
the Dave’s actual opinion on homosexuality itself at all. It
seems that Dave has some homosexual friends, so he has to have at
least some positive attitude towards them, but there is no
biblical discussion on the matter itself. I have missed this when
reading the post for the first time, and I got completely lost in
the fiery discussion of the point which was not there at all.
Let me thus start from somewhere else. We just returned a couple
of days ago from a very friendly visit to our very conservative
Christian friends. Although I tried to avoid it, I made some
unfortunate comment about the Muslims and Christians praying
together in my “local” Catholic church (of course, not being
a Catholic makes this term a bit nonsensical). The result was an
explosion of rather unbelievably harsh and ungrateful
declarations about Muslims, among which the persuasion that
Muslims and Christians praying together is just a masquerade for
Muslims to achieve their dominance […]. It seemed to me very
much like the antisemitism by Chesterton (or any proper
Englishman of that time, I suppose). We can see how these
attitudes could lead to Auschwitz, but it is unfair to judge them
through the lenses of gas chambers, because they really did not
know about the Holocaust, and they would be quite certainly
against it with all their might. So, most of what my Christian
friends talk vis-a-vis Muslims is absolutely horrible and
despicable, but most of these people know nothing about the
racism and they have never seen it in its most ugly ends, so they
still feel free to play with those most horrible ideas, not
knowing that it is an dynamite just ready to explode.
However, only now, when I read the Dave’s post for the second
time, I have recognized how contemporary and acutely needed it is
now. And how much, by living among the bounded Christians, I lost
a bit of the healthy perspective.
security of the bounded set
---------------------------
One of the most important things which helped me to understand my
attitude towards homosexuality was proper understanding of what
the sin is.
I understand the centered set thinking correctly, than obvious
interdicts in the Bible should not be understood as zaps (and
even less used as such to zap others), but as an advice why
following the banned path will lead out of the center, Jesus, and
the life in fullness (John 10:10). So, we should not steal
because God would smite us, but because although it may seem
tempting it is not a blessed God’s path to achieving fullness
of life.
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When orders are issued in other spheres of life there is no
doubt whatever of their meaning. If a father sends a child to
bed, the boy knows at once what he has to do. But suppose he
has picked up smattering of pseudo-theology. In that case he
would argue more or less like this: “Father tells me to go
to bed, but he really means that I am tired, and he does not
want me to be tired. I can overcome my tiredness just as well
if I go out and play. Therefore though father tells me to go
to bed, he really means: ‘Go out and play’.” If a child
tried such arguments on his father or a citizen on his
government, they would both meet with a kind of language they
could not fail to understand–in short they would be
punished. Are we to treat the commandment of Jesus
differently from other orders and exchange single-minded
obedience for downright disobedience? How could that be
possible!
-- Dietrich Bonhoeffer, The Cost of Discipleship, chapter. III.
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Theological perspective is proposed and wins the day. It does
just great for however long, but then its blind spots become
evident and there’s pushback about it. The pushback ends up
being too corrective, an over-reaction, so it too ultimately gets
pushed back with something that itself is too corrective and
over-reacting. And there lies the history of theology.
Unfortunately, theology matters. And people who create bad
theology and a lot of mess around themselves are usually not bad
people. Liberal theology ...
