All the King’s men are falling down

Last updated on: June 13, 2015 at 6:57 am by Gerald McDermott

All the King’s men are falling down 2015-06-13T06:57:32-04:00 Gerald McDermott

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So now even David Neff, recently editor of Christianity Today, says gay marriage can be Christian. He was cheering Tony Campolo’s announcement that Christians should recognize that supposed truth.

Some of us have known that Campolo has been thinking this way for years, and that he was providing in his books hints about his post-biblical, unorthodox position for a good long time.

Neff is a friend and colleague. I am frankly surprised but not shocked. David held the line in his years at CT, where CT often gave reasoned arguments for the only position good reason and exegesis can support–that gay practice is disordered and clearly proscribed by Scripture and the Christian moral tradition.

But now other leaders in the erstwhile “evangelical” world are having second thoughts. The New York Times breathlessly reports that Biola professors agreed that “in the Bible, God did not destroy Sodom and Gomorrah because of sodomy, but because the residents were guilty of arrogance and greed.”

Did Biola professors at this meeting with Matthew Vines really agree that the judgment of Sodom had nothing to do with what is called sodomy? The grey lady of New York is not known for reporting orthodoxy accurately.

But even if they did not all agree, the now-lionized-by-the-evangelical-left-and-the-cultural-elite Matthew Vines thinks so, as do some scholars (the best scholars do not). (By the way, Vines’ book is a good example of superficial and downright wrong treatment of biblical scholarship on this issue, as Timothy George has recently reported.)

Is that true, then, about Sodom?

Not at all.

The newly enlightened claim that Sodom’s sin was against hospitality not sex because, in part, the Hebrew word yāda, which traditionalists have interpreted as “know” in the biblical sense, occurs 943 times in the Hebrew Bible but has a sexual meaning in only ten of those instances. (The men of Sodom urged Lot to “bring [his guests] out, that we may know them.”)

Yet six of these ten instances are in Genesis, and one of these is used of Lot’s daughter who had not “known” a man (just three verses after Sodom’s men said they wanted to “know” Lot’s visitors). While it is true that later Old Testament passages do not refer to sex sin in Sodom, intertestamental Jewish literature did (Jubilees 16.5-6 and the 12 Patriarchs, both written in the 2nd century before Christ, when Jews were alarmed by Hellenistic acceptance of homoeroticism) and Jude’s clear reference (7) to the same suggests that New Testament authors understood Sodom’s sin in this way.

Vines and others in the newly enlightened evangelicals also dismiss Leviticus 18.22 and 20.13 (where man-on-man sex is said to be tô`ēbâ or “abominable”) because they are found alongside other passages that are concerned with ritual (such as the prohibition of sex during menstruation) not moral purity. Yet the vast majority of Leviticus 18 and 20 (89 of 94 verses) deal not with ritual purity but moral issues. They command respect for parents and the elderly, concern for the poor, honesty in court, and love for neighbor (including the alien). They condemn child sacrifice, bestiality, adultery, incest, idolatry, theft, deceit, slander, revenge, sorcery, cursing parents, and dishonest business practices. Therefore it is likely that the author or editor of these chapters considered homosexual practice to be a moral concern, not a matter of ritual purity.

Besides, in the long list of prohibited practices in these chapters, only one is singled out as tô`ēbâ or “abominable”: same-sex intercourse. The ritually “impure” practices in Leviticus (childbirth, seminal emissions, heterosexual intercourse, and menstruation) are not punished but purified by bathing and sacrifice.

Mark Galli, CT’s new editor, is right to say this week that the vast majority of Christians in the world today are still orthodox on this issue. It seems in our little corner that all the King’s men are falling, but the King actually has his pockets of leaders all over the world who are among the seven thousands (1 Kings 19.18), and hundreds of millions more of faithful parishioners who know that no matter what evangelical leaders say and think, reason and scripture and tradition are agreed that marriage is between a man and a woman. And that those who think otherwise have been sadly deceived.

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