"Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You shut the kingdom of heaven in men's faces. You yourselves do not enter, nor will you let those enter who are trying to.
"Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You travel over land and sea to win a single convert, and when he becomes one, you make him twice as much a son of hell as you are.
"Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You give a tenth of your spices—mint, dill and cummin. But you have neglected the more important matters of the law—justice, mercy and faithfulness. You should have practiced the latter, without neglecting the former. You blind guides! You strain out a gnat but swallow a camel.
"Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You clean the outside of the cup and dish, but inside they are full of greed and self-indulgence. Blind Pharisee! First clean the inside of the cup and dish, and then the outside also will be clean.
"Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You are like whitewashed tombs, which look beautiful on the outside but on the inside are full of dead men's bones and everything unclean. In the same way, on the outside you appear to people as righteous but on the inside you are full of hypocrisy and wickedness."
-Excerpted from The Gospel According to St. Matthew, Chapter 23
The only people Christ ever condemned during his earthly ministry were religious leaders. Indeed, much of his earthly ministry was spent correcting the errors that had been passed down through the generations by the religious leadership of the Jewish people. This is the reason for the frequent construction "You have heard it said...but I say" that we find in Christ's rhetoric in the Gospels. This is indeed what put him so at odds with the religious order of his day, the gatekeepers of the Jewish theological tradition who were threatened by any suggestion that perhaps they had been wrong.
The Pharisees are alive and well today, and they are in panic mode over the election of Barack Obama.
(Given my sharp criticisms of the newly inaugurated American President, and my consistent opposition to the vast majority of his policies, certainly nobody can contend that today's post is a defense of Obama's ideology or of Obama himself.)
Conservative pastor John Piper posted to his blog under the title
How Barack Obama Will Make Christ a Minister of Condemnation. He argues that Obama's inclusion of the Episcopalian Bishop of New Hampshire, Gene Robinson in the inauguration ceremony is "tragic...because [Obama] is willing to get behind the church endorsement of sexual intercourse between men."
Before we get into Piper's poor theology and the dogma behind his outrage, it is worthy of pointing out that he first suffers from extraordinarily poor logic. This is something that seems to be endemic to the people of his religious persuasion. First, to say even, as Piper does beforehand, that Obama endorses the "legitimacy of homosexual intercourse" by including Robinson in the inaugural ceremony does not follow from the evidence. He may very well support these things, but to my knowledge he has not made statements to this effect, either on the campaign trail or as President-Elect. The act of including Robinson itself falls far short of substantiating Piper's claim.
This logical leap ignores the possibility that Obama was just trying to be politically correct after causing such a stir in his own party for inviting Rick Warren to lead the invocation. It also ignores that Obama is as genuinely inclusive as his political rhetoric would have us believe (I don't know how likely this is, but we must at least admit the possibility) and that he could quite possibly be very homophobic but believe that all human beings deserve to be included in the workings of their government and to have equal rights and dignified treatment. Further, it neglects that Obama is conscious of his own race's struggle against wide-spread discrimination that although he might (again, I do not know his heart) think that homosexuality is immoral or at least strange, he nevertheless does not want to see another group of people marginalized by society and discriminated against, and saw Bishop Robinson's involvement at the inauguration as a way to make a statement against this.
Although the underlying reason could be precisely what Piper argues it is, it is grossly irresponsible for him to make the conclusion so firmly and so resolutely, and to go so far as to claim that it causes Barack Obama to make Christ a minister of condemnation. For such a fierce charge, he provides mere assertion as his evidence and ignores a host of perfectly reasonable alternative explanations. It is importance to establish this, as we find it is a pattern of behavior within Piper's post and otherwise, in fact. (Back when I was a self-righteous and bigoted Southern Baptist Pharisee, I read many of Piper's books, and even then I found his logic in many regards to be fundamentally flawed, even if at the time I agreed with his conclusions. The reason that writers of his persuasion get away with this is that their audience already agrees with their conclusions, and so they will go along with the arguments regardless of how shoddy they are).
This brings us to his common, but grotesque exegesis of Paul's first epistle to the Corinthian church. Piper would presumably have us believe that this is one of the proof-texts against homosexuality in the New Testament, and that it is a conclusive repudiation of homosexual sexual acts, universally. He does this by employing an overtly political translation of the passage that ignores not only the historical context of the writing, but more importantly (and egregiously) the very syntax of the writing itself.
He quotes:
Do you not know that the unrighteous will not inherit the kingdom of God? Do not be deceived: neither the sexually immoral, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor men who practice homosexuality, nor thieves , nor the greedy, nor drunkards, nor revilers, nor swindlers will inherit the kingdom of God. And such were some of you. But you were washed, you were sanctified, you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus and by the Spirit of our God. (1 Corinthians 6:9-11) This translation is among the worst with respect to the liberties taken by the translators. The original Greek does not use a phrase for "men who practice homosexuality," as there is not even a word for "homosexuality." In fact, Paul, writing in Greek, used two words, "malakoi" and "arsenokoitai." Whether Piper realizes this and chose to select a translation that belies the original Greek for political reasons, or he is simply completely ignorant of Greek (given that he has a doctorate, I'd assume the latter explanation is less likely) is ultimately irrelevant. The Greek word "malakoi" literally means "soft." Its first translation into English was to the word "effeminate," in the King James Version. This is an inherently problematic translation as not all gay men are effeminate, and not all effeminate men are gay. Would then effeminate heterosexuals be condemned under this rendering?
The problem for Piper is that the word "malakoi" in Paul's time denoted a male prostitute or a "house boy," who provided sex to the head male of the household, who also happened to be married to a woman in most cases. There is even some historical evidence to suggest that the word applied specifically to male temple prostitutes who dressed as women and participated in orgy-like rituals as part of pagan religious practice in Rome. This word has extensive use in the context of prostitution in the era that Paul was writing, and it is not only a logical leap to conclude that it unquestionably refers to "all homosexual men," but it displays a marked lack of humility on the part of Piper as exegete, as he admits no possibility that it could mean other than his own modern translation says that it does.
The word "arsenokoitai" is used only one other place in the Scriptures, and that is in Paul's first epistle to Timothy, which is more or less a repeat of his letter to Corinth. Otherwise, it has no other scriptural context, and it is worth noting that neither "malakoi" nor "arsenokoitai" appear anywhere in the Gospels. Furthermore, "arsenokoitai" is thought to even be a neologism of Paul's own creation, as it is the first appearance of the word in any other Greek language writings still extant, and it has scant use thereafter. The King James Version translates this word as "abusers of themselves with mankind," which is a vague phrase with no other context. Martin Luther translated the word as the German for "child abusers." Given that pederasty was common among Romans (as it was amongst the Greeks before), it is possible that the term refers specifically to the adult men who kept and maintained such "house boys." This would not be an unreasonable translation, given Luther's disposition to apply the term to child molesters, and given the fact that most "house boys" were generally under the age of 18 (and started their duties sometimes as early as 14 years of age).
Far from being a resolute and unequivocal condemnation of all homosexuality, the actual evidence (as opposed to that fabricated by Piper and his homophobic friends) in the Pauline record takes a far more limited approach to the subject of sexual ethics entirely.
The modern predisposition against homosexuals and homosexuality stems from a bias that has existed since St. Augustine,
himself apparently a closeted homosexual, or at least one who had previously had a significant and longstanding "crush" on another male. (Read Chapters 4 and 6 of Book VII). Augustine's view of sex, which was essentially that it was in all forms vile, even as it tended toward procreation, and that procreative sex was only to be accepted grudgingly. Indeed, the Augustinian view of sex would have a profound influence on St. Thomas Aquinas and his own view of the subject, the two of which have continued their influence to today. Thus when Piper and others declare the "historic view" of the Church, they are reaching backward to periods of social history where theological exegesis (as in our own day) is derived in large part from common preconceptions as opposed to thorough scholarship. Given that the contemporary conservative Church has had a vested interest in maintaining the social status quo (the Southern Baptist Convention did not even formally apologize for its support of Slavery until the 1990s), it is no surprise that there has been no interest or desire amongst this segment of the Christian religion to scrutinize its understanding of sexual ethics generally, or of homosexuality in particular.
Piper then quotes the Anglican Calvinist theologian J.I. Packer, stating that homosexuals, like adulterers and thieves, will "keep people out of God's kingdom of salvation." The Packer quotation is important to Piper's case, but it is important as it indicates the liberties that Piper and others would like to take with some of the text of the Gospels that is not just questionable, but distinctly and historically unsound, either intentionally or accidentally ignorant of Jesus's First Century Jewish upbringing, cultural context, and taking into account the specific audiences he was addressing during his earthly ministry.
We must initially observe that the phrase "kingdom of salvation" is Packer's (or somebody else's) own innovation, but appears nowhere in the Scriptures themselves, in either the Old or New Testaments. It is, we must assume, a purposeful alteration of the Gospel usage of phrases "the kingdom of God" and "the kingdom of Heaven," which we find commonly in Christ's own language, and mimicked in the Acts of the Apostles and the writings of St. Paul. "The kingdom of Heaven" is a phrase entirely unique to the Gospels, with St. Paul's writings exclusively utilizing the translated construction "The kingdom of God."
It is quite common for those unlearned in 1st Century Judaism to to assume that Christ's use of the phrase "the kingdom of God" to mean plainly "heaven" or the state of affairs of the redeemed after the end of their mortal lives on earth. This simplistic and out-of-context interpretation seriously damages one's understanding of the Gospel message, and indeed of the person of Christ himself. Brad Young (Ph.D., Hebrew University) who serves as the founder of the Gospel Research Foundation, an organization committed to exploring the Jewish roots of the Christian faith, perhaps writes the most clear and instructive analysis of the meaning of these phrases within Christ's own cultural and linguistic context. I shall quote rather at length from his work Jesus the Jewish Theologian.
"Jesus does not give a dictionary definition of the kingdom of heaven, but he does tell his listeners what the kingdom is like via simple, yet powerful, parables. Although Jesus used simple word pictures to help his listeners understand, a careful study of the decisive technical term "the kingdom of heaven" in his teachings demonstrates that the original meaning of the kingdom has been routinely misunderstood in modern times...Johannes Weiss, the famous German New Testament scholar, and Albert Schweitzer, the well-known physician and theologian footsteps, claimed that the kingdom of heaven is an eschatological term referring only to the future day of judgment. The views of C.H. Dodd and J. Jeremias also emphasized the future meaning of the kingdom of heaven. In a similar way, the dispensationalists claim that the kingdom will not appear until the millennium, at the conclusion of the present church age. In the increasingly prevalent theology of the "kingdom now" movement, the kingdom of heaven is established on earth by human efforts which pave the way for the second coming. Popularly speaking, some Christians believe the kingdom of heaven refers to life after death. They think that someone must die to enter the kingdom...
"Is the kingdom of heaven to be revealed only in the distant future? Are the people of God able to establish his reign on earth by obtaining positions of leadership and power within the present political order? Is the kingdom experienced only at death? In Jesus's teachings, the kingdom of heaven is a powerful force in the world which brings healing and wholeness. Jesus defines the kingdom from his present experience rather than from his view of the end time. He expected his disciples to continue the kingdom's work...Moreover, the approaches of Weiss, Schweitzer, the dispensationalists, and those many others who could be discussed are mistaken as well...
"Jesus taught that the 'poor in spirit' make up the kingdom of heaven. Jesus' followers are those who mourn. They are meek. They hunger and thirst for God's righteousness and long for his salvation. They are merciful and pure in heart. According to Jesus, the members of the kingdom are the peacemakers. Jesus taught that his followers must turn the other cheek and go the second mile. The greatest in the kingdom is the one who serves others and who is willing to suffer in the interim in order to see God's higher purposes achieved. Jesus believed that redemption was possible as each person submits to the divine will and accepts his yoke. When someone who is hated by others loves in return, when someone who is persecuted learns to forgive from his or her heart, then the inner force of the kingdom is released. INdeed such power is able to work the miracles of healing and redemption in a needy world. Jesus taught about God's reign in parables. Jesus vividly illustrates through parables the progressive growth of the kingdom as it is compared to the mysterious power of a mustard seed and the unfathomable fermenting properties of the leaven in the dough. God's kingdom is not delivered into the hands of select leaders in order to control the lives of others. It cannot be viewed only as a future event reserved for the day of judgment. The kingdom is a present reality for those people who choose to obey the teachings of Jesus, to accept God's redemptive power in their lives, and toe exemplify the qualities of discipleship and servanthood in a hurting and needy world...It is like a mustard seed that grows into a tree. It is like leaven that permeates the entire loaf."
The prescient point for the present analysis is that St. Paul's own context is the Gospel account of Christ's ministry. Without the Beatitudes, without Christ's parables, St. Paul's language excluding people from "the kingdom of God" is meaningless. We can understand rightly then, that as Christ provided the qualities of those who would inherit the kingdom of heaven, St. Paul is describing the attributes of people whose behavior is antithetical to these things. If we engage the text by logically connecting Christ's inclusion and St. Paul's exclusion, then we can come to a better understanding of his overall purpose here, as well as to understand the problem with Packer's restructured phraseology, employing "kingdom of salvation" as opposed to the original phrases used in the Scriptures themselves.
Would Drs. Piper and Packer then accept Christ's declaration that it would be "harder for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven" as meaning that people with earthly or material things are damned to hell? Certainly Dr. Piper could not afford the financial loss to his ministry if he taught that, but I do wonder what he really believes on the matter.
If we are to accept Dr. Young's interpretation, on the other hand, then we have a far greater understanding of Christ's meaning (and thereby, St. Paul's). In Christ's day, people with great wealth often acquired it through oppressive, even violent means. This is not as true in our own day, but there are many wealthy people stricken with greed, who do not display the fruits of the Spirit (to use St. Paul's term) of "love, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self control." Indeed, we would find that these things are antithetical to what St. Paul says are the sorts of people who will not inherit the kingdom of God--thieves, idolaters, adulterers, swindlers, revilers, drunkards.
Taking these as opposing the positive properties described in the Corinthian epistles and elsewhere in the Pauline literature, all but the most bigoted and ignorant people would agree that they know homosexuals who are "loving, peaceful, patient, kind, etc." Apart from the disputed meanings of the terms supposedly referencing homosexuals, the other groups of people St. Paul says will not inherit the kingdom of God are people who in some way cause harm to others, and usually through deceit or malicious behavior. The thief harms the person from whom he steals. The adulterer harms his spouse. The swindler harms the person swindled. Revilers and drunkards are malicious disruption to all those around them, are unproductive sorts who contribute nothing to society. Homosexuals, to in contraposition, do not ipso facto cause harm to anybody. Certainly Piper could contrive a distorted view of the world wherein homosexuals by their very existence in some sense "damage society," but this is not only a strained view of the common understanding of the word "harm," but it is terribly difficult to even pinpoint the victim of the homosexual (in the context of consensual homosexuality), whereas the swindler's victim is particular and definable.
Moreover, there is a tendency among religious conservatives like Piper to assume that homosexual sexual intercourse is the sine qua non of homosexuality writ large, as if it were for sexual gratification and that reason alone that gay individuals entered into relationships with one another (it behooves us to note, if a bit late, that there is no reasonable translation of the Pauline epistles that anywhere mentions lesbianism, as the specific words apply to masculine "perpetrators." In fact, the only potential reference to lesbianism is found in a rather convoluted interpretation of the first Chapter of St. Paul's epistle to the church at Rome. This further compounds the view that St. Paul is condemning homosexuality universally, when one gender's homosexuality is entirely excluded from his supposed condemnation).
Gay people, like straight people, seek companionship with people to whom they are attracted and have things in common. One would hardly hear a married person argue that sex was the end-all, be-all of his relationship and not think he might be quite astray from a reasonable understanding of the institution of marriage. Gay relationships are no different in this respect. Healthy, stable relationships are predicated on and built around love, mutual respect, honesty, and dignity. Unhealthy relationships are built around selfish desires for sexual gratification, other selfish behavior and desires, the want of another person's material possessions, the desire to live off the productive fruits of another person, the hope to please one's parents by marrying a particular person, etc. To assert that homosexuals and heterosexuals are different in these respects is not only to be ignorant of human psychology, but to display an arrogant prejudice that dehumanizes one's fellow man in the pursuit of one's own self-righteous piety.
Ultimately, this is where we find Piper's analysis at the end of the day. The "ministry of damnation" is not on the shoulders of President Obama or Gene Robinson, but upon Dr. Piper's own shoulders. He seeks to turn a message of hope and unconditional love into a bigoted rejection of Christ's own words that the greatest laws, on which hang all the law and the prophets are "Love the Lord your God" and "Love thy neighbor as thyself." Piper may arrogantly assert that he is merely loving his neighbor, but he is really only self-righteously asserting that he himself knows better than others what is right for them, perhaps because he has some peculiar divine appointment from God or perhaps because he is just more intelligent.
Piper, a baptist (to my knowledge) seems inherently by his writing to reject one of the most fundamental aspects of historic baptist doctrine, "the priesthood of the believer." Each man and woman is to work out his or her own faith "with fear and trembling" (to borrow from the New Testament language). We must assume that Piper seeks to supersede this process by imposing his own view (however historically inaccurate or biblically strained) of the matter.
Instead of welcoming, with open arms, all those who seek a better life by embracing the law of love and the teachings of Christ, and allowing those people to work through the issues of their lives with careful discernment and prayer, Piper wants to rebuke and exclude people who disagree with his views, and sullying the reputation of the Church as being a bigoted institution that rejects any divergence from its leadership's own orthodoxy. The likes of Piper have been responsible for turning thousands, if not millions of people away from the Church, either directly by running them out of their halls, or indirectly, by making them feel alien and unwelcome. Even if homosexuality were the moral equivalence of adultery and thievery, Christ himself welcomed the adulterers and the thieves, and the Church must do so too, with the same loving embrace that Christ did, not with the pious down-looking attitudes of the Pharisees.
I would be remiss if I did not grant a few things before ending this already lengthy post, and so in spite of breaking all conventions of conciseness, I will do so now.
Without question, specific expressions of homosexuality can no doubt, fall into sinfulness, as can specific expressions of heterosexuality. This would have been a far more biblically agreeable ground from which Piper could have criticized Gene Robinson's inclusion in the Obama inauguration. Robinson, like the Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church, Katherine Jeffers-Schori, more than strain orthodoxy in their views not only of sexual ethics, but of the meaning and purpose of the Gospels, the role of the Church, etc. Robinson and Jeffers-Schori, far from helping the cause of gay inclusion in the Anglican communion, have alienated our fellow Anglican brethren by ignoring the basic principles of community and the specific canons and covenants of both the Communion and the Episcopal Church.
The divisiveness of Bishop Robinson's consecration was the beginning, not the end, of the reckless and feckless actions by the left-wing of the Episcopal Church, which has, in the intervening years, rent asunder one of the most rich theological traditions in the United States and, given the effects this divisiveness has had on the Communion, the world. The prosecution of the Bishop of Pittsburgh, and his defrocking was not only in outright violation of the Canons of the Episcopal Church, but it was a base, politically motivated witch hunt by Jeffers-Schori and others.
Rather than being willing to endure persecution and with a long-suffering manner with love and tenderness try to convince the Anglicans of the "global South" of their error in hatefully condemning and excluding homosexuals from the Church, Jeffers-Schori and the left-wing of the Episcopal Church have themselves become the persecutors, all the while in some sense abandoning every pretext of historic Christian orthodoxy, from the Trinity to Original Sin. George Will wrote, in an October article about the Episcopal Church that "The Episcopal Church once was America's upper crust at prayer. Today it is "progressive" politics cloaked -- very thinly -- in piety." If a religious figure is to criticize Robinson et al, it should be on these grounds, not others.
The problem with both Piper and Jeffers-Schori (and to a lesser extent, Robinson) is that they are Pharisees, but of different doctrines. Both ultimately reject the call of Christ to love one another as even he loved us. Both ultimately reject, both in spirit and in practice, the command to do unto others as we would have them do unto ourselves. If we wonder why the Church is falling apart, and why the number of secularists has skyrocketed, it is because we have rejected the very unity of the body of Christ that he commanded to us on Maundy Thursday. As the church continues to fracture and fragment, it will grow leaner and more frail. If we are to adhere dogmatically to a doctrine, let it be the doctrine of "faith, hope, and love--these three, the greatest of which is love."
Christ commanded us to love our enemies. Perhaps Dr. Piper and Bishop Robinson should sit down with one another and become living examples of what this means. It would not be politically correct for either of them to do this, so I will not hold my breath.
I do not hold malicious thoughts toward either man, however. I think both of them, like myself, are working out their faith with fear and trembling. But I think we must all go through this process with greater humility, and with our eyes focused on God, not on each other. If we see each other in the frail state that God sees us, then perhaps we would be more likely to help heal each other's wounds than to create more scars.