Dec 09 2008
Newsweek: The Bible and gay marriage
I hesitate to respond to the recent Newsweek column that is causing such a stir. Newspaper editorials about religion are usually as worthwhile as a trapeze artist at a science convention. If there is one thing journalists insist on knowing next to nothing about, and then feeling smug in their ignorance, it is the quaint realm of religion.
In this case, the opinion of “religion editor” Lisa Miller (that the Bible does not oppose gay marriage) certainly has its school of scholarly supporters, as did the flat-world theory in its day. Part of the beauty of being a journalist is that you can always pull an expert out of your hat and either quote him as an authority or simply claim his ideas as your own. But when a flat-world theorist publishes his view in a magazine, no respectable person gives him the honor of a rebuttal. In the same way, I feel that Miller’s shoddy journalism should not be dignified with anything more than deafening silence.
Yet here I am talking anyway.
This is not, per se, a rebuttal. I have no interest in countering all the so-called arguments Miller throws at us in a “see what sticks” fashion. What interests me more is what the article unintentionally reveals about Miller and people like her.
After giving all the reasons why the Bible is worthless trash, but then oddly also trying to prove that the text does not support an anti-gay agenda, Miller makes an eerily-familiar statement: “Biblical literalists will disagree, but the Bible is a living document, powerful for more than 2,000 years because its truths speak to us even as we change through history.”
Where have we heard this before? That’s right, the U.S. Constitution. When you don’t like what an authoritative document has to say, the rule of the day is to strip the document’s authority by breathing “life” into it. In this case, what Miller means to say is that any honest textual scholar cannot possibly come to the conclusion that the Bible favors gay marriage. But if we disregard the original meaning of the text and impose our own preferences upon it, then yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus – a flaming limp-wristed Santa who stuffed divorce papers in Mrs. Claus’ stocking and took a sleigh ride with Jack Frost.
What Miller has done is stolen the church’s words and used them against us. The Bible is indeed a living document, not because it has no authority but because it carries the authority of the living God who brings a message of life.
The trouble with people like Miller is that they think they can have their cake and eat it too. They try to earn our respect by doing pseudo-scholarly research into the true meaning of the Bible, when in the next breath they make all scholarship irrelevant by declaring the text a living document.
If Miller is serious about this, then I challenge her to be consistent. Go ahead and believe that the Bible favors homosexual marriage, but allow me to simultaneously claim that the Bible opposes it. Because if the Bible means whatever we want it to mean, then my interpretation is no more or less valid than hers. Whoever wants to accept gay marriage can stake their claim on the Bible, and whoever wants to reject it can do the same.
But as if Miller’s heap of scholar-shit were not foul enough, editor Jon Meacham chose to heap more guilt upon Newsweek with this poisonous statement: “No matter what one thinks about gay rights—for, against or somewhere in between —this conservative resort to biblical authority is the worst kind of fundamentalism,”
Wait a minute. Belief in the Bible’s authority is the worst kind of fundamentalism? My poor confused friend, have you ever read a book that wasn’t written by the Jesus Seminar? The religion of Christianity is based upon the teachings of Christ, and if we reject the Bible we have no teachings. We might as well say that belief in the Communist Manifesto’s authority is the worst kind of fundamentalist Marxism.
“Given the history of the making of the Scriptures and the millennia of critical attention scholars and others have given to the stories and injunctions that come to us in the Hebrew Bible and the Christian New Testament, to argue that something is so because it is in the Bible is more than intellectually bankrupt—it is unserious, and unworthy of the great Judeo-Christian tradition.”
Unworthy of the great Judeo-Christian tradition? The Bible IS the Judeo-Christian tradition! If the Judeo-Christian tradition is not about the business of believing its own traditions, then what business is it about? For Meacham’s part, I suggest he go back to the business of journalism, from which he has strayed very far. I would not wipe my arse with the paper upon which this fecal matter has been smeared.
Thank you for your comment.
Maybe some isolated passages can appear as you perceived them. But homosexuality has never been accepted either in the church or in pre-Christian Judaism. Moses’ law forbade it, and although Jesus himself never brought up the subject, St. Paul explicitly forbade it, and the church persisted in the same path for two thousand years.
I’m not sure what you mean by non-sexual romantic love. But yes I agree that homosexuals did not chose to have the inclinations that they do, anymore than a person desires to be an alcoholic or manic-depressive. There’s a reason why the Bible tells us to resist temptation, and the reason is that it assumes we are going to experience temptation of one sort or another. Otherwise, Christianity would be way too easy.
Amen, amen!