The lead singer of Jars of Clay, one of my favorite bands, cannonballed the Twitter pool repeatedly this week with commits and questions on gay marriage. Dan Haseltine asked if ruling out gay marriage was really as bad as many say it is. I’m tempted to reenact the drama for you. I got caught up in it somewhat. I saw Dan’s tweet splash down: “I don’t particularly care about Scriptures stance on what is “wrong.” I care more about how it says we should treat people,” and my heart sank.
But yesterday, Dan explained the context of his tweets, what he was trying to say, and how he messed it all up. He says he came from a panel discussion on gay marriage in Australia last week where many things were said that provoked him. He hadn’t thought about it much before, so on Twitter, not the best platform for this, he wanted to ask questions outside of his own box, to assume he didn’t have all the answers and to wonder where his blind spots were, if any. And he said things that easily misrepresent his views.
It’s encouraging. I like this guy and his music. One of his recent songs says we “don’t know enough about love, so we make it up.” It seems to call our current sexual chaos into question. Some of us talk love but we don’t know anything about it. In one of his books, Jared C. Wilson notes that God is love, but love is not God. We can’t define love however we feel is right and then say that’s god. It doesn’t work that way.
I feel we’re in a similar situation with homosexuality and the civil marriage debate. We are taking our feelings and outside assumptions to the Bible and reading them into the text or scanning to see where they are directly rejected. When I say on Twitter that Matthew 19 defines marriage (other passages add to it as well), a liberal responds that my hermeneutic is bad. She says the definition of marriage has changed since the Bible was written. The cultural context is completely different now. In response, I ask whether culture is proscriptive.
Marriage, as legally defined, is not a civil rights issue. How is someone’s basic human dignity denied by being ineligible to file legal documents as a married couple? If a woman wants to marry her sister, where would her human dignity be denied: by forbidding her to marry a woman or by forbidding her to marry a sibling? We have to draw a moral line somewhere, and the Bible seems pretty clear about this.
This gets back to the one problem I have with Dan’s blog post. He writes:
I was trying to communicate that although we often say, “Scripture is clear about this or that,” the very fact that so many people disagree or have alternate perspectives or interpretations of scripture, means that we have to move beyond simply quoting a scripture to prove our point. We have to dig into the scripture and help translate it and offer context. Simply quoting a scripture can stall out a good honest dialogue.
Good point that we can’t just bat Scripture into the air and ask, “Isn’t it obvious?” But the fact that many disagree on Scripture’s intent doesn’t mean it isn’t clear. It usually means we don’t know what God has said and are reading our ideas into his words. It’s easy to do.
On this issue, the Bible is clear. Marriage defines moral sex. It is a picture of Christ’s intimate love for his church, and it doesn’t apply to any relationship but one. Everywhere God explains immorality it’s in relationship to the marriage of a man and woman.
We can’t look at a civil definition of marriage in secular terms. Every law comes from a moral framework of some kind, so why should Christians ignore a biblical framework in an effort to find the Fountain of Youth on common ground where everyone can agree? It doesn’t exist.
More context: Haseltine has seemed pretty ambivalent about evangelicalism for a while now.
I point this out as someone who owns every single one of JOC’s albums.
That’s an odd post. I clicked over to Haseltine’s original, and he doesn’t appear to be correct. That album was well-received. I remember World praising it. And being uncomfortable with church culture as he experiences it or the CCM industry isn’t the same as misinterpreting the Bible.
What did you think of the Inland album? Did it have themes that were far outside the evangelical church, as he says?
Were the themes that far outside of orthodoxy? Not really. The tone was pretty downbeat, but not as grim as The Eleventh Hour. Honestly, I think the band is trying to shed the evangelical image as much as anything else, which has pros and cons. Maybe that explains a little of Haseltine’s equivocations on sexual ethics.
“The cultural context is completely different now.”
I guess when Hitler killed millions of people it was okay, because the context was different then from when murder was wrong before he came to power.
Morals don’t change. What’s wrong will always be wrong. The world needs to learn and remember this.
Hilter is a bad example, because no one will defend him, but they will talk about killing people out of mercy or eugenics for the good of society. At least, they may. Those issues are beside the points here. Here we’re talking about the biggest idol of all time, sex. Should we define ourselves by our sexual habits or desires? Is sexual identity an actual thing? And since God didn’t say anything about it (using the terms we have defined ourselves), does that mean he didn’t know?
Also, Godwin’s law.ddd
Yeah, but does Godwin’s Law apply here? I suppose this being a high-tension moral discussion, the probability of a Nazi comparison starts off high.
The way I understand Godwin’s law is that the longer an Internet discussion goes on, the more the chances of a Nazi illustration increase. Also, the first person to use said illustration loses. So I never use them, no matter how apropos.
I could have used Margaret Sanger, but seeing as she’s a secular saint now, what’s the point?
The fact is that morals don’t change. Whether we’re talking about murder or sex not focused on life.
We agree with you, but many would rather talk us to death instead of face this fact. I suppose the woman I was talking to would have done this to me, if we had been face to face.
Fair enough.