Who’s this We?

As I opened the most resent issue of the Waltonian I stumbled upon the article regarding homosexuality. After reading the title I imagined the piece as a call to Christians to be more loving to homosexuals and a ‘love the sinner but hate the sin’ mentality. My eyes then glazed over the bold quote “We already believe that the Bible is sometimes wrong.” Immediately I thought “WE?” We already believe? I wondered if there was a meeting at Eastern that I was unaware in which “we” decided this. I thought about looking to see if there was a Christian committee that recently decided that “we” all believed the Bible was sometimes wrong. Through reading the rest of the article I realized that the article was sometimes wrong.The writer makes his statement based on the ideal accommodation. He says that we must read scripture carefully to show that the homosexual community must be accepted. I have read scripture carefully and Genesis 19:1-13, Lev. 18:22-30, Lev. 20:13, Rom. 1:20-32, 1 Cor. 6:9,10 and James 1:14,15 all speak out that homosexuality is detestable in the eyes of God and those who participate in these acts and do not seek forgiveness will not inherit the kingdom of God. The text that the writer brings up about subordinate women is used in a context isolated from the wider perspective of Paul’s mission. Paul uplifts and affirms women twice as often as he does men in his letters and he had many women in very vital positions of his churches including leadership. With these facts in mind it is hard to perceive that the restrictions Paul wrote in those text were more than addressing specific cases in those church. Moving on, let us take the assumption the writer makes, but does not provide evidence for, that science has actually definitively proven people are born with a homosexual orientation. I think this is a lie, but lets assume it is true. People are born mean… people are born greedy and selfish… but those sins are never rationalized and should not be established as right. Man is born into sin! We cannot allow ourselves to live in that sin and accept it.So hopefully what the writer of this article meant by “We already believe that the Bible is sometimes wrong” is that those who accept homosexuality as moral have to believe the Bible to be wrong to support their case. Or maybe that “We who seek to appease everyone instead of preaching God’s Word have to believe the Bible is wrong.” I sincerely hope the views of my fellow Christian classmates and faculty are not included in the “we” that think the Bible is wrong.

Daniel Ulrich