Andrews University Lands on Shame List and LGBT Students Respond

[TonyR]

The reality is that our marriage conventions are western, sprouted out of Europe.

Tim, and yet Paul (a Jew from the middle east) wrote:

Therefore an overseer must be above reproach, the husband of one wife, sober-minded, self-controlled, respectable, hospitable, able to teach, (1 Tim. 3:2)

When asked, Jesus always pointed back to how it was in the beginning:

“This at last is bone of my bones
and flesh of my flesh;
she shall be called Woman,
because she was taken out of Man.”
Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and they shall become one flesh. (Gen. 2:23-24)

"So they are no longer two but one flesh. What therefore God has joined together, let not man separate.” (Mat. 19:6)

Very little about examples of biblical marriage are anything like our modern conventions. Those who think there are such examples is reading the bible wearing rose colored glasses.

We don’t need a thousand examples before we except something. Christ made it abundantly clear to the Jews (like you) who wanted something different; outside of His created order… they wanted culture to dictate how things are to be.

Edit:

A key concept, expressed here in the last phrase “let no man separate”, is a prohibition on adultery.

Hi again, Tim @timteichman

Jesus was dealing with divorce, adultery is not mentioned in the text. The Pharisees wanting to take it further go on to ask Him, “Why then did Moses command one to give a certificate of divorce and to send her away?” Which Jesus replies with, “Because of your hardness of heart Moses allowed you to divorce your wives, but from the beginning it was not so.” Pointing to Gods ideal.

This indicates that the happy couple is having sex, the act that joins you as one flesh. It does not say the man should be married to (should own in those days) only one woman.

I’m assuming you interpreted this having to do with sex because you (possibly) misunderstood it having to do with adultery. Or maybe I’m wrong, and you do believe it has to do with adultery. Personally I don’t see it. However, in the case that I did miss something you picked up on I decided to take a look at a few commentaries. They all seem to suggest divorce is being spoken of here and that Jesus is pointing to Gods ideal - if a man divorces (separates) his wife, he is undoing (separating) that which God meant to last forever. Hence, “So they are no longer two but one flesh. What therefore God has joined together, let not man separate [i.e. divorce].”

[gormac70 (Marc)]

God is a mystery whom the ancient Hebrews and Paul in his own time were unable to understand outside of their tribalistic Old Testament roots/literature. They spoke to, and within their own times. And so it seems even today - we simply cannot break free of ancient traditions which are based on ignorance.
Today vast swathes of Christians are perplexed by the existence of gays within their communities and yet we never find the same degree of perplexity when we read such verses as found in ‘The Word of God’ - such as those words in Deuteronomy 22:15-21, where a virgin is to be stoned because no blood was found on her nuptial sheets. That barbaric instruction is prefaced in Deuteronomy 1:3 - “Moses spoke to the people of Israel according to all that the Lord had given him in commandment to them”. “All that the Lord had given him in commandment”? Really? It seems that the god of the Hebrews was ignorant of the possibility that a young woman’s hymen could tear due to any number of reasons. As implied above, the god of the Old Testament is sometimes a feeble attempt by those early writers to come to grips with a great mystery - the mystery of the Great God Himself. Paul too, although sometimes breaking through an almost impenetrable fog returns once again to ancient tradition to define the boundaries of sexuality.

Homosexuality and lesbianism are as old as creation itself, and no doubt existed alongside heterosexuality. Gayness is a ‘given’ in the divine/human situation and enlightened Christians of today should endeavour to acknowledge that. Jesus himself, although speaking most times through the text and the idiom of ancient Hebrew scriptures surely knew of the existence of gays among the Greeks found in the cities of the Decapolis - and Sepphoris was not far down the road from Nazareth. And yet we never find Jesus condemning or even mentioning (in the gospel accounts) the existence of gays - or condemning a gay lifestyle. It was obviously a non-issue for him.

[TonyR]

Hello Marc,

We could do the same thing with slavery. Here allow me to edit part of your comment to give an example:

Jesus himself, although speaking most times through the text and the idiom of ancient Hebrew scriptures surely knew of the existence of [slavery] among the Greeks found in the cities of the Decapolis - and Sepphoris was not far down the road from Nazareth. And yet we never find Jesus condemning or even mentioning (in the gospel accounts) [slavery] - or condemning [slavery]. It was obviously a non-issue for him.

Argument from silence can cause all sorts of problems

Arguments from silence, based on a writer’s failure to mention an event, are distinct from arguments from ignorance which rely on a total “absence of evidence” and are widely considered unreliable; however arguments from silence themselves are also generally viewed as rather weak in many cases; or considered as fallacies.[1][8]
www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_silence

Jesus (or anyone else for that matter) not mentioning something, does not necessarily mean they are okay with it, or even see it as a non-issue.

[gormac70 (Marc)]

Thanks for your comments Tony. Just wishing to emphasise once again - there is so much which remains a mystery about God - including the silence on so many questions which we confront today. How would He/She understand the phenomenon of the human situation - which includes our friends and neighbours the gay community. I wish we knew more about the history of the Decapolis cities and of that nearby city of Zipphora. Just how seemingly ‘decadent’ were those Roman and Greek communities?

There are indeed so many unanswered questions and I have no confidence in the sometime ignorant opinions of tribalistic Hebrews and of Paul to fill in the gaps - Paul brought into his letters a fair amount of his Hebrew background - and who both - Hebrew and Pharisee - make much use of a ‘thus saith the Lord’.

Henry Wansborough once wrote a book The Use and Abuse of the Bible. I hope he may be spared to write of the use and abuse of God’s name by the Bible writers! But there we are . . .