We’ve featured the work of Matthew Vines
many times
before, and want to highlight a speech given at a conference recently
held by his organization, The Reformation Project. A keynote speaker,
David Gushee, one of the foremost evangelical ethicists in the United
States, used the occasion to announce his support for the full-inclusion
of LGBT Christians in the Church. The above video of Gushee’s remarks
is longer than we usually post, but it’s worth watching in full. (You
can read a transcript of his remarks
here.) For a sense of why this matters, Jonathan Merritt
sketches Gushee’s place in the evangelical world:
It is difficult to overstate the potential impact of Gushee’s defection. His Christian ethics textbook, “Kingdom Ethics,”
co-authored with the late Glen Stassen, is widely respected and was
named a 2004 Christianity Today book of the year. He serves as
theologian-in-residence for the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship, a
coalition of 15 theological schools, 150 ministries, and 1,800 Baptist
churches nationwide.
While other pro-LGBT Christian activists — including Justin Lee of the Gay Christian Network and Matthew Vines, author of “God and the Gay Christian”
— have been dismissed in some circles as wet-behind-the-ears youngsters
without formal theological training, Gushee, 52, is a scholar with
impeccable credentials. He can add intellectual heft to what has largely
been a youth-led movement, and is not someone who can be easily
dismissed.
Gushee
summarizes his approach to the issue this way:
Since the 1960s, when the gay rights movement began in
America, Christians and their leaders have struggled to figure out how
to respond to the growing tolerance of same-sex relationships. Most in
Christianity have responded by offering endless debates over how to
interpret that handful of biblical passages. Books erupted.
Congregations fought. Denominations split.
For me, the answer to this debate has become simple: There is a sexual-minority population of about 5 percent of the human family
that has received contempt and discrimination for centuries. In
Christendom, the sexual ethics based in those biblical passages
metastasized into a hardened attitude against sexual- and
gender-identity minorities, bristling with bullying and violence. This
contempt is in the name of God, the most powerful kind there is in the
world. I now believe that the traditional interpretation of the most
cited passages is questionable and that all that parsing of Greek verbs
has distracted attention from the primary moral obligation taught by
Jesus — to love our neighbors as ourselves, especially our most
vulnerable neighbors. I also now believe that while any progress toward
more humane treatment of LGBT people is good progress, we need to
reconsider the entire body of biblical interpretation and tradition
related to this issue.
Put simply, it finally became clear to me that I must side with those
who were being treated with contempt, just as I hope I would have sided
with Jews in the Nazi era and with African Americans during the civil
rights years.
