[Vision2020] HIS VIEW: What Christians should repent of (and why)

[Saundra Lund]

HIS VIEW: What Christians should repent of (and why)

By Kurt Queller

Monday, April 9, 2007 - Page Updated at 12:00:00 AM


A good deal has been printed on these pages of late, purporting to reflect a
bold countercultural witness to the truths of Christianity. The litany
includes screeds against homosexuality, complaints about perceived
persecution of Christians, and scornful dismissals of consensus scientific
views in biology and climatology as merely reflecting alternative
"religious" perspectives.

Lost amidst all the contentious culture-war rhetoric is any clear testimony
to the saving power of Christ in a suffering world. Some find the continual
chest-thumping and finger-pointing entertaining; others find it repulsive.
Either way, the effects on Christian public witness are profoundly
destructive.

As an evangelical myself, I have two simple pleas for my co-religionists.
First: can we stop whining? American Christians are not a persecuted
minority. Pretending that we are, while luridly invoking the Roman emperor
Nero's torture of Christians, might give us a delicious sense of vicarious
participation in the early martyrs' heroic witness. In the public square,
however, such self-indulgent foolishness can serve only as a tool for
counter-evangelism.

Listen up, brothers and sisters: Christian witness isn't about you. Nor is
it about those mean, intolerant secularists who supposedly persecute you.
It's about bringing the good news that Jesus preached and embodied to people
who don't know it. This absurd rhetorical posturing, with its mingling of
delusional self-pity and complacent self-celebration, in no way serves that
purpose.

Second: can we stop bashing gays? They aren't responsible for our family
values issues. Infidelity, child abuse, failure to be responsible parents -
all (as Douglas Wilson grants) are fundamentally heterosexual problems.

But what are we to make of attempts to turn Paul's letter to the Romans into
an argument that gays reflect God's wrath against American Christians,
because of our heterosexual sins? Only by "owning the curse" of
homosexuality and repenting of our own heterosexual sins, Douglas Jones and
Wilson argue (Credenda/Agenda 16:2), can American Christians turn away
divine wrath. Tactically conceding a possible genetic basis for
non-heterosexual orientation - the Almighty may after all choose any means,
including genetics, to smite a nation - Jones and Wilson urge American
Christians to abjure gay-baiting and accept their own chastisement. Only so,
they argue, may the homosexual curse be averted, and America restored.

In short, gays exist so that they may cease to exist. It's not about them;
it's all about us. Such self-absorption might be laughable - if it didn't
exact a real human toll. Can't we worry a bit less about our own exalted
role in God's plans to redeem America, and more about the effects of our
rhetoric on simple human persons? Suicide rates among our gay teenagers are
inordinately high. Grandiose theological arguments about a need to expiate a
homosexual "curse" are not entirely responsible. But they don't help.

What about public witness? When Christians continually fulminate in the
public square over how the "deviant" among us might provoke - or reflect -
divine wrath against the community at large, it offers an image of
Christianity that non-Christians can only understand as profoundly
Pharisaical. What sort of evangelical witness is this?

Paul's letter to the Romans indeed began with a condemnation of gentile
sexual depravity. Heterosexual men were routinely betraying their wives with
boy prostitutes and slaves. Such behavior was widely and justly condemned in
antiquity. But that wasn't Paul's real point.

Like the prologue in Amos, Paul's prologue in Romans is a set-up. Having
played upon believers' righteous indignation over characteristic gentile
sins, Paul turns to address their own hypocrisy. In chapter two of Romans,
he scathingly critiques the covenant people's proclivity for
self-congratulation and judgmentalism. Our public witness, he says, causes
God's name to be blasphemed among non-believers. Why should they care to
know about the sort of God to which our rhetoric purports to bear witness?

If we do concede that nonheterosexual orientation is for some persons
biologically given, we should also concede that Paul, who was unaware of
this phenomenon, probably never addressed it. But his primary point,
regarding the harm done by believers through self-righteous finger-pointing
and querulous self-absorption, addresses us unambiguously. This, says Paul's
prologue in Romans, is the characteristic sin of the faithful. Let's repent
of it now, before we do any further damage.

Kurt Queller holds a doctorate in linguistics from Stanford University and
teaches in the English department at the University of Idaho. He is a member
of Emmanuel Lutheran in Moscow (Evangelical Lutheran Church in America).