Sexual Orientation Regulations

The legislation was passed hurriedly through the house of commons last night. A group opf tories tried to demand a proper debate, but this was voted down. There is a chance that the House of Lords will reject it, and say you can't alter the fundamental balance of rights without a proper debate, but I can't see that happening.

And so, with out ceremony, the fundamental core of democratic values (religious tolerance) has been swept away. Despite all this, and even though I am losing sleep worrying about it every night, I still feel a strange sense of God-given peace about it all. It is not the first time the church has been persecuted, and a little opposition might cause us to get our act together a bit better.

And also, I can see the point of the regulations.

The church has always been a product of its society, and so in past generations where there was intolerance of gays, the church has reflected this and done so without showing the love of God. We have therefore brought this on ourselves. If we had expressed Christ's love for homosexuals properly before, rather than imprisoning them, and trying to enforce our own beliefs onto secular society, then there might not be this backlash.

So what can the church do?

Well, as I said, in every generation the church is a product of society. And so, as we see in the Episcopal church in America, some churches will adopt the modern values.

And yet, sin is an offense against an unchanging God. If it was a sin in the time of the New Testament, then it is still sin now. Sin is not negotiable or determined by a vote.

If we go back to the Garden of Eden, we see how Eve saw that the forbidden fruit was pleasing to the eye and good for food. Her logic told her that the instrcutions from God must be wrong. She couldn't understand why God should forbid such an obviously good thing. And I think homosexual acts are much the same. They are pleasing to the eye and good for relationships. Why should God forbid such a good thing? And so, just as Eve decided to make up her own mind about it rather han relying on God, so we too, take exactly the same steps and decide that we know better.

In the same way, the church has warned against extra marital sex. Society has ignored it - and know we have massive rates of teenage pregnancy, massive rates of sexual desease, massive abortyion rates, and a culture that no longer knows how to sustain the bonds of relationship. And while the gays are demanding the right to marry, heterosexuals are runing in the opposite direction and demanding equal rights for unmarried couples. And as families break down, we now have a housing shortage because we now live as individuals instead of couples, doublig our housing needs.

The church has also preached agianst abortion. Society has ignored this. We now have very low birth rates, and a workforce that is too small to sustain the social security system we thought we could rely on.

Now the church [most of it] preaches against homosexual acts. Society ignores it. If it follows the above pattern, I fear for what the consequences will be!

But the whole issue is makeing me reconsider my own position on homosexuality. I have come a long way since the times when I was subjected to sexual abuse by other boys at school. Where some of the church insists that homosexuality is NOT inherited, I believe that it is. Most gay people know that they are gay while still at primary school. If you do an autopsy on a transgender person who felt like a woman trapped in a man's body, you do find that the brain was a female brain. Some behaviours are learned, but many are congenital.

So if gays are born that way, why should the church condemn? Jesus said of the man born blind "Who sinned, his man or his parents, that he was born blind?" and the answer was neither. It is not a sin to be born in a particular way, and we must not condemn. But Jesus went on to change the blind man, and make him see. And that is where I am at present - I do not condemn, but I do seek to bring people to Jesus so that he can heal anything that needs healing.

So what about Leviticus? Jesus has fulfilled the Old Testament law on our behalf. It remains as light on God's character, but is not there for us to follow each letter. However, we need to distinguish between laws associated with ceremonial cleanliness (eg not having sex during a woman's period) and moral laws about who we can and can't have sex with - the former have spiritual meanings that we learn from, while the moral laws are nearly all repeated in some form explicitly or implicitly in the New Testament.

So what about Corinthians? " Let no one be decieved ...[list of sinner types]...will not inherit the kingdom of God, and some of you were such". The word generally translated as 'homosexual offender' is arsenokoitoi. I don't know what an arsenokoitoi is. Bishop Ingham, quoted in the Church of England newspaper thinks that St Pauls would never have encountered romantic homosexual love, only pederasty. What nonsense! Gay relationships are not a new phenomenon and to suggest they were not in existance in Corinth beggars belief. But the Corinthians passage makes it clear you can stop being an arsenokoitoi, and I don't think you can stop being a homosexual. So I don't think an arsenokoitoi is a homosexual. But you can stop doing homosexual acts, and so it could refer to that. Yet that is a big thing to ask of anybody, to cease their sex life. And yet that is what we expect and demand of pedophiles and people into animal sex. We also say it to sexually promiscuous heterosexuals, and standing as a virgin the day before I met my wife I had accepted that I might never marry and have sex. So we are asking something big, but not impossible, not different to other people, not different to the standards that I had expected to live by myself.

What I have writen here tries to be open and honest about how I see things today. Tomorrow I may have thought more and moved.

I don't want to condemn what God has blessed.
I don't want to bless what God has condemned.

I welcome your comments, particularly from gay christians. Give me Biblical Theology, medical science, a correct definition of arsenokoitoi, and your experinces of good and bad practice in the church.

I seek the truth!