Contestability
My Initial Response to the SSM Debate
My continuing deconstruction story: I’m an Aussie who grew up Catholic, became a Protestant, spent six decades as an Evangelical Christian, then de-converted. Today, I’m looking at the 2017 Same Sex Marriage debate that changed everything.
Last time, I revealed the role religion played in triggering the Aussie SSM debate. In early 2017, I was a Christian recovering from burnout. Most of my friends were Christians, and my feed soon filled with strident anti-SSM comments. People I knew well were strongly urging a ‘No’ vote as the only legitimate Christian response. My faith community had chosen an aggressive exclusionist position. This made me very uneasy, but when I queried it, no one gave a good explanation. Some quoted obscure Bible verses. So, I decided to take a closer look.
I’m a quiet, thoughtful person who doesn’t like large groups. Others march in the streets, but I’ve never considered myself an activist. Researching and writing is what I do, how I process issues, how I know what I’m thinking. I’d done that for a living for decades. So, I did my thing, researched and wrote a paper on the ‘clobber verses.’ Then I posted it on my social media with the following introduction:
Dear friends. I’ve shared my views on Same-Sex Marriage before. Many in my faith community are opposed, puzzled, hurt, or shocked that I support it. I’ve looked at the biblical basis fueling the opposition and come to some startling conclusions. Today I’ll share the first of two papers. I invite you to engage, read, and rebut. You may well find, as I did, that all isn’t as it seems.
Principles of Bible Interpretation
My first paper, The Bible and Same-Sex Marriage (linked at end) looked at what the OT said about homosexuality and its historical interpretations. I planned to cover the three NT clobber verses in a later paper but didn’t finish it.
My first paper introduced six General Principles of Bible Interpretation:
Scripture is meant to be understood
Carefully observe what the text says
Context is critical: Both Literary and Historical
Compare scripture with scripture
Consider the literary genre
Consider the historical view of the church
These principles are a basic guide to biblical exegesis for believers. They offer a cautious approach to interpretation, a fairer process that reveals truth, a set of checks and balances, or controls to steer us away from error. While using them doesn’t guarantee accuracy, ignoring them can cause serious problems. If I could use them to make a compelling case that the historical interpretations were unsound, then those interpretations would be contestable, or simply wrong.
Today, I don’t agree with all the principles. Not all scripture is meant to be understood by all readers for all time. That’s a post-biblical teaching that relies on magic or the supernatural, not logic. Bible writers had an audience in mind to interpret their messages, but none of us are in that audience today. That doesn’t mean we can’t understand them, but it may be irrelevant to us. I also don’t consider the historical view of the church always relevant, it’s often widely inaccurate. The remaining principles are useful common-sense literary checks and balances.
The Challenge of Bible Interpretation
Interpretation is central to understanding the Bible but it’s not easy. The key is to observe what the text says, not what we want it to say, and therein lies the first problem. Writing uses symbols or characters to encode spoken language, to send thoughts and ideas across time. Authors encode meaning, readers decode it, so the meaning of a text should always depend on the author, not the reader. However, decoding symbols, characters, or ideas from an ancient cultural context is error-prone. Even if we translate the symbols and characters correctly, the thoughts and ideas are still from a foreign culture, and they may defy translation.
Thus, Bible interpretation is the art of decoding and explaining what we think an ancient author meant. However, we often see it through our own cultural lens, not the authors. Our cultural lens is the default, so readers can get the decoding wrong. Even translators get it wrong, since all translation is an act of interpretation. Then, of course, the entirety of Christianity is a reinterpretation of ancient Judaism. That often makes interpreting the Bible a meaning minefield, but it gets worse.
Religion makes interpretation harder by applying dogma. These are rules laid down as incontrovertibly true. Dogmas are unquestionable imposed, regarded as legitimate, treated as absolute truth. A dogma is prescriptive, dictating behaviour, morals, or worldview. However, dogmas don’t always read the author’s meaning out of a text, they often override the author’s meaning and produce errors. If that imposed meaning is then weaponised against minorities, real people get hurt.
And that’s why many Christians claim the Bible is anti-LGBTIQA+ and SSM. They like to play the dogmatic interpretation game, and they don’t care who gets hurt.
My paper made a critical point: If we quote the Bible to kill or discriminate, it should at least be incontestable, with no substantive argument on textual interpretation. It did feel strange warning my coreligionists to not kill or discriminate unless you’re sure of the Bible. Like it was an academic discussion when real lives were at stake. Indeed, the tone of my paper was academic. I was a Bible College graduate, so it took a cautious approach and built a logical case. I invited others to read and rebut my work, but no one ever did. Who needs logic when you’ve got the Bible?
The Signature Clobber Passage
My first paper looked at three Old Testament verses, and I’ll share one. Genesis 19 is the signature clobber passage on homosexuality. It tells the story of Sodom, from where the word ‘sodomite’ is derived, still code for a homosexual today. In the story, God sends two Angels to extract Lot and his family before destroying Sodom. Lot’s house is surrounded by men who demand to have sex with the Angels.
It’s a horror story, with no mention of a consensual same-sex relationship like SSM. The form of sexual behaviour described is a threatened violent gang-rape. This was likely a form of humiliation for prisoners of war, to dominate them as subjugated women. We can’t confirm that since the text does not explain why the men tried to sexually assault the two Angels. We can only speculate, and people do.
The traditional ‘interpretation’ of this signature passage is that the most horrific part was the demand by the men to have sex with the Angels. The assumption is that this was an attempted homosexual act, proposed by homosexuals, an act so vile that God destroyed the entire city of Sodom with fire. Boom!
The problem with this ‘interpretation’ is that it’s not supported by the specific text or the rest of the Bible. It’s pure speculation. The threatened violent sex act reads like a gang-rape. The sexual orientation of the men is never mentioned. It’s a better assumption that the majority were heterosexual, since the whole city was involved. Why else would Lot offer his virgin daughters instead? Would he offer them to a gay mob? It’s a better theory that the men just wanted violent, non-consensual sex, didn’t care who with, and the strangers were considered fair game.
From a cultural perspective, the worst part was Lot’s acute embarrassment as host. Note his desperate attempts to protect the Angels, who didn’t need help, defended themselves and fulfilled their mission. For me, the worst part was Lot offering his daughters. Women were disposable, nothing but property and breeders for men’s use. Clearly, we’re not dealing with a culture many of us recognise today. Yet some are still vehement the main problem in Sodom was ‘homosexuality.’ But was it?
How can we know what the problem was in Sodom? Why God chose to destroy it? Because the Bible repeatedly tells us elsewhere. One principle of interpretation is to use scripture to interpret scripture. The Bible often references Sodom as an example of great sinning, but no reference mentions homosexuality. In Isaiah 1:10-17 it’s injustice, not rescuing the oppressed, defending the orphan, pleading for the widow. In Jeremiah 23:14 it’s adultery and deceit. In Ezekiel 16:48-49 it’s arrogance, a lack of concern for the poor and needy. In Zephaniah 2:8-11 the sin is bullying, boasting, pride and idol worship. Even Jesus weighs in on the argument, citing inhospitality as the issue in Matthew 10:14-15. Sodom’s sin is definitely not homosexuality. Boom!
Yet people still quote Genesis 19 to ‘prove’ homosexuality is a detestable sin that brings down God’s fiery wrath, so I quote the Bible back at them. I love using myth to debunk myth, because that’s all Genesis 19 is: A scary story, a myth. Yet this passage has launched a million hellfire and brimstone sermons and still does.
Interpreting Genesis 19 to condemn homosexuality is laughingly false and easily rebutted by the Bible itself. That makes it a highly contestable interpretation. All the other ‘clobber verses’ are also contestable on multiple grounds. If you don’t know what they are, the information is freely available. There’s no excuse, and no defensible basis for Christianity’s vendetta against the LGBTIQA+ community.
Bottom line: The Bible never talks about same-sex attraction or marriage. It condemns acts of sexual violence involving control, abuse, or depravity. For example, the pederasty which was common when Paul wrote Romans. If we understand the cultural context, fair-minded people can see it, and they do. If other people can’t or won’t see it, they need to be educated and perhaps grow up. If pastors can’t or won’t see it, they should know better. They need to shut up and stop maliciously condemning the LGBTIQA+ community. Sadly, the hate never stops, and that’s an increasing problem for our secular civil society to deal with.
The Importance of Contestability
By introducing the idea of contestability, I naively hoped my paper would blunt some ‘No’ arguments or at least make them less strident. But of course, it didn’t.
Contestability occurs when an interpretation of the Bible is open to debate, for example, due to a lack of evidence or different perspectives. Admitting an interpretation is contestable doesn’t mean it’s wrong. It means we hold our beliefs humbly and allow legitimate challenges. Contestability gives our beliefs integrity and honesty. We may think we’re right, but we’re open to opposing ideas. However, from the fierce push-back I received, none of my opponents conceded that. They craved certainty, not contestability, and they did some underhand things to get it. No one ever admitted they could be wrong in the slightest, and that suggested their arguments lacked integrity and were deliberately or unwittingly dishonest.
Back then, I was still in the faith and wanted to stay that way. Now these confronting realisations were destroying my trust and tearing me up inside. I don’t think I’ve ever seen such intellectual intransigence in my entire life. Surely integrity and honesty should be important to everyone, especially Christians.
Contestability is critically important because history shows us beliefs can have dire consequences. Historically, the Bible has been used to justify killing, imprisonment, slavery, and discrimination of all kinds. That should be a giant red flag to anyone who learns from history. The lesson is contestability, not certainty, is a better path to truth. Yet those opposing SSM wanted Bible-based discrimination using the same verses that once upheld the death penalty for gays. They had obviously not learnt anything or were ignorant of their own religion’s history and doomed to repeat it.
Now, if a religion kills, imprisons, enslaves, or discriminates; I call that toxic. If a religion preaches hate (while saying it’s a religion of love) I call that hypocrisy. Yet Christians have done all these things to the LGBTIQA+ community thru human history, based on highly questionable interpretations of the Bible. To me, part of the SSM debate was righting this historical wrong. Instead, people I once trusted lined up to repeat the wrong and try to justify it, and they couldn’t justify it.
Discussing the competing interpretations of one ‘clobber verse’ I wrote:
I’m prepared to concede that I don’t know the right answer. I do know this: It doesn’t hurt anyone … if I don’t know the right answer, it only hurts if I insist I’m right and then seek to impose my view on others by force.
I welcomed contestability, I wasn’t imposing my views by force; I engaged in online discussion to defend a vulnerable minority. Those opposing SSM wanted to use the force of a discriminatory law to impose a highly contestable Bible interpretation on a vulnerable minority. Sadly, there were people in my church, one I’d served faithfully for a decade, prepared to use any force to wage a hurtful culture war.
In my exegesis, every ‘clobber verse’ wilted under scrutiny. I didn’t need a theology degree to know the interpretations used to oppose SSM were questionable. All it took was a careful reading, logic, and a bit of clear thinking, applying common-sense principles of biblical interpretation. Nor was I the first to point this out. Many Christians had done it before and since, much better than me, at length, in greater detail, in widely published texts. Yet none in my opponents had read a dissenting voice, or dismissed them, because the facts didn’t fit their dogma.
For example, David Gushee wrote a brilliant book called ‘Changing Our Mind’ in 2015[i]. I highly recommend it. Matthew Vines’ ‘God and the Gay Christian’ is illuminative. Colby Martin’s ‘UnClobber: Rethinking our Misuse of The Bible on Homosexuality’ is a post-debate worthy read. A quicker online read is Why I Affirm and Support Same-Sex Marriage by Douglas Bursch. There’s a lot more where they came from, so no one has any excuse for Biblical ignorance. If you’re still a Christian with questions about this issue, read widely, laterally, and often.
Of course, many Christians did support SSM, but in my evangelical circle, supporters were a tiny minority, and most were unusually quiet, with a few notable exceptions. Most didn’t want to pick a fight with their aggressive coreligionists, so they stayed silent, and silence is violence. They weren’t much help.
I felt enormously discouraged, but I stayed engaged and kept trying to break through the mountains of misinformation I saw daily. I even wrote a second paper, tackling the broader issues in the debate. That’s next time on UNSAVED.
Next: Shifting the Goalposts. #HaveAGoodWeekend.
[i]Gushee, David P.: Changing Our Mind: A call from America’s leading evangelical ethics scholar for full acceptance of LGBT Christians in the Church 2015. Amazon eBook.