Love is an Orientation: Elevating the conversation with the gay community, by Andrew Marin
Since January I have been preaching through 1 Corinthians, with my plan being to finish up to the end of chapter 6 by the beginning of July, then to take a break, and pick things up again from chapter 7 next January. By the last Sunday of the series things had got squeezed and I knew I was being overly ambitious, trying to deal with a whole range of sexuality issues in one sermon, but ploughed ahead regardless.
Preaching 1 Corinthians 6 means dealing with Paul’s comments about homosexuality. Normally when teaching on this subject I would want to have an open ended session in which to do it, with lots of time for questions and reflection, not just a few minutes as part of one preach. I also really meant to say as I preached, “If you are gay you are so welcome here, we love you, we want you to feel accepted here,” but somehow missed it. After the service a man came up to me and said, “I’m gay, and I’m a Christian and I felt no love in what you were saying – I couldn’t take communion this morning because in what you said you were rejecting me.”
Ouch.
We spent quite a while talking together, and in the end were able to pray, and break bread together, which was good.
I got a number of positive comments about that sermon, but it was one of those ones where I spent the next 48 hours brooding on what an inadequate job I had done.
Andrew Marin spends his life seeking to demonstrate Christ-like love to lesbians, gays, bisexuals, and transsexuals. He wouldn’t have made the mistake I made in my sermon, and his book is a challenging one. To a large extent I agree with his emphasis, but I got to the end of it with rather unresolved feelings as to whether this is a book to pan or recommend. Overall I would go for the recommendation, if nothing else as a thought starter, but it is a recommendation with reservations.
Marin describes himself as a conservative, evangelical Christian. He is straight, and he is married. But he has chosen to live in Boystown, a predominantly gay area of Chicago, where he runs The Marin Foundation which researches religion in the gay community.
Perhaps it is the name of this foundation that first made me feel edgy about the book. Maybe its just my British repression, but heading up an organization named after oneself just doesn’t feel, well, polite. The next stumbling stone to negotiate was who Marin calls as witnesses. Clearly this books primary target is conservative evangelicals – those people who have a reputation for intolerance (if not hatred) towards gays. But if you want to buff your credentials as a conservative evangelical and want to reach that constituency then really you want a recognised conservative evangelical to puff your book. Instead, Marin has an introduction by Brian McLaren, who an increasing number of conservative evangelicals would regard as wandering ever further from any kind of Christian orthodoxy. McLaren introduces the book with a parable, and as soon as I’d read that that was what he was going to do I knew exactly what the parable would be – and I was right: A story told to make conservative evangelicals think that gays are the problem, but where the twist is that it is actually those pesky judgmental conservative evangelicals who are at fault. There may be some truth in this parable, but it was so blindingly obvious that this was what McLaren was going to say – because it is the kind of thing he always says – that it just got my back up even before I’d read a word of what Marin himself had to say.
So, that gripe got out of my system, what is it that Marin has to say?
It is a story of suddenly being confronted with a number of friends coming out, not knowing how to respond, but then ‘immersion’ (his word) into a gay community in order to try and understand this group of people. Marin’s overarching theme is that we need to reach out in love to LGBT people, that there are huge preconceptions on both sides, and that the treatment of many gay people by many Christians certainly justifies their preconceptions. Marin rightly points out that both sides feel threatened by the other, “both Christians and the GLBT community are imagining themselves in the same role: each as the underdog who has to fight their way out of a corner.” In the US this is perhaps more understandable, where a relatively huge number of people claim to be ‘evangelical’ and the friction between gay and evangelical is much more obvious. In the UK we conservative evangelicals are such a tiny minority and the tide has turned so absolutely in favour of sexual relativism that it is perhaps understandable if at times we feel the beleaguered few.
Marin does a good job of explaining how sexual orientation is the identity marker for gay people, so, for many gay people, to take away their sexual behaviour would be to strip them of identity. What he doesn’t attempt to do is explain how this came to be – apparently for the first time in human history. How did it happen that gay people now effectively see themselves as a people group, in an analogous way to how people of a certain ethnicity might?
Maybe this is too abstract and large a question for Marin to tackle, but I felt that he failed to connect the dots and recognize that for many straight people sexual behaviour is also core to identity. So when we wrestle with sexual behaviour it is not so much an issue of being gay or straight, it is more an issue of whether we are living in a biblically faithful and Christ-honouring way, because sexual behaviour shouldn’t be what defines us – rather, if we are believers, it is that we are
in Christ. The problem we are facing in our culture is not so much homosexuality, as sexual immorality generally. (Carl Trueman makes some interesting observations along these lines here)
One of my core concerns with Marin’s approach is his statement that, “I promise that God loves his children enough that he will always tell each of them what he feels is best for their life.” This attitude finds its outworking in a friend of Marin’s who “felt that God was telling him that it was OK that he was gay, and that he had the freedom to explore his sexual desires.” So Marin thinks this was OK too, and quotes the oft-misquoted (or, rather, misapplied) instruction of Jesus in Matthew 7 not to judge. There is so much here that gives me pause – but basically it comes down to the problem of an overly existential faith – that following Jesus is all about what I feel, and no-one else has any right to comment on that. But this is not how the Bible describes our faith! Faith in Christ is always worked out in the body of Christ, in the church. And that body has a right and responsibility to safeguard itself against harm and to live in the way of purity. We are not meant to interpret and apply the “I felt God saying…” feelings on our own, but work them out with our brothers and sisters. And we are meant to hold one another accountable for our actions.
Marin seems to have no theology of the church. And he seems to have no theology of marriage. (I might be being unfair here, as it is only quite a short book, but the church and marriage are such vastly important subjects to the matter in hand they should not be ignored.) He identifies the five places in which the Bible mentions homosexuality and explains a gay apologetic for them. If you are not already familiar with these arguments it is worth becoming familiar with them, as they are important. But in focussing on these five passages – and in critiquing conservative evangelicals who do nothing but focus on these five passages – Marin says nothing about the overarching biblical theme of sex being something that is restricted to the marriage covenant, in reflection of the fruitful, faithful, sacrificial marriage between Christ and his church – which is why when I am teaching on homosexuality I always spend far more time teaching on marriage than I do on any of those five passages. The one place in the book this is mentioned is an Appendix of testimonies where a man who is gay and who is Christian does a superb job of articulating the difference between sex within marriage and the sexual desires he feels for other men. It is a pity that Marin does not engage with this at all. Instead, in his desire to “not start with the word but the big picture” Marin misses the big picture of marriage and also fails to adequately deal with the passages under consideration – his treatment of 1 Timothy 1:9-11 is especially poor, in that he doesn’t deal with the passage at all, but makes unsupported comments such as “Paul eventually recognized that his blazing trail also left some burned areas.”
Because Marin’s theology is existential and feelings based, it inevitably tends towards the woolly. For example, “I define sin as anything that keeps one from realizing God’s full and perfect potential.” Sure, that’s true to a degree, but it makes sin sound like something a bit of positive thinking might resolve, rather than the cause of a devastating gulf between us and the creator, that could only be resolved by the Saviour bearing that sin and the Father’s righteous wrath towards it. Another example, “The good news is that the final determining factor of a person’s eternal security is not the achievement of sinlessness but the establishment of a one-on-one relationship with God.” Again, true to a degree, but missing the bigger point that the good news is that relationship with God means a declaration of our righteousness precisely because Jesus carried our sin, and relationship with God is only possible on that basis.
This has been a much longer review than I normally do, but this is such an important subject. Overall I would recommend the book, I greatly admire Marin's courage and love, and would be happy to have him speak at my church, but would urge readers to watch out for some of the things I have pointed out above. I would also urge all conservative evangelicals who do feel nervous or hostile towards gays to read this with an open mind and let it challenge you where you need challenging. At one point Marin provocatively states, “I have never met a more loving community in my life than the GLBT community… Their actions were supposed to be me – I was getting out-Jesused by gays and lesbians!” This should not be! I felt gutted that the gay man who heard me preach from 1 Corinthians 6 didn’t feel any sense of love in what I had said, and we should feel heartbroken if gay people are not able to enter our churches because all they feel is condemnation.
Marin is right – we need to show more love. But I think where Marin is wrong is that that he doesn’t equally argue our need to live in the tension of showing unconditional love while exercising real discipline. The first epistle of John is an intriguing example of this – again and again the apostle says, “love one another” but he also expects the church to be very direct with heretics and to live in purity. This is a hard road for us to walk, and inevitably we will make mistakes on the way, but by the grace of God we can build churches that are loving, and also are pure.
Age of Opportunity: A Biblical Guide to Parenting Teens, by Paul Tripp
