Dialog With A Christian Postmodern Part 3
Sitting down with a fresh cup of brew, I asked, “Now where were we?”“Alex, I was trying to say that Jesus, unlike the religious Right, would have been an advocate for the homosexual – anyway Jesus accepted people, never condemning anyone!”
“Jane, I will agree with you to a point. Jesus fully accepted individuals and showered them with the compassion of healing, feeding, advocacy, and forgiveness – no doubt! But He never left them in the state He found them, telling them to “go and sin no more.” Clearly, Jesus was expressing judgment against a moral absolute. By the way, if Jesus never condemned anyone what do you think He meant when He told the religious establishment of His day, “if the miracles that were performed in you had been performed in Sodom, it would have remained to this day.”
Then with fleshly air of smugness I added, “Also what do you make of His statement, ”Whoever believes in him is not condemned, but whoever does not believe stands condemned already because he has not believed in the name of God's one and only.”
Settling comfortably back in my seat, she soon unsettled my surfacing buoyancy.
“If homosexuality is such an important issue and such a grave sin, why was it not specifically forbidden in the ten commandments? Why did Jesus not condemn it?”
Taking in a long draw on the brew, (forgive me Father, give me wisdom!) I swallowed and said,
“Jane, if you question the immorality of homosexuality because of its omission in the Decalogue and in Jesus’ specific teachings, do you also question the immorality of bestiality, incest, pedophilia, rape, wife-beating, child abuse, drug-dealing, etc, etc,?”
Evading the obvious question, Jane responded, “How can we judge the behaviors of others who have unimaginable struggles that we can’t begin to understand? As the catchy slogan goes— ‘God doesn’t create junk.’ “
"Jane, you appear to embrace a mixture of Hobbesian pragmaticism and relativism with regard to abortion and homosexuality. That is, if certain moral constraints are too difficult or impractical for individuals because of their genetic propensities or environmental circumstances, then those constraints should not be imposed. Obviously, there are many problems with such pragmatic view. Not the least of which is what would happen if every anti-social behavior is condoned because, hey, that’s the way God made me, and God don’t make junk? Unfortunately, I think that our society has largely bought into that. We increasingly see the legal defense of some of the most heinous crimes being founded on bad homes, bad neighborhoods, bad influences, weak pre-dispositions, etc. Thus, as moral responsibility and accountability have become vestiges of a forgotten past, even perpetrators of crimes are being promoted as victims.”
Seeming a bit on the defensive, Jane countered “Some people are just born different. It seems to me that homosexuality could be compared to Down’s Syndrome. So maybe homosexuality is not a choice.”
Taking in a much longer draw of coffee, while silently praying and desperately scanning my memory banks for all of the great centurion dialogs and materials I’ve been exposed to in the last few months, I remembered my experience in mentoring several men…
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