Dartmouth professor Randall Balmer is a gifted historian and author, but he is far less reliable when it comes to interpreting the Bible or understanding Christian theology and ethics (“Commentary: Evangelicals came to accept divorce; they can do the same on gay marriage,” July 9).
His assertion that Jesus “demonstrated the principle that love always trumps law” is questionable. Jesus insisted, not that love is somehow superior to law, but that love is the essence and summary of biblical law.
Likewise, the idea that “acceptance is superior to condemnation” is the kind of mushy platitude that can be used to justify all manner of evil; many behaviors are clearly unacceptable and worthy of condemnation. There is simply no transformative power in a Gospel that is stripped of the call to repentance and change.
That Jesus “said nothing whatsoever” about homosexuality proves absolutely nothing. Neither did he specifically condemn incest, polyamory and bestiality – or other sexual deviations that everyone in his culture agreed were prohibited along with same-sex relations.
No one in Jewish or other circles in that day (or for the next 2,000 years) proposed the unthinkable idea that men could marry men or women could marry women. Rather, Jesus clearly and unmistakably affirmed that marriage is between a male and a female.
Balmer is correct that many evangelicals have not been faithful to Jesus’ teaching regarding divorce and remarriage. Shame on us.
However, failure to promote the divine and natural ideal when it comes to the permanence of marriage should in no way lead to capitulation when it comes to the binary nature of marriage: It is the union of a male and a female. Anything else is a counterfeit of the real thing.
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