LGBTQ+ Against God's Design? Progressive VS Conservative Christian (Part 1)

the church has a long tradition of getting issues significantly wrong that do a vast amount of damage to people and this has been one where the church has done a ton of damage for lgbtq people and i hit a point where i'm like if i'm going to continue to be a part of this christian tradition being in this work i need to figure out if i can continue holding on to this belief with any [Music] integrity [Music] yeah so i was born in coastal maine um raised in maine in a small rural town uh born into a christian family my father and mother knew the lord and raised me to know christ from a young age i remember being very convicted of my sin when i was eight or nine heard the gospel at a small youth camp in maine and realized that you know i was deserving of hell eternally for my sin but that jesus had paid the price for my sin on the cross to wash me clean and man that was a watershed moment in my life as is the case for many a young evangelical and grew up in a pretty traditional home like i said dad and mom in the house just one sibling a sister and went to church on sundays my father would also go to a prayer meeting on wednesday nights and that had a real impression on me because i saw a man who lived out his faith he wasn't one who talked a lot about theology and that sort of thing but he loved the lord in a kind of humble and simple way and that had a real mark on me so very thankful for that example went to college went to a very secular school called bowdoin college in maine and it was there that i really felt the wind in my face as a christian i'd been in public school before that but this is a private secular school and there were like 20 students out of 1700 uh who would show up at the weekly christian gathering there was just one there weren't all these different christian groups as you get on some campuses there was just one intervarsity and so it was there that i started to draw fire for my christian beliefs including sexuality biblical sexuality and homosexuality in particular and that really shaped me it shaped me to recognize that i was going to face opposition in the world for holding to the biblical sexual ethic for believing that marriage is between only one man and one woman for life um also i should mention during those college years i had a friend who um the first friend i knew who had a battle with same-sex attraction and i remember learning of this issue this struggle and thinking we would find some way to kind of deal with it in a decisive once for all manner and uh prayed with my friend and tried to help him pursue the lord in these sorts of things as best i knew how but honestly i've i've thought back and realized there was a sense in me that thought that if i would just pray enough for him you know that this struggle would just magically go away and i had that same perspective on my own sin frankly i knew that i had sins of various kinds that i faced as a christian that is and i was fighting them but you know i had this kind of naive view of sanctification that you could kind of just zap things by prayer and they would go away or if you went to church enough you know things would be great for you and uh have have really learned over time that i have to be more patient with myself and with others regarding our our battle with the flesh so then i uh i do a master's degree in theology and a phd in theology and the lord calls me to work for an organization called the council on biblical manhood and womanhood and that's where i really start to get a strong interest in speaking up on sexuality and biblical complementarity manhood womanhood all these kind of issues and and so that's a part of my story as well that for the last 10 years or so i've tried to be as best i humbly can a voice for biblical sexuality and and speak to these things so those are the basic contours of my story i don't frankly have that exciting uh or that uh stupendous and evangelical background or testimony it's pretty standard fare but um i'm pretty convicted i'm very convicted of the need to stand for what the bible teaches on these issues and any other issue that the bible speaks to and recognize there's going to be a price to pay for doing so recognize there's going to be relational costs all sorts of things that in the natural man we don't want but um but that's part of how my upbringing shaped me in terms of that christian background so those are some some of the contours of my story i'm married now uh married for 13 and a half years to bethany she's a great wife don't deserve her and i have three kids 11 8 and 5 girl boy girl and love those kids and trying to raise them in the christian faith and train them in the ways of god to know jesus christ as their savior above all and teach theology at a seminary that's what i do for a living i teach systematic theology at midwestern seminary in kansas city and run a center called the center for public theology and i've written some books on this topic i have a book called what does the bible teach about homosexuality so you have no idea what that one's getting at that comes out very soon so we've both written on those things i know and uh and engage that issue as much as i as i as i can as god calls so those are some of the contours of my story i love it thanks for sharing man yeah absolutely it's good to meet you thanks for listening yeah uh in a s so in a similar way um i grew up in a conservative christian environment mine was a baptist world so i'm a recovering baptist um and i had a you know my dad came from a long line of baptist my mom was a first generation christian but my brothers and i had the experience that a lot of people similar to us have which is you're in church every sunday and then oftentimes in between wednesday night choir practice you know my brothers and i are going and fighting over the little caesar's pizza that we had to eat in the break room my mom and dad were singing in the choir and i remember at uh at five years old my dad was putting me to sleep top bunk of our bunk bed and he shut the light off and just a moment after he leaves i shot down the hall dad dad and he comes running back in i'm like i'm ready to accept jesus into my heart and so he turns the light back on and you know good baptist that he was he was all excited to lead me in this prayer now i had no idea what i was doing to five years old but i had picked up enough uh i imagined through sunday school and through other conversation that there was something important about this prayer and so my dad led me and i would imagine some version of what you might call that you might call the sinner's prayer um and that that was my you know what's my earliest memory of having this sense that we can have a connection with the divine that we can we can uh we can somehow know the transcendent we can somehow get past this finite body that we live in and and have some sort of connection with the thing behind the thing then you know fast forward a few years my parents divorce we leave the baptist church find some other generic evangelical church uh and then my senior year in high school is kind of the moment when i really found a relationship with jesus to be central in my life i went on some youth conference and felt super convicted that i was just a christian a name only and had this experience of where i felt like all right before me is two paths i can either keep living my life entirely selfishly where it was all about me which i'd kind of been doing at that point but as a teenager all teenagers most teenagers live like that sure but whatever that was the rubric that i had at the time or i could use that opportunity to make a radical shift and start you know at that time i would have called it living for the lord or um you know living a christ-centered life and so um i i had this moment of that's the path i need to take and i was determined like whatever life has for me i'm gonna i'm going down this path um at the time it was to be a youth pastor because i think every kid and as a youth man in youth ministry thinks i want to be a youth pastor so i went to a college good baptist college got my degree and eventually passed oral ministry because after a semester of youth ministry i realized i don't really like kids so what am i doing i don't i don't want to be a youth here's a terrible idea so i got a degree in pastoral ministry while i was there i picked up learned how to play guitar and sing and actually found out that leading worship was a thing that i was sort of strangely good at and so after college i got a job at a nearby mega church as a worship pastor did that for a couple years moved to phoenix arizona and got a job there as their worship and arts pastor but after graduating college i read a book that my baptist professors would not have put on the syllabus the book was a new kind of christian by brian mclaren and i remember at the time for the first time in my life being confronted with that oh there are other ways to think about god the bible jesus than this narrow baptistic evangelical tradition that has been handed to me like we've actually been talking about these things for hundreds and hundreds you know 2 000 years and there's been other other ways to think about this and that set me on a a journey to start asking questions which i didn't know i was allowed to do a good baptist is is about getting the right answers not about asking the right questions so i was committed to the right answers and having all conviction and certainty and be able to back everything up uh i was like the quintessential bible answer man in in college uh but i wasn't really ever asking questions about what i was learning or what i'd been taught and so while i was in arizona i began this process of just reading people that i didn't know that were out there asking questions that i didn't know you could ask finding other ways to think about things i didn't know existed so today i find myself pretty far removed from my conservative evangelical roots on on almost every topic like i could look back at my final essays and some of my systematic theology classes in my undergrad and be like i don't really uh feel any of that is true anymore um and yet the the the that that impulse that intuition that my life can be about something bigger than just me and be about somehow serving god and even doing that in a church context that stayed with me so i've been a pastor for 15 years my wife and i started a church that we co-pastor um going on six years ago in san diego we call ourselves a progressive christian church i don't know that those are the best terms but they each kind of get at a little bit of what we do um and so yeah now i'm here uh and i do um oh i should i forgot this point obviously because that's why we're here today uh but while i was in arizona one of the things that i i started asking questions about was um lgbtq inclusion in the church and people who identify as queer lesbian gay all that i knew at that point was that they were not allowed members in the church the church that i was at uh and that the bible was clearly opposed to anything having to do with homosexuality and i never asked any questions more than that i just assumed that that was what the bible taught and so when i'm in this process in arizona of reading and asking questions i thought you know what i'm gonna i'm gonna check on that one um i didn't actually have any gay friends well i might have had friends who are gabe i didn't know they were yeah uh never had any gay friends no gay family members i just had this sense of i need to figure out if the bible really does teach this if god really does hold lgbtq people in a categorically different space than people who identify as straight because the church has a long tradition of getting issues significantly wrong that do a vast amount of damage to people and this has been one where the church has done a ton of damage for lgbtq people and i hit a point where i'm like if i'm going to continue to be a part of this christian tradition being in this work i need to figure out if i can continue holding on to this belief with any integrity so that began so then i began a research of the bible on this topic and i came out the other side of that realizing oh no the bible doesn't teach what i've always been told that it says uh and that led me to then getting fired from my church once they figured out i was affirming in my theology and then that's how my wife and i kate started our church a couple years later but anyway so that's where i am now i'm uh fully affirming of people who identify lgbtq i don't i don't think that uh um who we love uh or or the the genet or the gender makeup within the context of a relationship uh somehow precludes some relationships from being holy or sacred or good in the eyes of god um and so yeah our church now one of our big ministries is to is to catch people who have been uh harmed by the church over these sorts of teachings uh also married one wife and uh four kids and uh yeah all right i feel like that was a lot but thanks for you know thanks for listening yeah absolutely man god has a specific enjoyable and beneficial design for sexuality what do you think about that yeah i think it's true um i think from the start in terms that are going to be familiar to you of course from your background and your pastor now um so i think god creates adam and eve and he forms them specifically so that they can join together in covenantal marriage um i think god makes the man and the woman to fit together honestly in every way uh bodily of course but also emotionally and um psychologically and and otherwise in other words the man and the woman are unified in terms of both being image bearers um so there's tremendous grounds for for unity nothing less than ontological unity unity of being even and yet also distinct and that distinctness is is beautiful it's it's god's beautiful design that even reflects i think in a kind of distant way the godhead father son and holy spirit one god three persons distinct persons so the design then is is for sex in marriage it's it's not to take sexual capacity and do with it whatever you like or whatever your desires most strongly drive you toward the design that god blesses and has set things up to bring to fruition is one man loving one woman for life in a totally unified marriage relationship so that's i think the design of genesis 2 of course the fall of genesis 3 complicates this tremendously i think it's a real historical fall that accounts for why we all naturally are sinners and don't have to have anybody train us uh in classes titled how to be debauched or you know how to run away from your parents when they say to come these sorts of things no we naturally go astray so despite that fact though that beautiful design of god still holds and when you see a young man marry a young woman you're seeing something that is ancient that is from god's own mind and that speaks to the beauty of of nature itself nature meaning how we're constituted not meaning trees and fields and that sort of thing though that's beautiful too so i think yeah i think god's design is is best i think it's what promotes human flourishing i don't think it's easy in a fallen world you've been married for numerous years i've been married for numerous years so we know it's very hard work to live out god's good design one man one woman covenantal marriage but i think it's a beautiful design nonetheless yeah yeah what would you say well i'm struck by a couple words in in that in that phrase that i think are worth pointing out before you know what we're talking about so god so the idea of god having a design if we if we accept the premise that god is a being that is up or out there that has i talked about it as like a set of divine documents that god keeps in like a file drawer that pulls out occasionally be like this is this is sort of how i've mapped out my idea for this thing um i i reject that as a um as a possibility for how things work like i don't think there is some sort of divine document out there that lays out a being's preferred order of things um and then the last word was sexuality which well that's an interesting term what do we mean when we talk about sexuality well sexuality encompasses a lot of things part of it encompasses uh the potentiality for procreation so sexuality is uh pretty important for procreation i think there are some maybe flowers and animals that can just procreate without the need for uh you know sex but the idea of sexuality within humanity you know has we we we've evolved from single cell organisms into organisms that needed to uh procreate and so yes right now the way the procreation happens is through uh you know male and female coming together whether it's in a test tube or or implanted or natural way so so anyway those are the few things that stood out to me was what do we mean when we say god designs because i i reject the idea that there is some being out there that is like mapping out expectations as it relates to sexuality and then what do you mean by sexuality so you took it in a sexual orientation which i think is fine because it's part of why we're here but for me that's only one part of it all that to say um i would affirm that on some level there is a designed sexuality that seems pretty self-evident insofar as we've seen you know we've seen homo sapiens uh you know for the last 200 000 years sort of beat out the other human species uh and we've done it in part through procreation like through through sexual reproduction so that that design has come to us through millions of years of adaptation so whatever whatever is driving this whole thing and i'm still of the opinion that there is some source behind it all there is some um there's some loving transcendent being that isn't the separate being that we talked about i talked about earlier there's some thing there that is that is sort of has this push in this poll effect and part of it is uh within sexuality is reproduction so so i'm having some so yes on some way i can i can totally sign off on god designing sexuality um if i'm allowed to sort of have my ways of thinking about it then yeah i totally get that but i would then say i don't to just to go back to where i started i don't think that there is some uh being in the sky who's like and this now is how humans once they get once they show up on this thing it's been around for millions of years once they get here here's my expectations for how they move forward yeah i mean this the capacity uh for sexual desire and the instinct for sexual pleasure in a human person is honestly one of the strongest capacities there is it's a very strong drive and it's a drive as i understand it that can be used in ways that are very good and very positive in ways that are not good at all so i i don't know really how you account for there being good usage of sexuality and bad usage of sexuality if you don't have some kind of standard giver some sort of being who is behind this in other words this is i'm not the first one to think of this but how do you have an ought right if there is no is and even beyond that if there is no being who makes sure that there's an is it's a very confusing sentence so far but in other words if if there's not some kind of creator figure if if everything's just evolutionary right in secular terms i'm not naturalistic terms i'm not sure how you can ultimately get down the line when we get to human behavior and say this behavior is good behavior or societally approved behavior even if you want to go kind of more more perspectival versus bad behavior um because you have to do that pretty quickly with sexuality given how strong sexual interest instinct is i think yeah yeah uh i think i understand what you're saying um but again sexuality for me is just a is a term that applies to a broad number of things so speaking of it as though whether it is good or bad for me isn't all that helpful um but we if we break down what we mean when we talk about sexuality what are the components of that then yes i think we can have a really fascinating conversation around what is i think beneficial was one of the words that was put out there so yeah there are some aspects of expressing a person's sexuality that are beneficial to that person and other people and there are others that are not so but i think what you're saying is if i understand you is that the only way that you can conceive of there being some expressions of any behavior right in general but uh but sexual behavior and specific for you the only way you can conceive that there being uh uh differences between good and bad or better and worse is if there is an intelligent being that has thus declared it so is am i understanding that correctly you're understanding it exactly right i didn't say it that clearly but yes if if it's either it's pretty stark options as i understand it just very quickly if there's a designer then there's a good design if this if this god figure is good as i believe the bible says god is and so god is good but if there's no designer i don't know that there's really any hard and fast understanding of design for sex then and i don't know that we're really going to be able to account for good and bad whereas when we come to the actual world when we're looking at child molestation or rape or sexual harassment or sexual abuse right things that are prevalent in our world or even let's not talk about criminal activity even just i don't know a guy being kind of slimy towards women in the way he approaches them sexually thinking of them as sexual objects how how do i call him to any form of repentance if there isn't a design and before that is a designer yeah i think that question makes sense and the conclusions are somewhat reasonable within our context but most of human history has not been in our context so most of humans have lived within a world where it might have been the thought there was many gods or might have been no gods might have been an animistic world where it's just their spirits and all things yeah my my point is is we've managed to and by we i mean the collective species of humans have managed to make it this far by creating sets of norms and values and ideas of what does contribute to flourishing and what doesn't without sort of concrete ideas about a god so so i don't know that i guess that's a long way of saying i don't think that the idea of god as a being out there who creates the laws on here is is not needed for humans to figure out what contributes towards well-being and what contributes towards destruction and chaos and sorrow and suffering christians need to be careful of misusing the bible true yes that strikes me as i i as a pretty self-evident statement i think uh we have a long complicated history uh of you know well the christian religion in general has done a lot of amazing things for the world and has contributed to a lot of atrocities um just like all religions really so and and many of those have been fueled by so by those what i mean i mean what are the staples we know uh the crusades uh burning people at the stakes for having different ideas about who what happens in the the bread and the cup um uh slavery segregation at each of those uh catastrophes you could you could find solid biblical justification for it and now we'd look back and be like oh well we missed that one like that was uh they were clearly wrong about that right and we and we know that we know that for a long time the church believed like the rest of the scientific community believed that the earth was the center of the universe and the sun went around us and then science helped us figure out wait that's actually not how it works uh and the church was like oh yeah well we got that one wrong but they had used in part versus from the bible to be like this is what's true about the universe uh so yeah so the statement for me is self-evident that we have to we have to be aware that we are not uh we are not at all immune from getting the bible wrong at all like just the fact that there's 40 plus thousand denominations of christianity is evidence that we there isn't one version of understanding the bible there like there's many different versions so clearly most people are wrong about most things uh so yeah we i mean we have to always sort of have some humility in our posture to it that we could very well be wrong on this issue too yeah i think that's i think that's true um christians can easily misuse the bible i think i can explain why in terms of biblical teaching it's because of the fall of adam and eve so there's an actual cause for our wrongness for our sin for our misusing and hijacking of the scripture to further our own causes and ends um you know you think about secularism in the 20th century and you recognize that more people die under secular regimes in many cases explicitly god denying regimes in the 20th century than all other previous centuries combined and you recognize not so much just religious versus non-religious but just in a basic way humans have a tremendous capacity for destruction and hatred and perversity and evil and that's that's real and that's that's what i actually love about the bible itself is that it doesn't give me a varnished whitewashed portrait of humanity it gives me a real blood and guts portrait of how bad things are in a fallen world and part of that fallenness as i understand it theologically is that we we won't just misuse common grace or common sense truths we'll take the bible and we'll hijack it and we'll use it for our own evil ends i think i think it's right uh you're right to reference slavery in this conversation and racism because the curse of ham for example is developed in christian circles even a theologian that i love like jonathan edwards i think there's many reasons to revere jonathan edwards even i'm not into canceled culture myself but man i have to be honest when i read him and i see that that he didn't understand slavery in the right way in his context the interesting thing for me though to balance that is that i think the resources to overcome evil are also in christianity and that's a unique thing to say in other words i don't think the resources to overcome evil are found in secularism i don't it doesn't mean that a secular person could never get something right i'm not saying that but within christian circles the abolitionist movement develops and and that to me speaks to the power of the bible and its clear teaching not enfranchising not supporting slavery in the american form that gives me real hope and real confidence that though i can misuse scripture i surely can um to my shame i'm sure i have in my life nonetheless if i am following god's spirit and god's leading i don't have to misuse scripture yeah so you don't need religion to muck things up we're plenty capable of doing it yeah and one of my and then i made the other point too which is uh so the idea is you just getting rid of religion is not the solution we can say that religions caused a ton of harm and ton of baggage but i disagree with the richard dawkins of the world which is that take religion out because it's the it's the bane of humanity's existence well no um we've seen that experiment play out like you said and um your point i'm 100 with you that just as much as christians defended these horrific uh ways of being in the world it was also values and the ethos and the conviction of christians i mean martin luther king jr was just a perfect example of someone whose christian convictions led him to say uh no we have to treat everybody equal not based on what their ancestry is right so i'm totally totally with you um but i think for me the biggest thing to hold on to in this conversation for this topic is an awareness that you know because part of what we're disagreeing here on is lgbtq inclusion in the church right and so for me just you haven't said this yet but just saying that well this is how the church has always taught it like it isn't a sufficient response because we know that the church has gotten it wrong before so we have to be open we have to at least be open to the possibility that we can be wrong whether it's this topic or other topics we have to at least say man we could have people that are the smartest scholars the most genuine men and women doing this work and they could be wrong about it yeah i think you're right to phrase it that way i think the church canon does get things wrong sadly i hate that it's true but it is true um i get things wrong so there's personal example of of that claim but we also have to say the church can get things right and we also can say because there is a god there can be such a thing as truth in other words i think god personally funds truth i think god personally bankrolls if you will right and wrong that's why we can draw lines in this world that's why we can say this ideology is harmful and bad and wrong and this is good it's because ultimately there's a personal god who's a saity self-existence means that no one has to to teach him and coach him and what's right he himself is right he himself is truth he himself is goodness so when it comes to homosexuality even there i'm gonna say i don't think the church is always spoken as well as it could have on this issue so i don't that takes you back or what but i can admit that you know what i can't admit though is that the bible itself is wrong on homosexuality and the what we call the conservative evangelical position on homosexuality from the bible is wrong because if you're looking at god's initial design we were talking about this a few minutes ago you recognize that god's design is one man one woman marriage that's not incidental that's not just the way it happened to be that's not evolutionary that's god's own blueprint his beautiful joy-giving life-yielding design homosexuality then is is not just a violation of certain texts the clobber passages homosexuality is a violation of god's very design from start to finish the gospel itself is a complementarian gospel you could say in other words it's it's christ the head the husband purchasing his bride with his own blood laying down his life for his for his bride ephesians 5 22-33 and then we know that in revelation the end of all things the the father brings his bride home and christ and church live together in this perpetual union spiritual union not physical union but spiritual union so the church can get these things wrong i don't think the bible does and that's where you know we're probably going to have our starkist yeah and and so the statement was about misusing the bible so i so even if i did submit to you or submit that there was a god out there who had some sort of right and wrong expectation for humanity which is not a premise i support but if i submit for the sake of this conversation that is a thing how are we to know what that is know what god's will is that's correct how are we supposed to know what is right and what if this sense of right and wrong does exist at a cosmic divine level how in the world are we supposed to know which is what uh god being a speaking communicating god communicating through his word giving us the bible through human authorship spirit inspired producing old and new testament 66 books from 37 to 39 authors right but it strikes me as a pretty tenuous set up at best because as we've already acknowledged humans have been certain that they've gotten god right by using the bible in certain ways only to discover that they were incredibly wrong so how can we know that we have the bible right this time on this issue yeah well when you think about an issue like slavery for example you recognize that the the christians who supported slavery from the bible were wrong right they they had a wrong interpretation so here again we keep having this matter of a standard of right and wrong cutting into the conversation in other words we're not free to interpret the bible however we see fit and as i understand it we have to we have to understand it rightly so if you understand how do we know when we've got it rightly is my question when we understand the bible as it intends to be understood when we're not saying you know when paul is speaking to the galatians about salvation he's actually saying pink elephants should dance on mount moriah in springtime in other words we all have to take authors literally don't we we say we don't like literal interpretation or these sorts of things but if we don't take somebody literally as if there's a right way to interpret them in a wrong way to interpret them we're in nonsense land even now you and i are using truth we're using categories of truth i'm taking your words as if you mean what you say and you're taking my words as if i mean what i say in the same way we have to take the bible as if it's meaning a certain principle in reality someone else can come along and say no it doesn't mean that but there has to be some kind of standard by which we say i'm hearing you rightly and i'm hearing you wrongly yeah i i'm with you that maybe i would still say maybe maybe there is a right way to interpret some of these letters and these poems and these stories maybe there's a right way to understand them yeah i'm still stuck on how do you know yours is the right way because take a time machine back and you've got people that know that this is the right way to interpret this we know now they were wrong so how what is the thing that sort of sits behind it outside it within it that's like no no no this time i've got it right trust me guys i don't know i don't how do you how would you know dude that's a fantastic question seriously it's it's the bible itself it's the plain teaching of scripture itself reading the whole bible together of course not reading verses in isolation from one another but it's the whole bible itself so the bible prohibits man stealing first timothy 1 10 okay the new testament prohibits man stealing so when you're talking about american chattel slavery for example which is based on man stealing right african man stealing shipping across the atlantic to various ports in america in the 18th and 19th centuries so when paul is talking about slavery he's talking more about what we would call indentured servitude he's not supporting chattel slavery where because of this false conception of race and inferior races in terms of african tribes i can go and steal somebody and enslave them he's not saying that so that's where in other words a plain understanding of the text correlating text with text in addition as a second hermeneutical principle interpretive principle actually frees me from being enslaved if you will to terrible theology of slavery so the bible itself has to be at standard you have to read the bible as if it's really speaking to what it says i hear you but i don't feel like that really holds up because again go back in time and i would imagine that people were swearing they were interpreting the bible correctly and literally and we have we have the sort of privilege now of having some information that helps us maybe understand things differently but at every point along the way you have people who are earnestly seeking after the truth taking the plain reading of the text as best as they can and swearing that they are just interpreting it and it's and it and it isn't it isn't good it isn't helpful it isn't right so i still feel like there's a there's a there's a piece that isn't being acknowledged here which is at the end of the day you can't really know that you have got god's standard of right and wrong exactly figured out and there really isn't a way to objectively assess that other than so this is how i would then sort of respond to that how can we know if we were even in the ballpark of what might be a divine sense of right wrong which by the way fun fact uh the the tree that uh adam and eve were instructed to not eat from was the tree of knowledge was the thing that gave them insight into what is right and wrong it was the thing that let them know the difference between good and evil it's almost as if god's saying i give you everything but the capacity to know right and wrong good and evil i'm going to keep that one to myself because you all are just going to muck it up if i give it to you and then we ate it and well here we are trying to figure out what's right what's wrong not doing really well at that job but i do think that you want to use the bible to help understand the bible all right but for me there is something that helps us know are we getting close to understand or or reading close to this idea of what is helping humans flourish and what is not two things come to mind one is jesus's teaching that you will know people by their love and this by how they love one another bad tree doesn't give good fruit um good tree doesn't get bad fruit so we can look at the fruit we can look at actually what's being manifested in the world we can look at paul the fruits of the spirit is there peace patience kindness gentleness like are these things being manifest here if they're being manifest here i think that's a that's about as close as a compass that we can get that okay i think we're in the ballpark here uh because trying to know exactly what is right and what is wrong um i don't know that or i do know that we don't have any way to like have certainty on that we just don't um but we can get close if we use what's what's the fruit that's being made here is it good fruit if it's good fruit then we're i think we're in the ballpark here uh so anyway so we can we can move on from that but i was just still trying to figure out if there is a right and wrong the bible isn't sufficient to let us know that because we because men and women for hundreds thousands of years have been taken in all sorts of directions justifying all sorts of things so that cannot be the only way that we know uh what is ultimately good and bad yeah um i understand your point but when you speak clearly to your sons you have four four kids i have three kids when you and i as fathers speak clearly to our kids there is a right way to interpret what we say and a wrong way to interpret what we say and for our kids to say i'm sorry i i what you said wasn't sufficiently clear i i don't think in this world dad anyone can have exact epistemological clarity about anything you know if our kid gave us that kind of response we would not be super pleased with them oh you said uh while i was at home watching my fellow siblings you know to feed them at six i thought you actually meant to starve them and mistreat them you know we would be we would be terrified to hear such a thing so i think in a similar way we have to be very careful that we don't end up in relativism and and the line of thought that you're arguing leads there in terms of attesting the fruit uh kind of hermeneutic we are looking to see how people respond to god's word that's true but we have to be very careful also not to make the standard of behavior and goodness and truth us and our behavior something is right because it's right something is wrong because it's wrong here again we keep bumping up against this but that's why you need an objective standard you need somebody who can bankroll that because you and i actually we're actually not that dissimilar we both have moral standards we both believe in objective truth it's just different a different set of truths and a different set of morals i think only one of us though can account for why we have belief and objective truth and objective morality it's because there's a divine god who again funds that and bankrolls it you take that away you collapse that into a a non-personal being i don't know how you hold on to take my words as what they mean and there are certain things that are right and certain things that are wrong yeah i feel like some things are getting conflated which is totally fine this is a convoluted conversation but um i don't disagree that there are more accurate ways to understand any given conversation yeah um yeah there are interpretations of a given statement that are closer to the actual intent and truth of the thing and they're ones that are farther away sure so uh by no means am i am i throwing up my hands being like oh we can't know anything um i think i'm just trying to go go back to even if i were to submit to you or or for the sake of this conversation say yes there is a god who has now decided what is right what is wrong our capacity to know that with as much certainty that it would take to then not question if we have somehow misused the bible on a particular topic i think is misguided because i don't think there's any way we can no and i think history is i think history's on my side on this in terms of how many different interpretations some are closer to probably what is most true and some are way far away and how are we going to know well i think the fruit's going to get us close to [Music] that you

Channel: Anchored North

Views: 317,203

Rating: 4.7844357 out of 5

Keywords: anchored north, can LGBTQ+ and conservatives see eye to eye, lgbt and christian, honest discourse, middle ground, jubilee, jubilee media, love is love, gay marriage, owen strachan, colby martin, LGBT, LGBTQ, christians, equal rights, gay pride, homosexuality, christianity and sexuality, gays vs conservatives, gay rights, should gay marriage be legal, can you be gay and christian, gay and religious, gay christian, gay to straight, gay, christian testimonies, lgbt vs christian

Id: mLBOMKSBd1c

Length: 47min 28sec (2848 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 09 2020