Introduction
When the Church becomes a
mirror of the culture, it becomes irrelevant to the culture. Its youth drift away, its numbers
decline. It throws its angelic visitors
and own daughters out to the horde of Sodom knocking at its door. When the Scriptures are used in defense of
the culture, its words are co-opted by the culture and its message suppressed. It is no longer the Spirit-inspired Word of God
but becomes words in the mouths of other spirits.
A
Tale of One Culture in Two Centuries: The Cases of Slavery and Homosexuality in
the West
One still finds today
people who try to link the Church’s use of Scripture to defend slavery in the West in the 19th century to the
Church’s use of Scripture to oppose homosexuality
in the 20th/21st century.
The assumption, of course, is a liberation hermeneutic (a liberation
interpretation) that equates the situation of slaves to other marginalized groups,
such as women and homosexuals and transgender people and persons wishing to die
or to design their own babies. This is a
confusion of categories—otherwise we would find ourselves championing the
causes of every marginalized group.
One might even argue, on
such a logic, that once the West’s majority affirms homosexuality on the
grounds of its pursuit of freedoms, the Church would then have to change its
stance and take up the cause of the now marginalized orthodox (an increasingly
persecuted minority) who oppose this new teaching. However, the error is not just one of a
confusion of categories (putting slavery, women, and homosexuals in the same
grouping). It is also a misuse of
Scripture. The particular mistake is to
use Scripture like a puppet, making it say what you want it to say: people see
the puppet’s mouth moving, but the puppeteer is the one talking.
On this matter of the misuse of Scripture, the issues of
slavery and homosexuality are related
(and not on the issue of liberating the marginalized). In the 19th century, a culture that had slaves and economically
depended on them to work the cotton and tobacco fields of the American South,
conveniently ‘forgot’ Scripture’s calling the slave-trade a sin. In its interpretation of laws 5-9 of the Ten Commandments,
1 Timothy 1:10 relates the commandment, ‘Thou shalt not steal’, to slave
traders. In its description of God’s
judgement on Rome’s economic system, Revelation 18:13 highlights that the slave
trade is a trade in ‘human souls’ that God’s judgement will end. To strike at the very mechanism of slave
trading is to strike at the institution of slavery itself.
1 Timothy 1:10 also
mentions that homosexuality is a sin, relating it to a breaking of the
commandment ‘Thou shalt not commit adultery’.
The Ten Commandments stand for moral topics rather than single issues,
and this commandment stands for all sexual immorality, not just adultery. In a Western world that sees things through
the lenses of liberation, both a licensing of sexual immorality and an
opposition to slavery make sense. But
from a Biblical perspective, as in 1 Timothy 1:10 itself, the two issues are
distinct. To allow sexual immorality and homosexuality in
opposition to what Scripture says is to break the seventh commandment not to commit
adultery. To allow people to capture and
enslave other people is to break the eighth commandment not to steal.
The West’s chief cultural
lens has, for several hundred years, been liberation. It is the value that determines all other
values. This explains why mainline denominations
that have embraced this culture have searched for ways to remove Scripture’s
concrete and clear teaching from the discussion. Some have turned to the numerous, conflicting
options to reinterpret Biblical passages addressing homosexuality: any
interpretation will do other than the one that the Church has affirmed for 2000
years. Others have acknowledged that
Scripture says what it does but have tried to override these texts with the
more abstract values of liberation and love—values that can be shaped into any sort
of teaching one wishes. (For example,
for one person, giving a mother the right to abort her child is to give her
freedom to choose, and to give her this freedom is how to love her; for another
person, killing your own children is hardly loving and not a freedom the unborn
child can be expected to embrace. Vague
values are little more than wax noses in the hands of whoever is shaping them.)
Thus, it should be no
surprise that, when the Anglican Bishops of the Global South met this past week
in Cairo, they did not sign up to the West’s cultural interpretation—or misinterpretation—of
Scripture. They rejected the cultural ‘West’s’
mainline denominations’ rejection of Scriptural authority, be they in North
America, the United Kingdom, Australia, or South Africa. For the Anglican Bishops of the Global South,
Scripture stands first, not some culture’s primary value over against Scripture
or misinterpretation of Scripture. In
Scripture, liberation is first and foremost liberation from idolatry (Egyptian
bondage) and sin (Babylonian exile), and love is first and foremost the love of
God by obeying His commandments (Deuteronomy 6:4-6). It is no use separating love of God from
obeying His commandments (cf. John 14:15, 23).
Nor it is any use making ‘liberation’ a tool for redefining Biblical
sexuality over against what Scripture actually teaches.
The
Saga of South Africa
South Africa offers an
interesting case study in the misuse of Scripture to establish rather than
challenge the culture. The Dutch
Reformed Church was the actual incubator for Apartheid in South Africa already
in the 1800s. Scripture was read in such
a way as to support Apartheid, the separation and subjugation of the native
races under white, colonial power.
Opposition to this teaching was particularly strong in the Anglican
Church of Southern Africa, but it, too, turned to a particular ‘culture’ in
order to articulate its message. In the
case of ACSA, the ‘culture’ was a theological cultural wind blowing from the
West, the wind of liberation. Liberation
theology from the mid-twentieth century in the Americas was a ready tool to
oppose Apartheid in South Africa. Rather
than the subjugation of non-white races, as in the Apartheid theology, their
liberation was championed.
If the Dutch Reformed
Church was the instigator of an Apartheid theology and politics in South
Africa, it was also a key player in its demise.
With mounting international pressure and sanctions in the 1980s and
continual opposition to Apartheid from several Christian denominations
(including Reformed denominations outside South Africa and the Anglicans inside
the country), certain Dutch Reformed theologians began to call for a new epoch
(Kairos). The initial call was rightly focussed on a call for Biblical justice. But the developing call for liberation in the culture, which might have appeared to be in agreement with the virtue of justice, easily became something more. The wax
nose of liberation served the South African situation rather well to undercut
misinterpretations of Scripture and Christianity in the Apartheid culture and to call for justice, but it could be shaped into other things as well.
The borrowed theology from the
West of liberation was (to change the metaphor) a lion let out of the
cage. What else would it attack? Unchained to Scripture, it quickly gained a
taste for other liberations within Western culture. Who can argue against anything when ‘liberation’ is the chief value? Only liberation that takes away someone else’s
freedom can be checked; but giving people a license to do whatever they wish in
all other cases is clearly the ethic of the day—so much so that enforcing people to participate in
others’ liberation is also considered ethical and even a legal necessity. (You will
open your bathrooms to any gender.
You will bake the cake for a
homosexual wedding. You will call a person by the gender pronoun
he, she, or it wishes.)
The West has lost the
very vocabulary and the ability to articulate any ethic other than assent to
individual freedoms—the right to engage in whatever sexual unions people
desire, the right to define one’s own gender despite ones sexuality, the right
to abort children, the right to design children (eugenics), the right to adopt
children into same-sex households—and so forth.
We watch the news each week to see what the latest victim is that this
unchained liberation devours. This past
week, in South Africa, the old champion of liberation during the Apartheid era,
Archbishop Desmond Tutu, picked up the cause of assisted suicide. Of course he would. He did so in the midst of a student uprising
on college campuses to demand free education and other real or imagined ‘rights’. Of course they would. All this is perfectly logical: liberation as
a cause in the culture prowls from village to village, snatching unprotected
victims day by day.
So, it was no surprise
that the bishop of Soldanha Bay in the Western Cape put forth a motion at the synod
in September, 2016 for the Anglican Church of Southern Africa to affirm same-sex
unions through church blessings. (Over
against the canons or laws of the Anglican Church of Southern Africa, the
diocese had already declared that homosexuality is not a sin! The motion was defeated at the synod, but the
Archbishop of ACSA has vowed to continue the cause—the cause of liberation is
never sated, and the culture cheers it on even in the Church.)
Nor was it a surprise
that the once Bible-believing Dutch Reformed Church in South Africa earlier in
the month condoned same-sex marriage. (With
its congregational Church polity, individual congregations may be able to
resist the denomination’s view.) It has
exchanged Biblical interpretation for theological application, and the chosen
theology to apply is liberation theology.
Such views affirm a liberation from the Biblical understanding of
marriage itself—people can be sexually united with the Church’s blessing
outside marriage—and a liberation from Biblical teaching on sexuality—in particular,
the Bible’s teaching on gender and marriage being between biologically male and
female persons. For a culture that
marinated in Apartheid for so long and that, in the end, used liberation theology
to deliver itself, this makes perfect sense.
But it is solidly opposed to Scripture and the teaching of the Church
from its beginnings when it comes to the issues of sexuality and marriage.
It is also no surprise,
then, that the Bishops of the Global South, representing somewhere around
2/3rds of the Anglican Communion throughout the world, rejected the liberation
interpretation of sexuality from the West and reaffirmed the historic
commitment to Scripture of the Anglican Church in October, 2016.
Individually and collectively, they are not so blinded by their cultures
that they forever try to bend Scripture with the hurricane winds of liberation to
affirm rather than challenge culture.
They have not guzzled the wine of liberation to the last drop but have
savoured it along with the meat of God’s Holy Word.
Conclusion
There lies the
challenge. Every mainline denomination
in the West imbibing the sweet wine of freedom derived from its culture is in
free-fall. The Episcopal Church in the
USA, having cast itself off from Scriptural authority, is sailing at the mercy of every
wind of doctrine. Its numbers are half
today what they were in the 1960s. The
more it looks like culture, the less relevant it is for culture. The Church of Wales has so few ‘participants’
in its services and has so fully embraced the culture (there are always
exceptions in a few individual churches, to be sure), that it is an ossified
relic of a Church that Once Was. England
is facing the same challenge, and that with an Archbishop guiding it who seems
to want everyone to sing together rather than sing truth as the ship goes down.
And what of South Africa? Will this country at the tip of a continent
where the Church is growing fastest in the world continue to link itself to its
Western, colonial past by reading the world through the lens of liberation? And what of the Church? Will it join with the orthodox faith of
historic Christianity, affirming the teaching of Scripture and prophetically
witnessing in its context in the face of a cultural suicide in the name of
liberation? Or will it choose to mirror the culture and become irrelevant?
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