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95 of 111 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
An opportunity to heal the church, May 16, 2006
This review is from: Jesus, the Bible, and Homosexuality: Explode the Myths, Heal the Church (Paperback)
The issue of whether to allow ordination and marriage of people who are lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender is being debated in almost every major Christian denomination. This book is essential reading for anyone who wants to be informed about this issue. It's meticulously researched (483 footnotes!) but also very clear and accessible. It's thoroughly Biblical--something that I believe will be appreciated by people on both sides of the debate. Dr. Rogers wrote the book from his own Presbyterian perspective but it will be a wonderful resource for people of all Christian denominations. Looking at each chapter in turn:
Chapter 1, "Studying Homosexuality for the First Time," describes Dr. Rogers' background as an evangelical and how he first began to study the issue of homosexuality in his local congregation.
Chapter 2, "A Pattern of Misusing the Bible to Justify Oppression," documents how leading theologians, for two hundred years, misused the Bible to try to justify the enslavement of people of African descent and the subordination of women to men.
Chapter 3, "A Breakthrough in Understanding the Word of God," shows how Biblical interpretation has changed for the better over the last two hundred years.
Chapter 4, "Interpreting the Bible in Times of Controversy," outlines the 7 guidelines on Biblical interpretation officially adopted by the Presbyterian Church and applies them to the issue of homosexuality.
Chapter 5, "What the Bible Says and Doesn't Say about Homosexuality," takes a close look at each of the passages that supposedly condemn people who are LGBT and shows that much of the conventional wisdom about these passages is simply incorrect. There's also a great discussion in here about how Acts 10-15 provides a helpful model for how the church can resolve this issue.
Chapter 6, "Real People and Real Marriage," shares the stories of actual gay and lesbian Christians and debunks the stereotypes and cliches that so often characterize this debate.
Chapter 7, "Healing the Church," includes recommendations for what the Presbyterian Church needs to do to make things right and to heal the divisions in the church.
If we choose to listen, the thoughtful scholarship in this book presents a tremendous opportunity for the church to affirm its biblical and confessional tradition while also welcoming people who are LGBT as full and equal members.
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39 of 45 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Author gets Barth wrong, September 19, 2007
This review is from: Jesus, the Bible, and Homosexuality: Explode the Myths, Heal the Church (Paperback)
This book has much to commend it, but the author's summary of Barth on male-female relationships (and his subsequent rejection of same-gender love) disregards Barth scholarship of the past 10 years, and is a superficial reading of Church Dogmatics in any case. A brief conversation with George Hunsinger at Princeton--one of the leading Barth scholars in North America--would have cleared this up and resulted, I think, in a very different argument. Eberhard Busch, Barth's longtime secretary and a respected theologian in his own right, would also have been helpful.
Barth, in the last months of his life, dictated a letter to a pastor struggling with the issue of homosexuality, in which he said that while he was too old to give the issue the attention it deserved, he suspected that if he were to rewrite the offending paragraphs in Church Dogmatics III.4, he would have said that homosexual relationships, too, shared in "freedom for community." That comment is brief, but striking, since "freedom for community" is precisely the divine gift in which heterosexual married partners participate, according to Barth.
To argue that Barth believed that the male or female is incomplete without the other does not mean that Barth concluded heterosexual marriage was normative for everyone. In fact, in the context of Protestant theology in the early 50s when Barth wrote III.4, he rather boldly praised vocational celibacy and reminded the reader that Jesus had no wife. Therefore, if Rogers is right, Barth believed that Jesus was "incomplete" or "not fully human" because he was unmarried.
On the contrary, if you dig deep enough, you can see a trajectory leading from III.4 to the comment near the end of his life that same-gender relationships might also be seen as a divine gift that leads to "freedom for community." So Rogers missed an opportunity to approach the issue constructively in a Barthian context: instead, he merely concedes Barth to those Barthians whose reading, like his, of Church Dogmatics is one-sided. Thus, Barth has to be rejected as a theologian of "male superiority" who has nothing to contribute to the debate. The sad thing is that up-to-date Barth scholarship--which would have called this view into question--was available to the author in his own church.
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12 of 12 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Thoughtful and challenging presentation for full inclusion of LGBT community within the Church and society [1st edition], June 6, 2010
Jack Rogers has written a concise articulation of how a Christian can (and should) seek equal rights for those in the gay and lesbian communities. Rogers approaches this issue from a variety of different angles, not restricting his case or discussion to one area such as Biblical references to homosexuality. Here are several of these perspectives or angles and some of what he states concerning them:
--The pattern of misusing and abusing the Bible in order to justify oppression: Rogers focuses in on slavery (or Black civil rights) and woman's rights. In both cases, these groups were viewed as inferior based upon a biblical curse, their moral character, and their willfully sinful nature. Rogers briefly attempts to explain how seemingly upright individuals could come to hold such repugnant views, concluding that it was a mixture of bad biblical interpretation and philosophical presuppositions. He finally notes that the same pattern has reappeared in the LGBT controversy with gays and lesbians simply taking the place of Blacks and women.
--Biblical interpretation methodology: On this issue, Rogers contends that the general or persistent themes surrounding the life and purpose of Jesus are to be given interpretative priority over individual passages isolated from this overarching narrative. As he states, "The Bible is a story, and its central character is Jesus Christ" (56). Rogers thinks that these general themes should be held in the forefront when interpreting each passage of Scripture, especially passages referring to narrow commandments or moral prerogatives. In light of this, he holds that Jesus' words on divorce should be seen as ideals desired to be held but not slavishly enforced. Regarding homosexuality, the centrality of God's love and the need to love one's neighbor is seen as providing good grounds for equal treatment of homosexuals.
--Specific Biblical texts related to homosexuality: Here he argues that all of the texts proffered as evidence for the immorality of homosexuality fall short of establishing this. His primary claim is that none of these passages address homosexuals involved in committed and loving relationships. The homosexual activity referred to in these passages always have some other element (e.g., prostitution, ritual uncleanliness, etc.) that makes them disanalogous to the contemporary homosexual.
--Engaging living examples of homosexual commitment: Rogers thinks that actually meeting and witnessing the commitment and love present in homosexual relationships can serve as evidence for accepting God's blessing of such a relationship. Following several New Testament scholars, he thinks that Acts 15, in which the gentiles were included in the blessings of the covenant, can serve as a precedent for accepting a formerly rejected class based upon seeing God's spirit at work in and with them.
Coming to the book from a traditional perspective, I found his arguments to be interesting, enlightening and challenging. He presents a good case within a small framework. The strength of the book, I think, is in his exposition of the "problem verses." Though his presentation is brief and one-sided, the cultural issues surrounding these passages does at least give one (or at least me!) a moment's pause before coming to the traditional conclusions. There were still, however, several aspects of the book which I found wanting.
Rogers' particular methodology for interpreting Scripture isn't exactly clear and maybe even inconsistent. Coming to the text from a big picture perspective (absent a belief in the inerrancy or infallibility of scripture, which I don't think Rogers' has) presents the problem of discerning which Biblical particulars are to be authoritative--or morally imperative--and which aren't. This approach leads him to hold the view that Jesus' statements about divorce are to be taken as ideals but aren't expected from his followers. Yet when it comes to sexually promiscuous behavior, Rogers seems to think that the Biblical condemnation of this is to be taken at face value. The reasoning on this goes as follows: proper sexual conduct is restricted to married (or at least committed) relationships because that is how God structured human sexual conduct, and we know this from the Bible. But I could envision a proponent of sexually promiscuous behavior presenting a case very similar to the one Rogers presents for homosexuality. If this problem is insuperable (though I doubt it is), the texts specifically related to homosexual behavior would be even more important.
Numerous times Rogers appears to argue with non-sequitors, that is, arguments in which his premises don't support his conclusion. For instance, at one point he exclaims: "Can you imagine Jesus turning away someone who is despised, discriminated against, and distraught to the point of attempting suicide?" with the concluding remark that we "see everyone in this discussion of homosexuality as our sister and brother in Christ" (57). But even if one agrees with Rogers on what Jesus would do in this example, it doesn't follow that one should believe that homosexual behavior is permissible or morally acceptable. Jesus himself proclaimed that many of the people he ministered to were sick and in need of a doctor. In a similar fashion, he references John 7:53-8:11 as supporting his position on homosexual equality (44), but this story ends with "Go and sin no more," so even though there is an accepting and forgiving tone to the story, there is still the call to refrain from sinful behavior. Not too different from these cases, Rogers appears to be confused when discussing the work of Richard Hays, who views homosexuality as an aspect of our fallen and sinful nature. Rogers states, "by singling out a particular group of people, Hays is contradicting the essential Christian message that we are all broken people, saved through the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ" (85). There is clearly no contradiction here. Rogers doesn't appear to recognize the possibility that--though we are all fallen--each of us is fallen in a different way and that some of us may be fallen in similar ways, that is, we have similar fallen tendencies. This is quite evident on the Christian doctrine of man and entails no contradictions. Hays may be mistaken that homosexuality is an aspect of being fallen, but it's not because this contradicts some core truth on sin and redemption as Rogers claims. To a lesser extent, some of Rogers' arguments pertaining to the history of biblical justification for oppression are misguided. In short, though these examples should humble us and our ability to see through our cultural prejudices, they're only relevant to the case at hand if--in fact--the traditional view of homosexuality is mistaken, which is the very thing that is at issue.
One minor complaint I had was that he focuses in on debates within the Presbyterian Church too much for a book devoted to healing "The Church." He constantly references various disputes and decisions reached throughout the history of this church, including some involving homosexuality. Though Rogers is Presbyterian, this issue of homosexuality is relevant to the whole of the Christian church (as Rogers knows), and it would've been better if the book had been presented from a broader Christian perspective.
Lastly, the book doesn't include many dissenting voices. It would've been nice if Rogers could have dug into the other camps' literature a bit more, but given the length of the book this is understandable. He does, however, refer to Gagnon and Hays' works.
In the end, this book is recommended for those interested in this debate. The writing and presentation are clear such that one is able to understand the whats and whys of Rogers' positions. Also, the book is short enough that one can have a decent understanding of how a Christian can welcome homosexuals while (attempting to be/) being faithful to the Biblical witness. It should be noted, though, that the sections pertaining to the Presbyterian Church can be hard to get through for one not too interested in that church's historical disputes.
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