Our perceptions of God’s intentions keep evolving

More than a year ago I decided not to write further articles on homosexuality as long as we were neglecting the issues of war and peace. Our attitudes toward war need the perspective of our United Methodist Social Principles and the biblical teaching of loving our enemies and working at peacemaking.
However, I cannot remain silent in the light of J. David Trawick’s Aug. 26 article, “We should offer Christ with love but not accept sin.”
Mr. Trawick writes: “God’s intentions for sexual behavior are expressed throughout the Bible in a unified voice starting with the creation story.”
For now let us ignore polygamy, Levirate marriage, concubinage, divorce and male sexual freedom, which hardly represent a unified voice. Instead, let us look at same-sex relationships from the perspective of biblical writers’ limited version of what God intended.
Hebrew writers, including Paul, imagined God’s intention. We discover by historical analysis and later revelation that the writers were often wrong about God’s intention. Examples are numerous.
The purity/dietary laws of Leviticus 18 and 19 express what the writer thought was God’s intention: no eating of pork, no interbreeding of cattle, no wearing of clothes of different material, no man acting like a woman, etc. God’s intention suffered from the limited perspective of the writer.
Consider the Hebrew treatment of so-called enemies. God’s perceived intention was that all should be killed: men, women, children, cattle, etc. (1 Samuel 15:3 ff and many other passages). Again this perspective of God’s intention came from the limited understanding of a people in a war mode.
Even the Psalmist said that God’s intention was to take the enemies’ children and dash their brains out against the stones (Psalms 137:9). That passage is from a writer in Babylonian captivity who hated those who removed him or her from his or her homeland.
Think, too, of Paul’s view of women. He thought it was God’s intention that they should keep silent in the church (1 Corinthians 14:34) as well as face other restrictions.
Would Mr. Trawick affirm that all these biblical positions represent God’s intention?
In the course of time we have learned that God’s intention wasn’t always what was once conceived. All these earlier perspectives need to be brought into the understanding of God clarifying God’s intention through a continuing revelation in the Jewish and Christian communities (and elsewhere) as historical situations change. Jesus saw that:
“You have heard that it was said of old ... but I say to you ... .” (Matthew 5:21-22)
In addition, Mr. Trawick plays loose with the term “sin” as though it were simply a moral concept. My professor, Paul Tillich, has done more than any other theologian to clarify the meaning of sin. He says in The Shaking of the Foundations that sin is a state before it is an act.
What is that state? Separation from self, others and the Ground of Being (God).
Apply that to the homosexual controversy. Is the homosexual separated from self by homosexual acts? Not if the homosexual is created that way. The evidence mounts that people are created that way.
Is the homosexual separated from others? Not in committed, consensual same-sex relationships.
Is the homosexual separated from the Ground of Being, from One who loves him or her? Not if that person is not a predator and is in a loving relationship.
Of course, all of us, heterosexuals and homosexuals, are at times separated in one or more of these ways. That separation may lead to immoral or inhumane acts or, as is common to most of us, socially acceptable ways of sinning. That is why “There is no one who is righteous, not even one” (Romans 3:10, quoting Psalms 14 and 53).
To quote homosexual acts simply as sin is a judgment made by those with a very narrow view of sin. “O that we all could be more loving, more accepting of our differences!” Tillich wrote in a sermon from the volume mentioned above. Those words come from God’s intention expressed in Jesus of Nazareth: “You are accepted!”
I hear that word. I hope homosexuals hear that word. And all my readers!
Would that I could sin no more, no more be separated from myself, my brothers and sisters, or from God! I and the rest of us are in constant need of forgiveness and acceptance.