One of the most essential books on Christianity and LGBTQ inclusion has received an update and now appears in an expanded and revised edition.
God and the Gay Christian, written by Matthew Vines, is now 10 years old. When it appeared in 2015, the book became an instant bestseller and changed the narrative on what the Bible says about same-sex attraction and same-sex relationships. At the time, our church was going through an inclusion study and there were few other resources that rose to the level of help as this book.
The revised edition includes additional biblical exegesis in support of not only tolerating but blessing same-sex couples.
Last fall, I had the privilege of introducing Vines at the CenterPeace conference where he previewed some of the new material. Here’s what I said in that introduction:
In my experience, there are two ways people approach LGBTQ inclusion in the church. One is emotional and one is rational. There are people who need to know how we deal with the Bible. And there are people on the other side who say, “I just feel in my heart this is the right thing to do.” And sometimes these two people don’t get along because they’re talking past each other.
I know no one in American Christianity today who deals with the rational side of that argument better than Matthew Vines. It is his forte. It is his expertise all the way from God and the Gay Christian to the Reformation Project. I often say to people, “You cannot out-orthodox Matthew Vines.” And this is a beautiful contribution to the work we’re doing here because both of these streams matter.
It’s not that you have to be one or the other, but Matthew has the unique ability to take the Scripture and to take rational thought and say, “Come, let us reason together.”
Topol as Tevye in “Fiddler on the Roof”
The Bible and tradition
God and the Gay Christian is full of Bible. For anyone who demands a biblical accounting of how it is possible to be both gay and Christian, this remains a go-to resource. That’s due in part to the genesis of the book, which was the byproduct of a challenge from the author’s own father to prove to him from the Bible it is OK to be a gay Christian.
In the past decade, Vines has launched the group The Reformation Project that provides online resources and conferences, moved to Dallas from his home state of Kansas, and he has gotten married to Zach.
Matthew Vines
And amid all that, Matthew Vines remains one of the most orthodox Christians I know.
He began his talk last fall with the song “Tradition” from Fiddler on the Roof. Tradition is “one of the main arguments we hear from non-affirming Christians in the debate about same-sex relationships,” he said. “No one’s really arguing with the fact that for the first 1,900-plus years of the church, no one affirmed same-sex relationships. It wasn’t until the middle and then the latter half of the 20th century that an affirming position was first articulated, initially in the mid-1950s by an Anglican theologian named Derrick Sherwin Bailey. But the point is, many Christians will then say, ‘Look, if everybody thought this for basically 2,000 years, who are we to come along now and say, actually we think that that position was wrong?’”
Fair point, he acknowledged.
Various Christian groups rely on tradition as part of their faith formation, he said. And while he doesn’t want to focus solely on the ways tradition has been wrong — on women, on race, on slavery, on antisemitism, for example — he wants to acknowledge tradition does matter.
“The vast majority of traditional Christian beliefs are still things we continue to affirm today,” he said. “When we read the Apostles’ Creed or the Nicene Creed, all of those beliefs are very traditional and none of them are wrong, in my opinion.”
His point is that affirming the reality of same-sex attraction does not require ditching the Trinity, the Virgin Birth or the Resurrection.
Yet on some other issues, new information comes to light across history and the church must take this knowledge seriously, he explained.
Galileo
In the book, he cites the story of Galileo Galilei, who in 1609 looks through his telescope and sees things he didn’t expect to see, that tradition said he shouldn’t see.
(123rf.com)
“He sees that Jupiter has moons, that Venus has phases, and as he’s collecting his data, he’s realizing none of this aligns with the traditional view that the earth stood still at the center of the universe and that all celestial objects revolved around the earth. In fact, everything he was finding was indicating that it was precisely the opposite, that the earth revolved around the sun, not vice versa.”
To announce these findings would appear to challenge the traditions of the church and the teaching of the Bible, Vines said.
“Psalm 93 says the world is firmly established, it cannot be moved. Joshua 10 famously recounts how the sun stopped in the middle of the sky and delayed going down about a full day, which again on its face would suggest that the sun typically moves. Ecclesiastes describes how the sun rises and the sun sets and hurries back to where it rises. All these passages and a number of others referring to the sun, the moon, the stars and the earth throughout Scripture would suggest at face value that the traditional interpretation was correct.
“However, Galileo wrote a letter explaining how his findings could be reconciled with the authority of Scripture. What he proposed was what he called an accommodationist understanding of how Scripture was speaking about the earth and the heavens. He said the biblical writers were seeking to communicate with people, and so they described how things looked to people on earth. They were not trying to write a precise treatise on astronomy. Despite what I think was a good argument, in 1616, the Roman Catholic Church formally condemned Galileo’s view as heretical and confined him to house arrest. This was not the brightest chapter in church history.”
Yet over time, “the church’s reading of Scripture changed to accept Galileo’s argument and now most of us see his argument as kind of commonsensical. Sure, Ecclesiastes says the sun rises and the sun sets, but so do we when we talk about sunrises and sunsets, even though we know that that’s not literally what’s happening, it’s just a much easier way to communicate. So this is not causing a crisis of faith for almost anyone today, but this is an area where new information led Christians to a new understanding of Scripture.”
That’s a relevant parallel to our expanding knowledge about human sexuality, Vines said. Today we know more about committed and loving same-sex relationships in a way the ancients did not know because they lived in a world of hierarchy and abuse. And there’s scientific data and medical data and genetic data.
Yet not all Christians are convinced.
A moralistic drawing with a verse in German about the usury practices of the lawyer and jurist. (Shutterstock)
Usury
In the expanded content of the book, Vines introduces another biblical example of how the church has changed its mind. That issue is usury, or the lending of money.
That very word, though, has been “redefined to mean that usury is charging excessive interest on loans, but that is not what it used to mean in the Bible and throughout most of the church tradition,” he said. “Usury was defined as charging any amount of interest on any loan, period.”
For example, Exodus 22:25 says, “If you lend money to any of my people with you who is poor, you shall not be like a money lender to him and you shall not exact interest from him.”
Leviticus 25, 35-37 also prohibits charging interest to a fellow Israelite who becomes poor. That prohibition is expanded in Deuteronomy 23:19 to include all fellow Israelites. And so on. Until Ezekiel 18:11-13 which says one who lends money at interest and makes a profit should be put to death as an abomination.
“What’s particularly striking about this is that the verbiage here is virtually identical to the punishment language in Leviticus 20:13 for male same-sex relations. … And yet in the (usury) case, no Christians today are arguing that this practice remains intrinsically sinful,” Vines said.
“The underlying point is that over time the church clearly changed its mind on usury.”
In the speech and in the book, he tells this story in much greater detail. The underlying point is that over time the church clearly changed its mind on usury — even though in the early centuries of the church lending money at interest became something meriting disfellowshipping, even being labeled a heretic.
What happened? The world changed. The world economy changed. And the church changed its practice and its theology.
“It’s very similar to the basic affirming case today,” Vines said. “After all, the primary forms of same-sex behavior in the ancient world were practices that Christians should be against — things like prostitution, sex with people who were enslaved, pederasty — that most noxious practice where you had adult men and adolescent boys — which was particularly a feature in ancient Greece but also practiced in somewhat different ways in ancient Rome.”
Still orthodox
The updated book includes an appendix addressing the question of whether there were relationships in the ancient world truly analogous to the kinds of same-sex marriages we are discussing today. “It matters if the forms of same-sex relationships we are considering today are significantly different from the forms of same-sex behavior that were widely practiced and discussed in the biblical world,” he said.
Again, Vines stands out among some other LGBTQ-affirming Christians because he makes the case for a high sexual ethic for people who are heterosexual or homosexual.
“What many affirming Christians are arguing for is not an anything-goes attitude toward sexual ethics, but specifically for the church to bless and affirm monogamous, covenantal same-sex relationships,” he said. “Yes, to make a change, to include something, to recognize that something once seen as intrinsically wrong, that actually it’s not intrinsically wrong, but not just to say, ‘Hey, no more boundaries, no more rules.’ That’s not what we’re doing at all.”
Again, it’s hard to out-orthodox Matthew Vines. If you’re looking for a book that makes a solid biblical case for covenantal same-sex relations, God and the Gay Christian is it. There are other gay Christians and allies who make more expansive cases — see Brandan Robertson’s new book Queer & Christian, for example — but the starting point to the biblical exegesis remains God and the Gay Christian.
And now we have an updated version of this essential volume with an updated introduction, two new chapters and two new appendices.
We all have nonaffirming friends who demand detailed debate over the Bible before they’ll accept any gay or lesbian people in the church. They want to debate the issue to death. Introduce them to Matthew Vines. He will meet them point by point.
The video of his presentation last fall is online and available for free. Share that with anyone and everyone. And then hand them a copy of the updated and expanded God and the Gay Christian.
Mark Wingfield serves as executive director and publisher of Baptist News Global. He is the author of five books, including Honestly: Telling the Truth About the Bible and Ourselves.