At its meeting in Roanoke, the Baptist General Association of Virginia experienced a Galileo moment.
Galileo, you may recall, riled the church authorities of his day by taking seriously what he observed through his telescope and concluding that the earth revolved around the sun. Church authorities believed that it was the other way around. They emphatically pronounced that the Bible taught an earth-centered universe. As the chief theologian of the Catholic Church, Cardinal Bellarmine, put it, “all agree in interpreting [the Bible] literally as teaching that the Sun is in the heavens and revolves round the Earth … and that the Earth is … at the center of the universe, and motionless.”
Drexel Rayford
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Cardinal Bellarmine already knew what he believed, and had a millennium and a half of church interpretive tradition on his side, so the only conclusion he could come to was that Galileo was wrong. As far as history records, Bellarmine never looked through Galileo’s telescope.
At the BGAV this year, the gathered messengers voted, among other things, to confirm the decision of the Virginia Baptist Mission Board’s executive committee to refuse fellowship to Ginter Park Baptist Church on the grounds that they, contrary to the teachings of the Bible, had ordained an openly gay man. I seconded Jim Somerville’s motion to take a year and dialogue about that historic action primarily because conflicting principles of biblical interpretation lie at the center of this issue. During the discussion that followed Dr. Somerville’s motion, we had our Galileo moment.
The members of Ginter Park know the man in question, had examined him and had sensed in him gifts to ministry which they affirmed. They saw something of God’s leadership in the young man’s life, a reality they chose not to deny but to affirm. When news of these observations reached the ears of our association, the conclusions of the brothers and sisters of Ginter Park were disregarded on the basis of denominational interpretive tradition. Indeed, more than one of our chief theologians stood to oppose Dr. Somerville’s call to dialogue by stating that long tradition and what they felt were obvious biblical mandates which make it impossible that God could have been present in the ministry of a gay man.
Our own Cardinal Bellarmines drew conclusions based on literal interpretations of the Bible without ever having observed the human being at the center of the issue, and certainly without trusting their brothers and sisters at Ginter Park to be spiritually intelligent enough to sense God’s guidance.
Here’s my question: What interpretive principles do we employ which excuse us from examining evidence presented to us by fellow Christians? Additionally, what principles allow us to reject broad swaths of Deuteronomy and Leviticus while retaining others? What guiding principle do we employ in taking seriously the first part of Leviticus 20:13, which describes homosexual acts as detestable, but not taking seriously the second half, which says that the homosexuals should be put to death? And why not take seriously the injunctions in Leviticus 19 not to wear two different weaves of cloth simultaneously, not to have tattoos, and for men not to trim the end of their beards or the hair at the sides of their heads? And what about all those laws about cleaning mildew and feminine hygiene? Lord knows that we found some interpretive flexibility in order to enjoy our Virginia barbecue and all those delightful clam bakes and shrimp cocktails!
These are not flippant questions. The fact is, our Virginia versions of Cardinal Bellarmine all leave out, qualify or take as metaphorical or symbolic dozens of biblical passages that would make their preferred lifestyles less comfortable were they to take them at literal face value. In many of those cases, I would agree with them. The question, again, centers on the interpretive principles we use to understand and apply to our living this or that segment of biblical text. What principle do we employ to bring us down so hard on homosexuality while at the same time never mentioning Deuteronomy 23:19, for example, which explicitly prohibits charging interest on loans?
But of deeper significance to me in all of this is the profound cognitive dissonance I feel between the abstract characterizations of homosexuality I hear from biblicists and the concrete experience I have of the actual character of many gay persons I know, including my own daughter, who is gay. No one I know lives out the mind of Christ better than my daughter. She lives a life characterized by compassion, forgiveness, simplicity, disciplined love, grace and worship, as well as a thirst for open-eyed truth. My experience of her personhood throughout her life and my own efforts as a father to raise her to know the mind of Christ have served to challenge my own interpretive principles. It’s as if I’ve looked through a telescope and seen a world I’d never known before, and must acknowledge its beauty.
One messenger who spoke against a year of dialogue strongly suggested that he and others of his perspective would be watching to see whether or not the BGAV voted in a manner consistent with his version of orthodoxy. He and his unnamed cohorts were not the only ones watching. After the vote, my daughter announced on her Facebook page that she could no longer be a Virginia Baptist. Her friends — and she has a passel— responded en masse supporting her. The BGAV had successfully confirmed their stereotypes, that Baptists of our ilk profoundly lack love.
It has been said that “you have to draw a line somewhere.” The principles and criteria we use to draw that line are in question, and it seems to me that Jesus drew his line at “love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind and strength, and your neighbor as yourself. All of the law and prophets hang on these two commands (Matthew 22:36-40).”
I congratulate the messengers from Ginter Park Baptist Church for not denying what they had seen and heard, even though they knew some Baptist cardinals would judge them to be morally deficient. And I’ll hang with Jesus’ wisdom that any law should serve the purpose of loving God and loving neighbor, or it’s a bogus law. And when I have to choose between a selective interpretation of Leviticus and my daughter, I’ll choose my daughter every time.
Interesting: Between Galileo and Bellarmine, who does history remember best?
Drexel Rayford ([email protected]) is pastor of Walnut Grove Baptist Church in Mechanicsville, Va.