Olliefranz, (and KCKID)
Nope. If all scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness, so that the man of God may be thoroughly equipped for every good work, then the scriptures I have posted exclude and prohibit homosexuality. The question is are they rebuking and correcting your position, or are they teaching? I think its fairly obvious they are rebuking and correcting. But one cant claim all scripture is God breathed and useful in this way if one doesn’t believe all of it, and if one doesn’t accept it one cant claim they believe it. Whether you like it or not the dictionary definition doesn’t allow one to dispute something and claim to believe it at the same time.
Your favored prooftexts are not
All Scripture. You need to read and try to understand
all scripture. A couple of paragraphs before 2 Timothy 3:16 is 2 Timothy 2:15
Study to shew thyself approved unto God, a workman that needeth not to be ashamed, rightly dividing the word of truth.
2 Timothy 2:15
Studying means more than memorizing prooftexts and remembering Sunday School Bible stories. It means reading the books of the Bible as they were meant to be read: reading the whole of each book in order to get a sense of the writer's main point in writing the book. It means looking at the culture of the time. Both Jewish culture/the culture of early Christians, and the culture of the people around them that they had to interact with daily. It means studying the meanings of the words. The mormal denotations, the connotations and the contexts in which they occur, their use in idioms, and the limits of those idioms. It means recognizing literary influences, whether it is Paul's quoting from Epimenides and Plato, or Peter and Jude quoting from pseudo-Enoch. We are workmen in the dividing of the word of truth, and the Scriptures are our tools. A carpenter needs more tools than just a hammer, and we need more tools than just misunderstood prooftexts and half-remembered Bible stories.
That’s irrelevant, the Bible calls out homosexual practice as what pagans (Lev 18) and non-believers do (Romans 1, 1 Cor 6) Homosexuality is a pagan practice according to God, only a pagan or non-believing pov could disagree.
I agree that offering human sperm on the altar of Molech is a sinful pagan practice whether it is offered directly and burned, or it is offered in the form of visiting a temple prostitute, or it is given into an animal (or a child) which is then sacrificed (Leviticus 18:21-24, all of which are of a piece, just as Leviticus 18:6-17, the so-called incest verses, are all one of a piece) But I know of no one that does this today, and particularly no Christians do, gay or straight.
And if you want to connect the sin of Unbridled Passion (Romans 1:26-27) to pagan idolatry, you have to first get the sin itself right, and then connect it the same way that Paul did. Unbridled Passion had become an addiction, and this addiction was the
penalty for the pagans rejecting God. But even that misses the point of Romans. The portrait that Paul painted of the worst of all possible sinners is a set up to the claim that we have no right to criticize these horrible sinners because we are just as guilty. (Romans 2:1-3)
Nope. God told Moses to lift the brass serpent, nothing pagan in what God instructs.
Quite right. But what began in accord with God's will, and indeed at God's command was still turned into an idol. And King Hezekiah ordered its destruction for that reason.
Now it came to pass in the third year of Hoshea son of Elah king of Israel, that Hezekiah the son of Ahaz king of Judah began to reign. Twenty and five years old was he when he began to reign; and he reigned twenty and nine years in Jerusalem. His mother's name also was Abi, the daughter of Zachariah. And he did that which was right in the sight of the LORD, according to all that David his father did. He removed the high places, and brake the images, and cut down the groves, and brake in pieces the brasen serpent that Moses had made: for unto those days the children of Israel did burn incense to it: and he called it Nehushtan. He trusted in the LORD God of Israel; so that after him was none like him among all the kings of Judah, nor any that were before him.
2 Kings 18:1-5
Anything, no matter how holy, can be turned into an idol. The Brass Serpent, the Ark of the Covenant (first by the Philistines, and later, after it was lost, by generations of superstitious people), and even the Bible.
Let me remind you that Christians believe the Bible, if you are saying Christians do not believe the Bible then we have a debate about two different faiths. But Christianity is the one that has always believed the apostolic faith once delivered in the Biblical one. So the new one would need a new name.
I'm saying that there is a difference between believing that we were given the Scriptures by God So we could study the lessons within it and obtain the Holy Spirit's help in working out our Salvation in fear and trembling, and believing
in the Bible and revering it without knowing more than a few favored prooftexts. That is revering the object, not its purpose. And I agree that the second is not the Christianity to which we have been called.
And when you can come up with a dozen or so proof texts to support your argument the you can criticise the proof texts given, until then ist just wingeing,
And with your focus on prooftexts, rather than on the whole of the Scriptures have shown which camp you lie in.
Then you are cherry picking. There are plenty of passages in the NT which warn believers not to associate with the wilfully sexually immoral and false teachers.
And I'm sure that the Pharisees quoted all of them (or at least all the ones from the Hebrew Scriptures) when they complained about Jesus dining with prostitutes and tax collectors.
Edited to add: I saw "NT" and read "Bible" in Phineas remark. Of corse they did not quote the New Testament, but the Old Testament. But aside from that bit of pseudo-dyslexia, I stand by this statement.
We have been called to preach the Good News of the Gospel to all men. Paul tells us that means becoming all things to all men so that some can be saved.
To be sure, we have to be clear that we are not understood to be saying that all religions are the same, or that we agree with the people that we are reaching out to on matters of faith, but we are not to be rude about it.
And even if we think that someone else has not properly repented of his sins, or is claiming something we feel to be sin is OK under some circumstances, we are still not justified in judging him. Only One Person is authorized to judge him. Only One Person is qualified to judge him. Only One Person is without sin and can cast the first stone. And He is on record as postponing that Judgment until all have had all opportunity to be saved.
Ok so then I and most Christians would say you don’t believe it.
It is not clear what you mean by "it" in this sentence.
If you mean that I don't believe that the Bible condemns homosexuality per se, then I agree. I have studied the Bible, and it only mentions what we would call homosexuals in a few places. It shows us their flaws and their sins in most cases, as it does with any other person, but it does not show, or condemn their sex lives: Potiphar, Ashpenaz, Jezebel's courtiers, Candace's treasurer.
It shows us sins that have a sexual aspect, and some of them involve same-sex partners. But what makes them sin are the same things that make cross-sex partnerships sin: rape, prostitution, idolatry, wanton promiscuity, slavery, etc.
If you mean I don't believe homosexuality is a sin, then while I admit it, I wonder why you pointed it out here, since I had just stated that, and also stated that it was irrelevant to the point I was about to make. That we are not to usurp Jesus' authority and judge others is a direct warning from the Bible, repeated by Jesus, by Paul, by John, by James.
If you mean I don't believe the Bible, or
I don't believe what you claim the Bible teaches, my answer is that the two are not the same. I believe what the Bible teaches to someone who takes the time to study and understand it. I believe that your pre-digested pablum of misunderstood prooftexts and half-remembered Bible stories is less than accurate.
The word of God says it is a sin so how come you don’t believe the word of God?
I believe the Scriptures when they teach that temple prostitution is a sin (Leviticus 18:22) I believe the Scriptures when they teach that torture and rape is a sin (Genesis 19; Judges 19; 1 Chronicles 19). I believe the Scriptures when they mention that, along with other sinful practices, enforced child prostitution is a sin, and that everyone is guilty of some sins on the list (1 Corinthians 6:9-10; 1 Timothy 1:8-11). I believe the Scriptures when they teach that Unbridled Passion not only is a sin in itself, but it leads to addiction (Romans 1:26-27).
And I also believe the Scriptures when they make no big deal of the Ethiopian treasurer's orientation, but instead there is no impediment to baptizing him as a Christian (Acts 8). I believe the Scriptures when they report that Jesus tells us that men like the treasurer are born that way "from their mother's womb."
But even more importantly, I believe the scriptures when they teach over and over again, in book after book that all of the times that Paul or James lists sins, it is so that we can examine our own lives. That we have no authority from God to judge others, since he gave all Judgment to Jesus and we are not Jesus. That we have no moral authority to judge others, since we are just as guilty as they are.
I believe the Scriptures when they warn that judging the sins of others is rejecting the grace of God and agreeing to be judged by the Law (Matthew 7:1-5; Galatians 2:21; Galatians 3:12; Galatians 4:21; Galatians 5:4). That is a scary proposition, since under the Law no one can be saved.
No, the Bible tells believers not to judge non-believers, (1 Cor 5), the sins of believers are to be restored by each other (Gal 6).
You are ignoring Romans 14, which is about fellow Christians who are doing things we consider sin. (At that time the hot-button issues were holy days and meat purchased from butchers associated with pagan temples, so those are the examples Paul uses.) You are also ignoring Matthew 18:15ff which tells us when and how we are permitted to "restore" a fellow believer.
First, it is not anything I think is a sin. It is a sin against me. He has to be harming me. (In the later stages, neutral third parties are brought in, but it is one of the two involved parties that calls them in, and there is still the fact that one is harming the other. If the situation in 1 Corinthians 5 was handled properly, the Church became involved because the cuckolded husband asked them to.)
Second, I am to forgive him. I am to forgive him whether or not he repents. I am to forgive him even while he is still sinning against me. There are no conditions on the forgiveness. None. It is to be as unconditional as Jesus love of me and His forgiveness for my sins.
I am looking to restore you as a brother from a false understanding by quoting the scriptures to correct you so you see homosexuality is a sin. Believers are restored, those who call themselves brothers but are wilfully sexually immoral are to be disassociated from. That’s the instruction to believers.
In what way am I being sexually immoral? I am celibate, and have always been. Although I do not believe there is anything in the Bible to indicate that homosexuality, per se, is sin, I am not "fully convinced in [my] own mind" that there might not be some teaching on the subject that I'm missing, so for me, if I were to marry and have sex with another man it would be a sin
because of my doubt (Romans 14:23). Likewise, if someone came to me for advice, i would identify their needing advice as doubt and counsel against it.
But the other side of the coin is Romans 14:3-5. If he is "fully persuaded in his own mind," then it is not my place, but Jesus' to judge.
