On the topic of “Just how much doctrinal right thinking does the Lord require of you,” I found John Calvin’s perspective to be interesting:

http://www.evangelicaloutreach.org/ashes.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Servetus

This is new to me. I didn’t previously know this piece of Reformation history. Hurrah for Wikipedia.

And Joao, perhaps the question of love-vs-standards, if I may caricature it, should really be reframed as “which of our King’s commands do you have the toughest time with? Then work on those.” I scare myself as I type those words, but I think there’s some truth in them. . .

Pardon my ignorance, but I am fuzzy as to the connection you are making.

Lots to think about. We may be in more agreement than it seems. Maybe word usage, semantics and context makes the difference in our thoughts seem larger than it is.
One example. I think you insinuated you prefer the separation from God description of hell over the torment forever idea.
I believe that actual separation from God equals torment forever, no better than the torture and fire you are uncomfortable with.
Maybe the punishment part of hell is not so much applied by an angry God, but is a result of His absence.

Happylad, thanks so much for your vulnerability. I very much struggle with the homossexuality issue because a good friend of mine, one who was key in my early Christian development, struggled with homossexuality and now has delved into the lifestyle.
So it is certainly true that if an issue affects you close to home, it becomes more difficult to just dismiss it or simply condemn it callously.
I think the key (not that I practice it well), is to walk that balance of loving the sinner, yet rejecting the sin. I know…this phrase is so maligned this day and age, but if you unpack it, it is pretty well descriptive of how Jesus acted. He openly accepted and loved the sinners around Him and did not constantly bash whatever sin they struggled with. I think most of the time, the phrase he used after healing or showing kindness to a person, no matter the sin, was: go and sin no more.
So maybe we can take this as an example to love the people God puts in out path, no matter their struggles, and yet, not also embrace their sin. But putting the greater effort in loving them as they are, not necessarily obsessing on their sin.
Lord knows, I am glad the people who love me don’t constantly harp on my sins.

“If there is any witness to man’s utter depravity, I find it revealed most in man’s tendency to demonize and falsely judge others, to think the worst of others, while falsely assuming the best of their own heart’s intentions.”

Yes, yes, and YES! It’s internalizing the whisper of the snake, isn’t it? “Did God really say…?” We not only demonize and falsely judge others, when we do so, we also are thinking the worst of GOD. This is the very essence of blasphemy. We set ourselves up to be “like God, knowing good and evil” when we can know and be absolutely nothing apart from Him.

I struggled with homosexuality for 13 years of my life, seven of those years fully embracing a gay identity. When I was a gay man I had no great love for Christians. They were the people who were the most demanding of me as a server and they left the worst tips. In the gay community I heard that Christians hated us and that I was destined to be gay the rest of my life.

A waitress I worked with showed great empathy to me and loved me regardless of my sinful life (and I’m not necessarily talking about my homosexuality here). She loved me and shared her faith in a non-judgmental way. She wasn’t like the people I had been warned about. I ended up coming to Christ within a short span of time. Rosie had NEVER mentioned my homosexuality as an issue related to my salvation.

The months following my salvation experience were times of deep examination of my heart and of the scriptures. I never heard one sermon about homosexuality during that time. When I read Romans 1 I didn’t feel like killing myself at all. I was challenged, but not suicidal.

It was while reading 1 Corinthians 6:9-11 that I had my epiphany. This scripture listed many of the sins I struggled with (lying, being a drunkard, homosexuality). I thought to myself “Hmmm, that’s not so good for me”. But then I continued in the scripture and it said “such WERE some of you”. “Were”! Past tense! And I knew that there were former homosexuals in Corinth and hope came into my heart.

Now I will confess that the road has been difficult and painful, but it has also been joyous and beautiful beyond description. I wouldn’t trade my life or my former struggles for anything.

So empathy changed my life!

In Dec. 2008, the Journal of Pediatrics published an article about it — and the results are deeply troubling. Here’s a link to the abstract: http://pediatrics.aappublications.org/cgi/content/abstract/123/1/346. I wish the whole article were free.

Fellow christians, I have two questions:
1) Do you care?
2) Is defending our notions of truth worth the cost?

For years I have been deeply uncomfortable with the Christian response to homosexuality. As a teenager, I read and, for a short while, believed the rants from the American Family Association and other “Christian” organizations that (1) no one is inherently predisposed toward homosexuality, (2) homosexuals are utterly depraved because they reportedly have numerous partners simultaneously and are basically hypersexual, and (3) homosexualiy will inevitably lead to pedophilia and — or so some Bible narratives suggest — a Sodomite systematic-rape-of-everybody culture.

Since that time I have come to know some homosexuals and lesbians and — surprise, surprise — they haven’t been the monsters AFA and others made them out to be.

Thank God I never had those dispositions, because if I had had them, I am 100% certain that I would have taken my life. I can’t help but wonder how many people struggling with homosexuality have — after reading the Romans 1 passage and repeated failed attempts to change their orientation — given up, concluded that they were depraved beyond hope, and just taken their lives. (After all, there’s that other passage about if your hand offends you, cut it off. Only here, it’s in your head.) I also wonder how many fundamentalist parents have driven their children to suicide. Finally, I wonder how much these victim’s Christian family members and church friends cared when the victim took their life.

If there is any witness to man’s utter depravity, I find it revealed most in man’s tendency to demonize and falsely judge others, to think the worst of others, while falsely assuming the best of their own heart’s intentions. (Interesting, Jesus seemed to have the same perspective too, given His denunciations of the Pharisees).

I think thoughtful evangelicals should adopt the following approach to the issue of homosexuality:

1. We don’t know — and the Bible doesn’t tell us — all there is to know about homosexuality.

2. If there is a reasonable doubt about a matter — and I think there is room for a Christian to have reasonable doubt about whether homosexuality is depraved — then refrain from judgment. Let God sort out these unknowns. Yes, choose for yourself to abstain from homosexuality, but don’t judge someone with that orientiation — after all, you never had to bear that cross. (As far as I am concerned, giving homosexuals the benefit of the doubt also means giving them a wide spectrum of civil rights, including state-recognized marriage, while at the same time protecting the rights of churches, pastors, wedding photographers, DJ’s and others to refrain on religious grounds from participating in those ceremonies).

3. One thing we can be sure of is the command to love our neighbors — including our homosexual neighbors — as ourselves. Empathize with them. Put yourself in their shoes. See them as eternally significant beings made in the image of God, and don’t let that love be diminished by their sexuality.

With #2 I am rejecting the popular refrain of “judge the sin, not the sinner.” For I don’t think Christians should presume that it is, in every imaginable circumstance, sin.

Thank you much for your post. Reading your blog — particularly your thoughtful posts on Scriptural Inspiration — made my day. I’ve been in a spiritual wilderness for years, so I’m deeply grateful to find this and other blogs so I don’t have to struggle with these theological issues alone.

Joao, thanks for your post too. There’s a lot to unpack there too. I don’t deny human depravity. 100+ years ago, liberals were supremely optimistic about the goodness of man and mankind’s inevitable progress toward a millenial-like future. WWI, WWII, and many murderous tyrannical regimes crushed that optimism.

We are reminded by history and news reports every day of how depraved we are capable of becoming. A person is foolish to think himself too good to cause a great harm.

Personally, I want there to be a hell for people like Hitler, Stalin, and others who have killed and tormented so many.

My problem is not with the abstraction that sin separates us from God, or the abstraction — posed by some Christian philosophers — that hell is, at its essence, nothing more than separation from God.

What I recoil at is the passages emphasizing endless and unimaginably intense conscious torment. And if one objects that this is not the mainstream view of Evangelicalism, take a look at the Wikipedia entry on Hell in Christian Beliefs: “Traditionally, the majority of Protestants have held that hell will be a place of unending conscious torment, both physical and spiritual….”

Joao, it’s not hard to say what you said: “We are hopelessly lost and all deserve eternal separation from God by our very nature.”

But can you say this: “We all deserve to spend an eternity of conscious, unimaginably extreme torment in hell”?

I noticed that you didn’t express it that way. But many evangelical statements of faith do express it that way, more or less.

My problem with penal substitution is that it is premised on the belief that death and hell were required to appease a wrathful God.

Do you think that the view of Atonement expressed by Dan would “cheapen Jesus’ sacrifice for us”? For me, that view doesn’t cheapen anything, but rather makes sense of Christ’s suffering and death.

I think that there are things of God that will offend our sensibilities and that instead of simply choosing to cast them out as wrong, maybe it would behoove us to wrestle with them.
I very much believe in the substitutionary aspect of Jesus’ death. There are plenty of biblical references to its necessity, including the pretty strong reaction Jesus had towards Peter when he implied that perhaps Jesus did not have to go to the cross.

We deserve death not because of little sins or great sins. The issue is not whether we lied or killed someone. The issue is the fact that we are by our very nature, God’s enemies. The issue is that God was not kidding when he warned that if we disobeyed Him in the garden, we would surely die.
We are hopelessly lost and all deserve eternal separation from God by our very nature.
If you doubt that, look at history, you or I are no better than Hitler or Stalin on a fundamental level, compared to God’s perfection and it is our fault.
So God’s substitutionary death on the cross is essential, needed and planned from His love for us despite ourselves.
To deny that I think is to cheapen Jesus’ sacrifice for us.
I agree that mankind is self righteous and much evil has been perpetrated by religious folk, but there are other sins mankind is guilty of besides self righteousness.
And Jesus’s sacrifice covers all of them, the only thing us sinners need to do is to accept our guilt and accept His offer of cleansing.
It’s simple, anyone can understand it, but it required humility on our part. I strongly believe if this is ignored, much of the heart of Christianity is gone.

Eric, while I know I would not land exactly where you do in all your issues (I still have some problems with affirming homosexuality in a Christian context), I want to strongly affirm the tenor of your questions and explorations. I, too, come out at a Christus Victor view rather than a Penal-Substitutionary one. But it has occurred to me recently that an understanding of the war between God and the Powers arrayed against him helps us to understand Jesus’ (non-penal) substitutionary death in an enriched way. It is the Powers who demanded blood, more than just Pharisaical men, and definitely NOT YHWH. In his incarnation and death, Jesus submitted himself to the Powers’ greatest weapon–death–so that he could vanquish it and them in his resurrection. More detail on that here.

And Joao, perhaps the question of love-vs-standards, if I may caricature it, should really be reframed as “which of our King’s commands do you have the toughest time with? Then work on those.” I scare myself as I type those words, but I think there’s some truth in them. . .