MINNEAPOLIS – When conservatives discuss sexual morality, they often focus on rules – as in, “Are you obeying the rules,” said theologian William Stacy Johnson.   And liberals often start by asking, “Is this relationship sincere?”

            But Johnson, a lawyer and professor of systematic theology at Princeton Theological Seminary, suggests that the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) has nothing to gain by continuing the same debates over homosexuality that have polarized the denomination for decades. A better question, he suggested, would be to ask: “What does my relationship with another demonstrate about the gospel?”

            “I think it is time for us to quit fighting over gay sexuality using the old rules, the old paradigms, the old lenses,” Johnson told the Covenant Network of Presbyterians meeting at Westminster Church in Minneapolis. Instead, Johnson said on Nov. 8, Presbyterians should stop debating gay ordination as a political issue, and see the people behind the issue – often committed couples, some of them raising children.

            “Such couples deserve to have their relationships consecrated in our religious communities,” Johnson said. “There is nothing in the Bible that directly prohibits us from doing so, and much that invites us to think afresh on the issue.”

            When Johnson tries to bring fresh thinking to this familiar, jagged terrain, he starts – not surprisingly – with theology. And part of his thinking involves examining what it means for God to have established an enduring covenant long ago – to have said, “I will walk among you, and I will be your God and you will be my people.”

            The commitment “I will be your God” demands a response from the people receiving that commitment, Johnson said. It demands from them a movement towards holiness and sanctification. “It is precisely through our response, through our action, that God’s engagement to be our God becomes most vivid,” he said. He offered the metaphor, “our house is broke, and God is going to fix it. But God is going to fix it through us.”

            Through the Holy Spirit, God completes the covenant and widens it to include all God’s children, Johnson said. By the power of the Holy Spirit, “God is at work among us . . . God has a stake in what happens among us.”

            In other words, “God is not just some celestial spectatator.”

            Trinitarian theology is a way of describing that relationship, Johnson said. So when Jesus cries out in agony on the cross, in one way it’s the tragic cry of a human being suffering and being broken. “But when Jesus cries, God cries too, which gives us confidence that when we cry, God cries.”

            John Calvin, one of the Reformers, wrote that “whenever and wherever human beings cry out for justice, a miracle occurs.”

            And when people fail to do justice, “when there is massive evil in the world, when there is warfare and genocide and global famine,” that’s the result “of people who fail to know God.”

            Having laid that foundation, Johnson turned his attention to the church’s interactions with gays and lesbians. Part of the difficulty, he said, is that the PC(USA) took on the question of gay ordination before considering its views on gay relationships. “The debates in the church for 30 years have focused on homosexuality in the abstract . . . with biblical proof texts thrown back and forth,” Johnson said. “We have been debating an issue and failing to see the people behind the issue.”

            In looking at references in Scripture to homosexuality, too often people use the wrong lens, Johnson said. For example, he described the sexual ethos that existed among the Romans towards the people whose territories they had conquered. Slavery was common; freeborn Roman males were expected to pleasure themselves sexually with men and women, Johnson said. So the language used in the Bible in Romans and I Corinthians to discuss men having sex with men referred to male prostitution or slavery, not the same kind of committed relationships among gays and lesbians the church is considering today.

            He ran through other biblical examples – offering other lenses for interpretation, the use of which Johnson contends can change our understanding of the meaning.

            “The covenant,” he said, “should be extended to gay and lesbian couples.”

            One woman asked what word Johnson is offering to people who are single – to those who want to be faithful but are not involved in a committed relationship.

            The idea of developing a sexual ethic for those not in a covenantal relationship – gay or straight – is something he wasn’t prepared to address that day, Johnson said. But that’s “an excellent question you are raising.”

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