It’s Not Just About Acceptance
April 3, 2005 · By Tom Cerber
Reverend Gene Robinson is the first openly gay bishop in the Episcopalian Church in the US. He caused a big controversy lately when he married his same-sex partner. This is also at the center of the huge rift within the Anglican church between the North American and European and African wings. The Archbishop of Canterbury was authorized to tell the North American arm to come up with a more orthodox position on marriage and pointed to Robinson’s case as a key sticking point.
This issue has mostly been treated as a matter of the limits of tolerance within the Anglican Church. However, according to the Daily Telegraph, Robinson recently gave a talk where he seems to identify Jesus Christ as a homosexual. This of course shifts the discourse from one of tolerance to transforming the theology of the church:
The first openly gay Anglican bishop has sparked outrage for suggesting that Jesus might have been homosexual.
The Rt Rev Gene Robinson, the Bishop of New Hampshire in the Episcopal Church of the United States, said that Jesus was an unmarried, “non-traditional man” who did not uphold family values, “travelled with a bunch of men” and enjoyed an especially close relationship with one of his disciples.
You can listen to his talk here.
We’ve noted how here in Canada how same-sex marriage is not simply one of tolerance but one of stifling dissent. Now here’s a case where an activist wants to redefine the cosmos. For general details on this more ambitious desire, you can’t do better than to read The Rebel, by the great Albert Camus.
This is hardly newsworthy or anything new to theology or the cosmos. Since the Bible doesn’t mention who Jesus did or did not have sex with, the possibility does exist that he was or was not a homosexual because we do not know.
And if we do believe that the Bible is a divinely inspired document, and this little factoid was left out, then my post-seminary guess is that it doesn’t matter if Jesus was or was not a homosexual, or what colour his eyes were. His teachings should dictate theology and church practice, for example “Jesus said love everyone, treat them kindly too.”
Then how would you explain Robinson’s attempt to portray Jesus as a homosexual?
Of course, the big question is what did Jesus MEAN when he said “love everyone.” Did he in fact say “love everyone” during, for example, the Sermon on the Mount? What did he mean by “love”? Unlike contemporary liberals, his own example shows he didn’t mean “love and take people as they are.” He can’t be reduced to a spokesman for easygoing relativism, as some contemporaries seem to think. Otherwise he wouldn’t have driven out the money-lenders from the temple and corrected numerous others. Contemporaries have a way of obsessively citing Jesus’ admonition of hypocrits without seeing his deeper teaching
To my knowledge, the chastity teaching derives more from Paul than from the Gospels, though they contain numerous examples linking chastity to holiness (i.e., Mary). Jesus’ general example of asceticism, including time in the desert, is often linked to chastity teachings.
This is extremely sketchy, but I would conclude from this that Jesus linked holiness with not indulging one’s carnal appetites, whether they be hetero- or homosexual. But see Paul’s advice for people to get married and have children.
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