Christianity and Homosexuality - Contemporary Views On Homosexuality

Contemporary Views On Homosexuality

Many of the debates among Christians have roots in questions about the sources of authority different Christians believe represent God's purest or most definitive message. More generally: which kinds of arguments should be persuasive to Christians, and which do not possess the weight necessary to determine opinions and policies. Such is also the case with the issues related to the morality and inclusion of LGBT persons in Christian life.

In conservative strains of Protestant Christianity, Scripture is understood to be the only truly definitive authority (a position called Sola Scriptura). Exegesis, or the reasoned study of the text to discover its own meaning, is the central concern for believers in Sola Scriptura. The classic formulation of Sola Scriptura regards "good and necessary consequence or deduction" from Scripture as authoritative and morally binding; what these deductions might be is a frequent subject of controversy.

Liberal Christians tend to regard the Bible as the record of human doings, composed of humans encountering the Divine within their specific historical context. They often interpret passages of the Bible as being less a record of actual events, but rather stories illustrating how to live ethically and authentically in relation to God. Some might, for instance, see Christ's death and resurrection in terms not of actual physical reanimation, but in terms of the good news of Jesus' teaching: that God's children are no longer slaves to the power of death.

Some professional exegetes consider the Bible, to a greater or lesser degree, to be a document of its time, taking on attitudes which may not be God's. While they may hold the document as sacred, and most certainly as central to Christianity, they are also aware of the historical and cultural context in which it was originally written through archaeological and from critical study. Some scholars feel that in addition to its spiritual components, portions of the text merely reflect the human authors' beliefs and feelings about God at the time of its writing, and their cultural sensibilities. The influence of such persons may reflect a heightened spiritual consciousness, or may simply represent people attempting to explain the world as best they could given the tools of the time. Such scholars purport that passages in scripture related to slavery, war, genocide, female marginalization, and sex between men may not necessarily be about God's wishes, but rather about the predominant culture's opinions at the time of the passage's writing.