Colson, Boyd and Claiborne Video

The second video was from a “Speaking of Faith" radio program where three generations of evangelicals…Chuck Colson, Greg Boyd and Shane Claiborne expressed their opinions on a variety of topics.  The snippet I watched was about homosexuality. Greg Boyd said this,

It seems to me that there's two fundamental issues that Evangelicals do have to wrestle with. The one is simply the terrible, abysmal track record the church has towards gays. You know, the reputation out there is that Evangelicals are homophobic and I don't think that it’s liberal media that's spinning that. I think we've earned the right to have gotten that.

But what's happened is, we have a list and our sins, you know, like gossip and greed and gluttony and not caring about the poor, and all the stuff that's mentioned all the time in the Bible, we minimize.

You can be a church member and have that stuff, but the homosexuality issue is all of a sudden the deal-breaker. And who christened that the deal-breaker sin? I don't get that. I used to wonder why did Jesus attract prostitutes and other, you know, sinners that were judged by religion and the church doesn't? They tend to stay away from us as much as the Pharisees. And one of those reasons might be that Jesus never made a public policy trying to pass laws against them. And here's where politics can get in the way of our Gospel message. They don't want to hang out with us, because we made a platform out of, uh, you know, going after them instead of our sins….

Many conservative Christians feel entitled to speak out against homosexuality….and to make it a political issue…a litmus test issue… because of their interpretation of certain verses in scripture that appear, at least on the surface, to deem homosexuality an abomination to the Lord. I think those verses can be explained using the same principles that universalists use to denounce an eternal hell (reasoning, definition of certain words in the original language, context and the customs of the times)   But that is the subject of another series of posts…one that I wrote about, in part, HERE. 

As far as scripture…well, there are plenty of abominable things that touch the lives of all Christians. More than enough abomination to go around…. 

Proverbs 6 comes to mind….

There are six things that the LORD hates,
seven that are an abomination to him:
haughty eyes, a lying tongue,
and hands that shed innocent blood,
a heart that devises wicked plans,
feet that make haste to run to evil,
a false witness who breathes out lies,
and one who sows discord among brothers.  ESV

Note the reference to abomination?  Just sayin'….