The 14-article document, dubbed the “Nashville Statement,” was released by the Council on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood (CBMW) on Wednesday, focusing primarily on issues of gender and same-sex marriage. The first article in the document affirms that "God has designed marriage to be a covenantal, sexual, procreative, lifelong union of one man and one woman, as husband and wife” and not for “homosexual, polygamous, or polyamorous” relationships. The document follows a meeting in Nashville at the Southern Baptist Conference’s Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission's (ERLC) annual conference.
The statement also condemned Christians who expressed support of LGBTQ issues, saying: “it is sinful to approve of homosexual immorality or transgenderism and that such approval constitutes an essential departure from Christian faithfulness and witness ... [we deny that it is a matter of] moral indifference about which otherwise faithful Christians should agree to disagree.” [...]
But the timing of the document — as churches grapple with much more pressing national conversations on issues like racism — has made it particularly jarring, especially to its critics. After all, the US Supreme Court ruled to establish same-sex marriage across the country two years ago. Meanwhile, in recent weeks and months, America’s Christian religious leaders have faced a number of politicized challenges, from the violence in Charlottesville, Virginia, to how to respond to the Trump administration’s more controversial statements and actions. [...]
In other words, the evangelical community as a whole has seen a shift in recent months and years, as the conflation of Republican Party values and Christian values is no longer as straightforward as it once was. To an extent, the Nashville Statement thus seems like something of a reactionary gesture — an attempt to foster unity in the evangelical community (uniting, say, pro-Trump figures like James Dobson with critical firebrands like Russell Moore) by appealing to a doctrinal issue — sexual ethics — that still unites many of them. [...]
he “queer theology” movement of the late twentieth century, inspired by similar social justice Christian movements like liberation theology and feminist theology, featured thinkers like John McNeil and Marcella Althaus-Reid. They didn’t just argue that being queer was acceptable in Christianity, but rather that the very nature of Christianity — following a radical divine being who was willing to upend the whole social hierarchy in pursuit of justice — demanded that we reassess how we think about gender, sex, love, and desire outside of wider “cultural norms.” For these thinkers, racism, sexism, and homophobia were all themselves part of human “culture;” something that Christianity should resist. This thinking come to influence later progressive Christian approaches to social justice.
No comments:
Post a Comment