Re: the Bible, translation and gays

rtdavide@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
 writes:

>You make the point that the bible was written to different cultures
>with the obvious intent to cast some doubt on simply reading the bible
>straight up... presumably we need to understand the culture it was
>written to so that we avoid the error of just accepting what it says.

But it was written to different cultures. That's a simple fact. The
question is how that fact affects how we read it.

There are at least three examples that as far as I know evangelicals
agree with:

1. We do not bar employees of the Internal Revenue Service from
being officers in churches, even though tax collectors are the
standard NT example of sinners. Presumably this is because we
think there are significant differences between Roman tax collectors
and US ones.

2. We do not bar employees of banks, even though taking interest is
condemned widely in the OT. Again, presumably there are enough
differences in our economic system that interest is no longer
necessarily abusive.

3. The Bible permits, and in some cases in the OT, encourages slavery.
Everyone now believes that this is wrong.

It may be that homo***uality doesn't fall into this category, but we
can't solve that by pretending that we don't take the cultural context
of acts into account.

I realize that this is to some extent subjective. However there's no
reason to think that the Bible can be properly applied without some
degree of spiritual insight. If God had intended it to be a rulebook,
he is perfectly capable of having created a lawbook rather than a
mixture of narrative, poetry, letters, etc. But such an approach would
violate the spirit of Jesus' teaching, and the letter of Paul's.

I'm not taking a position on homo***uality here. It isn't immediately
obvious to me that anything relevant has changed. But the question is
certainly legitimate.