Proclaimer Blog
Why we’re right to keep banging on….
Sometimes, PT is accused of banging on about things that don't seem to matter. But there are some issues that we're right to bang on about, not least that if we are to rightly handle the Word of God, we've got to rightly understand the words of the Word of God. There was a great example of how indiscipline can lead us astray in yesterday's Times letters. Here is a letter from Rev Dr Martin Henig of Wolfson College Oxford (if you have access to behind-the-paywall you can read it here).
Sir, Discomforting as it is to modern Christians, Christianity did nothing to sweep away slavery (letter, Nov 24). Indeed, St Paul exhorts slaves to obey their masters (Ephesians 6,5), while the writer of 1 Timothy reiterates this injunction (1 Timothy 6, 1-6).
To our shame, slavery as an institution continued to be universal in the Christian Empire and into the Middle Ages and beyond. The 18th century did not re-discover slavery; the needs of plantation owners in the New World simply built on an endemic structure of slavery and serfdom that had been in existence since human records began.
Bishop Gene Robinson is right. It was the emergence of a liberal conscience that looked to the heart of the Gospel message of liberation which ended slavery. Let us hope that the same truly Christian spirit will at last end centuries of injustice and discrimination against lesbians and gays, many of them fervent Christians. If we were guided simply by biblical texts without recourse to the compassion of Christ and our own God-given reason we would still be owning slaves, stoning adulterers and burning “witches”.
Have a careful read and see where you think the exegesis and argument is flawed (I don't mean the implication that someone other than Paul wrote 1 Timothy, though I would want to take issue with that too!). It's worth spending some time trying to work it out, not least because it both reinforces how we understand Scripture and answers a very common objection to our view of homosexuality (and, indeed, a whole raft of sexual ethics).