Biblical support for gay clergy and marriage

Quite frankly, he wasn’t interested in giving the topic serious thought. “I opposed homosexuality reflexively — that was just what I thought Christians were supposed to do,” he recalls.

But once he did embark on a scholarly journey, the Presbyterian minister found that his views changed 180 degrees: He’s become a vocal advocate of ordaining gays and marrying gay couples in the church.

“I am so convinced that Jesus and the Bible, rightly understood, support the equality of all persons, including gays and lesbians, and that the church cannot continue going against its central values,” says Rogers, 72, a former Presbyterian Church U.S.A. “moderator,” the denomination’s top leader.

“We can’t keep making a group of people pariahs. Jesus would never have stood for it,” he stresses.

How an evangelical Christian’s views changed so dramatically on an issue that has divided his church since 1976 is mapped out in fascinating detail in “Jesus, the Bible and Homosexuality: Explode the myths, heal the church.”

His thoughtful new book, which recounts “how the church changed its mind on other moral issues,” couldn’t be more timely: Presbyterians will again weigh the place of gays in the church at their June 15-22 General Assembly.

Rogers’ turnabout came in part from his scholarly reading of the Bible verses mentioning homosexuality. He concluded that cherry-picking verses to try to justify prejudices ignores the ancient Near East’s cultural norms, fails to address other verses suggesting different interpretations and disregards the Scriptures’ central, loving message about the life of Jesus.

Asking fellow Christians to temporarily take off 21st-century spectacles, Rogers shows how the Presbyterian leaders deriding blacks and women in the 19th century sounded eerily like the ministers of today who brand those of us who are gay as sinful.

Back then, Rogers notes, most Americans believed women and blacks were especially sinful and that the Bible told them so: Both were viewed as morally inferior to white male Christians, sexually threatening and deserving of punishment.

Leading ministers confidently grounded their defense of slavery and the subordination of women in biblical verses, endorsing as simply part of God’s divine plan practices now recognized as abhorrent. (See Genesis 9:22-25, Ham’s sin of seeing his father naked; and Genesis 3:16, Eve’s sin of eating forbidden fruit and sharing it with Adam.)

Presbyterian theologian Robert Dabney, laying out the slippery slope argument of his day, warned soon after the Civil War that allowing black men to be ministers would lead to race mixing. He later called the push for women’s rights “a new attack on God’s Word.”

Society — and the church — of course changed, not the Bible.

“We changed our minds because we changed the way we read the Bible — from proof-texting to looking at the Bible as a whole and especially through the lens of Jesus’ life and ministry,” Rogers says. “Most people don’t pay attention to history. They say, ‘Oh, that was different.’ No, it is the same.”