Theology in the Raw - Bonus Q & A (Patreon Special): Masturbation, Annihilation, Cussing, LGBTQ, and How to Share the Gospel

Starting point is 00:00:00 Hello, friends. Welcome back to another episode of Theology in the Raw. This is a Q&A podcast episode where I respond to questions sent in by my Patreon supporters. Questions like the morality of masturbation, church gatherings focused on the sermon. Is that something that we should value? Hell as annihilation, Christians and cussing. There's several questions that include LGBTQ related issues. Does egalitarianism lead to affirming same-sex marriage? How do I share the gospel? And many, many, many other questions. You'll get a sample of a few of the questions here in the public podcast episode, but if you want the full length Q&A episode, you would have to become a Patreon supporter.

Starting point is 00:00:41 And if you want to do that, you can go to patreon.com forward slash Theology in the Row. Okay, let's jump into the first question. What is the best biblical argument against masturbation? I've always heard that it is a sin, but I can't see why. That rule seems like a heavy burden for many. Okay. So that's an interesting way of wording it. The best argument against masturbation. I think traditionally the text that some people have gone to is Genesis 38, where you have this somewhat strange story where Judah, one of the sons of Jacob, has a few sons and God keeps killing his sons. So the firstborn son, I believe it's Ur, dies because he did evil in the sight of the Lord and he died childless. Okay. So his second brother, Onan, had, according to Leverite law, he had the duty to procreate with

Starting point is 00:01:47 his older brother's widow, Tamar, and raise up a seed to carry on the line of Ur. And he didn't. He did have sex with Tamar, but every time, well, I can get into the gritty details, but he would, as the text says in Genesis 38, spill his seed on the ground, I think is how the KJV worded it. Some people use that as a text against masturbation. I don't think that's what's going on there. I think that's a poor use of that text. I think if I was going to, you know, steal man a biblical case against masturbation, I would probably go to more of a theology of sex and marriage. You know, you can make an argument that sex is designed for procreation. Procreation is one of the goods, one of the purposes of sex. It's not the only good, it's not the only purpose,

Starting point is 00:02:38 but it is certainly one purpose of sex. It's sort of, there's a procreative design built into the sex act. And so you could make an argument that any kind of sexual relationship, or you could even go even further and say any kind of sexual act, even within marriage, that is not designed for procreation, does not follow God's design, is how maybe some people would say it. I think most people are not going to say every single sex act, even within marriage is designed for procreation, but maybe a sexual relationship, any kind of, I guess, on a more general level, sexual relationship is designed in part for procreation. Obviously, masturbation is some kind of sex act that is by definition, not procreative. And so it would be ruled out

Starting point is 00:03:24 on theological grounds. Or you can even, um, another angle theologically to argue against masturbation might be, you know, that sex is not only designed for procreation, but it's designed for mutuality. It's not really designed to be simply for individual self-pleasure. Um, but there is a, an otherness sort of built into God's design in sex and sexual activity and masturbation excludes obviously otherness. It is by definition an individual act and sex is not designed for individual pleasure alone. There's a mutuality and otherness built into God's design for sex. I think that's probably the best maybe theological argument against masturbation. I mean, if you want my pushbacks to that, I just,

Starting point is 00:04:14 when it comes to sexual activity, the Bible does give a lot of kind of concrete guidance and clarity on this. And I'm going to assume, okay, let's just get raw here for a second. I'm going to assume that people were masturbating throughout the biblical time period. I'm also going to assume that God was very well aware of that. I'm also going to assume that God had a hand in breathing out scripture to give us moral guidance on many things, had a hand in breathing out scripture to give us moral guidance on many things, including sexual activity. And the fact that there is utter silence, you add all those ingredients together, if you agree with those premises, and then you agree with the premise that masturbation is not anywhere clearly even addressed or prohibited. That, I don't know, I think that opens the door to maybe God did not

Starting point is 00:05:06 see this as a sin that needed to be addressed. So I do think there's, I mean, there's probably more unclarity, more unclarity than clarity regarding what the Bible says about masturbation. I do think it's probably more of a gray area. I personally, I mean, this is not something I've done like an exhaustive study on. I don't have a PhD dissertation in the theology of masturbation. So this is just kind of my thinking out loud opinion as I've thought about kind of biblical sexual ethics. I don't think that, you know, I think that lust is a sin, watching porn would be a sin. Probably a lot of things maybe that could be associated with masturbation very much could be a sin. But I don't think there's a good

Starting point is 00:05:54 biblical case to say that masturbation in and of itself is a sin. That's where I'm at. I would love to be proven wrong. But I also, well, I was going to get into kind of like a post-purity culture conversations around masturbation, but I'll hold that off to another time. Okay. Next question. Most modern church gatherings are focused on the sermon. Oh, this comes from, I'm going to say the names here. Most of these are from people who are anonymous. Oh, there's a few names here. This comes from Jace. So thank you, Jace, for your question. Most modern church gatherings are focused on the sermon. Was this the case in the early church? Is the sermon more akin to prophecy or teaching? This is a great question. And honestly, we, well, when you say early church, that can mean one or two things. Is that like

Starting point is 00:06:42 first century New Testament era? Or are you thinking like the first few hundred years of the Christian church? If you're thinking first century New Testament era, we don't have a lot to go on here. I think we would have a lot more to go on because there's just a lot more writings going on in the first few hundred years of Christianity that we might have a better understanding of what early church gatherings in the first few hundred years of Christianity, that we might have a better understanding of what early church gatherings in the first few hundred years of Christianity look like than we do in the New Testament era. I'm not an expert on the first few hundred years of Christianity. I've dabbled, but I don't have a... I would say go elsewhere for an expert opinion on what early church

Starting point is 00:07:24 gatherings looked like in the first few hundred years of Christianity. I can navigate my way around what we do and don't know from the first century. It does seem that early Christian gatherings probably were modeled after synagogue gatherings. We do have a little more information on what early synagogue gatherings look like. Even there, we do have a problem of dating. A lot of our knowledge about synagogue gatherings comes from later rabbinic literature. And there's always, this is kind of like the number one kind of rule of thumb in early Jewish studies is we can't just assume that when rabbis writing in, say, the Mishnah or Talmud or whatever, a few hundred years after the first century, when they were talking about the first century, that everything they're saying is quite accurate. I'm more of a fan of relying on actual first century Jewish literature to talk about what was going on in the first century. And when we do that, though, we just unfortunately have less evidence to go on. We've got some stuff from Qumran, from the Dead Sea Scrolls that give us kind of a picture. Again, it's not crystal clear. And then there's other Jewish writings that do contribute to our knowledge. But again,

Starting point is 00:08:38 we don't have like an A to Z. Here's exactly what everybody was doing with as much clarity as we would like. But we do have general patterns of kind of what the synagogue gathering, you know, would have looked like. There was, you know, prayer was an essential part of it. There was a reading of the Torah probably, and maybe an exposition, some kind of exposition, some kind of explanation, comment on the reading of Torah. We do see this in Luke chapter four, when Jesus goes into a synagogue, he's handed the scroll, he reads from Isaiah, and then he gives, we don't know if, you know, the actual historical incident, if he gave

Starting point is 00:09:18 a five minute explanation, a 50 minute explanation, we just don't know. Luke just records Jesus' kind of pithy statement. You know, this reading has been fulfilled in your midst, basically pointing to his messianic identity. At least that's what he's hinting at there in Luke chapter 4. So, we do see, you know, statements like in the book of Acts, Acts chapter 2, where they're gathering for, what is it? Teaching, prayer, the breaking of bread, and what was the fourth? There's a fourth ingredient here. Oh, fellowship, of course. They gather for fellowship, teaching, prayer, and the breaking of bread. And you see also, I mean, just throughout the book of Acts, when Paul goes into synagogues, there seems to be some teaching going on, some preaching, some proclamation, some, you know,

Starting point is 00:10:05 conversations about, you know, Paul's gospel that he's bringing to the synagogue. So, all that to say, we can get kind of a general idea of what was going on. 1 Corinthians 12 to 14 gives us probably one of the most explicit insights into an early church gathering. Now, and you probably, you know, maybe you're familiar with these passages where Paul's talking about, you know, people, you know, prophesying and speaking in tongues and praying. And it seems to be a little chaotic. And here is where, was the Corinthian church chaotic and Paul correcting that? Like he didn't like that? Or was it chaotic and he was simply trying to order some of the chaos a bit? It does seem to be Corinthians, and there's people who are way bigger experts than I am on kind of the Corinthian letters.

Starting point is 00:10:53 The Corinthian letters or the church of Corinth does seem to be a bit more democratic, a bit more what you might see in more modern charismatic churches today, where there's a lot of that. what you might see in more modern charismatic churches today, where there's a lot of that. It's not just kind of like 2% of the congregation doing all the leading and talking and stage stuff and everybody else is sitting receiving. You don't get that impression at all from reading 1 Corinthians. It seems to be like, you know, this person stands up as a teaching, this has a word, this has a revelation, this person has a prayer, this person has a prophecy, this person is speaking a tongue, somebody else is interpreting tongues. A lot of, it's like a beehive, you know, spiritual beehive. It seems like Paul's trying to regulate some of that, not trying to say this whole thing, this whole model is, you know, just terrible, you know. He seems to be regulating and trying to introduce more order in some of the chaos, but not saying,

Starting point is 00:11:37 I don't, doesn't seem like he's saying, you know, like, you know, we shouldn't have, you know, somebody stand up and give a teaching or give a prophecy or give an interpretation of a prophecy or whatever. He doesn't seem to have a problem with that. He seems to have a problem with the chaos, lack of order that was ensuing. But then you go to the pastoral epistles, 1 Timothy, Titus, and you seem to see a lot more structure. Now, those are written quite a bit later than Corinth. But even there, I mean, you do seem to be, you do seem to see different models of gathering that Paul seems to be okay with. I would imagine the gathering in the late 50s, early 60s in Ephesus might've looked different than the gatherings in Corinth in the late 40s

Starting point is 00:12:27 or whatever, you know, first Corinthians was written. When was it written? I think early 50s maybe. And I think that's okay. So here's, I guess this is a long way of me saying, I think that the New Testament church was designed to be not ethnocentric, but multi-ethnic, multicultural, and global and portable. Not this mountain or that mountain, but wherever the Spirit of God is present is where worship can happen, you know, Jesus says in so many words in John 4. So, I think there is a flexible design in church models that's intrinsically built into the New Testament ecclesiology so that we don't have and probably shouldn't have some kind of monochromatic... No, there's a word. It escaped my mind. But there's not some uniform prescribed model for church gathering

Starting point is 00:13:19 in the New Testament. And I think that's by design because New Testament ecclesiology is designed to go to the nations, to be able to morph and flex to its different cultural expressions. So all that to say, most modern church gatherings are focused on the sermon. I would say certain kinds of Protestant modern American church gatherings, well, not just American, but yeah. So I would say if you open up your horizons a little bit, there's a whole huge chunk of Christianity that's more liturgical where the Eucharist and the liturgy is going to be the focus, not the sermon. The homily is, if it's present, is not typically the focus. I do think the sermon-focused gatherings,

Starting point is 00:14:08 that does seem to be emphasized, not invented, but emphasized in the wake of the Reformation. You go to churches, if you travel the world and go to the old cathedrals, it is interesting when you go to Protestant churches post-Reformation and you see the kind of, you know, the pulpit, this tower sometimes that the preacher would climb up into. And it's just such a, you know, it's just the focal point of the cathedral seems to be, you know, where the preacher is going to go. Whereas if you go to churches that were built prior to the Reformation, then you see more of like the Eucharist altar. Is that what it's called? Being more the focal point. So even the design of the church buildings do kind of reflect this kind of sermonic versus non-sermonic focus. So to answer your question,

Starting point is 00:15:00 no, I don't think what we now call the sermon was the focus of early church gatherings. I do think there was teaching involved, but given the size of the gatherings that were typically anywhere from 20 to 50 people, you know, it's however many can fit into a house of a Mediterranean house of a wealthy person, which, you know, 50, 60, 70, I mean, you know, these were not large gatherings. So I don't think you had a monologue oration in the same way we do today. There might have been a reading of scripture and an explanation. So I think there could be some expository kind of teaching happening, but it probably didn't look exactly the same from house church to house church.

Starting point is 00:15:42 But I don't, you know, I've been talking to some friends about this, you know, that the pros and cons of having kind of a monological sermon focused service. And I'm like, you know, I just, I want to constantly resist saying this model's good, this model's bad. I think there's certain models given the gifts of the people involved that are maybe better than others. But I just, I don't want to say there's a one size fits all model. If a church has been gifted with an orator, like a Martin Luther King, you know, whole movements were prodded on by amazing oration, like with Martin Luther King, you know, you listen to his sermons and they're just,

Starting point is 00:16:23 oration like with Martin Luther King, you know, you listen to his sermons and they're just, they just are like wildfire, you know? So if a church has somebody with those kind of oration skills, I'm going to say, I think maybe that church, maybe, yeah, let's have these orations, you know, not to elevate some kind of celebrity pastor or preacher. Let's put major guardrails on that. But if a church maybe that has a pastor that just doesn't have really great oration skills, maybe there should be other kinds of teaching that can be explored. I don't think, while I don't want to say all sermon-focused gatherings are wrong or even not the best, I'm not going to say that. I'd also want to say that I don't think every single church gathering needs to have kind of a 30 to 45 minute monologue from the senior or paid

Starting point is 00:17:11 pastor. Like there could be other kinds of teachings, discipleship through teaching that could happen in different ways than simply a monological sermon. And there could be dangers too, if you center it on a monological sermon, again, going, you know, falling into kind of celebrityism and neglecting many other gifts of the Spirit that are present in that gathering. That's my one big question is when you gather together, whether it's 50 people or 500 people, the Spirit of God is gifted every single one of those people. And we gather together, it does seem a little, my charismatic listeners are going to love me for this, I guess, but it does seem a little odd. Like, it just seems like the spirit who breathed creation into existence is abiding in every individual believer, you know, the believers that are there and has

Starting point is 00:18:03 given them gifts to be used for the building up of the body. And I want to say, when are those gifts being used? Maybe it doesn't, I don't think every single gift necessarily needs to happen on every time they gather. So I'm not saying that like every single Sunday morning, everywhere, every individual Christian should be exercising their gifts. I don't think that necessarily needs to happen, although I'd be interested to maybe explore maybe more of that, you know? But it just does seem odd that it does seem that most, right? Correct me if I'm wrong. In most church gatherings around at least America, maybe the world, the overwhelming majority of spirit indwelt believers

Starting point is 00:18:48 are not using their gifts in the building up of the body period, or especially in the main kind of gathering, the Sunday morning service gathering. I don't know what to do with that. I don't, I'm just kind of pointing out something interesting observation that I have. I don't know how to reconstruct that because especially in larger gatherings, I don't know how to reconstruct that because especially in larger gatherings, I don't, I think we would end, we could very easily end up in Corinthian chaos times 11 if we just made sure every single person exercised a gift every time we got that together. So anyway, that's, that's me thinking out loud. So, but I think I already sufficiently answer your questions. Let's move on to the next one. Okay. John asks, what convinced you of the annihilationist view of hell?

Starting point is 00:19:26 The short answer is the Bible. That sounds so arrogant. I'm sorry. I had to. You set me up, John. It's John's fault. Okay. So to be clear, it actually was the Bible.

Starting point is 00:19:37 I am. Okay. And there's many, many, obviously, obviously, obviously, obviously, many, many other smart people who say, no, the Bible convinced me of universal salvation or the Bible convinced me of eternal conscious torment. So everybody's going to kind of claim the Bible as their source. But to be clear though, I, it wasn't some kind of like emotional distaste for eternal conscious torment. Although that, I guess that is there. That was never a motivation for me. Um, I do still take a kind of, if God said it, I believe it,

Starting point is 00:20:05 that settles it kind of approach that my grandma taught me when I was like zero years old. You know, if God designed hell to be a place of punishment for everlasting on people that deny him or simply reject the gospel, whatever, if that's the creator's design, then that's the creator's design. I'm not the creator. He is. So I submit to whatever that is, whether I like it or not is almost irrelevant. That's kind of how I approached, I don't know, like stuff in the Bible. So I didn't have like an emotional aversion to eternal conscious torment that kind of like turned me on to the annihilation view. It wasn't like a problem of evil. Like I lost a loved one and how could God be punishing that person forever and ever? And there must be a better reading of these texts. Like none of that was going into it. It really was looking at how the Bible talks about

Starting point is 00:20:56 the final state of those who are the wicked. I'll just use the phrase of wicked. That's the phrase of the Bible use. I know that's maybe unloving or whatever today, but I think it's always safe to maybe stick to the actual wording that the Bible is using. So specifically, okay, let me get specifically. It was the first really convincing piece of exegetical evidence that I was like, oh, wow, I've not considered that before, was the pervasive language of destruction, finality versus language of torture or torment that pervades almost all of the biblical references to the final state of the wicked. all of the biblical references to the final state of the wicked. A few maybe clear ones to me.

Starting point is 00:21:53 Let's start with John 3.16. For God so loved the world that he gave his only son that whoever believes in him will not be tormented forever and ever, but have eternal life. Is that how the verse goes? No, it's shall not perish. And for me, it was almost like, wait a minute, this is John 3, 16, and I've never thought through the meaning of perish. Just that psychological kind of like moment was pretty, kind of caused me to be, wow, what is going on? Like that's an interesting, like hermeneutical kind of crisis of faith, if you will, or, you know, like, or maybe an epistemological crisis of faith, not only crisis of faith, but you kind of like, wait a minute, this is the most famous verse I've repeated a thousand times. And I've never reflected on one of the more significant elements of this verse. Will not perish.

Starting point is 00:22:46 It does not say be tormented. And the Greek word perish, apolumi, you know, if you do a word study on that, and there's debates about this. Okay. Everything I'm going to say is debated. To me, the overwhelming majority, if not all the, well, okay, let's just say the overwhelming majority of uses of apolumi in reference to a person in a judgment context, it means the cessation of life, not just... Then you say, yeah, the cessation of earthly life, but your soul lives on all the way.

Starting point is 00:23:17 That's your reading. That's just a lot of assumptions going into that. It means something used to be alive, conscious, and it no longer is. Shall not perish, but have eternal life. Matthew 10, 28 is even, I think, clear. Do not fear those who kill the body, but are not able to kill the soul. Rather, fear him who is able to destroy both body and soul in hell. So, those who want to make a body, earthly life, you know, afterlife, soul lives on, you know, distinction. Here, Matthew 10, 28 addresses that explicitly. The wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life. The wages of sin is not

Starting point is 00:23:58 never-ending torment. All throughout the Old Testament, you see language of destruction, comprehensive, irreversible. I almost said annihilation. That's kind of the, that'd be, if we weren't talking about annihilation versus ECT or whatever, we would typically use the word annihilation to describe like Psalm 21, nine, you know, God will make his enemies like a blazing oven. Psalm 21, 9, you know, God will make his enemies like a blazing oven when you appear. God will swallow them up in his wrath and fire will consume them. You will destroy their descendants from the earth. Psalm 97, 3, fire goes before him and burns up, consumes his adversaries. Malachi 4, 1. I know these are gruesome images, but I mean, I think they're important. The day of the Lord will be like a furnace and the wicked will be reduced to ashes under the soles of your feet. So if you're asking, and these are all images of kind of the final state of the wicked. If you're going to ask,

Starting point is 00:24:54 okay, reduced to ashes under the soles of your feet, does this seem to be more annihilation? Like you used to exist and now you don't, or does it seem like there's going to be some kind of ongoing experience of torment forever and ever and ever? Surely this verse, we can all agree, at least this verse and others that I've mentioned, talk about some kind of cessation of ongoing life, not a never ending conscious existence. Throughout the Old Testament, all kinds of references where the future state of the wicked will, you know, they will be like Sodom. So, Sodom, actually all throughout the Bible, Sodom, the destruction of Sodom, just reduce the ashes, becomes kind of the picture of God's, well, the final state of the wicked. Do you need some verses? Isaiah 1, 9 to 10, Jeremiah 23,

Starting point is 00:25:46 of the wicked. Do you need some verses? Isaiah 1, 9 to 10, Jeremiah 23, 14, Jeremiah 50, 40, Ezekiel 16, 46 to 56, Amos 4, 11, and on and on it goes. I mean, I've got dozens of references here. Fire, brimstone, smoke, uninhabitable wasteland left in the wake of God's destruction of Sodom. This becomes kind of stock images for God's future judgment of the wicked. 2 Peter 2.6 is another kind of, if you want kind of a one verse to kind of like, wow, this seems really clear. 2 Peter 2.6, God reduced the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah to ashes. He condemned them to, this translation says, extinction, catastrophe, making them an example of what is going to happen to the ungodly. So again, here, look at what happened to Sodom and Gomorrah. We can all agree. We all know what happened to Sodom and Gomorrah. Reduced ashes. You can go there today. I've been there. I've been to nothing there. There's no, nobody being tortured or, you know. And that's an example of what's going to happen

Starting point is 00:26:46 to the ungodly. So, I'm just giving you a tiny sliver of what I would see is so many passages, so many passages that, again, without, yeah, so many passages that seem to clearly teach annihilation. And they're like, you know, people, some people say, yeah, but what about this? What about that? What about Matthew 26 or Matthew 25? What about Revelation 14? What about Revelation 20? So they'll, you know, go to the passages that, you know, seem to support eternal conscious

Starting point is 00:27:16 torment. I would say most of those passages, as I work through most of the passages, I'm like, what about weeping and gnashing of teeth? What about, you know, Jude 7, the eternal fire? And what about, you know, Isaiah 66 and Revelation 14? Almost all of those passages that seem to support ongoing torment, most of them, if you look at them closely and do word studies, they actually don't. There's only two or three to my, two really, to my mind, kind of one. It is like, okay, in and of itself, if this is all we had this, okay. Yeah. I think we would assume some kind of eternal, uh, conscious torment.

Starting point is 00:27:51 I think Revelation 14, nine to 11 is maybe the strongest, but even that it's like, it's just, there's so many questions about what's going on there with the imagery and where it's at in the flow of the letter. And is he even talking about kind of end time punishment and so many metaphors in the book of Revelation and Old Testament allusions that inform those metaphors. So it's at the very least pretty complicated. But even if we chalk up that one, maybe Matthew 25 or 26, 46, I keep getting the references wrong. Okay. That would be two against like a hundred of passages that seem to clearly teach annihilation. So yeah, that's a snapshot. I've done a couple of podcast episodes on this over a year ago. If you just go back in time, I didn't look at the numbers here, but there's,

Starting point is 00:28:36 there's several or a couple I did back to back kind of like on the annihilation view of hell. So just scroll back over a year and you'll, you can get ahold of those. Maybe it's two years. I forget when I did those. Before I move on, just to be clear, like when I talk about annihilation, like I, or any kind of biblical view that I hold about what the Bible says, like I get passionate and I make it, trying to make an argument for it and everything. But I just, I don't think that if you don't hold to annihilation, that I think you're stupid, that I think you're wrong, whatever, Like what? I guess I do think you're wrong, but I mean, we can agree to disagree on that. But like, I don't, I don't want to make it sound like I just

Starting point is 00:29:12 think everybody else is just totally stupid and isn't, you know, doesn't take the Bible seriously or something like that. So I've got many friends who don't agree with me and are more or smarter than I am. Okay. So if some of you are just really resistant to maybe my arguments for annihilation, that's totally fine. Okay. Next question, Alana. My friends are saying it's okay for Christians to cuss as long as it's used in a positive sense, like F yeah, not tearing someone down, like F you. What are your thoughts about this? Oh, and by the way, Alana did not spell out the F word. I don't want to throw her under the bus. She put the little like symbols and stuff to symbolize it,

Starting point is 00:29:50 but I'm just kind of reading into what she was trying to say. Okay. Christians and cussing. I actually wrote an article a while back on my blog that was actually reproduced by Relevant Magazine called, What the bleep does the Bible Say About Profanity? So if you Google my name and what the bleep does the Bible say about profanity? Hey friends, I hope you enjoyed this portion of the Patreon-only Q&A podcast. If you would like to listen to the full-length episode and receive other bonus content like monthly podcasts, opportunities to ask questions,

Starting point is 00:30:21 access to first drafts of my research and monthly Zoom chats and more, then please head over to patreon.com forward slash theology in the raw to join Theology in the Raw's Patreon community. That's patreon.com forward slash Theology in the Raw. This show is part of the Converge Podcast Network.

Theology in the Raw - Bonus Q & A (Patreon Special): Masturbation, Annihilation, Cussing, LGBTQ, and How to Share the Gospel

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