Theology in the Raw - Does the Bible Affirm Same-Sex Sexual Relationships? Dr. Rebecca McLaughlin

Episode Date: August 5, 2024

Dr. Rebecca McLaughlin holds a Ph.D. in Renaissance Literature from Cambridge University and a theology degree from Oak Hill College in London. She is the author of several books, including Confronting Christianity: 12 Hard Questions for the World's Largest Religion (2019), which was named book of the year by Christianity Today, and Does the Bible Affirm Same-Sex Sexual Relationships? (2024). In this conversation, we talk about her latest book. We address various arguments for same-sex marriage, talk about the idolatry of marriage and the beauty of singleness, and also celebrate the radical call to follow Jesus, which leads to a meaningful and flourishing life—even when we are picking up our crosses and denying ourselves. Register for the Austin conference on sexualtiy (Sept 17-18) here: https://www.centerforfaith.com/programs/leadership-forums/faith-sexuality-and-gender-conference-live-in-austin-or-stream-onlineRegister for the Exiles 2 day conference in Denver (Oct 4-5) here: https://theologyintheraw.com/exiles-denver/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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My guest today is dr. Rebecca McLaughlin. She holds a PhD in Renaissance literature from Cambridge university and a theology degree from Oak Hill collegeLaughlin. She holds a PhD in Renaissance literature from Cambridge University and a theology degree from Oak Hill College in London. She's the author of several books, including Confronting Christianity, 12 Hard Questions for the World's Largest Religion, which was named book of the year by Christianity Today. And her recently released book is, Does the Bible Affirm Same-Sex Relationships? Examining 10 Claims about Scription Sexuality. relationships, examining 10 claims about scripture and sexuality. That is the content of our conversation. We talk about various arguments for same sex marriage and same sex relationships and other issues related to sexuality and marriage. And Rebecca is just an awesome thinker and awesome

human being. So I think you will enjoy this conversation. So please welcome back to the show, the one and only Dr. Rebecca McClosser. I remember when you tweeted or asked over a year ago that you had just signed a contract for this book and I was so excited that you were doing it. I have a similar book out there, but I knew you would go about it in a way that would be extremely helpful. You have, yeah, just your ability to defend the faith and sound doctrine with winsomeness and kindness and just you about a way that I don't have the skillset to do. So anyway, super stoked about this book. How has it been received? I'm curious. Are people refuting it or angry about it or, or the opposite of people have been really blessed by it? I'm sure it's been all the above.

You know, I'm someone who at the end of the day, I care about individuals. And when I hear, you know, this and then many numbers of people like what a book or listen to a podcast or other, I'm like, fine. The thing that has been most refreshing to my heart has been hearing from a few people who have found it very personally helpful to them. One of the first reviews that kind of went up on Amazon was from a young woman who had just been what she needed to hear at the time that she needed to hear it. And so seeing the Lord using his word, because at the end of the day, that's all I have to offer is God's word. And seeing the Lord using his word to actually minister

to people's hearts has been really sweet. Yeah, I haven't seen a whole lot of kind of critiques of the book. I mean, I'm sure if you go to the Amazon reviews, you'll see the one star reviews from people who I'm sure are not happy with anything that I've said. But yeah, broadly speaking, I've heard from people who found it helpful. And I think the particular need that I was wanting to meet with this book was to write something actually very short that people who don't necessarily read a whole lot of big theology books could easily grab that could go into enough detail to help people address the most prevalent questions that people have when it comes to

sexuality in scripture and particularly the question of whether two people of the same sex of the Christians could pursue a same sex marriage. Yeah, get enough detail on that without getting completely bogged down. Also, to hear some of the stories of people in my life for whom Christian sexual ethics has actually become true and beautiful in their eyes, even if before they had seen it as restrictive and repressive and wrong. So yeah, just wanting to tell some of those stories as well as to go into some of the more technical details. I loved how conversational story driven it was. Yeah. And it's funny because I mean,

half of the name probably more than half of the people you talk about, I know who they are. And so I'm just picturing them and even how they write and speak and everything. So yeah, it's an enjoyable, it's a really, well, it's weird because it's a quick read. What is it? A hundred, just over a hundred pages. Um, but it's not, it's one of those books where there, it seems like it is very in depth, a lot of content, but short and concise. Like you're able to pack in just a lot in a short amount of space and make it very fluid and easy to read. I'm sure I imagine that was the goal, right? I mean, yeah, I actually originally wanted it to be even shorter. Really? How many words is it?

Is it like 30,000 words? Oh gosh, I don't actually even remember. No, it's less than that. I was originally wanting it to be more like 10,000 words where each question would get the shortest punchiest kind of summary. But my fantastic editor at the GoodBit Company saw actually, I think we need a little bit more time for people to dwell on these questions. And I think that was the right advice, but I do want it to be something that people could sit down and read in one sitting or over a couple of

coffees rather than having to lay between something more substantial. Do you enjoy like debates or refuting arguments? I mean, a few of the books you've written kind of have that kind of like apologetic goal. But again, as I said earlier, you do it a way that's just kind and winsome, where most people that have that apologetic bones in the body, they're a little more aggressive than I think is helpful, but you go about it in a way that's just really easy to receive. But do you enjoy debates and stuff? Yeah. I mean, people sometimes ask me, how come you're so gentle and loving in the way

that you engage with people? And I'm never quite sure I'd answer that question because it seems to me to be basic Christian ethics. When Peter says, always be ready to give a reason for the hope that you have, but do so with gentleness and respect. When Jesus tells us to love our enemies, which for sure includes our ideological enemies who want a better word and those who would sit themselves in a very different position than I do, whether they're not Christians or whether they're Christians in a very different place. So yeah, I think it comes with the territory of just trying to read the scriptures and apply them to not only to what we say, but also to how we say it. I do like to engage the kinds of questions that people find hardest to answer. In part, because I think that Christianity

actually has all the cards. On any of these questions, I actually, whether it's science or sexuality or suffering, you name it, I think Christianity is true. I think in many areas, we have many more receipts than we realize. Because my background is at a moment where I've had the opportunity to engage with a lot of experts in various questions. I'm not an expert myself in almost anything, but I'm good at finding the experts and then translating what they're saying for people who may not have the time or background to dig in a great deal of depth to any particular question and to say, hey, yeah, actually, when Jesus says he's the way, the truth and the life, there's an extent to which we need to believe

that on faith. There's also an extent to which compare him to any other option in the world today. And Jesus looks astonishingly good, actually, I think often more than we realize. So yeah, I love to engage on those questions which feel like major defeaters for the Christian faith, because I think in every instance, when you look more closely, they stop being a roadblock to faith in Jesus and they become a signpost. And I think questions of sexual ethics are absolutely in that territory. Why did you choose 10 arguments? Was that just kind of give a good round number? And how did you decide which 10 to address? Are these the ones that come up most often in

your ministry? Yeah. I think those were the 10 that certainly seemed to surface for me. There's obviously some overlap between them. 10 was a round number, but I didn't know that there's 11th that I would have put in if only I wasn't shooting for 10, or there were really nine and I spread it out so that there could be 10. I did want to start with a question that would enable me to lay out what seems to me to be the central picture of Christian marriage and the Bible's understanding of sex and marriage, which is really all about Jesus' relationship with his church. Because I think until we get that in the center of our minds, in the center of our conversations, we're not actually talking about Christian sexual ethics. We might be talking about conservative ethics or we might be talking about broadly monotheistic understandings or whatever, but we're not

really talking about Christian sexual ethics unless the gospel is at the center of it and the Bible places the gospel literally at the center of our understanding of what it means to be human beings made in the image of God, male and female, and the institution of marriage and the place of sex within marriage. So to not start there would feel like I was robbing my readers. Yeah, that's good. That's good. I mean, I don't want to go through all these, but, so, yeah, the first one, okay, the first ones, I think, I'm glad you put it first. I think it's super important. And it's one that I think a lot of pastors kind of resonate with a little bit that Christians should just focus on the gospel of God's love. Like, why are

we even having, why even focus on this? And I get this, I don't know if pastors would say it like this, but I know a lot of churches who maybe believe in a traditional sexual ethic, but there is like, I'm just, we're just not going to go there. We're not going to address it. We're just going to focus on giving people saved. We're going to preach the gospel. And to my mind, they kind of make a dichotomy, maybe a false one between kind of what it means to love Jesus and what it means to follow Jesus. Um, but we, uh, give us kind of a bird's eye view of this first argument. What is the argument and how do you respond to it? Yeah. So I think a lot of people say, as you've mentioned, and I think well-meaning Christians

will sometimes say Christian sexual ethics today is so controversial, especially the Bible's seemingly clear no to any same-sex sexual or romantic relationships. That's such a barrier to people in my city. For example, I live in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Being open to Jesus. As soon as that conversation comes up, people are going to just dismiss what I'm saying as just coming from a homophobic bigot. So wouldn't it just be more evangelistically strategic or more fruitful for the gospel if we said, listen, let's categorize what the Bible says about sex and especially same-sex relationships in the same bucket as something like bad to some where it can be like an agree to disagree

is an issue, not an issue on which Christians need to divide, not an issue that we need to have clarified in our church communities or that if it comes up in conversations with friends, we can say, oh well, this is a secondary issue that we can fumble on as it were. I don't think we can do that for a couple of reasons. One is that the New Testament and Jesus is fully included in this, in fact, leads the child on this, takes Sanctal Sin exceedingly seriously. People sometimes have the idea that the Old Testament is sort of hard on sexual sin and then Jesus comes along kind of and resends everything up. Actually it is, you know, well-pressed and Jesus tightens up the Old Testament law when

it comes to what sexual sin is in a way that makes all of us sexual sinners from the get-go, which is humbling as Jesus so often is. Even when Jesus is teaching on the Sermon on the Mount, and he says, you felt that it was said, do not commit adultery. I said, do you know when he looks at a woman with lustful intent, he's already committed adultery. And then he goes on to say, if your eye causes you to sin, tear it out because it is better to enter the kingdom of God without an eye than to keep your eyes and go into hell. Jesus couldn't be more serious about our sin. And the radical solution is his death on the cross

for us. Of course, it's not that we're just left there squirming in our sinful misery. But then to say we're not going to actually seek as best we can to understand and apply the Eshaseimit teaching on sexual sin is a profoundly dangerous thing to do. It's striking to me that the apostle Paul, who obviously is the author of a number of the New Testament passages that speak specifically to same-sex sexual relationships, he also speaks in exceedingly serious terms about sexual sin in general. I don't think we can set this aside as if it's like a kind of agree to disagree issue. It seems to be an issue of salvation level importance actually. And the consistent call in the New Testament is not just to believe, but actually to repent and believe. And so

we kind of need to know what are the things that we need to repent over our lives if we don't have clarity on that. We're stuck. But even before that, to divorce the gospel from Christian sexual ethics or to say that Christian sexual ethics is a distraction from the gospel is actually to misunderstand what the role of Christian sexual ethics is when it comes to the Bible. Because we have from the Old Testament this picture built up of God as a loving, faithful husband and Israel as his all too often unfaithful wife and this crisis in God's marriage to his people because a holy God cannot live with sinful people. This is the presenting problem of the Old Testament that expresses itself and manifests itself in so

many different ways. Then we have Jesus stepping onto the stage of human history and saying, he is the bridegroom. A very weird comment for a man who never married in his life on earth to make, unless we understand that Jesus is actually stepping into the shoes of the creative God of the Old Testament and saying, you know, essentially, I've come to claim God's people for myself. I am the bridegroom, I'm the husband." We see that then further clarified in Paul's letter to the Ephesians when he describes Christian marriage as being like a little scale model of Jesus' love for his people. The metaphor comes sort of bouncing back again in the book of Revelation at the end of the Bible when this great shout goes out, the wedding of the

lamb has come and Jesus' marriage to his church brings heaven and earth back together. We have marriage to his church brings heaven and earth back together. So we have this overarching metaphor from the beginning of the Bible to the end, which is helping us to see that just as God calls himself Father and so the absolutely best human father gives us a tiny little echo of God's Fatherly love for us, so God presents Jesus as the husband to his people. Christian marriage is designed to help us flesh out what that looks like. What does this one flesh union between Jesus and his people mean? We have an opportunity in our lived experience to get our hands around that in a very inadequate and limited way, but in a meaningful way. According to Paul in Ephesians 5, that's what marriage was about from the very beginning. When Paul quotes from Genesis 2, that curious verse, which

says, therefore, I'm going to leave his father and his mother, you've been there to do as like the two shall become one flesh. Paul says, this is a profound mystery and I'm saying it refers to Christ in the church. Even that original, creational institution of marriage from the first was always about Jesus and his people. To say that believing that Christian marriage is the one flesh union between a man and a woman is a distraction from the gospel is actually to completely undermine the, the point of God creating us human beings, male and female in his, in his image and giving us the capacity for sexual relationships. And in particular, for the marriage covenant, because that's what it, it's all about the gospel at the end of the day.

Right. It's, it's almost like it's a, and I know the term Gnostic gets thrown around a lot, but it's almost like a Gnostic-ish gospel, a disembodied gospel when you detach it from embodied human experience. We are embodied humans, we are sexual beings, and our salvation cannot be separated from who we are as sexual embodied people. And yeah, the whole storyline of scripture, as you said, has been wrapped in this marriage metaphor, you know? So, no, I totally agree. How do you address though, the question, I'm sure you get it, I get it all the time, you know, does this mean that if somebody is affirming of same-sex marriage, they cannot be a Christian? Or more specifically, if somebody is in a

same-sex relationship while confessing Jesus? Are you saying that they are just categorically not saved? Do you get this question a lot and how do you respond? Yeah, I mean, it's obviously a very heavy and painful question and one that none of us should answer lightly or glibly, I think. One of the places that I think gives us the greatest clarity is when Paul writes to the Corinthians and says, do you not know that the unrighteous will not inherit the kingdom of God? And then he goes on to list a number of sinful practices which if not repented of, are walking people out of the kingdom of God. And men sleeping with other males is one of the sinful practices listed. And then he says, and this is what some of

you were, that you were washed, you were sanctified, you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus and by the Spirit of our God. Of course, the Christian life is a life of faith in Jesus in the context of ongoing sin. Like you and I have already sinned in more ways than we probably even realize at this point in our day. I'm probably ahead of you because I woke up earlier. Oh, I'm catching up. Quick. Maybe you'll have caught up with me by bedtime. The point is not sinful Christians cannot be followers of Jesus, for sure. If we say we have no sin,

we deceive ourselves and the truth is not in us, as John reminds us. But to say as somebody in a, for example, in a kind of legal same-sex marriage or in an ongoing same-sex sexual relationship, to say, actually, I am declaring this to be good and I'm intentionally living into this when God's word is declaring it to be evil, is an evident unrepentantness. That wasn't to work, but you know what I'm trying to say. You can say anything with a British accent. Yeah, I'll play that card. I think I would want to distinguish between people who are truly confused on this issue and have been misled on this issue by their leaders and teachers and the leaders and teachers who are misleading people on

this issue in the sense that I think we have new testable president for saying that those who presume to teach will be judged more harshly and that actually being a false teacher is an incredibly serious situation to be. I mean, you are in a very, very bad situation if you are a false teacher. And I think people who are teaching that the Bible leaves room for same-sex sexual relationships or same-sex marriage are false teachers. And again, I don't say that with any relish. It's not my job to pronounce the salvation status of anyone who is kind of living under one form of false teaching or another, but it is my job and this is why I've written a book like this, to, in as far as possible, to give people

access to the truth and to warn them of the seriousness of God's judgment. I appreciate that. I usually say something similar. I usually say on the one hand, the Bible, especially the New Testament, gives serious warnings against, I mean, remaining in any sin, but there is a particular passion against sexual sin. We see it in Revelation 2, 1 Corinthians 6, Ephesians 5. I mean, really just, there is a particular aggressiveness in the language denouncing any self-professing Christian who is living in ongoing, unrepentant sexual sin, full stop. At the same time, like you said, that, you know, the salvation stat, I, you know, there's people I thought were in there, you know,

not in and other people, you know, just, I, I think playing God and determinative is salvation can be dangerous too. So I kind of hold those intention. What I will say is I don't think the Bible gives a lot of salvific confidence in somebody who is living in clear violation of scripture. But how much of it does you mentioned in passing, like the intention, people who genuinely are in reading the Bible, maybe they're reading other books about the Bible. Maybe they've read some of my friend, my books and they're genuinely convinced that the Bible endorse celebrates can celebrate same sex relationships. Or maybe they lean that direction. Maybe they think it's not super clear. But

there's a genuineness there. You get them alone at night in their room. They're like, no, this argument about Leviticus 18 and Romans 1, I want to follow scripture. And I don't think it's outlined this. How much of the subjective individual genuineness of our interpretations matters for how we are living. And I guess I will say the analogy of like how many Christians throughout history have owned slaves. Like is Jonathan Edwards, who from what I heard, wrote a sermon on the back of a receipt, a receipt that he bought a slave. You know what I'm saying? Like, like, or, or how many Christians were male Christians were misogynistic or felt like women didn't fully bear the image. You got just like real fundamental violations of what we now see as like clear teaching in

scripture. I really wrestle with this, you know, like it will Jonathan Edwards be in the kingdom. He won two or three slaves or however many you had, you know, but we would say, well, that was the era, you know, he was like, well, it was complicated back then. Would we apply that same kind of complication to now living in a very hyper progressive, especially if somebody is in a very progressive environment, maybe they're just surrounded by a lot of progressive Christian teaching. So there's a, they genuinely think that the Bible celebrates same sex relationships. Yeah. I mean, it's, I, I do think a lot of people have what you might describe as sort of good intentions in this area. And there are a lot of people who think

that they are being loving to others by affirming same-sex sexual relationships. You know, this may not be something that they are drawn to themselves, but they they think that they are being loving and they may have heard actually a lot of genuinely unloving talk and action and seeing genuine unloving actions from Christians who say the Bible says no to same-sex relationships. So I understand where people are coming from. I don't know that the genuineness of someone's belief in anything actually removes their culpability because at the end of the day, there are many people who genuinely believe that Muhammad is the prophet. I'd say that with, again, with sorrow in my heart. There are millions of people, billions of people across the world

who are deluded but genuine in what they believe. I don't know that it gives us an out as it were if someone is genuine in their beliefs. At the end of the day, your job and mine doesn't really change because it's on us, especially as people who've had the opportunity to look into these questions more deeply than the average Christian. It's on us to then explain as clearly as we can how, because the scriptures are clear on this question, however countercultural that may be and however hard that might be for people to hear and to pray that people would grow in their clarity. I do think this is a question where, I'm not saying this is true in every single case, but typically once people say, you know what, I've come to the point of saying the Bible does make room for same sex marriage,

they will typically find that their understanding of the authority of scripture pretty much unravels from that point on. I think it's sufficiently clear that the amount of hermeneutical gymnastics you need to do on multiple passages is not like there's just this one sort of passage that we can find a way of looking at from a certain angle. But that multiple passages, that once you've said, do you know what, in the face of these multiple passages, I'm going to say that I don't think the Bible is clear on this question. You're going to have a very hard time holding onto the authority of scripture on a whole range of other questions as well. So I think we even sort of see the consequences of that, I guess, in the rest of people's theology that tends to then proceed from making that shift. I'd say yes. A nice tan? Sorry. Nope. But a box fan? Happily yes. A day of sunshine?

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Have you seen that anecdotally in your own experience, people or churches that move to an affirming position that the proverbial slippery slope actually does happen. I know people often sort of throw around slippery slope arguments in ways that are often illegitimate and unhelpful. Yeah. I think here, because as I said, it genuinely does require you to play very fast and loose with scripture in a number of dimensions. And because it's something that has come to us in many ways from cultural or personal pressure. So then actually, why would we not then accommodate in other areas where there's going to be a

lot of cultural and personal pressure. I'm not saying that people consciously go through that thought process, but in reality, it'd be so convenient in one sense for me, again, living in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and especially for me as someone who's always been primarily attracted to other women. It would have been very convenient for me to have said, you know what, I think this is a question of which the Bible isn't clear or it does leave room for same-sex sexual relationships. But then actually, there are so many other really difficult teachings of scripture that if I'm going to shift my ground on that, why not shift my ground on those other things

as well? And I mean, I do think that premise is borne out by kind of experience in terms of not any individuals, but also kind of denominations that make this shift. There's a certain, what the slippery slope thing, because I grew up in a very much fear of the slippery slope. I mean, if you went to any other seminary, other than the one that I was at, you were on the slippery slope to liberalism.

So I'm, and I got kind of annoyed at some of those just slippery slope assumptions. And I'm like, well, hold on. But there's a difference between that kind of just an assumption about a slippery slope versus a logical connection. For instance, people talk about the slippery slope. I just got this question the other day, you know, do you think churches that go like move to

an egalitarian view of women in ministry are on basically are going to progress to be an affirming. I said, well, that happens for sure, but there's no feel a lot. Logically, there's no real connection there to say that men and women are created different and sex differences are real, but there are equal roles between two of these different kinds of people. There's no logical connection that should lead you to be an affirmed, even if that sometimes does happen. Now, say if a church goes affirming and then they end up embracing, say, polyamory.

Well, I think there's a logical correlation there because if, you know, like in Matthew 19, Jesus says, you know, God created the male and female, the man shall leave his father and mother, and the two will become one flesh, like the sex differences between male and female are intrinsically connected to the number two. So, if you say that sex difference is no longer important, then you kind of logically also paved the way for the number two to be not super important either. Does that make sense? Do you agree with that? I mean, that there are certain slippery slopes that have a logical connection, whereas other ones are just more out of fear or just kind of anecdotal evidence of people going

that way. Yeah, I guess I would say when it comes to affirming same sex marriage for Christians, I don't know that it's the beginning of Slippery Slick. I think you've actually jumped off the mountain to put it in kind of brutal. It's not like, well, there's a way to read scripture that accommodates this, but you might end up with something else. I'm more saying if you've already jumped off that mountain, you're probably not going to be climbing up it again on other questions. If that, I mean, I get, I, I haven't used that analogy before. So forgive me if it, if it lands, it almost feels like, no, this is not a slippery slate. This is like a great leap. Okay. So you're saying that that when you, when you go a firm, you're not at the beginning

of you're kind of already to get there, You've already made some hermeneutical decisions that you're already further down the road. Right. Yeah. Cause usually slippery slip arguments. So like the thing you were actually doing here isn't necessarily wrong or beyond the bounds of scripture, but I've seen people take that as a first step and then end up with other steps that truly are here. I think we're in a like, Oh no, this is clearly outside the bounds of scripture. I'm going to assume that five to 10% of my audience is probably affirming.

So this is fun. Cause they're probably really mad at you right now. It may be mad at me too. I let's, I want, can you identify what you think is the strongest argument for the affirming position and then respond to that? Yeah, I want, can you identify what you think is the strongest argument for the affirming position and then respond to that? Yeah, I think, cause I know a lot of people are probably screwed that the five, 10% is like, what about this? What about this? You can't just like say that. Like I go through a number of, of the, I mean, well, I go through precisely

10 of the, of the family arguments in the book. I think the strongest is the claim that the Bible seems to affirm slavery. Basically to say, yes, I know the New Testament says no to same-sex sexual relationships, but it also says yes to slavery. And if we have figured out a way to not follow the Bible when it comes to slavery, then can't we also figure out a way to not follow the Bible when it comes to slavery, then can't we also figure out a way to not follow the Bible when it comes to same-sex marriage? The way that this is typically framed is it is just part of a trajectory argument where people say if you look from the Old Testament to the New Testament, there is a trajectory when it comes to slavery which moves from some provisions and protections of slaves in the Old Testament to ways in

which the New Testament seems to be undermining the institution of slavery. It never quite gets to the abolition of slavery, but if we follow that same line of thinking, then we end up there. Likewise, if we look at the trajectory of the alternate New Testament when it comes to sexual ethics, we'll find that there's a trajectory toward equality and freedom and all these things. If we continue on that path, we will find ourselves affirming same-sex marriage even though the New Testament doesn't get there. The reason I think that's the strongest argument is because I think it takes the most amount of detailed work to show why it isn't true. But I actually think that understanding of what the Bible says about slavery is wrong. And I think that understanding what the Bible

says about sexual ethics is also wrong. To start with, when it comes to slavery, I'm currently writing a commentary on Colossians and Philemon, which folks might know two letters in which Paul specifically talks about slavery in certain ways. In particular, in his letter to Philemon, he is returning a slave who has run away from his master to his master. You might say headline news, like clearly this is Paul affirming slavery. What could be more affirming of slavery than returning a slave he's run away to see his master? In actual fact, if you read Paul's letters of Olimen, you find, I sort of like to call

it one of the best pieces of passive aggressive writing in all of human history. Yeah, it is. No, it really is. It's a great way to put it. Paul is radically undermining the institution of slavery in that letter. He's sending Anesimus back to Philemon. He says, not as a bond servant slash slave, but as a beloved brother. So we first have that kind of transition. Number two, the affectionate language with which Paul describes Anesimus is stronger than his language toward any other individual in all of his writings. Paul is very big on brotherly love in general, and he speaks in affectionate terms of a number

of different kind of his comrades, as it were. But he calls Anesimus his very heart, or literally his sort of intestines, as about, you know, sort of one of those very delightful Greek expressions that we translate as heart because that's what works for us in our language and culture, but with more kind of intestines and that. He tells Philemon that he needs to welcome Anesimus back as if he were Paul himself. So Philemon's most respected mentor. Now in the kind of Roman culture that Paul was writing within, the expectation would

have been that Anesimus should have been severely punished for running away from Philemon. And it's not just that Paul's saying, don't do that. He's saying, welcome him back as a brother and honor him as you would honor me. It's a complete inversion of the master-slave hierarchy that would have been normal in the Greco-Roman Empire. What Paul's doing there follows a very much in lockstep with Jesus' teaching and Jesus' life. And again, I think this is where people, like we don't spend enough time thinking about what the New Testament actually says about slavery to where some of these arguments become easy to make because Jesus famously, when explaining to his disciples how power in his

kingdom just doesn't work like power in the rest of the world, he says anyone who wants to be first must be last and whoever wants to be great must be the slave of all. And then he explains why, because even the son of man, Jesus himself, did not come to be served but to serve and to give his life as a ransom for many. So Jesus is positioning himself as a slave who came to give his life as a ransom. For many, he then famously on the night that he was betrayed at his last supper with disciples, he strips himself down to a towel, dresses himself essentially as a slave, and washes his disciples' feet, taking on a role that was specifically reserved for slaves and most of Greco-Roma culture. His disciples

are horrified, but Jesus is saying, this is how I'm serving you and therefore this is how you should serve others. He's sort of presenting himself as the slave. He was also the model for how Christians are to relate to one another. Then Jesus dies as slave's death. The crucifixion was very much seen as a death appropriate to slaves. It was kind of designed for that. Jesus takes on that role and then in the greatest inversion in all of human history, his seeming great defeat as the lowest of the low becomes his cosmic victory and the reason why he is exalted to the highest place and given the name that is above every name. So Jesus is the one who takes on the stage role and comes to die for us. And then Paul

frequently refers to himself as slave of Christ because his whole identity is actually as a servant of the Lord Jesus. And the way that he then talks about Christian community is to say, actually, in Christ there is neither slave nor free. That great division in the ancient world is erased in Christ. And if anybody is technically free, they are in fact a slave of Christ. If anybody is technically enslaved, they are Christ's freedmen. He does all this inverting and messing around. The reason he teaches slaves to serve well, to work hard for their masters, is because they're working for Jesus, actually not for the master at all.

So there's this whole, like so many New Testament verses that we don't see their full implications because we're not living in the world that the original recipients of these letters were living. We don't see how countercultural it is, but it's massively countercultural. And it's even the tiny details like, I'm going to shut up in a minute about slavery, but it's massively counter-cultural. Even the tiny details like, I'm going to shut up in a minute about slavery, but when Paul writes his letter to Volumen about Anesimus, and then he also writes a letter to the whole church in Colossae, which is where Volumen notes. At the end of that letter, one of the people he mentions is Anesimus. Whereas he calls a number of the other people in his letters

like slave of Christ or fellow slave, he just calls Anesimus but of a brother. I find it so moving. The one person who we know was actually technically a slave, Paul wasn't going to use that metaphor for him. So kind of peaceful and tender. Yeah, and so in the ways that we map ancient understandings of slavery onto our kind of more modern understandings of slavery as sort of race-based and that's lifelong, there's no kind of possible way out of it. There are all sorts of ways in which, as you know, the ancient world had, there was no particular kind of racial basis for slavery. Slaves can encompass everything from the most abused menial worker to somebody who today would have been recognized as like a doctor or an accountant kind of thing. So actually, even some of our categories

aren't quite right. So I think the idea that the New Testament in quote endorses slavery is highly misleading. And then when it comes to the trajectory of sexual ethics from the Old Testament to the New Testament, as I've already touched on, actually the New Testament tightens up the sexual ethics of the Old Testament. There's not even a hint anywhere in the New Testament of a loosening or opening up of the categories when it comes to marriage. What there is though, and this is what I'm passionate about us reclaiming as a Christian culture, there is a beautiful, life-giving, powerful vision for love between believers of the same sex in the New Testament that

we miss to our great loss in much of our Christian culture today, which sort of buys into the idea that actually the only kind of love that really matters is sexual and romantic love. So we're big on marriage and how important marriage is. Marriage is a great, wonderful institution of God. But if you go through your New Testament with a highlighter and you highlight every verse that calls you, commands you to love your brothers and sisters in Christ, you'll be out of highlighted by the end. And if you go through with a different color and highlight every verse that's anything to do with marriage, you have plenty of anger left in your highlighter. Again, it's not to say marriage is unimportant, but it's not that the Bible doesn't have a vision for love between beliefs of the same sex. It just has a very different vision.

Because we've kind of lost sight of that, we've got ourselves in a whole big mess. You expand, I think, I mean, you expand on this in the last, the last chapter or claim number 10, a God of love can't be against relationships of love. And you say here, this is on page 98. So how can people of the same sex loving one another be against God's will? And then you say, the answer is it isn't. I thought that was a little clever. So wait, I was like,

wait, wait, wait. We've been arguing the whole book that the same, a same sex loving relationship is against God's will. And now you're saying people, the same sex loving each other isn't against God's will. Can you expand on that? Yeah. I mean, Jesus said the night that he was portrayed, this is my command that the new love one another as I have loved you. Greater love has known the nest through led the less like was rent. I didn't think Jesus is only talking about love between believers of the same sex. I think there's an important place for brother and sister love in the community of faith. But he is speaking to male disciples.

He's speaking at least predominantly to his, he had male and female disciples and I actually think the female disciples were there at the last supper as well. But at minimum, he is primarily speaking to people who are relating as friends. I think there is a particular intimacy to same-sex brother-sister-sister relationships that opposite sex relationships, not saying those can't be good and fruitful, but actually there is a particular kind of freedom for pursuing God-deriving intimacy with friends of the same sex. I think that the New Testament vision is one of real abiding sacrificial love and intimacy between believers outside of a sexual or romantic context. I don't think that it is giving us a mandate for mimicking marriage with somebody of the same sex in all bar a sexual

relationship. I actually think we're missing the point if that's what we're going for instead. Marriage by design is exclusive, one man and one woman, and it's by design sexual. Friendship is by design inclusive. Paul, there are multiple guys at the end of Paul slash the Remants, he refers to as my beloved or the beloved. I've talked about his love for Onesimus. We also see his great affection for Timothy. We hear him saying that if Epaphroditus had died, he would have experienced sorrow upon sorrow. Paul is completely unashamed to speak with great affection about his brothers in Christ. That is an inheritance that we not only can claim, but we actually are commanded to claim by Jesus himself.

And so we need to lean into meaningful love between believers, in particular of the Saint Sex. But we need to recognize that in the New Testament, if you look at, for example, some of the lists of sinful practices in the New Testament, and you look at some of the lists of wonderful things like the fruit of the Spirit, those kind of vice and virtue lists as people sometimes call them in the New Testament. You'll often find that sexual morality is high on the list of sinful practices. Then you will find that love is very high on the list of virtues. To conflate those two is completely to miss what the New Testament is calling us to. But to say that any relationship that isn't sexual cannot be loving and cannot be

a place of real, meaningful love. I don't know how many pages of the New Testament you have to tear up to stand on that ground, but it's an awful lot. For example, when Paul's writing to the Thessalonians, he has this very serious warning about sexual immorality and not wronging your brother in this way. And then he says, about brotherly love, I don't even need to write to you guys because you're so good at it, but I'm telling you, do it more and more. Love is the contrast to sexual immorality in the New Testament, which is partly why it's so vital that we understand what sexual immorality is. Because no relationship where we're indulging in sexual

immorality of any kind is actually a relationship of love. So it's just, I mean, it just comes down to equating a sexual relationship with a loving relationship. Yeah. That people, when they hear the word love or, I mean, a loving relationship with so-and-so, they just, their minds immediately go to romance and sex, which is kind of a very modern Western notion, right? Yeah. It's actually, if you think about one of the most powerful arguments in our modern world today, it is that three word statement that love is love. If I drive around my neighborhood

in Cambridge, Massachusetts, I see that statement multiple times. We know that what that statement is claiming is that the love between two men or two women can be just as faithful and beautiful and good and true as the love between a man and a woman in marriage. Love is love, therefore we should affirm same-sex sexual relationships. I actually think as Christians, we need to say, God is love and he has called us to experience his love in different kinds of relationship. We have an intuitive sense of this in some areas of life. So for example, I have three children who I love very dearly and I have a great deal of intimacy with my children, physical

affection, emotional affection, all the things. But it is a meaningfully and importantly different relationship than the one I have with my husband. And we understand intuitively that there are different kinds of love in a family, for example. But because we have sort of drained all the blood out of love, like brotherly and sisterly love, which is in the New Testament, the primary kind of category of Christian love. We don't see that this is a whole other thing. And we even do this thing of making marriage about like, oh, you marry your best friend. And we sort of completely collapse those two categories into one. To where single people are sort of left thinking, well, okay, so my best friend just married somebody clearly like I'm not their best friend anymore because this woman

ain't all this man is or whatever. Like can we not enjoy different kinds of relationship that the Lord has called us to rather than sort of actually making the same mistake as the world links of loading everything onto one kind of sexual romantic relationship and making every other relationship sort of, you know, at best a sideshow to that. I don't know if you read the book by Christopher Ash called Marriage. I forget what the subtitle is. He's a British scholar. Yeah, no, I have read it. It's not a widely known book. It is one of the best books on marriage. But he shows in that book that biblically speaking, marriage is never presented as a solution to human

loneliness. And I know people automatically go to Genesis two. It's not good for man to be alone, but there you have a conflation between, you know, Eve is yes, Adam's married partner, but she's also any other human community. Yeah. Yeah. Another human. And it's like, it doesn't kind of get bled together there. And I don't think even there Genesis two, and this is what he argues, that marriage, even in Genesis, that his solution to loneliness was to get married. It was, I need other humans, you know. And he happened to marry the one, you know, the first one was created. But all throughout Scripture, we are designed for community. We can be lonely. Loneliness can be a problem, but it's always solved in non-romantic relationships all throughout

scripture. You never see marriage presented as if you're lonely, then God designed marriage to solve that. And I'm not at all taken away from the deep rich companionship that happens in a marital relationship. But yeah, I do think it's, I just made me think in light of what you're saying that sometimes we put way too much weight pressure on a, on a marriage partner or the expectation of a marriage partner to solve so much of these gaping needs we have in our life. And then when it doesn't happen, you know, and seven years in the marriage, the chemistry kind of wears off.

You get it in enough fights, you have enough ups and downs, all of a sudden you're like, man, I put way too much stock in this other person solving all my needs. Yeah, and I think we've meaningfully made marriage into an idol in all the church circles. Again, not because marriage isn't a good and beautiful, wonderful thing, it is.

But it's a signpost, not a destination. And when we talk as if marriage is the one relationship no human can kind of thrive without, we're actually denying the gospel. You know, Jesus is the one relationship with him, without which none of us can live. And we've, there were people say, oh, you know, how can you say that people who are maybe only ever

find themselves attracted to some of their same sex, like they're denied marriage and therefore have to be lonely for the rest of their lives? I'm thinking if it is true, and I think it often is true, if it is true in our Christian communities that single people are lonely, we are massively failing to live into Christian ethics. I also, I mean, for the record, people are sometimes assume that I'm saying that if somebody's experienced the same type of structure like I do, they can't or shouldn't get married to somebody the opposite sex. I actually don't think that. I don't think people ought to or ought not to. I think it's actually a question of Christian freedom, whether we get married or not. And

I think we need to have a very high view of marriage as well as a very high view of singleness if we're going to be sort of holistically biblical in our understanding. But if we are functionally leaving all our single brothers and sisters who are single for whatever reason, lonely, we need to open up our New Testament and we need to repent because like really it's not okay. We are failing to follow Jesus's, as he puts it, his new commandment. God, we love one another as he has loved us. Pandora, be love. What does be love mean to you? I definitely would say my be love role model is for sure my sister.

Unconditional, infinite love. Something that is never ending, that you know is always there. Never questioned. Never questioned. No matter if you fall off a cliff, she's there to catch you, you know? Be love. Shop now at Pandora.net. How do you, how do you, how do you communicate to a 17 year old that a Christian for a year, same sex attracted, it's not going away, whatever, you know, um, how do you communicate all of

that in a way that is not just true, but it's compelling and beautiful to somebody saying that the process of being a Christian is not just true, but it's compelling and beautiful to somebody saying that the prospect of a same-sex romantic relationship is off the table for you to follow Jesus? Like again, I could point the verses, I could say that. To me, I can easily say that. Yeah. Just pastorally, how do you approach that? Put yourself in your own shoes as a 17-year-old. You were in there. I mean, this is your story. Yeah. I mean, I actually, I tell a story, I think in the penultimate chapter of my book, maybe, I forgot the exact ordering, because it really stuck with me. I was doing a Q and

A with a pastor a few years ago with a bunch of teenagers on questions of sexual ethics. And like me, this pastor has always been attracted to people of the same sex. Unlike me, he's not married. He's now in his late 50s or early 60s. And one of the questions we were asked was, what would you tell your 18-year-old self? And this pastor very movingly kind of reminded, recalled when he was 18, he was a serious Christian and he was wrestling with same-sex attraction. It felt like he was thinking, I don't know how I'm going to live the rest of my Christian life this way. It felt like I can maybe stay faithful for some period of time, but I just don't know that I have the resources to do this, you know, for decades. And when he was asked, what would

you tell your 18 year old self? He said that he would tell his 18 year old self, your life will be so good. And it almost makes me cry to like record it now because he has lived his life and he continues to live his life embedded in the family of his church, following Jesus, having multiple rich love relationships with brothers and sisters in Christ, and just his sort of lived experience of the goodness of Christian community was a beautiful testimony to the fact that we don't need to find our sexual fulfillment in order to be fulfilled human being actually. If we turn away from Jesus to find our sexual fulfillment, we are only losing out, really. And I think secondly, and this is

something that I kind of preach to myself relatively often, not as often as I should, as Christians we are meant to have our eyes fixed on Jesus' return. As I mentioned, I'm working on a culture on Colossians and one of my favorite verses in Colossians is when Paul says, you know, you died and your life is now hidden with Christ in God. When Christ who is your life appears, you also will appear with him in glory. So he's calling the Colossians to set your minds on things above because that's when you truly are. And we so often actually set our minds on the here and now and we lose sight completely of the resurrection and of Jesus' return and of the fact that we are not meant to be comfortable and fulfilled and happy in this world in any kind of ultimate sense. We're running toward

eternity with Jesus and we're running together, whether we're married or single, like whatever our sort of marital status is, we're running together under Jesus' arms. And the things in my life that make me dissatisfied with this world are reminders that I'm not made for this current reality ultimately. I'm made for eternity with Jesus. And not to say, I mean, I think we can get ourselves sort of twisted up into funny shapes when we point to our sort of sinful tendency as something that's like, you know, potentially a good. I'm not sort of saying that. But the moments in my life when I find myself thinking, gosh, maybe there's a piece of me that longs for a particular kind of romantic relationship with another woman that I'm absolutely not planning on looking for. But that piece of my heart that sort of feels a loss or a lacking is even

though it comes from a sinful desire within me, it's actually a reminder to me as well of Jesus is coming. And one day all my simple desires will be gone and I will have a richness of life with him and his people beyond my wildest imaginings now. Pete It sounds like Ed Shaw. If you weren't talking about Ed Shaw, he's younger than the guy you described. The pastor has been single his whole life and I just hung out with Ed in Cambridge. You know Ed, right? Ed Shaw from Lebanon? Yeah, he's amazing. But yeah, I look at him and like any Christian walk, there's many challenges and difficulties and every individual has their unique challenges

and difficulties, but he would never as a single, I don't know how old he is, he's about my age. Yeah, sometimes I look at him and say, you know, like he's had a very, very life giving fulfilling life. And I don't think he would have been able to predict that as a teenager when he kind of looked forward to like, kind of like what his future life is going to look like. I want, you know, going back to the teenager, I just, I wonder if there's just, there's

this underlying assumption that to make the gospel appealing to younger people, we need to, the classic phrase, you know, water it down. Or we think that if we say, no, there's going to be many challenges here. It could lead to major social ostracism from your peers, could lead to you saying no to certain desires for life. And guess what? It is the most fulfilling and meaningful life you can live. And Jesus is worth it that when you find the pearl of great price, you sell everything and buy the entire field to get the pearl, you know? And that when you find Jesus and find your ultimate identity in Him, everything else pales in comparison. Like, these aren't just abstract theological truths. They are true, you know? And like, I just wonder if we have fallen into the trap of feeling like if we really

reveal the full gospel to kids, they're like, well, that seems tough. I'm not going to choose that. It's almost like we deny the work of the Holy Spirit and the lives of people who are considering Jesus. And I think sometimes we sell our teenagers short. I think they want the challenge. And we sell God short too, that there's a power in the gospel. That when somebody has an actual encounter with the

risen King of the universe, who walked it up a grave 2,000 years ago, like 17 year olds can have that encounter. And when anybody has that encounter, they're capable of radical obedience. Yeah. And actually, the gospel is most appealing when we realize quite how sinful we are. I think if I meet your friend Rachel Gilson, who's met by God while sitting in the library at Yale and her first experience of that was recognizing that there is a holy God who made the universe and that she will earn account to in and that she was in fact exceedingly sinful in all the ways. It was sort of evident. She didn't need convincing that she was a sinner. If there was a holy God, she was in big trouble.

And actually the heart of the gospel of Jesus is substitutory attaining death for us. It only really makes sense when we recognize that we are in desperate need of that salvation and that we are going to face a holy God. Now, more comes with that. When we embrace the gospel, we find not only are we forgiven, we are in fact everlastingly loved. I think many of us who've been Christians for years under-realize both aspects of that actually. It's easy for us to forget how much in need of salvation we were and how much our own sinful nature is still operative. We also forget quite how loved we are. It's not just that Jesus washes away our sin and then moves us in a neutral place. Actually, we are in Christ. We are drawn into the very

center of who he is. Again, that's why I find Colossians so beautiful. When Christ, who is your life, appears, you also will appear with him in glory. By virtue of being in Christ, we are also with one another. We are joined to one another in an incredibly intimate way because we are joined to Christ. I think we lose sight of that as well because at the heart of our desire for sexual intimacy is actually a desire to be fully known and completely loved. We're never actually going to get that from even the best sort of sexual or romantic relationship, but that's kind of what we're really there for. It is something that we're going to get if we're in Christ that we're going to have fully realized when he returns.

We find that we are not only completely united with him, but that we also are in complete union with one another. This incredible connection that we are together, Jesus' body, and we are together, Jesus' bride, everything that sexual, romantic, or intimacy pointed to, we will have the real thing, regardless of whether we're married or single in our lives here. And we have to believe that. Again, it's not just an abstract truth. I can cite all the verses that support that, but that's actually true and real and should drive how we live. And yeah, I just, yeah, there's that gap between like, people believe in these abstract truths between,

the gap between that and then believe in like, these are actually true for my life. And these will, these are real when you apply them. One more question to let you go, same-sex attraction. This has been, I feel like a very, the sinfulness of same-sex attraction, this same-, I feel like a very, this, the, the sinfulness of same sex attraction, this same sex attraction itself, sin. Um, you touch on it a little bit in one of, um, I dog eared it somewhere.

I hate dog earing books. You probably hate it as a British British, British lip major. I do it all the time. I scribble on books and I have full pages and I generally desperate them. Yeah. Oh, desperate them. Yeah. Oh, that's so fun. Okay. My kids actually, my one daughter, she thinks I'm like offending the book if I could dog

ear it, but I don't have a bookmark. So you said same sex attraction is, well, to be clear, this doesn't mean same sex attraction is morally neutral any more than the desire to commit adultery is morally neutral. So there you're kind of highlighting more that like the sinfulness of same-sex attraction. Later on, you describe yourself as a woman who experiences significant same-sex attraction. How would you, and I don't think those are contradictory. Maybe just two, two sides of one coin. But is same-sex attraction itself a sin that somebody needs to repent from is how the question is often framed. How do you?

I think if I can, I don't want to, I'll shut up. I think I want to say like, well, what do you mean by same-sex attraction? That can mean many different things. How do you? I'll maybe start by clarifying the second piece of what you brought up there. And so when I say I'm someone who's experienced a significant same-sex attraction, let me just explain what I do and don't mean. Yeah, I've been married to my beloved husband for the last 17 years.

My guess is that I've probably had an average, like the normal, whatever the normal amount of occasions in the last 17 years when a married person finds themselves attracted to somebody outside of their marriage. As far as I know, I'm not sort of on the top end of that or the bottom end of that. But anytime I have found myself romantically drawn towards somebody who is not my husband, it's always been to a woman. So it's not like, oh, sometimes it's a man and sometimes it's a woman. I's like, I am absolutely, I could hang out all day with the best looking men in town and whatever. Like it would be no problem to me whatsoever. So I would say I have a capacity for same sex attraction that does not seem to have gone away in all the years I've been a Christian or in all

the years that I'm married. Now people sometimes hear that and think I'm saying every day I'm sort of racked with sexual desire towards every woman I see. That is absolutely, praise God, not the case at all. It is simply the case that any time that I have felt drawn towards somebody, it's always been toward a woman. Now, when it comes to the question of the sinfulness of same-sex attraction, one of the places that I actually find most helpful is when Jesus is explaining to his disciples that it's not what you put into your body that makes you unclean, it's actually what comes out of your heart. One of the sinful things that he says comes out of our hearts is sexual immorality.

Jesus doesn't say that something might come out of your heart and then you decide on the basis of that whether to commit an act of sexual immorality or not, although that is certainly true. He's also not saying we're completely passive in the face of whatever comes out of our hearts and suddenly, you know, lurches us towards something and we have no kind of no ability to sort of stop that or to say no to that. But he seems to be saying sexual immorality comes out of the deepest part of me and that it's, that's what makes me unclean. Not just the sexual immorality, but like the sinful things that come out of my heart, what make me unclean. That there is, I didn't just have a kind of actions problem or even a kind of conscious decisions problem.

My sin problem goes right down to the very core of my heart, which is part of the reason why the gospel message is so good because actually Jesus comes to deal not just with the steps three, four, and five in any process, he actually comes to deal with the very root of the problem, which is in my heart. Then when it comes to the question of is my same-sex attraction something like a sinful desire of which I need to repent, I would say high-level news, I would probably say yes. But the fact is, my heart has so many simple desires coming out of it, you know, in all my conscious hours, that taking specific time every, like

every time I become aware of something that is pointing me to be in a sinful direction, to sort of consciously get an out on my knees or a pentavit like it would make the logistics of living very difficult. Because I'm not saying I don't mean that sort of flippantly, but I just mean the reality is I still have a simple nature wrestling way inside me. And I don't think that my capacity for samesex attraction or my experiences of same-sex attraction are in a meaningfully different bucket from my sinful envy of others, for example, or from my sinful laziness or all the other things, all the other simple things that are coming out of me. People sometimes say pasturally if we say to people, you know what, even before you've made a decision that you're conscious of to kind of take a second look at somebody or whatever, like your desire is already sinful, that that will cripple people

emotionally as they seek to follow Jesus. And this can be especially true for somebody who experiences same sex attraction rather than is, in terms of people of the opposite sex. I actually don't think that has to be the pastoral implication of believing that same-sex attraction is in and of itself sinful because Jesus is the one person who knows all of my thoughts and desires and he's also the one person who loved me enough to die for me. So I don't need to be sort of crippled by guilt because Jesus has actually paid for my sin, you know, soup to nuts. Is that the expression? Yeah, yeah. Soup to nuts. That would be American. I don't know what it means, but I

thought I'd just try that. Still general, we try out new phrases all the time. I guess, so I think, still general. We try out new phrases all the time, I guess for, so I, I think, no, that's how that's really helpful. And I, I, cause yeah, I absolutely want to affirm the sinfulness of certain desires that aren't aligned with, with God's will. I think a lot of times, well, how about this? Do you think it's helpful to distinguish between, and I don't know the best wording here, but maybe like same sex attraction as an active sexual desire that we might experience in a particular moment toward a certain person, maybe several people versus a very general category to describe. And I know orientation languages, I don't want to sign off on all the Freudian implications,

all that stuff, but people are either same sex attracted, opposite sex attracted, not attracted to anybody or attracted to both. Like those are kind of the four options as a very general category. When I go to the store today, the fact that I am attracted to females and not males, it's, it's evident. Does that mean I'm looking at every female like w as a walking temptation? No, absolutely. I'm I, I can go to the whole day, a whole week without even having like, Oh, this is now a temptation, but I'm still categorically opposite sex attracted.

I still notice men different than women, even if there's not some active sexual desire bubbling up. And so I feel like, first of all, is that distinction, do you find helpful or accurate? Because when I hear people say same-sex attraction is sinful, I think sometimes people can interpret that if until they become straight, opposite sex attracted, they are living in perpetual ongoing sin. Well, some people are like, yeah, now I know why I can go through the whole week and not even be tempted. And yeah, I'm still same sex attracted, you know? So I just seemed like there's two different categories being kind of blurred together there. Is that? Yeah. And I think just to speak to the end of your comment there, I think people can often get caught in very, you know, unhelpful ways

of thinking, which is like, oh, if only I suddenly started being attracted to the opposite sex, like everything would be fine. Because actually, you know, let's say if we look back over the last 17 years that I've been married to my mother-in-law's, but let's say every time I found myself attracted to a woman, I'd actually had the exact same experience but the direction toward a man. I mean, that wouldn't have really gained me anything. You know? Like so, actually kind of both simple things. I mean, I think it's sometimes hard for us to analyze exactly what is and isn't going on inside our hearts. And sometimes it can be, you know, we can have positive experiences that can be straightforward. So I think for example, I remember having dinner with some friends a few years ago.

I came back after the dinner and I was chatting with them. I was like, this is going to be very personal for a second, so forgive me for the overshot. That's how I deal with two friends, one of whom I have always had a great, close relationship with and I have just never had even the slightest second of attraction toward her. It's just not enough in any way. And the other was a friend to you when I was first getting to know her, I was actually really kind of struggling with attraction toward her and I sort of like figure out how to navigate that and like it sort of, anyway, it was just like a kind of complicated initial experience. And I remember coming up back from dinner with these friends a few years ago and saying to my husband, I was just lovely.

They both showed up for dinner at the same time. And I remember seeing them both and feeling for both of them this like complete delight in their presence. You know, they walked in, my face lit up. I thought, here are my beautiful friends. It was the same kind of delight that I have when I see my daughter walks into the room, I'm like, I just have this delight in my children's embodied selves. What I want to do is go and hug them. I love them and I delight in them and their physical appearance is part

of what I love as I see them. Do you know if that makes any sense? Sure, yeah. But I just noticed in that particular moment, this contrast between how once upon a time I struggled with one of these friends of thinking, oh gosh, I feel like there are ways in which my heart and my mind is sort of trying to like, twist this in a different direction to then be like, oh, it's just so lovely to see her and to feel exactly the same way

as I did about my other friend. I don't know if that answers your question anyway. Anyway, Shibu, I was just trying to kind of put my hands around, like for a moment around the potential to, and I don't think this necessarily depends on our patterns of attraction or whatever, but we can take physical delight in somebody in a way that actually isn't about attraction at all. It's about a kind of loving affection for that person. Which is inseparable from their embodiment. Again, we're not Gnostics, we're not just spiritual

immaterial beings. Yeah, and maybe as a sort of semi-related to note, sorry, I'm getting my kind of under-jested thoughts here, but I'm reading an article a few years ago which said, the question of the article was, if I met my husband today, would I be attracted to him? And I thought, what a completely stupid question to ask. Because when I look at my husband, I'm not evaluating him relative to other men. He's mine. It's just not even about if I met him today. I actually think he's very handsome, but that's sort of beside the point. He's mine and therefore I delight in him sort of physically. Yeah, so I think, I don't know, sometimes I think we get ourselves very mixed up with

these things. Yeah. I do think we need more good faith, curious conversations around the various shades of potential meaning of the term same sex attraction. I mean, I can hear five people describe it and I feel like I get six different descriptions, you know? And so I think we just need to, and we need a lot of clarity. If we're going to say it is sinful, what exactly is the it?

And what are we not saying is sinful? What are we saying is sinful? Are we crediting something to a individual, moral, culpable desire that we need to repent from in that moment? Or is it just a part of our sinful nature that's just always going to be with us at this side of the resurrection? And what's the difference we did? I just, you know, I think it can be pastorally really, as you said, you know, really destructive to people if we are using terms and categories and label them as sin when somebody else is hearing something that we're not actually intended.

Yeah. And conversely, I often find that people, you know, as you all know, there's a sort of, broadly speaking, the Protestant tradition would say that sort of sinful desire is sinful in and of itself, even if we haven't acted on it and Catholics were sort of landed in a different position. People will sometimes hear me talk and assume that I don't believe that same-sex attraction is sinful because they're hearing me speaking in ways that are sort of empathetic and compassionate and like all these things. I don't think those two things need to be differentiated from each other because at the end of the day, the message of the gospel is you and I are desperate sinners. It's not like, well, we sometimes sin. It's that we actually have sin coming out of our hearts on the regular. This is something that is very ongoing. Jesus'

salvation gets to the core of our problem and gives us hope in the face of sin and temptation and a future security that we will be one day completely released from every simple desire. So I think we can be very happy and optimistic today, even as we recognize the sins in our hearts. I think actually, the pastor of the church I went to in college for seven years, one of the things he used to say was, as you go on in the Christian life, you might think that you'll more and more recognize how holy you are. You'll sort of feel like you're getting more and more holy. He said, actually, most probably you will feel like you're more and more sinful. You kind of become more and more aware of your sinfulness. And that's actually a really

good sign because right now you don't even know half the ways in which you're sinful. You're completely blind to like a whole slew of simple thoughts and habits and practices in your life. And if you are following Jesus, either you go on the Christian life, you will start to notice it more. And by the Spirit, you'll see growth and you'll see simple practices, pray God, like kind of withdrawal from your life that maybe you were really struggling with previously, but you're never going to come to the point of saying, oh, look, I've arrived. You'll actually, you'll probably just see more simple things you didn't even notice

before and you'll need to pray for the Lord's help with them. Rebecca, I really enjoyed this conversation. Thanks so much for being on Theology and Rite. Your Bible does the Bible affirm same-sex relationships. I highly encourage people to check it out. So thank you for your work and really enjoyed the conversation. Thanks, Preston. Take care. This show is part of the Converge Podcast Network.