There’s an interesting exchange between the contributors to Two Views on Homosexuality, the Bible and the Church (ed. Preston Sprinkle) over how close the modern ideal of Christian marriage conforms to the biblical pattern of marriage. The underlying question is whether we have a closed and fixed or an open and evolving idea of “Christian” marriage. If the latter, then there is some scope, as Megan DeFranza argues, for extending “marriage” to include comparable same-sex commitments.

DeFranza thinks that we have already changed marriage by shifting over time from a patriarchal biblical model to an egalitarian model. So where’s the harm in changing again to accommodate gay marriage?

‘It is only very recently,’ she says, ‘that Christians have been shifting their interpretation of Eph 5 so that the call to “mutual submission” in verse 21… is read to support egalitarian human marriage, while the ancient vision of patriarchal marriage remains an analogy for Christ and the church” (101 n. 66).

I’ve been working with someone who is doing research on the tensions between what I’ll call for convenience a “narrative-historical” understanding of the gospel and the gospel as it is commonly presented in modern evangelism. The Talking Jesus report came up for consideration as an example of how evangelism is understood and practised in the UK today.

The report presents a snapshot of “perceptions of Jesus, Christians and evangelism” in England, backed up with an abundance of statistics. It was produced this year by Barna Group for the Church of England, the Evangelical Alliance, and HOPE, an organisation whose goal is to see “individuals and communities in villages, towns and cities throughout the UK transformed by Jesus’ love”.

I received a newsletter from a good missionary friend yesterday that spoke of his intention to “rescue lost people for Christ”. I have always felt uneasy about that sort of language. It sounds condescending and disparaging. Perhaps I’m just being squeamish, but I think I have some biblical warrant.

The word translated “lost” in the Gospels is the perfect participle of the verb apollumi. It is not the world that is “lost” but a section of Israel. The lost-and-found parables in Luke 15 are told to the Pharisees and scribes who are complaining, “This man receives sinners and eats with them.” The sheep, coin and son in the parables are lost in the obvious sense: they were part of something larger—a hundred sheep, ten coins, a household—but they have been mislaid and need to found again.

Emi sent me an email a while back, and because I have been slow to reply, she posted the whole thing as a comment. She notes that I argue in What must a person believe in order to be saved? i) that the mission of the church is not to save as many people as possible; and ii) that when ‘people today become part of God’s new creation people, they are “saved”… from the final judgment of death on human sin’. Isn’t that a bit perverse? If you accept that people who become part of the church are saved from the final judgment of death, why would we not go all out to save as many as possible? This is how she makes the point:

I don’t see how the falsity of the concept that our mission is to save people from hell means it is not our (ideal) mission to assimilate all cultures and peoples into God’s new creation, if still, non-Christians are at risk of the wrath of death come the final judgment.

In order to answer Emi’s astute question, I will try to set out in a more or less methodical fashion how I understand the biblical argument about salvation—my soteriology, in effect.

I have a very clear and consistent view on “hell” in the New Testament. The “wages of sin is death” (Rom. 6:23). That is the bottom line. But in the New Testament narrative it is the story of Israel and the nations that determines the scope and reference of the “hell” language: wrath against the Jew, wrath against the Greek; judgment on Israel in the form of invasion, destruction and slaughter; judgment on the Greek-Roman world, and on Rome in particular, in the form of civilisational overthrow; the corpses of Jews thrown over the walls of besieged Jerusalem into the Hinnom Valley; pagans bitterly lamenting the collapse of the old order.

There is no post mortem suffering, no eternal conscious torment, though Jesus is in no doubt about the horrors that his people will face before death. There will be a final judgment, but those whose names are not written in the book of life will be consigned to the lake of fire, which is the second death, a final destruction.

I don’t know how much of what I have written on the subject Lerman d’Eon has read, but he got in touch with a couple of questions. The first I’ve dealt with elsewhere. The second gives me an opportunity to dredge hurriedly through the murky literature of second temple Judaism in search of any unexploded mines that might sink my thesis.

In his chapter on homosexuality in The Moral Vision of the New Testament Richard Hays argues that in Romans 1:

Paul is offering a diagnosis of the disordered human condition: he adduces the fact of widespread homosexual behaviour as evidence that human beings are indeed in rebellion against their Creator. The fundamental human sin is the refusal to honor God and give God thanks (1:21); consequently, God’s wrath takes the form of letting human idolatry run its own self-destructive course. Homosexual activity, then, is not a provocation of ‘the wrath of God’ (Rom 1.18); rather, it is a consequence of God’s decision to ‘give up’ rebellious creatures to follow their own futile thinking and desires. The unrighteous behavior catalogued in Romans 1:26-31 is a list of symptoms: the underlying sickness of humanity as a whole, Jews and Greeks alike, is that they have turned away from God and fallen under the power of sin. (387)

Now, doesn’t that definition of “humanity” as “Jews and Greeks alike” strike you as odd? If Paul is offering a “diagnosis of the disordered human condition” or, as Ian Paul puts it in the Grove booklet on Same-Sex Unions, “telling the cosmic history of the failure of humanity” (24), why does Paul speak specifically of the coming wrath against the Greek (Rom. 2:9)?

The purpose of this post is, first, to register the fact that J. Daniel Kirk has used Acts 15 to argue for the affirmation and inclusion of gay Christians in the church. I hadn’t seen these before—thanks, Andy, for pointing it out:

• Embracing the Gentiles
• Scripture and the Spirit of Christ
• Gentiles? Really?

Kirk thinks that the “inclusion of Gentiles” constitutes a compelling narrative paradigm for the inclusion of LGBT believers in the church.