Some time after seminary, when I was serving my second parish, in rural Virginia, I was in a regular case study group of pastors and counselors led by a Clinical Pastoral Education supervisor. One participant was a very sharp Christian counselor. He presented the case of a young man who came in and confessed that he was gay and wanted to leave his marriage. I can’t remember what the counselor told him, but he explained to us that his philosophy of counseling was that the Bible was like a mathematical formula, into which you plug the variable of a human life, and then you get the answers you need.
We immediately challenged him on this. The Bible is not in fact a formula, or a manual like a car’s manual, or any sort of mechanistic analogy. And people are not variables in God’s formula for life.
Word Made Flesh
In fact, the central assertion of Christian faith is that God is most fully revealed, not in a book, not in a list of rules and regulations, not even in the Bible, but in a person–Jesus of Nazareth. This is what we mean by incarnational theology: that we discover God in the lived-out, “in the flesh” experiences of real life. The Bible directs us to the proper ways to understand God’s work in the world and in our lives, but it too is incarnational: it was written by real people living in real human cultures in a certain point of history.
That’s why we Presbyterians affirm that Scripture is “the unique and authoritative Word of God” (in both the Confession of 1967 and our ordination vows) rather than “verbal plenary inspiration” or “inerrancy.” It is the book that best reveals the God both Christians and Jews believe in. But it isn’t what or who we’re searching for. It’s the signpost on the way. And it shows us as well the often contradictory paths that our forebears on the same journey have followed.
Many people have learned that God loves gays through incarnational theology: we met someone gay and she changed our minds. The idea went from an abstract idea to a flesh-and-blood human being. When I first met the woman I would marry, Margaret, I discovered that her sister Carol is gay. Carol is delightful, intelligent, talented, and compassionate. She is a community health expert who has worked extensively on AIDS issues in Africa. It’s one of the great blessings of my life to know her, her partner Isabelle, and their daughter, my niece, Cecilia.
Carol always told me that, though her dad was a Methodist minister and she considers herself a Christian, she could never join a church that wouldn’t ordain or marry her. I suppose that, to a certain extent, I thought that she didn’t really plan to join a church anyway; so she surprised me when she joined a United Church of Christ congregation near her home in California. The UCC both ordains and marries LGBT folk.
Jesus Gets AIDS. Will the Church Visit Him?
Many of us experienced incarnational theology most directly through the horror of the AIDS crisis in the ‘80s and ‘90s. Christians were torn between the judgmental legalism we’d been taught—and the compassion to which Christ calls us.
When I entered the ministry in 1985, I was astounded by the smug “AIDS is God’s curse” attitude I found among some (thankfully, not all!) of the members of my first church. But by the mid-90s, when I was an associate pastor at a mid-sized suburban church, attitudes were vastly different. In Wilmington, DE, many churches supported an HIV/AIDS ministry called Peacemeal, which provided food, housing, transportation and moral support to the disease’s victims. Those were the days when AIDS was still a death sentence. I took the church youth group to serve and eat meals with gaunt, pale men of all ages who were witty and likeable and would sometimes be dead by our next trip back.
Experiences like that made LGBT folk concrete and real to GenXers. It made them—and me—see gay men, especially, through the lens of the suffering of Christ. And to see Christ through the lens of suffering gay men.
That’s why Christ came in the first place—to enable us to experience God not as a set of rules, or our nagging, judgmental, and always disappointed superego; but as someone like ourselves, sharing our joy and suffering, meeting us at a profoundly personal level, meeting us beyond our tendency to judge and categorize—meeting us at the level of experience—especially the experience of suffering. When Christ has met us there, and we’ve met others at the same place, we can never again see them simply as variables in a formula.
NEXT: The Blasphemy of Legalism