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Introduction In the summer of 2003, the Episcopal Church in General Convention debated the hotly contested matter of homosexual unions. The debate was intensified in that the Convention was being asked to ratify the election of a bishop for the Diocese of New Hampshire, a man who was living in a committed relationship with another man. In the course of the debate, talking points were used. The following is a brief essay I wrote to help out with some of the talking points. It is sometimes assumed that the biblical people had no concept of sexual orientation, and therefore, the biblical injunctions against homosexuality did not take orientation into account. This view is mistaken. Human beings are essentially the same as they were when Scripture was written. The biblical peoples experienced themselves and others as desiring all sorts of things, and these desires sprang from the deepest part of themselves. The source of these deep desires was called the "heart." The heart, to quote a standard text for biblical studies, is the "totality of the feelings, thoughts, and desires of a man, traced back to their deepest source in the inner life" (IDB, Vol. 2., p. 550) The term "heart" has affinities with the modern concept of will, but there is a critical distinction. In the modern concept the ego directs the will, or is the will, and it is assumed that the will is free. This is not a biblical understanding. The word "will" in the modern sense does not exist in Scripture. Instead, what we have is the heart understood as "the whole or the tendency of the soul."(1) It is the heart that leads to the act, the heart is the direction of the act. It is the deepest self inclined in specific directions, toward specific objects, animated with potent desires that arise deep in the soul. The source of these directional forces, giving a person his or her orientation, were so deep and subtle that the Hebrews believed that no one could fathom or change the heart. Only God could know and change the human heart. Not only did biblical thought deny that idea that a person could choose, direct, or determine the deepest desires of the heart, it was also believed that no one could restrain their hearts from evil. Always, for everyone, the orientation of the heart is not toward God, but away from God, toward things that God had forbidden, against things that God had willed. For this reason, Paul in Romans 3:10 is not only quoting Psalm 14:3, but summing up the entire Old Testament revelation when he says, "None is righteous, no, not one; no one understands, no one seeks for God. All have turned aside, together they have done wrong; no one does good, not even one." In spite of this rather gloomy assessment of the heart, Scripture offers a way out. One of the first to foresee this was Jeremiah who, out of his despair over the human heart, foresaw the day when God would make a new covenant with his people and write his laws upon the heart. That covenant was given in Jesus Christ, who by the power of his cross and resurrection, made effective in our hearts by the Spirit, believers are given a new heart by which to walk according to his purposes. In sum, we have the following. The biblical peoples were well acquainted with the concept of orientation. They knew it to be beyond conscious control, beyond choice. Their only hope was a new heart given by the Lord Jesus. That heart, however, does not come without a cost. It entails a spiritual struggle against oneself that lasts a lifetime. Finally, and this is critical: to accept homosexual unions as right and good on the basis of orientation is utter folly, for homosexual desires are not the only orientations that direct the human heart there are a myriad of other desires as well, all beyond our conscious control. To claim any one of them as good and right, simply because it is in the heart, is to open the floodgates to desires of any and every sort, all judged right and good by those who hold them. From a biblical point of view, this would be idolatry of the worst sort. 1. Jon Pederson, Israel, Its Life and Culture, London: Oxford University press, 1959, Vol. 1, p. 107. The Rev. Robert J. Sanders, Ph.D. September, 2003. |